He was still handsome to the point of beauty, his skin flawless and his hair golden. His features were in transition from boy to man, but he could already visualize the form they were going to take and knew they would be perfect.
Whittler walked alongside him, his legs seeming to move at twice the speed of Valerian's just to keep up with him. He was slender and apparently fit, but there was little vigor to the man, a trait Valerian was blessed with in abundance.
"How was she when you spoke to her?" asked Valerian.
"Much the same, sir. Though there was a certain animation to her today."
"Really? That's good. Any idea why?"
"No, sir," replied Whittler. "Though she did receive a communique from her father."
"How do you know who it came from, Charles?" asked Valerian. "Did you look at it first?"
"I most certainly did not," replied Whittler. "The very idea! Your grandfather always sends a communication at the beginning of the month. It is the beginning of the month: ergo, it is from your grandfather."
"Beginning of what month? We're in space, Charles."
"I keep a record of the diurnal rotations on Umoja and Tarsonis to keep track of our time relative to them. In such dislocated circumstances, I find it helps fix oneself if there is a predetermined point of reference to cling to."
"You've traveled a lot in space?"
"More than I have cared to," was Whittler's noncommittal answer.
Valerian wanted to ask more, but felt he would get little in the way of an answer that meant anything, so let the matter of Whittler's previous travels go and concentrated on the summons issued by his mother.
Juliana Pasteur was not a well woman, and her health had only deteriorated over the last six years. After his fifteenth birthday, Valerian had demanded to know what was wrong with her, and at last she had told him the truth of what the doctors had discovered, though sometimes he wished she hadn't.
His mother had been diagnosed with a carcinoid tumor, a rare cancer of the neuroendocrine system. The cancer had arisen in her intestine and grown slowly over the years, which was why it had taken so long for her to suspect there was more wrong than she realized.
By the time she'd consulted a physician, the cancer had already spread to her liver and begun to attack other parts of her body with unthinking biological relentlessness. Its progress had been slow, but steady, robbing her of her vitality and stripping the meat from her bones. Not even the most advanced surgical techniques could defeat the cancer without killing her in the process.
Valerian had cried with her as she told him and gently guided him through the same reactions she had experienced: denial, shock, anger, sadness, guilt, and fear.
She was going to die, and had made her peace with that.
It was more than Valerian could do.
He had immediately ceased his visits to the surface of the planetoid they circled and thrown himself into researching his mother's condition, despite the apparent hopelessness of the endeavor. Perhaps because she had been told she could live for several more years before death finally claimed her, his mother had tried to dissuade him from wasting his time looking for a miracle cure.
"Sometimes fighting to hold on to something you love can destroy it in the process," she had said to him one evening, holding him as he cried. "Let's enjoy the time we have left, Val. Let me watch you grow and live your life. Don't waste it chasing windmills."
But nothing she said to him could penetrate his need to do something, no matter that this was an enemy he had no means to light. He discovered that not even the most advanced intrascopic lasers—devices capable of targeting specific areas of the body with precise amounts of heat—nor the latest drugs or even nano-brachytherapy could defeat this foe without first killing its victim.
Valerian, however, was a Mengsk, and he did not give up easily, requesting fresh digi-tomes and the latest researches from the top medical institutes on Umoja and Tarsonis (via safe routes to avoid compromising their security, of course).
"Sir?" said Whittler, and Valerian started. He hadn't realized they'd reached his mother's room, and wondered how long he'd been standing here.
"Are you going in?" asked Whittier.
He look a deep breath. "Yes. Of course I'm going in."
Valerian sat beside his mother's bed and held her hand, wishing he could pass some of his own vitality on to her. He had plenty to spare, so where was the cosmic harm in evening the balance? But the universe didn't work that way, he knew. Ir didn't care that bad things happened lo good people, and was entirely indifferent to the fate of the mortal beings that crawled around on the debris of stars, no matter what those who believed in divine beings might claim.
His mother sat upright on her bed, her skin pale and translucent, as though pulled too tightly across her skull. Her hair fell around her shoulders, its golden luster now the sickly, jaundiced yellow of a chronic smoker. She was still beautiful, but it was a serene beauty bought with the acceptance of death.
Valerian found it hard to see her, fearful that if he looked too long he might lose grip on his emotions. At times like this he cursed his father for the lessons of emotional control.
"Have you been to your ruins today, Val?" she asked.
"No, Mum," he said. "I haven't I don't go to them anymore, remember?"
"Oh yes, I forgot," she said, waving a bony arm before her. "I have trouble remembering things now, you know."
Valerian looked around the room, its austere functionality putting him in mind of a mortician's workspace. He hated the reek of defeat that filled the room.
"Are you thirsty?" he asked, in lieu of something meaningful to say.
She smiled. "Yes, honey. Pour me some water, would you?"
Valerian filled two plastic cups with tepid water and handed one to her, making sure she had it held in both hands before releasing his grip. She lifted the cup to her gaunt face and sipped the water, smiling as she handed it back to him.
"Charles told me you received a message today."
"I did," she said with a smile that served only to make her face look even more cadaverous than it did already. "It's from your grandfather."
"What does he have to say for himself this month?"
"He says your father is coming to see us."
The cup of water fell from Valerian's hands.
The spire of rock soared above Valerian like the horn of some massive, buried narwhal, its surface pitted and worn smooth by uncounted centuries. He ran his hand across the surface, feeling tingling warmth through the fluted surface of the rock that was quite at odds with the chill of the air around him.
Sheer cliffs of curving rock arched up overhead, a natural canyon that Valerian suspected had once been roofed by ribbed beams of stone, but which now lay scattered and broken at his feet.
Frozen, gritty winds howled as they funneled through the canyon, lamenting the fall of so mighty a structure, and Valerian wondered what great catastrophe had occurred here to cast it down. The sky rippled through the thin atmosphere, stars pulsing in the far distance, their light already millennia old.
He pulled his thick jacket tighter about himself and adjusted his goggles as he descended the loose-rubble-and-scree slope that led to the colossal cave mouth ahead. He had ventured within this cave before and fell a deep sense of connection to the past within its shimmering, hybrid walls.
To know that long-forgotten hands had crafted this palace with ancient artifice was an electrifying sensation—proof that life had existed in the galaxy long before the arrival of human beings. The secrets that might yet be buried here were beyond measure and Valerian longed for the opportunity to plumb the depths of those mysteries, both for the sake of knowledge and for the rewards it would bring.