wild cards 21.3 - the elephant in the room by george r r martin

Author:george r r martin
Format: epub
Published: 2013-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

“My mother’s going to be in the audience,” I said, as we stood in the empty ring, me aching all over after the rehearsal.

Radha looked sidelong at me, taking this new factor onboard. Realizing, I think, that I was letting something out by saying it. “Does that add to the pressure?”

“I suppose.”

“Only, I was wondering why you seemed distracted—”

What, distracted enough to dump me at the last moment and send the clown car out a second time? “No! No, there’s . . . you know, stuff going on in my life. But when I’m up there, I’m completely focused.”

She rolled athletically onto her back, and lay there on the sawdust, looking up through the safety net that we knew would be totally inadequate for our own protection this afternoon, but was entirely to make the audience feel that they were watching something only reasonably death defying. “I do this for my mother, you know.”

Feeling a little awkward, I sat stiffly down beside her. “In my case, it’s kind of in spite of.”

“My mother was on the Queen Mary in 1946. The death ship. She was transformed by the virus. She grew thick gray skin. People are still shocked by the pictures of her, but to me that’s just Mum. I never heard her voice. I always wanted to. She’d never recorded herself when she was a nat. Dad stayed with her, while the rest of the world threw up their hands and backed away. They were taken in by this cult, back home in India. You’d see this awkward relationship between Dad and the priests. He loved Chandra, but they worshipped her. She took it, being seen as a kind of holy object, because, well, we needed a home, this was the only place we could live in peace. She had me seven months after the virus. She had a choice in that. Nobody was sure if she would survive the pregnancy. But they wanted me so much, they always told me that. My mother sacrificed so much, without being able to say a word.”

It took me a moment to be able to speak. “That sounds like . . . the opposite of my mother. I think she’d find some . . . horrible words to describe yours.”

“What, you’re setting me up for meeting her today, all the while thinking of her like that?”

“Would you prefer it if I lied?”

“Well, she is your mother. Perhaps she deserves some falsehoods being told on her behalf. None of us can really judge our parents. I don’t believe in karma, but . . .” She shook her head quickly and changed the subject. “I have to introduce you tonight. Have you chosen your ace name?”

“I sometimes think . . . The Understudy.”

She considered it, flatteringly seriously. “I like the humility of that. But you’ll need to know when to become the lead. You’ll need to be strong enough to make that change and have people accept it.”

I felt ridiculously close to tears. I shouldn’t have got into such a serious conversation with everything that was hanging over my head.

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