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She stepped from the semi-dim cabin into a warm yellow glow. The galley was a bright room of Island Cedar, yellowburl and brass. She could imagine a HoloVision Nightly News crew spread out over the two tables with coffee and notes in the half-hour before air time. It was a clean, well-lighted space. Holo cubes of the crew in action on various assignments sat in a rack against the inboard bulkhead. Crista sat at the first of two hexagonal tables and pulled down a couple of the cubes to look at.
“These really stand out at you,” she said, moving the holograms through different angles of light. “Nothing in Flattery’s collection matches these for quality.”
“Thanks to Rico,” Ben said. “He’s a born inventor. He’d be a rich man today if Flattery’s Merman Mercantile hadn’t jumped into the middle of things. Our stuff is good because Rico makes up the equipment himself. We always roll with the best.”
“She’s very pretty,” Crista said, holding a scene of Ben and Beatriz with their arms around each other. “You two have worked together for a long time. Were you in love, the two of you?”
Ben cleared his throat and pushed a few icons. She heard the whirr of galley machinery at work.
“Now it’s hard to know whether we were truly in love or whether we’d just survived so much together that we felt no one else could understand—except maybe Rico, of course.”
“And you made love with her?”
“Yes.”
Ben stood with his back to her, staring at the backs of his hands on the countertop. “Yes, we made love. For several years. Given our lives, it would have been impossible that we didn’t.”
“But now you’re not?”
She saw the slightest shake of the back of his head.
“No.”
“Does that make you sad? Do you miss her?”
When he turned to her she saw the consternation on his face, the struggle he seemed to be having with words. She thought perhaps he’d started out to lie to her, but with a sigh he changed his mind.
“Yes,” he said, “I miss her. Not as a lover, that’s past and would be too clumsy to rekindle. I miss working with her because she’s so goddamn good at getting people to talk in front of cameras. Rico handled the techno stuff, and between us she and I could get to the bottom of most anything. I think she’s in love with MacIntosh up in Current Control, but I don’t think she’s admitted it,yet. If it’s true, it should make life easier for both of us.”
“If one of you is in love, then that takes the heat off?”
Ben laughed. “I suppose you could say that, yes.”
She lowered her gaze to the cube that her hands passed back and forth in front of her. “Could you ever be in love with me?”
He laughed a soft laugh, picked up her hand and leaned closer.
“I remember everything about you,” he said. “That first day I saw you in Flattery’s lab, when you looked at me over your shoulder and smiled … I had a feeling when our eyes met like I’ve never had before. I still get it every time I see you, think of you, dream of you. Isn’t that something like love?”
Her pale skin flushed red from the neck of her dress to the roots of her shaggy white hair at her forehead.
“It’s the same for me,” she said. “But I have nothing to compare with. And how could I live up to whatever you’ve shared with … her?”
“Love isn’t a competition,” he said. “It happens. I had some tough times, living with B, but I don’t have to bring up the bad parts to punish myself for missing the friendship, the good parts. I think she and I are both people who refuse to dislike someone we’ve loved. She’s an exceptional person or I wouldn’t have loved her. A lot of bliss, a lot of turmoil, but no boredom at all. The bliss part she called ‘our convergent lines.’ Ultimately we blamed each other for being impossible when it was our situation we couldn’t bear …”
His green eyes darkened and, for a moment, went somewhere…somewhen.
Crista squeezed his hand.
“Did you take the job of interviewing me because you knew that she was working on Flattery’s project at the Preserve?”
He laughed again, an easy laugh, as though they and the boat were all that existed—no Flattery, no Warrior’s Union, just a little outing under the sea.
“That’s yes and no,” he said. “I think your story is the most exciting thing I can show the rest of Pandora. I wouldn’t have tried for it otherwise. But, yes, I did hope, in a moment of wallowing in loneliness, that I’d see her again.”
“And … ?”
“I did.” He shrugged. “The thrill was gone and we were good friends. Good friends who still work very well together.”
“You knew that Flattery was buying off all three of us with those interviews, didn’t you?” Crista asked.
She set her hat beside her on the deck and peeled off her headband and mantilla while still holding his hand. She gave her matted hair a shake, and he let go her hand to gather their utensils at the sideboard.
He held my hand longer than the sum of all human touches in my memory!
“I figured it out,” he said. “That’s why … this. Flattery pulled the corporate strings, denying air time before the first beam was shot. But no one was told. I was paid, you were interviewed at length on five occasions—and this was the story of the century! He paid to have it done so he could kill it.”
“Yes,” she said, “with no pangs of conscience whatsoever. Look what it got him: We are here, together. I, at least, am happier. And hungry,” she indicated her disguise, “in spite of how it looks.”
Ben patted the lump of clothing strapped to her belly. “And fulfilled, too,” he teased. He dared to stroke her cheek again with a smile before fetching two very solid mugs of very hot coffee. In rough current, the mugs didn’t slide the table like the utensils.
She watched the seascape as their foil slithered through the kelpways, her quick breaths fogging the plaz. Though the Preserve was a seaside base camp, Crista never once had been allowed down to the beach. Flattery feared her relationship with the kelp, and saw to it that others around her did, too.
Ben nudged her shoulder and pointed through the starboard port toward the skeletal remains of a kelp outpost, dimly visible in the foil’s deepwater lights. The kelp itself had been burned back to knobby stumps for a thousand meters all around.
“Report says kelp killed three families here, sixteen people,” he said. “Vashon Security did their retaliatory number on the kelp, as you can see. They call it ‘pruning.’”
Though it was shadowland beneath a weak wash of light and though the engines had quieted in submersible mode, Crista focused on the tingle at her shoulder where Ben had touched her. She fought back tears of joy. How could she explain this to him, who touched people and was touched at will?
He pulled two hot trays out of the galley and set them on the table. He dealt out little containers of red, green and yellow sauces. She knew she needed food, strength, but some dreaminess had caught her up since boarding the foil and she didn’t really want to shake it.
Sunlight strengthened her, this she knew. The beautiful kiss from Ben, that strengthened her, too. Something about this Rico LaPush also strengthened her, but she didn’t know what.
Crista glanced again at Ben, beside her, as his gaze searched the dimness of the passing landscape.
“The Preserve is under attack,” Ben said. She didn’t respond. “You can watch it onscreen if you want.” He indicated the briefing screen against the aft galley bulkhead. She preferred the old word “wall,” but not many used it. Tribute to Pandora’s watery history and Islander influence. Hunger broke through her reverie, and she chose the chopsticks.
Though Ben talked on, Crista concentrated on her meal, eating half of Ben’s as well, leaving him the vegetables. His words buzzed like a fat bee in the warm galley air. All the while a lullaby kept running through her head that no human ear had heard in two thousand years.
Hush little baby don’t say a word
Momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird …
She had learned to be cautious wandering her memories, too. When the flashbacks started sometimes they took over, unpeeling whole sections of other people’s lives. They lasted longer each time, dragging Crista through hours of lightning-fast memories: no focus, no fine-tuning, simply off or on.
First it was blinks, then seconds, moments. A minute of high-speed memory, lived with a full sensory component, could wring an entire lifetime out of the wet cloth of her mind. Her last flashback had terminated only after exhaustion and heavy sedation. It had lasted nearly four hours. Though conscious immediately, she had been dazed and unable to speak for three days. Flattery had used this as an excuse to further limit her life at his compound, and to adjust her medications.
She felt that same dazedness now, but no onslaught of memories, no sweat, no fear.
“Crista Galli,” Ben said, “you have quite the life awaiting you. You are ‘the One, Her Holiness,’ a living legend. You are the most important person alive today.”
She felt an uneasiness at what he said, and sought reason to feel uneasy at the way he said it. She clung to the word “person”, something she had never been called.
“‘The One’?” she muttered. “‘The One’ to do what?”
“You are the One for whom they have waited in suffering for so long,” he said. “Depending on whom you believe, you are the last salvation of humankind, or you are the kelp’s secret weapon to eradicate humans forever. In your glimpse of the people of Kalaloch you must have felt your power. There is a lot for you to learn, and quickly. We will help you with that. But because one does not touch a god, one does not come before a god scratching one’s fleas, you will see only the best side of the faithful, and the worst side of the rest.”
