The Ascension Factor: Pandora Sequence Page 6

  “What …?”

  “An old coracle,” Ben said, “registered to me. They will be busy for a while. With luck, they will believe we were aboard.”

  Another whump took Crista’s breath away, and as she pulled on the unfamiliar clothing she saw that the security squad had not disappeared with the crowd. They came on with the same precision and deliberation, door to door. The street was nearly empty as everyone else who was able-bodied fought the fires or moved nearby boats to safety.

  While Ben stood watch beside the window, Crista pulled on a heavily embroidered white cotton dress that was much too big for her. Her breasts bobbled free inside, another luxury Flattery wouldn’t allow. She held the fabric away from her flat belly and looked questioningly at Ben.

  He tossed her a black pajama-type worksuit of the Islanders that appeared identical to the one he wore. From a drawer beside the bed he pulled a long woven sash and handed it to her.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re pregnant. Quite a ways along, too.”

  When she still didn’t follow his intent, he said, “Strap the worksuit on your belly to fill out the dress,” he said. “You’ll need it later. For now, you are a pregnant Islander. I am your man.”

  She strapped the worksuit around her as instructed and adjusted the dress. In the mirror beside the hatch she did look pregnant.

  Crista watched in the mirror as Ben wrapped a long red bandana around his head, letting the tails fall between his shoulder blades. It was embroidered with the same geometries that appeared on her dress.

  My man, she thought with a smile, and we’re dressing to go out.

  She patted the padding on her stomach fondly and rested her hand there, half-expecting to feel some tiny movement. Ben stood behind her and tied a similar bandana around her forehead. He gave her a floppy straw hat to wear over it.

  “This manner of dress is the mark of the Island I grew up on,” he said. “You have heard about Guemes Island?”

  “Yes, of course. Sunk the year before I was born.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You are now the pregnant wife of a Guemes Island survivor. Among Islanders you will receive the greatest respect. Among Mermen you will be treated with the deference that only the guilty can bestow. As you know, it means absolutely nothing among Flattery’s people. We have no papers, there wasn’t time …”

  Two whistles at their hatch. Two different whistles. “That’s Rico,” he said, and matched her smile. “Now we get to go outside.”

  Chapter 9

  The things that people want and the things that are good for them are very different. … Great art and domestic bliss are mutually incompatible. Sooner or later, you’ll have to make your choice.

  —Arthur C. Clarke

  Beatriz dozed awhile on the couch after shutting off her alarm. The dark, plazless office at the launch site helped keep the fabric of her dream alive. Freed from the confines of her mind, it flowed about the room with the ease of a ghost. In a way, it was a ghost.

  She had been dreaming of Ben, of their last night together, and parts of the dream she wanted to savor. It was two years ago, the night before she made her first trip up to the Orbiter, before she met Mack. She was nervous about her first shuttle flight to the Orbiter, and Ben was going off to the High Reaches to meet with some Zavatan elder. In spite of the fact that they’d been lovers for years, they both felt awkward. It was ending, they knew it was ending, but neither of them could talk about it.

  Early evening, clear and warm. A shot of sunset still streaked the horizon pink and blue. They sat aboard one of HoloVision’s foils at dockside, in the crew’s quarters. She remembered the familiar shlup-shlip of water against the hull and the occasional mutter of wild squawks settling down. Children played their evening games before being called in for the night and they whistle-signaled from pier to pier. She and Ben had talked of children, of wanting them and of bad timing. This night the rest of their crews had discreetly left them alone. She found out later it was at Rico’s suggestion.

  “Women are the answer,” Ben said, handing her a glass of white wine. “And what was the question?”

  She touched glasses with him, sipped, and set it down. She did not want to ride a rocket into orbit in the morning with a hangover.

  Ben’s green eyes looked particularly beautiful against his dark skin. His lean, muscular body had always been perfect with hers. She couldn’t understand why he had to go off on his wild projects chasing down Shadows when he could stay and work with her. She’d covered as much death as she cared to, it was time they thought of themselves.

  I want to report on life, advances, progress.…

  “Women represent life, advances, progress,” he said.

  The hair prickled at the back of her neck. “Are you reading my mind?”

  “Would I dare?” he asked.

  Those green eyes twinkled in their way that shot something straight into her heart, something warm that always melted downward like a hand inside her underwear. Beatriz was a strong woman, and Ben Ozette was the only man who ever made her weak in the knees. She sipped her wine and kept the glass at her chest.

  “What am I thinking now?” she asked, feeling she had to change the subject.

  “You’re wishing I’d get on with whatever it was I was going to say so that we can get on with the evening.”

  She laughed a little louder than she liked, and ran a hand through her black hair. “Why, Mr. Ozette, what kind of girl do you think I am?”

  He ignored her flirtation. His manner turned serious.

  “I think you’re the kind of girl who wants to see the best for everyone—for the refugees, yourself, even Flattery. You’ve covered some of the most horrible disasters and bloodiest atrocities this world has seen. I know because I was there. Now it won’t go away, so you’re going away. You want to see progress, you want to see good things. Well, so do I …”

  “But look what you’re doing!” She punched her thigh and scooted back in the couch. “OK, security is more than enthusiastic, that’s bad enough. If you make heroes out of the people fighting them, then more will join them. They will have to fight the same way. There will be no end to the cycle. Dammit, Ben, that’s why they call it ‘Revolution.’ Wheels turn and turn in place and the vehicle gets mired down. I’ve come damned close to dying more times than I can count—most of those times with you—and now I want to get somewhere. I want a family …”

  Ben set down his glass and grasped her hand across the table.

  “I know,” he said. “I understand. Maybe I understand more than you think. I want to offer you life, advances, progress.”

  Neither of them spoke for a while, but their hands conversed with each other in the familiar language of lovers.

  “OK,” she said. She tossed off her wine, trying to appear lighthearted, “what’s the plan, man?”

  “I don’t know the plan, yet,” he said. “But I know the key. It’s information. Our business, remember?”

  “Yes?” She refilled her glass, then his. “Explain.”

  “You didn’t see any women in Flattery’s security force, and you set out to do a story, remember? What happened?”

  “Not approved, we never shot a photon’s worth …”

  “And how many times has that happened?”

  “To me? Not much. But then, there are plenty of stories to do, more than I’ll ever live to do, I just find another one or take an assignment …”

  “An important point,” Ben said. He hunched over their little table, tapping the top with his index finger. “If Flattery doesn’t get flattered, the story, whatever it is, doesn’t get aired. He is from a different world—literally, a different world. He is from a world that starves women and children because they are on the wrong side of an imaginary line, and he won’t allow them to cross it. We are from a world that used to teach: ‘Life, at all cost. Preserve life.’ Pandora has been adversary enough. We haven’t been able to afford the luxury of fighting amongst ou
rselves.”

  “So, I don’t get where …”

  “Half of the shows I do get dropped,” Ben said. “It’s not because they’re not good, it’s just harder and harder to keep Flattery from looking like the hood that he is. What would happen if people refused to have anything to do with him—refused to speak with him, feed him, shelter him—what would happen then?”

  She laughed again. “What makes you think they’d do that? It would take—”

  “Information. Show him up for what he is, show the people what they can do. This whole world’s been a disaster since Flattery took over. He promises them food and keeps them hungry. He keeps us in line because we know what he can do to us. If people knew they’d be no more hungry without Flattery, without the Vashon Security Force, would they put up with him?”

  “It would take a miracle,” she finished.

  She couldn’t look him in the eye. This was the conversation she really didn’t want to have on their last night together. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m running off at the mouth again. I interviewed a group of mothers today who are petitioning the Chief of Security for news of their sons and husbands who have disappeared. Another group, over five hundred mothers, says that they had sons killed but there was never an investigation, never an arrest. They say security did it, there are witnesses. Now, I don’t know about that. What I do know is that mothers are the ones on the march. HoloVision’s refusing to pick up on it, forbidding me to report on what people have the right to know. There has to be a way … I’m just thinking out loud, is all.”

  He kissed her again on the cheek, then lifted her chin.

  “I’ll shut up now,” he said. He kissed her lips and she pulled him down to the carpet beside the table.

  “Promise?” She kissed him back, and untucked his shirt from his pants so she could get her hands under his clothes, onto his smooth, warm skin.

  His hands unbuttoned her Islander blouse, unpeeled her cotton skirt and found her bare under both. “Pretty daring,” he muttered, and kissed her belly as she undressed him. “You realize we’re going to get rug burn.”

  “I thought you promised to shut up.”

  Her alarm went off again and startled Beatriz out of her waking dream. She shut it off and sat up to give herself some energy. Ben had been right about the rug burn. They’d kicked the wine over on themselves, too. She was sure that had been the night that Ben conceived the idea for Shadowbox. She sighed, trying to lift a heavy sadness from her chest.

  Too bad we couldn’t have conceived a little one, she thought. It might’ve saved us both.

  If they had, she wouldn’t have met Mack. Her relationship with Ben prepared her for Mack. He was a little older, and because of his upbringing on Moonbase he wanted a family as much as she did.

  Beatriz pressed the “start” key on her pocket messenger and it announced: “0630 …” She twisted the volume knob down and massaged her tired eyelids. The preliminary briefing from the HoloVision head office would be followed by more details before air time so she half-listened, intent only on news of Ben Ozette. Another deep sigh.

  The smell at her launch site office down under was distinctly Merman—air swept clean of particulate, saturated with the scent of mold inhibitors and sterile water. Lighting in HoloVision’s small broadcast studio always dried things out a bit and helped her breathe easier on the air. She suspected she would be on the air again in less than half an hour.

  She pulled the legs of her singlesuit straight and unbunched the wrinkled sleeves from her armpits. Her office was backlit in the Merman way, so her reflection in the plaz was a warm one, capturing the glow of her brown skin and the sheen of her shaggy black hair. Her generation and Ben’s was the first in two centuries to have more children born to the ancient norm of human appearance than not. Beatriz did not pity the severely mutated, pity was an emotion that most Pandorans could do without. She thanked the odds daily for her natural good looks. Right now she wanted a hot shower before facing her messenger’s latest story of woe.

  That’s what Ben always called it, she thought. She spoke it aloud, “‘Another story of woe.’”

  Fatigue and a half-sleep deepened her voice enough to sound vaguely like his. It made her want to hear his voice, to argue with him one more time about who worked the hardest and who got the shower first. She smiled in spite of her worry. It was more than symbolic that they had always wound up in hot water together.

  Fear for Ben made her not want to face the messenger just yet. It was hard enough to face the fact that she still loved him, though in an unloverly way.

  Suicide, she thought. He might just as well have run the perimeter on a bet and let a dasher have at him.

  Beatriz knew the signs, and it was Ben who’d made her aware of them. Crossing the Director was a survival matter.

  She dolloped enough milk into her coffee to cool it off, then sipped at the rim while she replayed the brief, chilling message.

  0630 Memo:

  Location brief, Launch Bay Five, air time 0645.

  Lead: Crista Galli still in hands of Shadows.

  Second lead: OMCs to Orbital Station today.

  Detail: ref terrorists, arms, drugs, religious fervor, Shadows. Final assembly of Voidship drive in orbit, OMC installation imminent. Items follow on Location.

  Secondary discretion: Mandatory at 0640.

  Time out: 0631.

  Beatriz glanced at the processor’s time display: 0636.

  “Secondary Discretion!” she muttered. That meant they were doing a time-delay. Time enough that HoloVision could run a pretaped Newsbreak if she didn’t show up or, worse, if they didn’t like what she said on the air. Ben had warned her it would come to this.

  “Damn!”

  What else was he right about?

  The elevator to the Newsbreak studio at Launch Bay Five was only a dozen meters down the passageway from her office. She fingered the tangles out of her hair and hurried out the hatchway. The hurry didn’t slow her worrying one whit.

  Ben had something to do with this Crista Galli thing, and she knew that Flattery knew that, too. Why, then, was there still no release on Ben? The answer was one that Ben had tried to warn her about, and it chilled her to think it.

  They’ll see that he disappears, she thought. If there’s nothing on him in the briefing … She didn’t want to think of that.

  Flattery knows about us … about Ben, she thought. She knew about the disappearances, the bodies in the streets of Kalaloch in the mornings. Ben had warned her about this more than once and shown her firsthand, finally, how it happened. She knew that unpopular people disappeared. She had never thought it would happen to one of them.

  Another thought shook her as she faced the elevator. If I don’t say something about him on the air, then he’s going to disappear for sure!

  She was scheduled to fly with the crew that delivered the OMCs to the Orbital Station for their Voidship installation. He must know about her budding relationship with Mack, that was no secret. The installation of the Organic Mental Cores was a nice piece of propaganda for Flattery that would take her conveniently out of the picture. It would also make it impossible for her to investigate Ben’s disappearance on her own.

  She hadn’t known what to think last night when she’d had to fill in for Ben. She’d read the prompter cold, too surprised at the lie on her screen, at the suddenness of the lie, to challenge it there. Flattery had finally tossed her a gauntlet.

  What is the worst? she asked herself now. The worst would be that they would both disappear.

  She squeezed into the elevator among the press of techs and mechanics, left their greetings unreturned. They were a sweaty bunch in the cramped humidity.

  What is for sure?

  For sure Ben would disappear if she said nothing, if HoloVision Nightly News continued to lie about his absence.

  She rounded the passageway into the studio suite of the HoloVision fe
ature assignment crew. It was an engine assembly hangar with ten-meter-high ceilings. The makeup tech’s hands were fussing over Beatriz’s hair and face as soon as she entered the hatchway. Someone else helped her slip into a bulky pullover blouse with the HoloVision logo at the left breast. As usual, several of the crew were talking at once, none of them saying what she wanted to hear. She wouldn’t be doing this Newsbreak unless Ben were still missing.

  She had seen Ben and Crista Galli together a few days ago at Flattery’s compound. Ben and Crista, in the hibiscus courtyard, Ben leaning toward Crista in that intent way he had. Beatriz knew then that he had fallen in love with the girl. She also knew that he probably didn’t know that yet himself.

  I should have had a talk with him … not a lover talk, a friend talk. Now he might be dead.

  She patted her cheeks flush and the lights turned up. It was nearly time, and still she spoke to no one, heard little, viewed the blank prompter with a certain measure of fear. He had held her own gaze intently hundreds of times over the years, dozens of times with the same argument.

  “I look at the big picture,” she’d say. “Pandora’s unstable, we’ve seen that. We could all die here on any given day at the whim of meteorology. We need another world …” And he would always argue for the now.

  “People are hungry now,” he would say. “They need to be fed now or there won’t be a later for any of us …”

  She always felt insignificant in the studio in spite of her fame, but today as they scrubbed and dusted her face, fluffed her hair and placed her earpiece she was writing her own script for the Newsbreak—one that she hoped would keep Ben in the news but keep Flattery off her back. She looked into the prompter, adjusted the contrast and cleared her throat. She had thirty seconds. She cleared her throat again, smiled at the lens cluster and took a deep breath.