The Ascension Factor

"Half of the shows I do get dropped," Ben said. "It's not because they're not good, it's because it's getting 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 that it sounded 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.

It was fear for Ben that 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.