PACIFICUM OCEAN: FORWARD OBSERVATION PORTAL

We flew a hundred feet above the vast floating garbage-covered surface of the Pacificum Ocean. Near the Hawaiian Islands, roped-together junks, floats, rafts, and hulls formed masses that stretched for hundreds of miles. Since we weren't doing shows and I didn't have any costuming duties, I spent most of the time on my stomach in the small forward observation portal sharing the eyescopes with Gregg.

"There's a couple over there!" he said, handing me the scopes. "He's sewing her cut hard."

I took the scopes, but I didn't seek his find, instead scanning the dirty faces of the algae and seaweed brandclan slubbers that gazed up at us. Children often threw things at the Pacifica Showhouse as we passed-until their parents smacked them when the debris inevitably came raining back down. "It's all sad," I said.

With a disappointed snort, Gregg snatched back the scopes. A minute later, the ship having drifted, we were past the couple and he raised his head. "We'll be in Baja in two days." He shrugged. "I haven't been sand chipping in years."

I didn't know what that meant and didn't ask. These slubs seemed far worse than the corn. I couldn't imagine living on floating garbage and subsisting on little but the emerald algae that filled the water.

"Over there," Gregg pointed to the right. "Is that a cut-ko getting undressed?"

I just shook my head. Gregg frowned at me for a moment and turned back to watch. "She's going swimming," he said. "Wait… never mind… it's a man." He took the scopes from his eyes and stared ahead glumly. Turning, he glanced over his shoulder and spoke quietly. "Vada's had others along for her show tours."

The news didn't surprise me. "Oh?"

"But she's different around you."

I raised my head.

"She's nice to you." He frowned and scratched his nose. "I can see she really likes you." He laughed and then whispered. "I'm afraid of her, but it's juice that you guys are fashionable."

Although I pretended I didn't care one way or another, my chest fluttered with a strange mix of joy, relief, and worry. It confirmed exactly what I wanted to believe and exactly what I was beginning to fear.

"You floaters, looking for tits again?" Marti stood glaring at us. I rarely saw her these days, as she was always on the bridge helping Xavier. She poked her head into the organza bubble.

"Cut off!" said Gregg. "There's not supposed to be more than two in here!"

"Shut up!" To me she smiled and asked, "You doing it?"

"They've been doing it the whole time!" said Gregg, before I could speak. "Don't you hear them?"

"I'm talking about him getting Bunné, floater!"

"Getting?" I asked. "I'm just supposed to rip a yarn."

"Rip a yarn?" Gregg scoffed.

"No," said Marti. "I heard you're cutting her."

Vada sat at her desk staring at her open notebook. Folding it closed, she spoke toward the wall, exasperation in her voice. "You were talking to the crew."

"Is it true?" I stood just inside her cabin's door.

She turned and faced me. "We need the yarn."

"You told me I'm ripping a yarn. Marti says I'm cutting Bunné."

She sat up. "You're not cutting her, whatever that means. Marti probably means that the information we can get from the yarn-as we understand it-could take her down. You might only be setting off a long chain of events."

I chewed that for a moment. "Okay," I said slowly, "and it's the end of us?"

Her gaze fell away from me. "Each of us-I mean everyone in this cell-will go a separate way. We'll go under the heavy blankets for months… maybe years."

It was then, standing in her cabin with the gentle vibrations of the ship thrumming beneath my feet and the sunlight filtering down through the ballonets, that I finally saw, understood, and began to accept the end-the end of my adventure, the end of my affair with the showhouse entervator entertainer, and maybe the end of everything I had known. I hated it, but didn't know what I could do to stop it.

Vada frowned. "I know you're angry."

"No," I lied. "I'm not."

She pursed her lips. "For us to be together like you want, you would have to give up your life."

"I would."

"You don't know what you would be giving up."

"Isn't that my choice?"

She shook her head slowly. "It's not fair to you. You're supposed to sew, not do what we do." She sighed. "I love how I looked in your work and, believe me, a part of me wants you just for me, but that's not fair to you and your talents."

"That's your excuse," I told her. "I'm the one who decides about me and my shit talents."

Her head slumped forward wearily. "Look… there are other things, too. I'm older than you think, and I've done terrible things. You have to understand who I really am. I'm not just the entervator entertainer you think I am."

"I know that!"

"I'm wanted by all the cities!" she said loudly, angrily. She covered her face with a hand and whispered. "I'm even wanted in Budai. And those people don't give a stitch if you cut out your own mother's lungs and eat them."

"I don't care about any of that."

Vada sighed. "And I wish I didn't either."

Two days later, after hundreds more miles of polluted ocean, I heard the call Baja ahead! from the bridge. For the next several days we flew north along the coast, closer here, farther there. We passed huge metropolises of G-Diego, Lax, Esefoh, and mile after mile of slubs everywhere in between.

"M-Bunny is pushing inland against L. Segu," said Vada. She and I lay on our stomachs in the forward observation port. "She's got masses of M-Bunny men as far down as Pelu. There's another corn clan down there called Rima, but they have been decimated with pox skirmishes. No one knows how many dead."

"Are you telling me so I'll be angry at Bunné?"

Vada paused. "I am."

"You don't have to."

"I just want you to understand."

"I do understand."

She frowned at me, but I ignored her, staring at the iridescent blooms of color in the water below.

Vada pushed herself up slowly. "I'm tired."

After she had gone, I lay there alone, a tingling fury racing up and down my body like charged electrons. I had to fight hard not to punch, kick, or scream.

Then the floor shifted. I turned, expecting Vada, but her brother Xavier lay beside me. I had barely even seen him on the ship over the past several months. He was always on the bridge. I glanced at the clump of chewed gum that had once been his ear.

He stared forward at the landscape below. "We're both a little bit doomed."

I didn't want his pity, or worse, to think that she had sent him to deliver the final blow, to tell me how impossible and tragic and different they were.

"We've both been hurt," he added. "In different ways." He stopped and shook his head. "Listen, all I know is that she thinks you're special. If she could… I think she might have run off with you." With that, he stood, and headed up the stairs to the bridge.

I know he had meant to comfort me, but his assurance only made it worse. It was close, he had meant. Just not close enough.

I didn't go to my room that night, but stayed there in the observation portal. Around dawn I fell asleep. When I woke in the afternoon, I used the toilet, ate, and then returned to the portal, where I spent the rest of the day staring blindly ahead as the earth flowed past.

I didn't see Vada.

Finally, we stopped in some slub place that Marti called Union. The tenting, the stage, and much of the gear was unloaded to lighten the ship. The crew was pared down with Gregg and Haas staying behind. At dusk, we turned north, and it wasn't long before I could see the top edge of the glowing towers of Seattlehama in the distance. I had imagined that I would feel some sense of homecoming and relief, but it was the opposite. I felt dread.

Through the eyescopes, I located Bunné's building, the Zea, and could see the lights of the open-air amphitheater on top, above her boutique. They were preparing for the show Vada had mentioned: The Suicital. I lowered the goggles. The stitches on that dress in Bunné's Boutique had been exactly seven hundred warp yarns apart. Standing, I hurried down the cloth corridor to the costume storeroom. Most of Vada's costumes and notions had been unloaded in Union, but a few remained, and after scrounging around in the darkness, I found the blouse I was looking for-a simple off-white number with black pick stitching. I checked the material: two-up twill with a high-twist blend warp and a low-twist weft. I guessed it was satellite silk as the hand was soft, supple, and coolly logical. With my thumb, I felt the pick-stitches and started counting the yarns.

A moment later, I tossed the blouse aside and made my way to Vada's room.

"I understand something."

Vada turned slowly from her notebook, her face grave. "Button the door."

I stepped in and closed the cloth behind me. "You're sisters."