Chapter Chapter Twenty Three

The rest of Ornette’s time touring the factories was fairly uneventful. She got along with Stonic all right. He told her stories of being a solarship pilot in the Jovian region, going as far as Saturn and touring their moons, and how dark it was as far out as Saturn. That was why he took a tour doing helocarrier work on Venus. He didn’t want to pay for a vacation and Sleeping Beauty Inc. let him come to sunny Venus to cheer him up before sending him back out to Jupiter.

Ornette thought the stories were interesting. She had only heard horror stories of Mars and she thought the other colonies must be similar, but Stonic reassured her over and over again that that wasn’t true.

“When you’re under the watch of Jupiter, you’d better believe that the whole planet is like a star all by itself. It’s very bright,” he explained pleasantly as they ate together in the back of the helocarrier. They sat on their beds and looked across at each other. “It’s especially wonderful when you’re on Calisto or Ganymede.”

“Not Europa or Io?” Ornette asked curiously.

“On Europa, they just shove you under the ice as soon as you get there. I’ve been told it’s only mildly less dreary than the mine shafts of Mars. It’s less dreary because they have windows that look out onto the sea. There’s a lot of water under the ice sheets there and the ice doesn’t utterly block the light, so you can see sea cows and other weird things swimming by. It’s nice, but it’s not as nice as being out in the light on Ganymede or Calisto. And yes, you’re out in the open on Io, but Io stinks, and the population is wildly against slavery. Both of us would be arrested if we ever set foot on Io. Sleeping Beauty Inc. has utterly pulled out of that moon.”

“There’s no slavery there?” Ornette asked curiously. Being a slave had not given her access to all the latest current events. Everything he said was news to her.

“None. The Church of Voynich won’t allow it.”

“But it stinks?” she persisted.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“The ground itself stinks. It’s the sulpher,” Stonic explained patiently. “But from what I’ve heard, once you get used to the smell, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the universe. There are big yellow sand dunes everywhere, a black sky, stars, Jupiter, and the sand fairly glows. That much I’ve seen for myself, but it smells like rotten eggs that burn the hair right out of your nose.”

Ornette chuckled. “Another perk of your job. You’re allowed to have nose hair.”

Stonic looked at her levelly and responded accordingly. “You’re not going to make me feel bad for you. You’re beautiful. You’re in a bad position. I’m the only person you have right now to turn to, but I’ve gotten mixed up with Sleeping Beauty Inc. models more times than you can even guess. It used to be my job to remove their bracelets and give them quarter physicals. I’ve had my fair share of unhappiness falling in love with friggin–”

Ornette cut him off. “You got all that from nose hair?”

A second on the clock passed and then he burst out a laugh. “Okay. I got a little carried away. I’m just…”

“Heartbroken?” Ornette finished for him.

“Yeah,” he agreed, rubbing the back of his neck in frustration.

“What happened?” she asked sympathetically.

“Nothing special, the same old story. She got bought by someone who was rich enough to pay her fees. Then she had her contract renewed for an even greater amount of money. Then she took a third contract. I hardly noticed. I was in cryostasis almost the whole time. She scheduled a vacation after her third round with him. She was going to spend it with me. She came. We had dinner. We talked… And everything was different. She had changed. She had aged six years, but I hadn’t changed. I’d stayed the same. She was bored. She was supposed to hang out with me for two weeks. She was done after two days and went to take the rest of her vacation elsewhere.”

“That had to have hurt,” Ornette agreed.

He clenched his jaw. “Don’t show me sympathy. I don’t feel sorry for myself. It’s happened before. She paid for the rest of my vacation and I bummed around Calisto for twelve days. It was fine. Afterward, I went to Saturn. After that, I came here. It’s just annoying because there’s always news about her in the Sleeping Beauty Inc. literature. She’s super famous now and she makes wads of cash so large they make the angels weep. What’s in your future? Do you want to make money like that?”

Ornette fumbled with her answer. Despite how frank Stonic was acting, Ornette did not want to tell him her plan to leave Sleeping Beauty Inc. If she said those things to him, he would think she was trying to convince him that a romance with her was entirely possible when it wasn’t. He was right about the way romances went in their industry. Ornette had scores of personal anecdotes to support his rhetoric.

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“I haven’t so far, and I’m not getting any younger,” she replied lightly.

He opened a bottle of something bubbly and agreed with her.

They got along fine. They visited the factories they were supposed to visit. Ornette arrived back in Nepra in time for the dress fitting for what she would wear to the filming of the show the next day. They said a pleasant goodbye that was filmed by a film crew, which Ornette thought was strange.

It turned out that Westen did not have time to dine with her or go to her dress fitting. He was having a team of writers work out what he would say when it was his turn on stage, but otherwise, he was too busy to bother with her. The camera crew had not been told, and they were annoyed. They were supposed to get footage of Westen with Ornette.

Ornette didn’t care. She did a happy little dance in her room to celebrate.

The day before the show was filmed, she went to the dress fitting. When she saw the dress on the hanger, she thought it was designed to be an insult. It was supposed to make her look boring. It was beige with hardly any flare or adornment.

When she saw it on the hanger, she thought that it was a surefire sign that Westen’s business was in trouble, but the only way that was true was if he had made some terrible mistake to screw it up. Everyone always needed new panels for the floating cities. The old ones did not last forever and they needed to be replaced from beneath. If he was having business trouble, that was a very interesting subject.

Ornette put the dress on and something amazing happened.

Sometimes a dress is not supposed to look good. It looks like a rag in the catalog. It looks like a rag on the hanger. It even looks like a rag in the changerooms until the very moment the zipper is done up and then, miracle of miracles, it looks amazing.

That was what happened to Ornette when she put on the dull beige dress. She put it on and suddenly, it was not beige, it was sunkissed silver. She was made of gold. Everything looked beyond perfect.

She came out of the changeroom and the sad little tailor who’d given it to her seemed like he swallowed his dentures. He put a hand to his mouth and through various tongue maneuvers, he corrected whatever had come loose in his mouth. He looked at Ornette and when he finally spoke, he said faintly, “I’ve never seen a more beautiful woman in my life.”

Ornette believed him.

And, since Westen had made no move on her, and didn’t appear to be interested, she swept up her skirt and kissed the tailor on his cheek.

The man turned all kinds of red, but he managed to get enough control over himself to remember his job, so he offered Ornette her choice of the jewelry they’d rented.

***

That night Ornette went to the cafeteria to eat dinner. The place was empty as all the other contestants had hot dates with their temporary owners on the last night and she was alone. There was no staff around and the only food that was there was food that had been there all day. So, there were a few plastic-wrapped sandwiches with wilted lettuce, an apple, and a bag of chips so tiny that it was under a hundred calories. No matter how sad that sounded, it was actually a lot more food than she had to eat the previous week when she dined with Hans, so she wasn’t unhappy as she ate.

She expected someone to make an appearance. The Coordinator would come in and talk to her breezily about this or that for a few minutes, or one of the other contestants would get dropped off early, or maybe even Desmond would show his face.

No one came.

That was fine by Ornette. She ate her food in silence, cleaned up in silence, and returned to her room in silence.

In her room, she wasn’t bored. She had a ton of grooming to do that she hadn’t really been able to do while she was on tour with Stonic. She gave herself a facial, a pedicure, then a manicure, and finished her evening with a full round of meditation.

Her meditation routine was done in bed when everything else was done. She imagined the clouds as heart-shaped balloons and tried to find that pleasant place where it didn’t matter what had happened to her last, whether it was good or bad, it was time to let it go like a balloon that floated up into the air until it got so high, she couldn’t tell what was balloon and what was cloud.

She fell asleep that way.

“Move over. You’re in the middle of the bed.”

Ornette’s eyelashes fluttered in the half-light. “Did you come in through the shoe rack?” she asked Desmond.

He pulled her onto his chest and kissed her temple. “Yes. Do you like shoes?”

“I love shoes,” she agreed, pulling him closer.

He sighed. “I don’t know why you want to do this.”

“You're curious why I want you to hold me even when you can’t fool around with me?” Ornette questioned drowsily.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“I wasn’t held exactly like this when I was little, but something like it. And one day, it was all over and I was never held again.”

“You weren’t with your parents?’

“No. After that…” she said groggily. “I was in a spacesuit. It was dark all the time. I was afraid. I even slept in my suit, and when I finally came out of it… I was being slapped. I was being thrown across rooms. My head was banging against drywall. I wasn’t safe. That was when I started forgetting everything on purpose, but no matter how hard I try, I can never forget about that time at the beginning when I was held and I thought that nothing would ever hurt me.”

He kissed her head again. “You’re very brave and you’re not what I expected when I signed up for this thing.”

“What did you expect?”

“Someone thoughtless.”

“You chose me and bought me, but why me? Especially when I cost so much less than the other girls? It must have made you look foolish in front of your friends.” Talking to Desmond like she was in a dream in the clouds was strange when she was only sleepy and imagining clouds when there were real clouds all around them. She didn't need to dream of clouds on Venus. That was something she dreamed of when she was in outer space.

“I liked something about your profile,” he answered vaguely. He kissed her a third time. “Stop asking questions and go to sleep. I can’t stay all night and I don’t want to sneak out while you’re still awake.”

“Don’t sneak out. Stay forever,” she whispered, once again enjoying the feeling of a bed that wasn’t too hot or too cold. It was just right.