Shuttered Sky

drunk couples sweating a hot lambada. He could see people on deck now, leaning on the guard rails. Bathing suits, sun hats, and everyone seemed to have a drink in their hand.

“If that’s haunted, the ghosts must be having a hell of a time,” said Winston. The boatman reserved judgment.

The ship loomed before them now, a massive thing that just kept growing as they got closer. The anchor was down, but the lower gangway doors were all closed. “No way on, my friend,” said the boatman.

“Go around a few times.”

Reluctantly the boatman turned the wheel, and began to circle the great ship.

Winston moved out to the center of the boat, where he could be seen from the Horizon’s deck. It also made him a target, but he was willing to take that chance. The boat circled twice, and by the time they came around to the starboard side for the second time, the aft lower gangway door was opening.

“Now they kill you,” said the boatman. He set his engine to an idle, and they coasted to the gangway door. Just inside, two unusually corpulent crewmen greeted them with disapproving frowns.

“She says you’re not welcome here,” barked one of them.

Winston grinned in triumph. So he was right—it was Lourdes! “Tell her she owes me five minutes of her time.”

“I suggest you turn your boat around, and go back where you came from.”

The boatman looked first at the guards, then at Winston. His eyes were pleading.

The men wore earpieces. Winston guessed that they must have been getting their orders straight from the horse’s mouth. He won­dered if Lourdes could hear him as well.

“Tell her,” said Winston, raising his voice, “that she’s a stubborn bitch without a shred of sense.”

The boatman took a deep breath and crossed himself. The crew­men hardened into a battle stance, and then a voice came down from heaven.

“Fine. Let him on.”

Winston looked up in time to catch a glimpse of Lourdes looking down on him from the railing seven decks above, before she backed out of view.

The two-man welcome wagon wasn’t thrilled about it, but they obeyed their orders, reached out and helped him aboard.

Winston turned to tell the boatman not to wait, but he was already pulling away.

The two overweight crewmen led him to a glass elevator in a six-story atrium of brass rails and polished marble. He passed several stew­ards on his way, noticing the air of despair that pervaded their eyes. They, too, were obese—so much so that they bulged painfully out of their uniforms. He looked at the ample gut of one of his escorts. “Cruise food?”

The escort said nothing.

As soon as they stepped out onto the pool deck, the weighty sense of oppression permeating the lower decks was blasted away by a party that stretched from stem to stern on the ship’s open-air decks. It was a fiesta of slim, beautiful people. The pool deck was a contagion of indulgence. On a dance floor past the pool, at least a hundred people sated their senses to the beat of the brightly frilled band, which, in spite of a cool ocean breeze, kept insisting it was “hot-hot-hot.” Gor­geous women in designer bathing suits that left nothing to the imag­ination sipped tall cocktails in every color of a neon spectrum. The beat of the music pulsed in the teak wood of the deck, and whoever wasn’t dancing was luxuriating on lounge chairs, or partaking of a sumptuous buffet. The atmosphere was so intoxicating, Winston forgot for a moment why he had come. Until he saw her.

Lourdes sat on her own private verandah one deck up, with a grand view of the partying pool deck below.

Pushing past the gyrating bodies on the dance floor, he made his way toward her, noticing that among the perfect physiques on this pleasure cruise were reminders of that other class that inhabited this ship. A towel boy with an unpleasant bloat about him, lumbering like a troll on the perimeter of the deck. A worker polishing the brass railings with turgid limbs and fleshy folds, his body drenched in acidic, malodorous sweat. These were members of a bizarrely obese servant class that greased the machine, and kept Lourdes’s movable feast afloat.

Winston climbed to Lourdes’s private deck perch. She reclined on a plush lounge, and was attended by two topless men with pectoral muscles the size of turkey breasts. Although she saw Winston approach, she made no attempt to acknowledge him. She simply waited for him to come to her. She had never looked better. Not exactly svelte—her frame would never allow that—but shapely, and well-contained within the smooth blue satin of her bathing suit. He now noticed that the two dark-haired, dark-eyed glamour boys who attended her were, in fact, twins. They threw him a disinterested gaze before returning to their duties. One rubbed Lourdes with tanning oil, the other dipped shrimp in cocktail sauce and held them to her lips.

“Cleopatra, I presume?” Winston said.

Lourdes bit the dangling shrimp off at the tail, and her shrimp boy dropped the tail into a silver bowl already brimming with them. “She was just Queen of the Nile,” Lourdes said. “I’ve done a bit better.”

A few feet away was a very large man in an expensive suit that was four sizes too small. Like the crew, he had that bloated look, but instead of being flushed, his face was a pallid shade of green.

Winston indicated her twin studs. “I see you’re into matching lug­gage these days.”

“Only way to travel.” Lourdes ate another shrimp. The fat man in the fancy suit moaned.

“Lourdes, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m on vacation,” she said, coldly. “Is that so hard to grasp?”

“And when does this ‘vacation’ end?”

“That’s the best part, Winston; it doesn’t.” And then she gestured to the pained man in the bulging suit. “Meet Mr. Peter Marquez,” she said. “Monarch Cruise Line’s Vice-President of Operations. He just joined us yesterday.”

The man seemed only able to move a pair of pleading eyeballs set deep within his porcine face.

“What did you do to him?”

“We’re in the middle of negotiations,” Lourdes said. “After test-driving the Blue Horizon these past few months, I’ve decided to buy it, and redeem my outlaw status.”

“And how can you afford a cruise ship?”

“We’re negotiating a steep markdown.” Her shrimp boy hung another cocktail shrimp before her and she took it in her mouth, chew­ing slowly. “Very steep.”

The cruise executive moaned. “Please,” he said. “No more.” His voice came from deep in his throat, sounding as Lourdes’ voice had once sounded in the throes of her own obesity.

Lourdes licked her lips. “Recently, I’ve found a depth to my ap­petites I never knew I had.”

“And yet it’s the crew that gets fat,” observed Winston. “Not you.”

Lourdes shrugged. “I eat quite a lot; all that fat has to go some­where.”

Winston shuddered. There was no end to the way they could abuse their powers, when they chose to—here was the proof. First it was just Lourdes’s ability to control metabolisms; put people to sleep, change the pace of their body functions. Then she found she could manipulate their muscles, as if they were puppets. And now this; she stayed slim by imposing her weight on others. A perverse conservation of matter. Winston wondered how many times her own body weight she consumed in food a day. Did she ever stop eating?

“What happened to you, Lourdes?”

She sat up, pushing away the hand of her shrimp boy. “I grew up, Winston. I finally realized that the only person I owe in this world is me.

“What about Dillon?”

“To hell with Dillon! He’s the one who screwed things up. Whether he meant to or not, he set the world on auto-destruct, and if the world is falling apart, I intend to suck every last drop out of it.”

Winston regarded her pretty-boy twins. The dark hair and wan expression on their faces was uneasily familiar. “Your matching luggage both look like Michael,” he goaded. “Should I ask what that’s about? Or do I already know?”

Her tanned cheeks began to flush at having been so easily read. He could feel her anger, and perhaps a hint of shame, charging the air between them. Her feelings for Michael had been no secret—but en­listing these surrogates into her harem was a desecration of Michael’s memory, and she knew it.