Flint, with typical showmanship, had paraded his haul along the deck, to the applause of the crew. Even the tiny fraction of its value that we’d each be entitled to was something to celebrate.
Pandora’s friend—let’s call her Cora—gave me a quizzical smile. “Do I remind you of her?”
“Him.”
That didn’t go down well. She scowled and stopped doing interesting things with her hands.
“We dance tonight, mates,” Flint was saying, as the base, animal scent of the ambergris began to flood the deck. “There’s more scratch in these barrels than in a half a bay full of sperm.”
“It’s your perfume,” I explained.
Cora pulled away from me and I reached out after her reflexively. I hadn’t actually liked her much, but rejection still made me want to vomit and kill myself.
“Ambergris,” I said. It made no difference.
“Ambergris,” I said to Q, who was watching the celebration with confusion—or I think she was, except we hadn’t reconciled yet, she was still in medbay hooked to machines and dying—still I remember the moment so clearly it can’t not be true. “They make perfumes from it.”
At least I was giving Cora a show. She stopped recoiling, which made me feel better than it had any right to, and stepped towards me again. I could still smell her perfume like a breeze across the void, spanning space and time and death and forgetting. “Perfumes?”
“Long ago,” I told her, “I sailed aboard a hunter-barque.”
That soothed her. It played into the rough-trade fantasy she was looking for. “That must have been perilous.”
She didn’t know how perilous, and in truth she didn’twantto know, not really. And I wasn’t much inclined to tell her. “I had my share of adventures. Heard my share of stories. I learned a thing or two about the world. It’s why I know the smell of ambergris.”
“It’s strange,” I told Q as I sat by her bedside later that night. “For something so prized and so beautiful to come from something so rotten.”
Q looked up at me with a smile. “De comendente exivit cibus, et de forti egressa est dulcedo.”
“What does that mean?” asked Cora.
“What does what mean?”
“De whatever whatever et de whatever whatever.”
I didn’t know, I’d never known. “Just something a friend said to me once.”
“This Flint?”
I shook my head. “No. Somebody else.”
In the medbay, Q kissed me. She was stronger than she had been, but at that time, with half a coffin built and half the tubes still in her, I still feared losing her.
“Wasthatone an old lover?” asked Cora, her smile wicked and possessive.
“In a way.”
“How many ways are there?”
That, at least, I knew how to answer. “Play your cards right and I’ll show you.”
We were back on track. At least, as far as Cora was concerned we were back on track. She drew me away from the window where, out in the lightless depths, a thousand bioluminescent creatures danced to their own music, and took me somewhere quiet and alone.
She laid me down on a low sofa in an alcove in what might have been a library but what with the mood lighting I couldn’t really see clearly enough.
“Tell me a story,” she said as she began to undress me. “From those days.”
“What kind of story?”
