Everyone froze.
“I like that. I like that a lot,” Cynthea announced. “Peach, did you get that? Great! Gentlemen-and lady
Cynthea was a dauntingly well-preserved woman, sexy at fifty. Her mother had insisted on strict ballet training from the age of five-the only thing she considered a kindness on her mother’s part. At five feet eleven inches without heels she still had the posture of a ballerina, though her imposing stature was better suited to the high-testosterone arena she had chosen to enter than to ballet.
Like a hermit crab out of its shell, Cynthea looked laughably out of place at sea, or even outside a city. But she couldn’t help noticing lately that she was being herded out to pasture in the youth-centric jungle she inhabited.
Cynthea had produced two number-one reality shows for MTV. But the cutthroat environment she lived in would not tolerate a single misstep. After her last network reality show, the misbegotten
, had cratered, her only offer was the job every other producer in town had passed on: a round-the-world sea voyage with none of the comforts of home.
Sensing that she had to adapt or go extinct, and in the midst of an acute panic attack, she told her manager to take the offer.
She knew she had won the
If this show was killed, she was convinced it would be the end of her career. No husband, no kids, and no career: all of her mother’s prophecies checked off. Which would be much easier to bear if Cynthea’s mother were dead, but she wasn’t-not by a long shot.
Cynthea pressed her hands together in a gesture of thanks to the powers-that-be. “This could not have come at a better time, people! I think we would have killed and eaten each other before we ever got to Pitcairn. Tell me more about this island, Glyn!”
“Well, it’s never actually been explored, is the neat thing. According to Nell-”
“When can we land?”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Glyn answered. “If we can find a place to put ashore. And if the captain grants permission to go ashore, of course…”
“You mean we can shoot our landing on an unexplored island for the anything-can-happen segment of tomorrow’s broadcast at five-fifty? Glyn, you will be my
if you
“Glyn, Glyn, Glyn!” Cynthea actually jumped for joy. “What was it you were saying about a British sea captain?”
“The island was discovered in 1791 by Captain Ambrose Spencer Henders…”
Nell was amused to see Glyn’s vanity flattered by Cynthea’s spotlight.
Glyn looked at Nell. “However, Nell is the one who-”
“That’s just
please?”
“You know Dawn? The tan, leggy brunette with the tattoo?” Cynthea gestured in the vicinity of her tailbone. “Yes? She was just remarking to me how she thought British scientists were the sexiest men alive.” Cynthea leaned forward and crooned in Glyn’s ear: “I think she was talking about YOU!”
Glyn’s eyes widened as Cynthea turned to Captain Sol. “Captain Sol, can we land?” She jumped up and down like a little girl pleading with her grandfather. “Can we, can we, can we?”
“Yes, we can land, Cynthea.
Warburton shook his head.
“Now if we could only find someone for Nell,” the producer persisted. “What about it, sweetie? What
Nell saw Glyn looking out the window at Dawn, who was performing yoga stretches on the mezzanine deck below. Hard-bodied and sporting buzzed black hair, Dawn wore a midriff-baring mustard mini-T over her imposingly toned core. A purple and yellow sun tattoo peeked over the rear of her black bikini bottoms. “I don’t have a ‘type,’ Cynthea,” she said. “And I wouldn’t want to be anyone’s ‘type,’ either.”
“Always the loner, eh, Nell?” Cynthea said. “You have to know what you’re looking for to find him, darling.”
Nell looked Cynthea in the eyes. “I’ll know him when I see him.”
“Well, maybe you’ll find a new rosebud or something to name tomorrow, eh? Give us some
Cynthea turned and loped out the hatch.
Nell looked back down at the plotting monitor, watching the island as it moved down in tiny steps from the top of the screen. As the sight overwhelmed her, she almost forgot to breathe.
Captain Sol looked at Nell with fatherly affection. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’d say it was destiny, Nell, if I believed in that sort of thing.”
She looked at him with bright eyes and impulsively squeezed his big, tanned hand.
“Still no response on the emergency frequencies, Captain,” Warburton said.
Nell traced a fingertip from their position over the blue plasma screen to the white circle above tiny white letters:
SeaLife
“Peach” McCloud sat by Cynthea, manning the editing/uplinking bay. Whatever original audio-visual equipment Peach was born with was buried under his hair and beard and replaced with man-made microphones, headphones, and VR goggles.
Cynthea had worked with Peach on live MTV shows in Fort Lauderdale and on the island of Santorini. Her one stipulation when she accepted the job as
Peach had agreed. He always agreed. Anywhere was his living room if he had a wireless connection. It really didn’t matter to Peach if he was on a boat weathering fifty-foot swells or in his Soho apartment. So long as his digital habitat came with him, Peach was happy.
Cynthea spoke urgently through her headset, on a conference call to the
“We
Anything-Can-Happen
distress
puking on each other!
suggesting
television history!”
Candlelit dining tables set for dinner dotted the foredeck as the
Captain Sol finally clanged a glass and, with the South Pacific sunset at their backs, he and Glyn addressed the crew.
“As I’m sure you’ve all noticed, we are now heading south,” the captain began, and he pointed his right arm dramatically over the prow.
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“A few hours ago we picked up an emergency beacon from a sailboat in distress.”
The crew chattered excitedly.
“We know that the vessel’s owner was rescued by the United States Coast Guard off Kaua’i during a storm five years ago. So either this boat has been adrift for five years, or it came aground on the island south of us even before then, or someone else is on board it now. We tried hailing the vessel on emergency frequencies but got no response. Since search-and-rescue aircraft don’t carry enough fuel to reach this location from the nearest airfield, we have been asked to respond.”
A chorus of “Wow”s rose from the tables.
Glyn cleared his throat. The biologist was visibly nervous now that the cameras and lights turned to him. “The good news,” the Englishman announced, “is that the signal seems to have come from one of the world’s last unexplored islands.”
After twenty-one miserable days at sea, the distress signal itself was cause for celebration. But the opportunity to land on an unexplored island inspired thunderous applause from all.
“The island is only about two miles wide,” Glyn said, encouraged. He read from cue cards Nell had prepared for him. “Since it is located below the fortieth parallel, a treacherous zone mariners call the ‘Roaring Forties,’ shipping lanes have bypassed it for the last two centuries. We are now headed for what could well be the most geographically remote piece of land on the Planet Earth. This empty patch of ocean is the size of the continental United States, and what we know about it is about equivalent to what can be seen of the United States from its interstate highway system. That’s how sparsely traversed this part of the world remains to this day. And the seafloor here is less mapped than the surface of Mars!”
Glyn got an appreciative murmur out of the crowd and he charged on.
“There are only a few reports of anyone sighting this island, and only one report of anyone actually landing on it, recorded in 1791 by Ambrose Spencer Henders, Captain of the H.M.S.
Bounty,
Glyn folded the worn printout Nell had given him. “That’s it- the only reported landing. If we can find a way inland, we will be the first to explore Captain Henders’s forgotten isle.” Glyn nodded and smiled at Nell.
There was a rowdy round of applause, and Copepod barked.
“So the storms served a good purpose, after all,” Captain Sol told them. “Poseidon has put us on a course to help a fellow mariner in distress. And we’ll have a chance to visit one of the final frontiers on Earth, where no man has gone before!” Captain Sol raised his fist skyward, a ham at heart.
“Yeah, that nearly killed us,” Peach agreed.
“Find some sea chantey thing, like something from
Nell glanced over at the next table.
Still puffed up from his starring debut, Glyn had seated himself across from Dawn. He seemed terribly interested in what she was saying.
Nell stifled a giggle at the almost inconceivable coupling. Dawn looked like she would eat Glyn alive.
Zero sat down across from Nell at her table and commandeered an unclaimed plate of food. Gouging a bite out of a filet of orange roughy, the lead cameraman looked at her. “So what made a gal like you want to be a botanist?” He broke off a chunk of fish and fed it to Copepod.
Nell sipped her ice water as she mulled over his question. “Well, when my mom was killed by a jellyfish in Indonesia, I decided to study plants.”
Zero lifted a forkful of fish to his mouth, surprised. “For real?”
“Of course, for real!” said Andy, who was sitting next to Nell protectively, as always, though it was usually she who protected him.
Nell had persuaded Andy to leave his cabin after his earlier tantrum, and he had changed into a more subdued blue plaid flannel shirt open over a yellow T-shirt with a smiley face on the chest. The vintage shirt said, “Have a Nice Day!” with no ironic bullethole in its head or anything out of the ordinary-just a smiley face waiting for the world to deface it.
Nell squeezed Andy’s wrist and patted Zero’s hand, instantly charming both men with her brief touch.
“My mother was an oceanographer,” she explained to Zero. “She died when I was a kid. I never saw her much, except on television. She was abroad most of the time, making nature documentaries in places that were way too dangerous for children.”
“You’re not the daughter of Janet Planet, are you?”
“Um, yeah.”
“‘Doctor Janet explores the wild planet!’” he said, mimicking the show’s intro perfectly. “Right?” A wide grin spread on the cameraman’s face as he remembered the early color TV series, to which he had been addicted as a boy.
Nell nodded. “Yeah. You remember the show?”
“Hell yeah! It brought full-color underwater photography to TV for the first time! It’s pretty legendary among my kind. So, why isn’t your name Nell Planet?”
Nell laughed. “Our last name didn’t play well on television.”
“So you’re following in your mom’s footsteps.”
“Except that I chose botany,” Nell protested, parrying with her fork. “Plants never eat people.”
“Right on.” Zero snagged a glass of iced tea from the tray of a passing server and raised a toast to her. “Conquer your fears, right?”
Nell toasted him with her water and frowned at the dark horizon. “Something like that.”
Behind her mother swayed a cartoon jungle of leaves, thorns, fur, eyes, pulsing, breathing, all of them melting together in a running liquid of anatomy. The jungle congealed into a giant face, and the face seemed like it had always been there. Her mother kept waving while the mouth in the jungle face opened behind her like a midnight sky.
Nell swung the flower in her hand at the screen like an ax, and the Monster howled in rage as its voice shrank into the clock radio alarm, beeping beside her.
Nell jerked awake and bashed the beeper off, irritated at its complicity.
She rose on an elbow and squinted at the dim rays streaming through the portholes of her cabin. Her neck and chest felt cool with sweat.
So, she thought, recalling the dream, she’d had a visit from the Monster.
Nell hadn’t had this dream for many years. Yet it still crushed her under the same debilitating fear she had felt when she was ten and dreamed it nightly.
Today, on Henders Island, she
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