I had a friend for life in Jackie after the water crisis ended. She followed me around like a child, not that I minded and not that I went much of anywhere, anyway. I had the tools of creation now so I stayed in my seat and used those tools sparingly. It was likely that once they were used up, there would be no more. It didn't bear thinking about.

A world without art. Life, survival, was the most important thing, of course, but a life without art is not worth living. Certainly not for someone like me, who makes art. And not for Jackie. Her man had been in the military but not on the only military vessel that survived the Cylon attack. She had a nursing baby and life full of uncertainty for herself and little Joe, but when I presented her with a drawing of her son, colored with my precious pastels, I saw delight on her face. This is what we survive for, otherwise we might as well be animals…

Or machines.

They say the Cylons look like us, now, so any one of us could be Cylons. I don't know from Cylons. The last war ended ten years before I was born. Geb's father fought in the war. He used to come to dinner and ramble on for hours about the "toasters" until it was running out of our ears. He frightened Abbie with his tales. She would beg him not to talk about toasters. He would laugh and agree and stay off the subject until he got a snootful (he always brought his own bottle), then it would all come bubbling out like pus from a festering sore that refuses to heal.

I don't wonder what he would think about all that has happened, I know. Forty years and Sy Cirusico had never trusted the peace. Never.

Could the Cylons program themselves to create art? Would they? Or is it as I believe, that creativity is a gift from the gods and far beyond a being's ability to manufacture in itself. At any rate, I have no time for paranoia. I feel I might have something to live for now, a mission: To seek out what beauty there is, to capture it with the means at my disposal, and to give it back to what's left of the world.

0o0o0o0o0o0o0o

Jackie wants me to go with her to the Colonial Day party on Cloud Nine.

"I don't know, love," I tell her. "I'm not the party type."

"Well, if you don't want to dance, you can look after Joe for me while I dance. Please, Serina, pleeeease?" She did a little begging dance that reminded me so much of Eonla when she wanted something that I had to laugh.

"You are worse than my children…" I stopped talking because I suddenly remembered that my children were no more. Jackie saw my face change. She hung her head for a moment, but then she said,

"It'll do you good to get away from this ship. Cloud Nine is a luxury vessel, with grass and trees and stuff. And sunshine," she added, as if that were a clincher.

I was amused. "I thought the party's going to be in the evening."

Jackie put her hands on her hips impatiently. "Well, the grass and trees and stuff are still there. It'll be like being back home."

"Oh, I doubt that seriously," I told her. "But I'll go and watch Joe while you dance." And I thought I would bring my sketch pad and perhaps capture some beauty.

"Ooooh, thank you so much, Serina!" She hugged and kissed me. I hugged her back and she went off to put her outfit together.

I stay in the shadows at gatherings. Jackie is used to my face and Joe is too young to care. But most people gasp and stare when they see the mark and sometimes small children are so frightened, they burst into tears. The mark is blue and purple and red, with tiny black spots where the pores are. It's shaped like a handprint, fingers stretching into my hairline. I look as if the Lords, all left-handed, had each taken a turn slapping my face for some heinous transgression. The mark deforms my features: it pulls at my eye, my nostril, and the corner of my mouth, as burn would. The mark isn't a burn, though. It's a birthmark.

My face had repulsed people all my life, but the rest of me isn't too bad, although I tend to thinness and now I am especially gaunt with the short rations. I do have pretty hair. It's long and wavy and the color of deep, dreamless sleep. I wear it in 24 braids (a family tradition) and I get lots of exercise stretching my arms upwards as I plait them and tie the ends in a knot. I drape my braids over my face in an attempt to shield the world from it.

My mother never thought any man would ever want me, but I found Geb Cirusico and he found me. Geb enabled me to make my art and we'd made three babies together and then the Cylons took all that away from me. But I can't think about that now. I can't think about that ever, because if I do I will surely go mad.

"Are you going to wear that?" Jackie said. We were making ready to leave for the shuttle, and she eyed my baggy bib-alls and the now miles-too-big sweater that I had bought at the spaceport in Caprica City for my trip home as if they were going to haul off and bite her.

I told her my ball gown was at the cleaners. She let it go and put the baby in his carry basket while I gathered up my drawing pad and pencils. And so we went.

0o0o0o0o0o0o0o

The lights were low in the ballroom, and the music wasn't too loud. Joey could sleep and I could sit in the shadows and watch and draw.

Those dancing were mostly rich people, and politicians, and military elite. Important people, those whose voices we hear over the wireless. They were dressed in their best which, for many of them, wasn't a whole lot more impressive than what I had on, although some of the women (like Jackie) had managed to make glamorous do with what they had.

I sat in my corner with the sleeping baby and I watched: faces that I would not remember once I left this place, the twist of bodies, the laughter, the talk, the meaningful looks and the meaningless ones. I filled my eyes with them, with humanity, and from within my trance I transcribed them.

I didn't know these people, but to draw them I have to look very deeply, so I saw their hearts.

I'd done five drawings and was very sleepy when Jackie finally tired of dancing. She and her baby were the perfect couple; he woke up hungry and her breasts were full. She decided to feed him before we took the shuttle back to our ship and she looked at my drawings while I tried to keep my eyes open.

"That's the President," she told me, pointing to a drawing I'd done of a pretty woman dancing with a stern-faced man in a uniform.

"Who is, that man?" I asked.

Jackie looked at me as if I were stupid. I suppose I was. "The woman. Our President is a woman, Laura Roslin. President Adar died in the attack."

"I haven't been paying attention, I guess," I said, pulling the pad toward me to look closely at the drawing. It's too much, I thought, staring at the slight, sweet smile on the woman's face.

"What's too much?" Jackie wanted to know. I hadn't realized I'd spoken out loud.

"She has to decide what's best for all of us and it's really too much and… she's not…" I stopped talking. I had no way of knowing anything about her, except when I looked at people to draw them, I could see their hearts.

"All of this has happened before…" Jackie murmured, and that snapped me out of my trance. I looked over at her. She sat cross-legged on the floor, rocking and nursing her baby. She stared into his little face, unaware that she had spoken.

"And all of this will happen again," I finished.

"So say we all," Jackie mused. She disconnected her son and put him to her shoulder, rubbing his back to help him get his bubble out. That reminded me of nursing Psyche, and how hard she was to burp, and I clenched my hands in sudden agony. I wanted to be dead. I wanted my soul to be with the souls of my children. To what purpose had the gods spared my life? I was ugly and useless, skilled at nothing but making pictures.

"Keeping us human," Jackie said.

"What?" I had closed my eyes under the sudden onslaught of grief and when I opened them she was staring at me.

"The gods spared your life because I need you. Joe and I would've died if you hadn't shared your water…"

"Someone else would have…"

"No one else would have, Serina." She shook her head. "No one cared. Only you. And you make such good pictures." She stared at my drawings and pointed. "So pretty… that looks exactly like the President." She looked up at me. "I'll bet it's the only drawing of President Roslin that exists… That's important."

I wiped my sudden, foolish tears away. "You're right," I told my young friend. "You're always right."

Jackie snorted. "I'm never right. I wanted to stay another day on Caprica but my mother insisted I come home, now." Joe burped and Jackie pulled him off her shoulder and stared into his face. He smiled at her. "Maybe she knew."

"We were all where we were supposed to be that day," I said. I sighed, gathered up my drawings and placed them carefully back between the covers of the pad. "Let's go…"

I almost said "home." How adaptable we humans are. Two months in space and a couple of seats on a commuter ship had become home.