# Babylon 5 and its characters and their words were created by J. Michael Straczynski, and belong to Joe and Warner Bros., and are used without permission. The rest belongs to Cathy Faye Rudolph.)

2__________

Garibaldi followed her through the maze of corridors and then down a passageway set off from the main corridor to the Meditation Center. The passage ended at a wall covered with a tapestry. She drew one corner aside, to reveal the room inside, and motioned for him to enter.

The chamber was spacious, and richly furnished. Along the walls were shelves with books and manuscripts, data crystals and readers. A young Minbari and a Drazi were reading at tables in the room, but each rose to greet Seren and after bowing in respect, left through the tapestry-covered entrance.

Garibaldi surveyed the room. "Not too bad," he commented, eyebrow raised. "The whole Boogie thing must be pretty ... rewarding to have quarters like these." Seren frowned. He seemed to be implying insincerity. It wasn't like Michael to ascribe motives to her. She shook her head. "This isn't my room. It's one of the private study rooms. It's a bit quieter than the Meditation Center and some of our visitors do research here. They--" she nodded her head to indicate the Minbari and Drazi who had just left, "-- they left out of respect, to afford us privacy." She pointed at another tapestry on the far wall, a tapestry bordered with small Minbari bells. The bells tinkled softly as she pulled it aside for them to enter.

The room inside was cramped, and contained very basic furnishings. A bed, a table and two chairs, a small dresser and a sort of camp stove cooking unit had been crowded into what had evidently been intended as a storage area behind the study room. A concession to human needs was apparent in the addition of a toilet alcove closed off by a sliding partition. Seren offered him a chair at the table, and then put the damp clothes into a hamper next to the dresser.

She started the water heating on the stove, and took two tea mugs from the shelves on the wall over the stove. Garibaldi looked at her small collection of personal effects on the dresser. There was a snapshot taken during what looked like a celebration, Minbari and Rangers and monks clustered around an embarrassed looking teenager seated in front of a cake with a short Minbari candle stuck in the middle of it. Judging from the construction materials piled against the wall in the background of the photo, it must have been taken during the first phase of the Grey 17 renovation. Next to the snapshot was a handdrawn sketch of the Shrine in a plexi frame, carefully penciled notes added in a light hand. And behind those, a small picture of him, from the Mars days. He briefly wondered how she'd managed to find a picture of him, then he placed the framed photo back where he'd found it.

She'd made no attempt to decorate or really personalize the cramped living space. There were no tapestries to grace the walls here. Sketches and plans for the Kosh memorial were taped up near the door, as was the final sketch of the main Meditation Center. The chairs at the table, the blanket and pillow on the bed, even the lighting panels above were serviceable, practical, impersonal. There was no richness, no embellishment, no personal adoption of the space. She seemed to invest nothing of herself within the room's walls.

All of which made the one exception all that more extraordinary. In the middle of the table, in the midst of a small assortment of spices in jars and a woven basket containing some dried fruit, was a miniature crystal figurine. Garibaldi had seen its like only once before, during an exhibition of Centauri cultural artifacts at the station. Ambassador Mollari had been all over him about the security arrangements, insisting that this painting and that statuette were "high-ly val-u-a-ble" but the single most valuable piece in the Collection was the Emperor's prized S'vin'Ka'ri figurine. The materials from which a S'vin'Ka'ri statue could be made -- flawless, highly graded crystal from several worlds -- could still be found today. But the technical artistry required to interleave crystal along precise fracture lines within an already finely carved and polished figure, to create an almost luminous image of the outer figure's 'soul', seemed to have resided only with the S'vin'Ka'ri. Only the S'vin'Ka'ri had known how to imbue spires and twists of crystal with souls etched from rainbows of light.

It seemed that governments, not private individuals, owned S'vin'Ka'ri glass. Vir had remarked at the time that the small figure was worth a king's ransom. Londo had offered that, in that case, it would be a poor exchange, and any self-respecting kingdom should simply find another king.

"This is a good imitation," Garibaldi murmured, peering down at the figure. It was smaller than the one in the exhibition, but it seemed to fill the room with refracted rainbows, the way it caught any stray thread of light in its twists of crystal. She brought his tea and hers to the table. The smile on her face was one of remembering, the precious evocation of some measure of happiness, not pridefulness of ownership or stewardship of a great treasure. She motioned that he was free to pick up the tiny glass creation. His hand dwarfed the crystal figure as he balanced it lightly in his fingertips.

"It's not an imitation," Seren told him, and he very nearly dropped the figure from his suddenly clammy and stiff fingers. Garibaldi awkwardly set the figure down amidst the spice jars and slowly drew his hand back. To hear Londo tell it, wars had been fought, populations decimated, whole planets ransacked, for S'vin'Ka'ri crystal glass, and yet Seren kept a S'vin'Ka'ri original on the table next to the dried figs and the salt cellar.

"What did you have to do for it?" Garibaldi asked. The question was crude, like a slap to her face. It said a great deal about his assumptions, and Seren didn't miss his intent. She winced slightly and in disbelief. Her voice was controlled in response. "It was a gift." This wasn't the Michael she knew, and this stranger didn't believe her. "Michael, what is this?"

Her words flashed him back to Sheridan's office.

"Who's our new best friend?"

"His name is Lorien, and that's all you need to know for now."

"Oh yeah, who says?"

"Michael, what is this?"

"What do you remember, Mr. Garibaldi? What do you remember? Tell us what you remember."

Garibaldi shivered and shook his head to disspell the half-remembered questions. Resigning as Security Chief hadn't silenced the nagging suspicion that someone else was running the show, manipulating him. Alliances and events were happening that didn't make sense: Sheridan with his First Ones buddies, and now Seren claiming a priceless artifact as a gift. Sheridan, he could watch, had watched, but Seren...given up for dead on Mars but evading the whole of PsiCorps for years, or so she said. It was a fantastic story, as bizarre and implausible as, well, dying at Z'ha'dum, or finding precious crystal at the heart of a planet of stone and dust. Sheridan and Seren: of the two, she might pose the larger threat.

"You haven't convinced me, Karena. And do you know why? Because no one ---no one--- gives something like that as a gift. Not when they can use it to buy the services of a former PsiCorps scientist." She was plainly shocked at the use of her given name. She had thought he'd understood that it would only take the merest suspicion, an idle or even innocent mention of her name to the wrong people to draw PsiCorps' attention in her direction. And while others might have suspected that she'd had dealings with the Corps, only Michael Garibaldi knew at what level.

She shook her head, and looked down at the table. "Michael, I told you, it was a gift. Freely given in friendship, for friendship's sake. And no, no 'services' rendered. 'Doing it' is...far more dangerous than I can make you understand."

"Yeah? I'll tell you what I understand," he seethed, patience at last too thin, anger too hot, "I understand that everyone else has their lives on the line. I understand that you've manipulated things so that PsiCorps doesn't know you and can't find you. Well, isn't that nice for you? That's something that you and 'Captain Sheridan The Almighty' have in common: both of you letting others go out and fight and die to bolster your positions and your own delusions of power!"

"What do you remember, Mr. Garibaldi? What do you remember? Tell us what you remember."

"I told you, I don't remember. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave---me---alone!"

She pushed her tea over next to the spices, and reached her hands across the table to him. "Michael, please, it's obvious there's something really wrong. We can talk this through, we can take as much time as we need. I'll make more tea--"

"I don't need any more damn tea!" With a violent motion he shoved the chair out from the table to get away from her, angrily pushing his tea mug in the process. The mug careened across the table into the grouping of spice jars and basket, scattering spices and fruit, leaving only her tea mug standing.

She moved her tea mug aside, and saw the shattered remains of the S'vin'Ka'ri figurine. Garibaldi was still raging, his back to her, decrying Sheridan and his so-called god-complex. She picked up the broken sections of the figurine and lay the tiny remains of glass in the palm of her left hand. Carefully, and tenderly, she closed her hand around the pieces, as a farewell to the light and grace they had once held.

...

[to Chapter 3]