Naturally, I left what I hoped would be the best till last: Vavash's studio. Several times during the course of the day I had caught a whiff of it, a tingly tangle of herbs and chemicals with the fragrance of the back room of an alchemist's shop. When I stepped through the door, I immediately saw where the smells came from: vats of fabric dyes, extracted by hand from roots and leaves and flowers and seeds that Vavash must have brought with her and grown hydroponically over the years. Above the vats were festoons of freshly dyed yarn in long skeins as thick as my arm, cones of thread stuck on pegs, and wool bats hanging from hooks like fuzzy ping pong paddles. On the opposite wall were shelves all the way up to the roof, thick with bolts of felt and broadcloth and muslin. In one back corner, a spinning wheel stood beside a cherrywood loom with more pedals than a pipe organ; in the other, a sturdy table two fathoms long supported a gleaming new sewing machine with so many dials and levers and robotic attachments that it would probably qualify for full citizenship under the Mechanical Species Act. And in the middle of the room, Vavash had left a small collection of her work. It brought tears to my eyes.
Honored Reader, Genius is rare. True talent is sparse enough, but Genius…the kind of great Genius vision where every picture tells a satori…. Some psychologists would have it that inside every human soul, there is Genius waiting to spring forth in strength and passion and beauty; and some sentimentalists would have it that full many a Genius is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air. All I know is that billions upon billions of human beings have been squeezed from wombs throughout history, but there are less than a thousand whom we can scrupulously say had Genius.
Vavash had Genius.
And she had squandered it.
Doll clothes. A tapestry strung with toys. Empty cradles.
So damned close to being a profound statement of loss or yearning or bitter tragedy, but ultimately heartless…some step of emotion that wasn't there to take. Entirely new ways of combining textiles and dyes, ideas as eye-opening as pointillism or cubism or scintillism were in their day…but once your eyes had been opened, there was nothing to see. The visions of a human being who had stared into the depths of the Abyss, and then had decided to make floral wallpaper.
Empty cradles. Empty fornicating cradles. Vavash had the eyes of Genius, the hands of Genius, the brain of Genius. But not the purity. Not here. Not in these works.
'There has to be more,' I said hoarsely.
'What?' asked Leppid.
'The woman's been working here for sixty years. She's done more than this. Where is it?'
'I think they have some storerooms in the basement here…'
'Show me.'
Leppid was looking at me nervously, as if I were a bomb about to go off—not a bad assessment of my mental state. Keeping fidgety watch over his shoulder, he led me through bare cement corridors to a thick metal door. 'I think it's down there. I've never been myself.' He tried turning the knob. 'No, no good.'
'Get out of the way,' I told him.
'You can't go down there,' he said. 'It's locked.'
'Nonsense,' I said looking at the latching system. It had been obsolete for centuries. 'A lock is a security device. This old thing is just to stop the door from banging in the wind.' I reached into my pocket and pulled out my namesake and totem, the most magnificent solidinum scalpel influence-peddling could buy. By grandiose claim of the manufacturer, it would cut through anything short of White Dwarf material.
'What do you think you're doing?' Leppid moaned.
'Vavash told me to feel free to wander where I chose.'
'I'm not going along with this,' the Doctoral Triumvirate muttered and stomped off. I suspected he was going to get Vavash, but I didn't care. I had got it into my head that I was being played for a fool. For some reason, Vavash had only put out her conspicuous failures for me to see. Perhaps she was trying to test my judgement after all. Perhaps she had been in a nasty mood one day and tossed together some bathetic Oh-Our-Terrible-Totless-Tragedy garbage to sell to off-planet yokels through D-D-Doctor Wouldn't-Know-Art-If-It-Carried-I.D. Perhaps someone else with hideous taste had chosen Vavash's display, and there were good and powerful works just on the other side of this door.
I started cutting. The scalpel upheld the family honor with speed and grace. In something under a minute, I was descending a long flight of steps into a darkened basement the size of a steel mill. Halfway down, I passed through an electric eye and a bank of lights turned on in front of me.
Blinking my eyes against the brightness, I saw a jungle of artworks, some packed in crates, some covered with tarpaulins, most just sitting out and gathering dust. They stretched off into a deep darkness at the far end of the cellars, where I could just make out a faint shimmery glimmer.
I walked through the silent collection, harsh overhead lamps turning on automatically whenever I approached the edge of the next darkened area. Flash, lights up on a flock of life-sized papier- mch pygmies, some standing up, some lying on their backs, one squat little androgyne fallen over onto a terra cotta jar whose rim was now deeply embedded in its throat. Flash, and there were long vertical racks that held canvasses slid in on their sides; I pulled a few out, saw stuccoed prickles of color in abstract patterns. Flash, and an echoing aura ignited in dusty stained glass, vases striped wine red and frosty white, engraved with tall slim men wearing the sharp-edged styles of long ago, casually embracing one another.
Flash, flash, flash, then Vavash.
Unmistakable. Unforgettable. Genius.
Utter simplicity: a tapestry hung from a tall wooden arch. A sun-crowned rainbow bursting upward in joyous fountain between the legs of a prone woman. Truth. Beauty. Purity. A clamping knot of hunger untied in my chest, like the release of doves at High Festival. Yes. Yes. In the hands of someone else, it would just be hackneyed vomit, trite images done to death by the sentimentality squad. But this…exquisite workmanship, flawless clarity, profundity in naivete, artless artless Art.
'Mr. Scalpel!' Vavash stood halfway down the stairs, one hand clutching the railing tightly, the other shading her eyes as she tried to catch sight of me amid the clutter.
'You've been hiding your light under a bushel, madam,' I called to her.
She turned towards me and snapped, 'Get out of my things.' There were perhaps fifty metres between us; her voice sounded thin and shrill.
'I can't imagine why you've been keeping your best work down here in the dark,' I continued. 'Of course, it's blatant birth imagery, but why should that bother you? Humans have been expressing their feelings about pregnancy and childbirth since Adam had Eve. There's nothing to be ashamed of.' I picked up a bulb-shaped basket made of bright ribbon woven on a wicker framework, and held it high enough for Vavash to watch me examining it. Through the vulva-shaped opening at the top, I could see an effusion of stylized flowers made of colored felt: cheerful, bubbly happiness embodied in fabric with love and spirit. 'You know that this makes the rest of the work here look like bot-work.'
'Leave that alone!' Vavash cried.
'Why should I?'
She glared at me with a hatred clear enough to see even at that distance. 'You have the sensitivity of a thug!'
'That's it exactly,' I snapped back. 'Every critic is a thug, and we work for that merciless godfather called the Spirit of Art. A long time ago, old Art loaned you a wheelbarrel full of talent, didn't he, lady? But recent-like it seems you ain't been keepin' up the payments. So Art sent the Scalpel-man to chat wit' youse an' have a look-see how to get you back on the program.'
'You're ridiculous!'
'If necessary,' I answered drily. Vavash was still up on the stairs, bending over awkwardly in an effort to see me under the glaring lights. Her feet seemed cemented to the step. I said, 'Why don't you come down here where we can talk about this more comfortably?'
'You come up here.'
'Now why would a grown woman be afraid to come into a well-lit basement?' I asked conversationally. I turned my back on her and began walking toward the area that was still dark.
'Mr. Scalpel!'
'Is she afraid of mice?' I went on. 'No, no mice in your standard Straight-From-The-Package terraformed ecology. Dust? No, regulation dome air filters make sure all dust is hypoallergenic. Things that go bump in the night? No, that's just childish, and there've never been children on Creche, have there?'
'Mr. Scalpel…'
The flash of another bank of lights, and there before me slept a herd of stasis chests…row upon row of glimmery mirrory cylinders, laid out with the care of a graveyard. The chests were less than half the normal adult size. In front of each chest was mounted a machine-lettered card. I walked among them in slow wonderment, picking up a card here and there to read:
'So,' said Vavash softly, 'now you know.'
She had approached silently, and stood now among her artworks, her body limp, her face old.
'I don't know anything,' I answered. 'Are they dead?'
'They were alive when they were put in,' she said distantly. 'That means they're alive now, correct? Time doesn't pass in stasis. Not a fraction of a second. Not even over all the years…'
'They've been in stasis for sixty years?' I asked in disbelief.
'Some. We kept having them…no medical supplies, you know, no birth control or abortion. We'd try celibacy, but it got so lonely sometimes…'
'You just kept dropping foals and merrily putting them up in stasis?'
'Oh, it's very easy to be self-righteous, isn't it?' she said angrily. 'Imagine yourself in our place. Imagine yourself with a world entirely to yourself, and being free, absolutely free, to follow your Art as you choose. No Philistines to question the value of what you're doing, no political system that feels threatened by your activities, no mundane responsibilities to weigh you down.
'And then the children come. In no time, you're up to your ankles in diapers and demands for your attention twenty-five hours a day…no time to work, not even a decent night's rest, the incessant crying…and finally, one night when you're groggy with lack of sleep, and desperate for anything to make it stop, you think of the stasis chests that you have by the hundreds, and it's like an answer to a prayer to tuck the baby away for the night. Just for a few hours of peace and quiet. And the baby isn't harmed—doesn't even know that it was…shut off. And you take to doing it every night—you get a good sleep, you rationalize that the child will benefit from it too, you'll be more relaxed and attentive. And in the middle of the afternoon when you decide you want to get a bit of work done without interruption…after a while, you tell yourself it's all right, the baby's fine, if you take it out of stasis for an hour a day, that's enough. You can play with it happily, make that little bit of time, everything's fine…even if you miss a day once in a while when you're busy, when the work's going well. If you have a life of your own, you know you'll be a better mother….
'And you miss a day and a week and a month, and every time you think about it, you're filled with the most sickening dread, the most sickening paralyzing dread…you try to put it out of your mind but you can't, you want to make it right again but you can't, you tell yourself how simple it would be to plunge in and fix it, but you're just so paralyzed with the dread, you can't face it, you want it just to go away, and you scream at a bot to get the chest out of your sight, get it out, get it out…
'And when another baby's on the way, and you swear on everything you hold sacred that you will be good to this one, that you'll never make the same mistake, that you'll be so much stronger…I had five children, Mr. Scalpel.' She waved at the silent chests. 'They're all out there. Sometimes I have nightmares that I lost count, that I really had six. Or seven. I don't know why that terrifies me. Losing count. What would be the difference? But the thought is so…chilling…I don't know why.
'But…' She straightened up a bit. 'Stasis
'No harm done!' I roared. 'You stupid bitch! Don't you realize what's happened here?'
'The children haven't been hurt! When we're all dead and gone, someone will come down here, find them, and <BINK> let them out. They'll be fine. Famous even. They'll all be adopted…'
'Do you think I care about a pack of puking papooses?' I shouted. 'What have these
