'
Six weeks till Chrys's show opened in Helicon, the Elf capital, and already snake-eggs pestered her in the street or hid like vermin behind her drapes and light fixtures, all hunting for an 'inside scoop' on her work and whatever dark personal secrets they could imagine. By accident (or perhaps not) one got stepped on. A veritable cloud of them descended, leading to the headline story, 'Prominent Artist Assaults Journalist.' If the news reached Dolomoth—she could not bear to imagine it. Her little brother's image up in the corner, turning cartwheels forever, receded even farther from reach.
'By the way,' Xenon asked one morning, 'it's no business of mine, but do artists often receive anonymous donations of ten million credits?'
Focusing her tired eyes, she counted the digits in the credit line that hovered ever longer in her window. Sure enough, there were eight, where there had only been seven the last time she counted. Her investments with Garnet were long gone; there was no explanation. Or was there?
On a hunch, she placed a call. 'Garnet, what the hell are you doing to my credit line?'
The sprite in gray smiled apologetically. 'What's the harm? It's anonymous.'
The way he said it, she couldn't help but smile. 'You know I can't take so much as quartz dust from you.'
Garnet said quietly, 'What you gave me was priceless.'
'In that case, I'm insulted.' She sighed. Being 'objective' was a joke, she had decided. All the testers had to judge people they loved or hated; there was nothing objective about it. But rules were rules. 'This time, I'll pass it on to the Simian Advancement League. But next time, I'll have to report you.'
'The Sim League—Jasper will be so pleased,' he exclaimed. 'By the way, how is your new recruit? We'd like to meet him.'
Zircon—her 'new recruit,' indeed. She started to protest but had another thought. Garnet needed to get out among carriers again. 'You can invite him to Olympus.'
The pain was there, in the lines around Garnet's eyes. No matter how young you look, there comes a day when you feel old. 'You'll be doing me a favor,' she insisted. 'Honest.'
'In that case, I have no choice.'
The next day, she faced the Silicon planning board. At the virtual meeting, she and Jasper sat at his giant- sized holostage. On the holostage the sentients or their avatars made a diverse assemblage. One was humanoid, bipedal with a knob of a head; another, built like a ladder with various appendages; while the dominant figure extended radially like a sea urchin, a core cortex within a nest of legs. Still others were too large and extensive to be visualized, such as the transit systems of Helicon and Papilion, each represented by a cross-shaped avatar.
The board included three Elf humans, one of them Guardian Arion. Arion's image spent most of the meeting sitting back with his arms crossed. From news accounts, Chrys guessed this pose represented the official Elf view of the sentient plans. Elves were mortified to see their aesthetics upstaged, though they could not survive a minute without the sentient partners running their cities.
Something pricked Chrys's memory. Selenite—where was she? Why wasn't she here to help present the design? Chrys had avoided Selenite since her accusations about art, hoping the dust would settle. Perhaps Selenite knew better—this deal would never fly.
The chair of the board was the giant black sea urchin, reputedly a top market investor like Garnet. Its twenty-odd limbs stood out straight from its body, each ending in a different mechanism for grasping, screwing, or drawing. The sea urchin methodically reviewed the city's needs: so much residential volume, of a dozen categories, from snake-egg to transit system; so many power connections, service conduits, and sewage lines; and something called 'wetware.'
The cross representing a transit system started blinking. 'Does a sentient city really need so much volume for wetware?' About 12 percent of the city volume had this designation. 'Couldn't that be covered under service conduits?'
'We must plan for wet visitation,' said the sea urchin. 'We've made our best estimate of wet volume occupancy.'
Chrys gave Jasper a questioning look. 'Visiting humans,' he explained.
An Elf asked, 'Have you considered the placement of the twelve percent, and the actual visitation patterns expected? Remember any Elysian city is a hundred percent accessible to sentients.'
Below at right blinked a circular avatar with two crossbars. A virtual information network; a sentient being who entirely lacked physical substance. 'Of course, our city will be a hundred percent accessible to humans—as accessible as it is to me.'
Above Chrys's left shoulder a light was blinking. Chrys twisted her neck up to see. A ladder with two clawed appendages waved both of them. 'Speaking of wetness, why build the first city for sentients literally floating on the greatest volume of water in the Fold? We could have picked Urulan—'
'With all due respect,' interposed the giant sea urchin, 'we settled the choice of planet two decades ago.' Two decades—they took their time, Chrys thought. Perhaps, she thought hopefully, they'd take another two decades more, while she went back to painting. 'Other questions?' invited the chair.
The transit cross blinked again. 'My calculations show the projected sewage conduits to be entirely inadequate. Such a large structure requires a greater scaling factor.'
There ensued a lengthy discussion of the amount, extent, and arrangement of sewage conduits. 'Why do they need so much sewage,' she asked Jasper, 'if they're avoiding humans?'
Jasper leaned closer to whisper. 'For sentients,' he explained, 'sewage is mostly waste heat; an unavoidable product of even the cleanest machine. 'Waste heat' is unmentionable in public, like human excrement.'
The ladder with the two clawed arms spoke again. 'Urulan proposed an innovative mechanism for efficient sewage dispersal.'
'That proposal received thorough discussion,' said the sea urchin. 'Other questions?'
After what seemed an interminable time, the word 'Eleutheria' leaped out. Chrys sat up straight, her pulse racing.
'Eleutheria—an award-winning firm of a million professional designers—presents its newly revised design for our metropolis.' Gone was the gleaming pearly surface of the great sphere that Jonquil had first proposed. In its place, the sphere shone brilliant red, into the infrared. The sphere resolved into a thousand facets, each a fiery spiral swirling gradually outward like a distant galaxy, a universe of flame.
Chrys stole a look at the Elves. None spoke, though one had a hand to her mouth. Arion's face was white as moonstone, the veins throbbing in his forehead.
In Chrys's window the words of Fireweed flowed across. Taking a breath, Chrys began to read aloud. ' 'The form, a heroic jewel, represents the very rising of the sun. Each facet of the jewel presents a slightly different hue, as it were, a facet of the rainbow ...' ' A bit much, she thought, adding at the end, 'It's really just a sketch.'
The sphere cut in, its the plane of section moving forward through the center. Beneath its fiery surface stretched broad shafts connecting the center with thousands of tunnels extending in every direction. The ramified tunnels led to homes, recharging stations, industrial plants for all kinds of implements of nanoplast:
The sentient machines watched and listened, with whatever sensors they had. The humanoid observed, 'This metropolis will actually grow itself. Can you guarantee the entire structure will grow . .. intact?' For a structure floating on ocean, the slightest fissure could spell disaster. A good question, considering what had happened to the Comb.
Chrys felt her ears throbbing. 'We guarantee our work.' She would end up broke, worse than before she ever heard of Eleutheria.
Jasper raised a hand, his jaw lifting impressively. 'The project has the financial backing of the entire House of Hyalite, the oldest and most reliable contractor of the twin worlds.'
Fireweed's letters glowed like lava.
