“I always need to spend some time with my subject before I can do a cube.” Except with the Buddha cube, I thought with a smile.
“Whatever you need,” Madelon said.
Mike looked past her at me and raised his eyebrows. I made a gesture of acquiescence. Whatever was needed. I flatter myself that I understand the creative process better than most nonartists. What was needed was needed; what was not needed was unimportant. With Mike, technology had ceased to be anything but a minimal hindrance between him and his art. Now he needed only intimacy and understanding of what he intended to do. And that meant time.
“Use the Transjet,” I said. “Blake Mason has finished the house on Malagasy. Use that. Or roam around awhile.”
Mike smiled at me. “How many homes do you have, anyway?”
“I like to change environments. It makes life more interesting. And as much as I try to keep my face out of the news it keeps creeping in and I can’t be myself in as many places as I’d like.”
Mike shrugged. “I thought a little fame would be helpful, and it has, but I know what you mean. After the interviews on
“The bitter with the sweet,” I said.
“Brian uses a number of personas as well,” Madelon said. Mike raised his eyebrows. “The secret lives of Brian Thorne, complete with passports and unicards,” she laughed.
Mike looked at me and I explained. “It’s necessary when you are the center of a power structure. There are times you need to Get Away From It All, or to simply not be you for awhile. It’s much like an artist changing styles. The Malagasy house belongs to ‘Ben Ford’ of Publitex . . . I haven’t been there yet, so you be Ben.”
4
People have said that I asked for it. But you cannot stop the tide; it comes in when it wants and it goes when it wants. Madelon was unlike any individual that I had ever known. She owned herself. Few people do. So many are mere reflections of others, mirrors of fame or power or personality. Many let others do their thinking for them. Some are not really people, but statistics.
But Madelon was unlike the others. She took and gave without regard for very many things, demanding only truth. She was hard on her friends, for even friends sometimes require a touch of nontruth to help them out.
She conformed to my own definition of friendship: friends must interest, amuse, help and protect you. They can do nothing more. To what extent they fulfill these criteria defines the degree of friendship. Without interest there is no communication; without amusement there is no zest; without help and protection there is no trust, no truth, no security, no intimacy. Friendship is a two-way street and Madelon was my friend.
Michael Cilento was also unlike most other people. He was an Original, on his way to being a Legend. At the bottom level there are people who are “interesting” or “different.” Those below that should not be allowed to waste your time. On the next step above is Unique. Then the Originals, and finally those rare Legends.
I might flatter myself and say that I was certainly different, possibly even Unique on a good day. Madelon was an undisputed Original. But I sensed that Michael Cilento had that something extra, the art, the drive, the vision, the talent that could make him a Legend. Or destroy him.
So they went off together. To Malagasy, off the African coast. To Capri. To New York. Then I heard they were in Algiers. I had my Control keep an extra special eye on them, even more than the usual protective surveillance I kept on Madelon. But I didn’t check myself. It was their business.
A vidreport had them on Station One, dancing in the null gravity of the big ballroom balloon. Even without Control I was kept abreast of their actions and whereabouts by that host of people who found delight in telling me where my wife and her lover were. And what they were doing. How they looked. What they said. And so forth.
Somehow none of it surprised me. I knew Madelon and what she liked. I knew beautiful women. I knew that Mike’s sensatron cubes were passports to immortality for many women.
Mike was not the only artist working in the medium, of course, for Hayworth and Powers were both exhibiting and Coe had already done his great “Family.” But it was Mike the women wanted. Presidents and kings sought out Cinardo and Lisa Araminta. Vidstars thought Hampton fashionable. But Mike was the first choice for all the great beauties.
I was determined that Mike have the time and privacy to do a sensatron cube of Madelon and I made it mandatory at all my homes, offices, and branches that Mike and Madelon be isolated from the vidhacks and nuts and time wasters as much as possible. It was the purest ego on my part, that lusting toward a sensatron portrait of Madelon. I suppose I wanted the world to know that she was
