Nova was leaning against the light brown wall of a warmsuit factory, her hands behind her, watching me look at it.
“I thought you went with the others.” She shook her head and smiled. I looked up at the graceful spire of rock that had been carved, experts told us, twenty thousand years before the Egyptians raised Khufu’s pyramid. It graced the cover of half the books about Mars,
I reached out and touched it. It was cool and smoothed by the thin winds, yet sensuous under my fingers. The convoluted rills of what had to be drapery but just as easily could have been huge folded wings slid under my palm as I touched time itself.
A burst of distant laughter brought me back from wherever I had been. Already Brian Thorne was imagining what it would cost and how it might be taken back to Earth; but Diego Braddock was saying no, leave it here. Leave all of the Martian finds here. If people want to see them let them come here. You don’t put the Grand Canyon in a trailer and take it around to show.
I laughed at myself. Brian Thorne could afford to come here, but 99.9 percent of the world could not. Would they know what they saw if they saw it? Did
“Left his wife and family and went off to paint in the South Pacific, he did. But look at him! Can’t even paint the sand right. When Wilma and I were down there last year with Tahiti Tours we took some stereos of what it
“He was a sort of dwarf, you know. Drank something called absinthe that rots your brain like headpoppers.”
“Old Pablo really had ’em all fooled, he did! They’d buy anything he put his name to!”
“The intrinsic value of the negative space is offset by the chromatic change in the positive area, as anyone can see. What the artist meant to say here, in this gray, undulating section, is that the innate nature of man is that of violence and self-defeat. In my opinion . . .”
“Isn’t that cute?”
“I’d buy it if it was in blues. I like blue. Would go well with the new Lifestyle furniture, wouldn’t it, honey?”
“My four-year-old robot can do
I shook my head. Probably some lice-ridden, fur-clad grump huddled in the Trois-Freres cave grumbled that Ogg was messing up the nice clean limestone walls with his scratchings, and anyway that didn’t look a bit like Grunt, the Boar-Killer.
I looked up at it again.
Nova took my hand. “C’mon, everyone’s going to the Redplanet Inn.”
I raised my eyebrows. The Redplanet Inn was the most notorious restaurant, gambling hall, hotel, and whorehouse in over forty-eight million miles.
“Oh, come on. Everyone goes there.”
I went with her down the street, past several assay offices, a sandcat repair shop, and a Bureau of Martian Affairs office. We went through a lock and into another dome, a sort of vast parking lot for sandcats, capsule trailers, big-wheeled prime movers, digger gear, and scooters. In the center was a repair complex and spare parts storage. Nova took me along the left wall, curving around toward a side lock. I looked at the battered, tough little vehicles and saw one lettered
Nova was indeed known in these parts.
There is something about certain machinery, certain tools, that is beautiful: A sculptor’s mallet, the 1860 .44- caliber Army Colt, the General Electronic C-model fusion plant, the World War II Jeep, the Randall version of the Bowie knife, the GM Lafitte Class torchship, the Colt .2 laser, certain racing cars, Shark-class personal submarines—all are beautiful examples of a merging of art and function. The rugged, bulging, functional Ford sandcat was one of those beauties. No artist designed it, no stylist smoothed over its features with a chocolate coating of thin steel and chrome striping. Few could afford to ship anything but the bare necessities this far, and already the cost of each sandcat was several times the cost of the most expensive
