For a Breath I Tarry

They came down upon Frost, and the spiders came to anchor them. Frost blasted them with jets of air, like hammers, and tore at the nets; he extruded sharpened appendages with which he slashed.

Mordel had retreated back to the entranceway. He emitted a long, shrill sound—undulant, piercing.

Then a darkness came upon Bright Defile, and all the spiders halted in their spinning.

Frost freed himself and Mordel rushed to join him.

'Quickly now, let us depart, mighty Frost,' he said.

'What has happened?'

Mordel entered the compartment.

'I called upon Divcom, who laid down a field of forces upon this place, cutting off the power broadcast to these machines. Since our power is self-contained, we are not affected. But let us hurry to depart, for even now the Beta-Machine must be struggling against this.'

Frost rose high into the air, soaring above Man's last city with its webs and spiders of steel. When he left the zone of darkness, he sped northward.

As he moved, Solcom spoke to him:

'Frost, why did you enter the southern hemisphere, which is not your domain?'

'Because I wished to visit Bright Defile,' Frost replied.

'And why did you defy the Beta-Machine my appointed agent of the South?'

'Because I take my orders only from you yourself.'

'You do not make sufficient answer,' said Solcom.

'You have defied the decrees of order—and in pursuit of what?'

'I came seeking knowledge of Man,' said Frost. 'Nothing I have done was forbidden me by you.'

'You have broken the traditions of order.'

'I have violated no directive.'

'Yet logic must have shown you that what you did was not a part of my plan.'

'It did not. I have not acted against your plan.'

'Your logic has become tainted, like that of your new associate, the Alternate.'

'I have done nothing which was forbidden.'

'The forbidden is implied in the imperative.'

'It is not stated.'

'Hear me, Frost. You are not a builder or a maintainer, but a Power. Among all my minions you are the most nearly irreplaceable. Return to your hemisphere and your duties, but know that I am mightily displeased.'

'I hear you, Solcom.'

'…And go not again to the South.'

Frost crossed the equator, continued northward.

He came to rest in the middle of a desert and sat silent for a day and a night.

Then he received a brief transmission from the South:

'If it had not been ordered, I would not have bid you go.'

Frost had read the entire surviving Library of Man. He decided then upon a human reply:

'Thank you,' he said.

The following day he unearthed a great stone and began to cut at it with tools which he had formulated. For six days he worked at its shaping, and on the seventh he regarded it.

'When will you release me?' asked Mordel from within his compartment.

'When I am ready,' said Frost, and a little later, 'Now.'

He opened the compartment and Mordel descended to the ground. He studied the statue: an old woman, bent like a question mark, her bony hands covering her face, the fingers spread, so that only part of her expression of horror could be seen.

'It is an excellent copy,' said Mordel, 'of the one we saw in Bright Defile. Why did you make it?'

'The production of a work of art is supposed to give rise to human feelings such as catharsis, pride in achievement, love, satisfaction.'

'Yes, Frost,' said Mordel, 'but a work of art is only a work of art the first time. After that, it is a copy.'

'Then this must be why I felt nothing.'

'Perhaps, Frost.'

'What do you mean 'perhaps'? I will make a work of art for the first time, then.'

He unearthed another stone and attacked it with his tools. For three days he labored. Then, 'There, it is finished,' he said.

'It is a simple cube of stone,' said Mordel. 'What does it represent?'

'Myself,' said Frost, 'it is a statue of me. It is smaller than natural size because it is only a representation of my form, not my dimen—'

'It is not art,' said Mordel.

'What makes you an art critic?'

'I do not know art, but I know what art is not. I know that it is not an exact replication of an object in another medium.'

'Then this must be why I felt nothing at all,' said Frost.

'Perhaps,' said Mordel.

Frost took Mordel back into his compartment and rose once more above the Earth. Then he rushed away, leaving his statues behind him in the desert, the old woman bent above the cube.

They came down in a small valley, bounded by green rolling hills, cut by a narrow stream, and holding a small clean lake and several stands of spring-green trees.

'Why have we come here?' asked Mordel.

'Because the surroundings are congenial,' said Frost. 'I am going to try another medium: oil painting; and I am going to vary my technique from that of pure representationalism.'

'How will you achieve this variation?'

'By the principle of randomizing,' said Frost. 'I shall not attempt to duplicate the colors, nor to represent the objects according to scale. Instead, I have set up a random pattern whereby certain of these factors shall be at variance from those of the original.'

Frost had formulated the necessary instruments after he had left the desert. He produced them and began painting the lake and the trees on the opposite side of the lake which were reflected within it.

Using eight appendages, he was finished in less than two hours.

The trees were phthalocyanine blue and towered like mountains; their reflections of burnt sienna were tiny beneath the pale vermilion of the lake; the hills were nowhere visible behind them, but were outlined in viridian within the reflection; the sky began as blue in the upper right-hand corner of the canvas, but changed to an orange as it descended, as though all the trees were on fire.

'There,' said Frost. 'Behold.'

Mordel studied it for a long while and said nothing.

'Well, is it art?'

'I do not know,' said Mordel. 'It may be. Perhaps randomicity is the principle behind artistic technique. I cannot judge this work because I do not understand it. I must therefore go deeper, and inquire into what lies behind it, rather than merely considering the technique whereby it was produced.

'I know that human artists never set out to create art, as such,' he said, 'but rather to portray with their techniques some features of objects and their functions which they deemed significant.'

''Significant'? In what sense of the word?'

'In the only sense of the word possible under the circumstances: significant in relation to the human condition, and worth of accentuation because of the manner in which they touched upon it.'

'In what manner?'

'Obviously, it must be in a manner knowable only to one who has experience of the human condition.'

'There is a flaw somewhere in your logic, Mordel, and I shall find it.'

'I will wait.'

'If your major premise is correct,' said Frost after awhile, 'then I do not comprehend art.'

'It must be correct, for it is what human artists have said of it. Tell me, did you experience feelings as you