“Ah, Johannes!” said a booming voice behind him. “Admiring your own work, you vain man?”
Johannes turned to face the guest of honor, Nicolaes Maes. “No,” he said. Maes waited, but Johannes said nothing more.
Not now, not ever.
2270
Cran is working on clearances at his console when Tulia bounces into the Project room. “Cran! They chose it! They really chose it!” She grabs his hands and twirls him in circles.
“Careful! You’ll hit the Squares!”
She stops moving and drops Cran’s hands. He hears his own tone: sour, disapproving, a cranky old man. He sees that Tulia understands immediately, but understanding isn’t enough to erase the hurt. Torn between them, she chooses hurt.
“Aren’t you happy for me?”
“Of course I am,” he says, and forces a smile. And he is happy, in a way. How could he not be—Tulia is him, or at least 32 percent of her genes are. It’s the other 68 percent that prompts this terrible, inexcusable jealousy.
She says softly, “Maybe next cycle the Gallery will choose one of your pictures.”
It is the wrong thing to say; they both know that will never happen. Cran does not have Tulia’s talent, has perhaps no talent at all. How does she do it, produce art that is somehow fresh and arresting, after working all day at the Project’s forgeries? How? Sometimes he hates her for it. Does she know this?
Sometimes he loves her for it. She knows this.
Cran says, “I am happy for you. But I need to work.”
Her eyes sharpen. She, after all, is also part of the Project. “Do you have something?”
“An ancient Egyptian vase, on Square Three. Go look.” She looks, frowning. “We cannot reproduce that.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s inside a tomb. We can Transfer a lump of rock and no one would ever know.”
We could Transfer one of my sculptures, which are just as dreadful as my paintings.
“The tomb was never opened before—”
“No.” No one ever names the Madness, if naming can be avoided. Even in a deliberately rational society—legally rational, culturally rational, genetically rational to whatever extent the geneticists can manage—superstitions seep in like moondust in airlocks. No one says the word aloud.
“Well, that’s wonderful!” Tulia says. “Has the Director vetted it? Have you done the clearances?”
“Yes, he did, and I’m completing them now. When … when is your Gallery presentation?”
“Tuesday. I’ll go now. I just wanted to tell you about … about my painting.”
“I’m glad you did,” Cran says, lying, hoping she doesn’t realize that. Sixty-eight percent foreign genes.
Tulia leaves. Cran de-opaques the window wall and stares out. The Project is housed in its own dome, and sometimes the bleak lunar landscape calms him when he feels equally bleak. Not, however, this time.
On the horizon, the lights of Alpha Dome are just visible below stars in the black sky. Alpha was the first, the only dome to exist when the Madness happened on Earth. Six thousand lunar colonists, half of them scientists. They had the best equipment, the best scientific minds, the best planners. Earth had those who could not qualify; Earth had too many people and too many wars; Earth had the ability to create genetically boosted bioweapons so powerful that when the Madness began as just another war, it quickly escalated. In three months everyone on Earth was dead. How could they do that, those Terrans of two centuries ago? Those on Alpha watched in horror. There was nothing they could do except what they did: shoot down both incoming missiles and incoming, infected escapees.
He was not there, of course. He’s old, but not that old. How long does it take for guilt to evaporate? Longer than two hundred years. Alpha Dome grew to sixteen more domes. If he squints hard, he might be able to see the robots constructing Sigma Dome on the western horizon, or the sprays of dirt thrown up from the borers digging the connecting tunnels. But through all the construction, all the genetic tinkering, all the amazing scientific progress, the guilt has not gone away. We humans murdered our own species. Thus, the Project.
Or perhaps, Cran thinks, that’s wrong. There is, after all, a strong but polite political faction—all Luna’s political factions are polite, or else they don’t exist—that says the Project should be discontinued and its resources committed to the present and the future, not to rescuing the past. So far, this has not happened.
It takes Cran nearly an hour to finish the complicated clearance procedures for the Egyptian vase. He finds it hard to concentrate.
The clearances are approved almost immediately. They are, after all, only a formality; the Director, who is the Project’s expert on art of the ancient world, has already inspected the image glowing in Square Three. Cran has worked a long day and it’s late; he should go home. But he likes working alone at night, and he has the seniority to do so. He gazes at the vase, this exquisite thing that exists in dark beneath tons of rock in a buried tomb a quarter-million miles and three millennia away. A core-formed glass vessel, three inches high, its graceful, elaborately decorated curves once held perfumed ointment or scented oils. Perhaps it still does.
The Project room is lined with Squares, each a six-foot cube. Some of the Squares are solid real-time alloys; some are virtual simulations; some are not actually there at all—not in time or space. The Project is built on chaos theory, which says that the patterns of spacetime contain something called “strange attractors,” a mathematical concept that Cran doesn’t understand at all. He is, after all, a Project technician, not a physicist. A senior, trusted technician who will never be an artist.
Why Tulia? Why not me?
One of those questions that, like the Madness, has no answer.
2018
The guard at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., made his early morning rounds. He unlocked each room, peered in, and moved on. He had worked there a long while and prided himself on knowing exactly what each exhibit held at
