The Best of Joe Haldeman (58 page)

We floated together for a while, comparing this soup to bodies of water on our planets and ThetaKent. It was tiring, more from the water’s heat and bad air than exertion, so we swam back in.

~ * ~

We dried in the blistering sun for a few minutes and then took the food box and moved to the shade of a beachside ruin. Two walls had fallen in together, to make a sort of concrete tent.

We could have been a couple of precivilization aboriginals, painted with dirt, our hair baked into stringy mats. She looked odd but still had a kind of formal beauty, the dusty mud residue turning her into a primitive sculpture, impossibly accurate and mobile. Dark rivulets of sweat drew painterly accent lines along her face and body. If only she were a model, rather than an artist. Hold that pose while I go back for my brushes.

We shared the small bottles of cold wine and water and ate bread and cheese and fruit. I put a piece on the ground for the nanophages. We watched it in silence for some minutes, while nothing happened. “It probably takes hours or days,” she finally said.

“I suppose we should hope so,” I said. “Let us digest the food before the creatures get to it.”

“Oh, that’s not a problem. They just attack the bonds between amino acids that make up proteins. For you and me, they’re nothing more than an aid to digestion.”

How reassuring. “But a source of some discomfort when we go back in, I was told.”

She grimaced. “The purging. I did it once, and decided my next outing would be a long one. The treatment’s the same for a day or a year.”

“So how long has it been this time?”

“Just a day and a half. I came out to be your welcoming committee.”

“I’m flattered.”

She laughed. “It was their idea, actually. They wanted someone out here to ‘temper’ the experience for you. They weren’t sure how well traveled you were, how easily affected by...strangeness.” She shrugged. “Earthlings. I told them I knew of four planets you’d been to.”

“They weren’t impressed?”

“They said well, you know, he’s famous and wealthy. His experiences on these planets might have been very comfortable.” We could both laugh at that. “I told them how comfortable ThetaKent is.”

“Well, it doesn’t have nanophages.”

“Or anything else. That was a long year for me. You didn’t even stay a year.”

“No. I suppose we would have met, if I had.”

“Your agent said you were going to be there two years.”

I poured us both some wine. “She should have told me you were coming. Maybe I could have endured it until the next ship out.”

“How gallant.” She looked into the wine without drinking. “You famous and wealthy people don’t have to endure ThetaKent. I had to agree to one year’s indentureship to help pay for my triangle ticket.”

“You were an actual slave?”

“More like a wife, actually. The head of a township, a widower, financed me in exchange for giving his children some culture. Language, art, music. Every now and then he asked me to his chambers. For his own kind of culture.”

“My word. You had to...
lie
with him? That was in the contract?”

“Oh, I didn’t have to, but it kept him friendly.” She held up a thumb and forefinger. “It was hardly noticeable.”

I covered my smile with a hand, and probably blushed under the mud.

“I’m not embarrassing you?” she said. “From your work, I’d think that was impossible.”

I had to laugh. “That work is in reaction to my culture’s values. I can’t take a pill and stop being a Petrosian.”

White Hill smiled, tolerantly. “A Petrosian woman wouldn’t put up with an arrangement like that?”

“Our women are still women. Some actually would like it, secretly. Most would claim they’d rather die, or kill the man.”

“But they wouldn’t actually
do
it. Trade their body for a ticket?” She sat down in a single smooth dancer’s motion, her legs open, facing me. The clay between her legs parted, sudden pink.

“I wouldn’t put it so bluntly.” I swallowed, watching her watching me. “But no, they wouldn’t. Not if they were planning to return.”

“Of course no one from a civilized planet would want to stay on ThetaKent. Shocking place.”

I had to move the conversation onto safer grounds. “Your arms don’t spend all day shoving big rocks around. What do you normally work in?”

“Various mediums.” She switched to my language. “Sometimes I shove little rocks around.” That was a pun for testicles. “I like painting, but my reputation is mainly from light and sound sculpture. I wanted to do something with the water here, internal illumination of the surf, but they say that’s not possible. They can’t isolate part of the ocean. I can have a pool, but no waves, no tides.”

“Understandable.” Earth’s scientists had found a way to rid the surface of the nanoplague. Before they reterraformed the Earth, though, they wanted to isolate an area, a “park of memory,” as a reminder of the Sterilization and these centuries of waste, and brought artists from every world to interpret, inside the park, what they had seen here.

Every world except Earth. Art on Earth had been about little else for a long time.

Setting up the contest had taken decades. A contest representative went to each of the settled worlds, according to a strict timetable. Announcement of the competition was delayed on the nearer worlds so that each artist would arrive on Earth at approximately the same time.

The Earth representatives chose which artists would be asked, and no one refused. Even the ones who didn’t win the contest were guaranteed an honorarium equal to twice what they would have earned during that time at home, in their best year of record.

The value of the prize itself was so large as to be meaningless to a normal person. I’m a wealthy man on a planet where wealth is not rare, and just the interest that the prize would earn would support me and a half dozen more. If someone from ThetaKent or Laxor won the prize, they would probably have more real usable wealth than their governments. If they were smart, they wouldn’t return home.

The artists had to agree on an area for the park, which was limited to a hundred square kaymetras. If they couldn’t agree, which seemed almost inevitable to me, the contest committee would listen to arguments and rule.

Most of the chosen artists were people like me, accustomed to working on a monumental scale. The one from Laxor was a composer, though, and there were two conventional muralists, paint and mosaic. White Hill’s work was by its nature evanescent. She could always set something up that would be repeated, like a fountain cycle. She might have more imagination than that, though.

“Maybe it’s just as well we didn’t meet in a master-student relationship,” I said. “I don’t know the first thing about the techniques of your medium.”

“It’s not technique.” She looked thoughtful, remembering. “That’s not why I wanted to study with you, back then. I was willing to push rocks around, or anything, if it could give me an avenue, an insight into how you did what you did.” She folded her arms over her chest, and dust fell. “Ever since my parents took me to see Gaudi Mountain, when I was ten.”

That was an early work, but I was still satisfied with it. The city council of Tresling, a prosperous coastal city, hired me to “do something with” an unusable steep island that stuck up in the middle of their harbor. I melted it judiciously, in homage to an Earthling artist.

“Now, though, if you’d forgive me...well, I find it hard to look at. It’s alien, obtrusive.”

“You don’t have to apologize for having an opinion.” Of course it looked alien; it was meant to evoke
Spain
! “What would you do with it?”

She stood up and walked to where a window used to be, and leaned on the stone sill, looking at the ruins that hid the sea. “I don’t know. I’m even less familiar with your tools.” She scraped at the edge of the sill with a piece of rubble. “It’s funny: earth, air, fire, and water. You’re earth and fire, and I’m the other two.”

I have used water, of course. The Gaudi is framed by water. But it was an interesting observation. “What do you do, I mean for a living? Is it related to your water and air?”

“No. Except insofar as everything is related.” There are no artists on Seldene, in the sense of doing it for a living. Everybody indulges in some sort of art or music, as part of “wholeness,” but a person who only did art would be considered a parasite. I was not comfortable there.

She faced me, leaning. “I work at the Northport Mental Health Center. Cognitive science, a combination of research and...is there a word here?
Jaturnary.
‘Empathetic therapy,’ I guess.”

I nodded. “We say
jddr-ny.
You plug yourself into mental patients?”

“I share their emotional states. Sometimes I do some good, talking to them afterwards. Not often.”

“It’s not done on Petrosia,” I said, unnecessarily.

“Not legally, you mean.”

I nodded. “If it worked, people say, it might be legal.”

“‘People say.’ What do you say?” I started to make a noncommittal gesture. “Tell me the truth?”

“All I know is what I learned in school. It was tried but failed spectacularly. It hurt both the therapists and the patients.”

“That was more than a century ago. The science is much more highly developed now.”

I decided not to push her on it. The fact is that drug therapy is spectacularly successful, and it
is
a science, unlike
jddr-ny.
Seldene is backward in some surprising ways.

I joined her at the window. “Have you looked around for a site yet?”

She shrugged. “I think my presentation will work anywhere. At least that’s guided my thinking. I’ll have water, air, and light, wherever the other artists and the committee decide to put us.” She scraped at the ground with a toenail. “And this stuff. They call it ‘loss.’ What’s left of what was living.”

“I suppose it’s not everywhere, though. They might put us in a place that used to be a desert.”

“They might. But there will be water and air; they were willing to guarantee that.”

“I don’t suppose they have to guarantee rock,” I said.

“I don’t know. What would you do if they did put us in a desert, nothing but sand?”

“Bring little rocks.” I used my own language; the pun also meant courage.

She started to say something, but we were suddenly in deeper shadow. We both stepped through the tumbled wall, out into the open. A black line of cloud had moved up rapidly from inland.

She shook her head. “Let’s get to the shelter. Better hurry.”

We trotted back along the path toward the Amazonia dome city. There was a low concrete structure behind the rock where I first met her. The warm breeze became a howling gale of sour steam before we got there, driving bullets of hot rain. A metal door opened automatically on our approach and slid shut behind us. “I got caught in one yesterday,” she said, panting. “It’s no fun, even under cover. Stinks.”

We were in an unadorned anteroom that had protective clothing on wall pegs. I followed her into a large room furnished with simple chairs and tables, and up a winding stair to an observation bubble.

“Wish we could see the ocean from here,” she said. It was dramatic enough. Wavering sheets of water marched across the blasted landscape, strobed every few seconds by lightning flashes. The tunic I’d left outside swooped in flapping circles off to the sea.

It was gone in a couple of seconds. “You don’t get another one, you know. You’ll have to meet everyone naked as a baby.”

“A dirty one at that. How undignified.”

“Come on.” She caught my wrist and tugged. “Water is my specialty, after all.”

~ * ~

The large hot bath was doubly comfortable for having a view of the tempest outside. I’m not at ease with communal bathing—I was married for fifty years and never bathed with my wife—but it seemed natural enough after wandering around together naked on an alien planet, swimming in its mud-puddle sea. I hoped I could trust her not to urinate in the tub. (If I mentioned it, she would probably turn scientific and tell me that a healthy person’s urine is sterile. I know that. But there is a time and a receptacle for everything.)

On Seldene, I knew, an unattached man and woman in this situation would probably have had sex even if they were only casual acquaintances, let alone fellow artists. She was considerate enough not to make any overtures, or perhaps (I thought at the time) not greatly stimulated by the sight of muscular men. In the shower before bathing, she offered to scrub my back, but I left it at that. I helped her strip off the body paint from her back. It was a nice back to study, pronounced lumbar dimples, small waist. Under more restrained circumstances, it might have been I who made an overture. But one does not ask a woman when refusal would be awkward.

Talking while we bathed, I learned that some of her people, when they become wealthy enough to retire, choose to work on their art fulltime, but they’re considered eccentric, even outcasts, egotists. White Hill expected one of them to be chosen for the contest, and wasn’t even going to apply. But the Earthling judge saw one of her installations and tracked her down.

She also talked about her practical work in dealing with personality disorders and cognitive defects. There was some distress in her voice when she described that to me. Plugging into hurt minds, sharing their pain or blankness for hours. I didn’t feel I knew her well enough to bring up the aspect that most interested me, a kind of ontological prurience: what is it like to actually
be
another person; how much of her, or him, do you take away? If you do it often enough, how can you know which parts of you are the original you?