Cosmocopia (9 page)

“Can you arrange for me to meet him?”

“Well, I don’t see why not. …”

Lazorg jumped up, grabbed Crutchsump’s hand, as well as the noetic’s, and pulled both to their feet.

“Quick! Let’s go!”

Arbogast lived on the top floor of a sprawling, solid but battered copper-roofed tenement, its stucco walls stained with verdigris streaks, the whole structured around an immense courtyard attained through a tall wide portal in the building’s north side. The courtyard teemed with the quotidian life of its inhabitants: children playing, domestic washing of both clothing and bodies being undertaken at a soapy stone trough fed by a fountain, a cook cart sending up charcoal smoke and the odor of clandestini meat on skewers.

Crutchsump imagined how splendid it would be to live in such luxury.

Upon being dragged from his shrine, Palisander had moved very slowly through the streets, reluctant to dispense with a noetic’s traditional decorum, and now Lazorg was fuming with impatience. He hustled Crutchsump and the noetic across the courtyard and up an indicated set of stairs.

“Slow down,” said Palisander. “There will be just as much interstitial nacre available an hour or a year from now as there will be in the next few seconds. The supply is, for all purposes, infinite.”

Lazorg paid little heed to the injunction, but took the stairs two at a time, leaving his companions to hasten after him.

On the top floor a wide corridor faced with numerous humble side doors terminated at a grander entrance to what was plainly a more impressive apartment. Palisander led them to this doorway, and knocked.

Arbogast himself opened the door before too long.

The master ideator was a burly fellow with a game leg. His sleeveless leather-and-fur jerkin revealed impressive arm muscles and a barrel torso. Wrestling with the nacre had evidently built his biceps and forearms up. He radiated a certain brusqueness not untempered by curiosity and a childlike vivacity and interest in whatever life presented him. His caul was studded with abstract trinkets.

“Palisander,” Arbogast said, “what draws you out of your meditative cubbyhole?”

“I’d like to present this fellow named Lazorg to you. He’s a curious case, a wanderer across the dimensions, and I thought you might find his story lively.”

Lazorg pushed forward. “Arbogast, I’d like to apprentice myself to you. I want to make ideations.”

Holding up a hand, Arbogast said, “Hold on one moment! Who says I’m taking any apprentices?”

“But you must!”

“Well, let’s discuss this inside.”

Arbogast’s apartment was a huge unwalled studio featuring broad skylights, with all the domestic furniture pushed into a corner. The rest of the space held shelving, and on these shelves rested a wide assortment of ideations of all types: figures of animals and buildings, as well as sensual sinuosities with no common referents.

But none of sentients such as Arbogast and Palisander and Crutchsump themselves.

In the middle of the space was a rack full of tranches of distinct shapes, a cushion for sitting and several other pillows meant to catch finished ideations safely as they fell like fruit from the tranche.

Arbogast led them to this work zone. He picked up rudimentary tranche of low complexity and handed it to Lazorg.

“Here, let’s see if you have any natural facility.”

Lazorg attempted to mimic what Palisander had done. Crutchsump watched with sympathy and hope.

Probing the air, Lazorg eventually encountered an interstitial node, but was unprepared for resistance. The tranche was almost jerked out of his grip. He managed to maintain his hold, however, and began to reel nacre out of the rift. But when he attempted to disengage, the lump of nacre did not sever, but pulled back like rubber, yanking the tranche out of Lazorg’s hand and snapping the bulbous wand in half against the edges of the rift.

Lazorg looked at Arbogast with despair in his eyes and stance. Arbogast regarded his broken tool for a moment, then said:

“It took me three days with my master before I could even sense a node. Perhaps your passage across the dimensions has endowed you with a certain intuition. But whatever the case, you may consider yourself my pupil from this moment forth.”

6. Artists and Models

CLIMBING THE COOKING-REDOLENT STAIRS to Arbogast’s apartment, Crutchsump vented an unusually self-indulgent expression of her weariness in the form of a deep trembling sigh. Her feet ached from tromping all about Sidetrack City in search of bones. (Today she had been as far as the Zolah stockyards, seeking whatever bones might be cadged from backdoor transactions with shifty employees.) Her hands still smelled faintly but distinctly of carnal muck and rot, although she had indulged in a bath of livewater before venturing here. And she had sprained her left wrist pulling the carcass of a guyan from a ditch.

But, she reminded herself, all her daily labors would be repaid once more in full, as they had been daily for the past six months, when she opened the door to Arbogast’s studio.

Two noisy children, their cauls colored in the bright shades favored by the young, rushed past Crutchsump on the stairs, and, avoiding them, she banged her sore wrist against a railing.

“Ow! Watch out!”

The unrepentant children laughed and raced on. Crutchsump vowed that if she ever had children, she’d be a better mother—or, less probably, father—than the parents who had failed to instill respect in these urchins.

At Arbogast’s door, Crutchsump knocked out of courtesy, but then let herself in. Had she waited, the preoccupied master and apprentice inside might have taken forever to answer.

Beneath grimy skylights that dimmed the twinned sunlight, the central workspace now boasted a second cushion for apprentice ideator, next to the master’s seat. Both cushions were occupied.

Arbogast held his tranche high, wielding it deftly, as Lazorg managed with a fair degree of success to mimic the master’s movements. On the tip of each tool, a sizable blob of nacre was assuming the unmistakable shape of a clandestini, from the points of its horns to the barbs of its tail. The little models were more or less evenly matched in fineness of detail, albeit exhibiting differences of style.

“That’s right,” urged Arbogast, “impress your will upon it! Every ounce of recollection and sympathy and zeal! And listen to your gut brain!”

Lazorg faltered in his making. “You keep saying that, but I still don’t know what you mean!”

“Your gut brain, your gut brain! What kind of infant are you?”

Suddenly the incomplete ideation fell, abortive, from Lazorg’s tranche. He dropped his tool on the cushions and angrily jumped up.

“I’m not an infant, damn you, Arbogast! In my own world, I’m a master! There’s no one more accomplished at my style of painting! Not even that pretender, Rokesby Marrs!”

Imperturbable, Arbogast unhurriedly completed his own ideation, and the perfect image of a clandestini fell to the receptive pillows, bearing the unmistakable Arobgast imprimatur. Only then did the master stand.

Rather than take umbrage at Lazorg’s impatience and bad temper, Arbogast laid a friendly hand on his pupil’s shoulder.

“I acknowledge your past, Lazorg. You’ve shared with me a fascinating story, these past six months. You’ve almost succeeded in making me imagine what ‘painting’ could be. But you have to face the reality of your current situation. Here, in this world, you’re not a master, you’re a student. Very much a natural adept, I admit, but still with a fair amount to learn. You have no reputation, no following, no patrons. Those are yet to be earned.”

Lazorg appeared mollified but still somewhat grumpy. “Well, how can I earn those things, if I never show my work to the public?”

Arbogast did not immediately answer that question, instead saying, “Repeat that last exercise for me, please.”

Lazorg picked up his tranche and began again.

Arbogast turned his back on Lazorg and finally spotted Crutchsump.

“Ah, here’s my pupil’s first and truest patron! Welcome, Crutchsump!”

Deeply focused on his task, Lazorg himself did not greet Crutchsump. Her heart sank a little, but she bucked herself up.

“I trust today was not completely enervating for you,” said Arbogast pleasantly.

“I did work very hard, as always. Supporting two alone is not easy, even with our simple needs. But I know that Lazorg needs to spend all his time practicing. And it won’t be forever.”

Arbogast turned again to watch his pupil intently. “No, no, it certainly won’t be forever….”

A muffled thump signaled the completion of Lazorg’s ideation of the clandestini. Arbogast bent to pick it up for close inspection. Crutchsump hastened over to look.

The little animal formed of nacre shared the exact coloration of the living species. Crutchsump could see the perfect compound pupils in its minute eyes. At the same time, it displayed a larger-than-life element of caricature, as if its creator had been unable completely to endorse its existence, and the ideation differed in that regard from Arbogast’s own personally stamped version.

“It’s beautiful,” said Crutchsump.

Lazorg surprised Crutchsump with a quick hug, and all her weariness dissipated.

Arbogast continued to study the creation from all angles. Finally he looked up to regard both Crutchsump and Lazorg.

“If, over the next week, you can produce a dozen ideations of equal quality, following the templates of Standard Series Six, then I will arrange a show at my gallery, the Jutesuitor, to introduce you to the right crowd.”

Lazorg gripped Arbogast by both shoulders. “A dozen! I’ll produce ten times that many!”

“Don’t overdo it. Quality over quantity should be our motto. And remember: always follow the archetypes. Now go home and rest—with your friend.”

Lazorg took Crutchsump’s hand, and she thrilled. “Yes, she’s been the best of friends.”

The two headed for the door of the studio, but stopped when Arbogast hailed them again. Crutchsump turned and saw the ideation maker removing a leather poke from a trunk.

“Here are a few extra scintilla. Go out for a meal, and then both of you buy some better clothes. Although ideally an artist should be judged exclusively by his creations, not his appearance, this is not the reality. And an artist’s date for the evening must look her best as well.”

That night, lying on her pallet, Pirkle thrumming at her feet, Crutchsump, watching the curtain dividing the room, waited with anticipation, imagining that Lazorg might silently breach the barrier and come to her.

But he did not, and she passed into exhaustion’s arms.

The Jutesuitor gallery lay outside the Telerpeton district. Palisander the noetic had explained to Crutchsump that Arbogast’s birth and continuing residence in the slums lent a certain enviable lowbrow cachet to his art and reputation. But actually to display at some amateur venue within the mirey, dangerous alleys and lanes, requiring buyers to visit the benighted ghetto—well, that would have been asking too much of his rich and exclusive patrons.

And so on the night of Lazorg’s debut as a publicly commodified ideator offering his wares to collectors—an “artist,” in short—Crutchsump found herself in a hired shay pulled by a matched pair of diaverdes, their six tails braided with colorful ribbons, entering the lovely district of mansions and carriage-trade shops known as the Passacantado.

The driver paused the shay a moment, so that he might get down and light the fore and rear lamps subsequent to dusk’s overtaking them a few blocks from the gallery. Crutchsump used the moment to glance at Lazorg beside her on the padded bench.

The alien visitor wore a sharp brocaded suit, leaf-green, and new caul of silky red material. Lazorg’s introciptor pouch was defiantly left empty, despite the socially prestigious occasion. Despite Crutchsump’s nervous advice to remedy his lack with a prosthetic, both Lazorg and even Arbogast had demurred.

“Your unique origin,” said Arbogast, “is already disseminated and impossible to hide. By now, the brutish ‘Monster from the Mudflats’ who became an ideator is a small and growing legend in the city. So you might as well flaunt your past. It could very well add to your selling power. Egregious and extraneous and reprehensible as it may be, collectors appreciate a story they can attach to an artwork, and will always favor an object with an anecdote appended over one without.”

For her own part, Crutchsump had splurged on satiny blue pantaloons and blouse, a small capelet and a caul featuring daring eyelets punched at random. She felt almost brazen, nearly drunk.

Lazorg had been fingering something in a pocket all during the ride, and Crutchsump could no longer contain her curiosity.

“Lazorg, what is that object? A lucky talisman of some sort?”

“Huh? Oh, this? I suppose you could call it a touchstone of sorts. It’s an ideation I created. One that I hope will send this show of mine over the top.”

“Can I see it?”

“Well. … Sure.”

Lazorg took out the object and handed it to Crutchsump.

The ideation retained, presumably by artist’s choice, the primal color of the nacre. It depicted two monsters—aliens of Lazorg’s species—locked in some kind of struggle, their bare limbs intertwined, their groins butting against each other, so as to conceal that bizarre excrescence sported by Lazorg down there, and, in all likelihood, by the other monster as well.

As the shay got underway once more, Crutchsump pondered the aberrant ideation intently. The obscenity of the uncovered faces of the protagonists in the static eternal tussle was alleviated slightly by the fact that they lacked introciptors. But still, the overall impression conveyed by the little “sculpture” was one of transgression against some ineffable set of proprieties.

Crutchsump sought to remember Lazorg’s features from that long-gone day when she had rescued him from the Mudflats, taken him home, cleansed the mud from his face.

Yes, yes, the features of the large figure were the same!

“One of these figures is you.”

“True.”

“And this other, with the deformed chest?”

“My old lover, Velina.”

Crutchsump remained silent, restraining any inquiry as to why they wrestled thus.