And Martin was good at compartmentalizing his worries, and he had a lot of patients to see today anyway, so he pushed the matter out of his mind, stood up and straightened his clothing, fetched a mug of iced coffee from the low-grade fax machine in his office, and went on about his business.
The encounter was also disturbing for Genie Scott, though for slightly different reasons. The thing was, in her estimation, Conrad Mursk looked terrible. About as bad as Genie had ever seen anyone who didn't come through the door on a trail of blood or shit. And this bothered her, because she'd been feeling like she maybe wanted another try at the first architect one of these days. But if the man couldn't be bothered to take proper care of himself, what made her think he could take proper care of someone else?
Not that he'd ever really tried in their brief time together, but fuffing hell, that was a hundred years ago. Didn't people grow? Didn't they change and improve over time? Genie herself had overcome many faults in a forty-year, twenty-step program of her own design, and was thinking about gearing up for another pass soon, to clear up the leftovers and start in on a new set of faults. She wasn't vain; she knew she had an infinite supply of these, and could safely plan an eternity of self-improvement. She thought someday that she might even license the program to others, for profit, leaving this hospital job behind for someone younger, someone with less to contribute.
Maybe she would even try it out on Conrad sometime, but on a professional rather than a personal basis. The thought of being intimate with him again had lost its appeal, at least for now. Geriatry, yuck! Shrugging, she too put the matter out of her mind, and resolved that she would have another crack at Dr. Martin Liss instead, who at least knew how the gift of a human body ought to be treated.
Chapter fourteen.
The glass palace
Matatahi Falehau was a less imposing structure than you might expect, and a gaudier one. It was only the second building Conrad had ever designed from scratch—the first here on Planet Two—and he winced to look at it now. If he had it to do over again, there were a hundred things he'd do differently, both great and small. According to the “iconographic transsect” of Queendom tradition, buildings of greater importance were to be signified with statuary, coats of arms, physical symbols of various kinds, and cosmetic embellishments unrelated to the functional demands of the structure.
“This communicates an expectation,” Laureate Gwylan Smith had told his class once in a series of crossly delivered training lectures, “about the social function of the building, which in the end is more important than its exact physical form.” And since Gwylan Smith was one of the Queendom's dozen-odd premier architects, he almost certainly had a point. But respecting authority in that particular way had never been a part of Conrad's character. The unwritten Mursk transsect favored clean lines and smooth, unadorned surfaces, not because they were easier (although they often were), but for purity's sake. To the extent that his buildings conveyed a message, it was a no-nonsense, striving-for-perfection kind of thing.
Except, of course, for this place, which had Tongan heraldry and iconography all over it. Even the wellstone facade was broken into tiles, each with the stars and cross of the Lutui family crest. Ugly, ugly symbols whose only redeeming feature was their color palette, which did at least match the grays and browns of the surrounding rock shelf.
Ah, well.
Domesville was not a large town, and the walk from the hospital to the palace took only a few minutes, through the industrial and warehouse quarter, past the town square with its burbling fountain, and then through the poorly planned maze of apartment buildings overlooking the beach.
The walk was not particularly pleasant, alas. If this were Earth it would be a gray day, drizzling a cool, steady mist. P2's equivalent was a haze of yellow-brown, blotting out the sun and filling the air with the swimming-pool aroma of wet chlorine and salt. The sort of day that would kill an unmodified human within minutes, yeah. For the people of P2—“pantropes,” Bascal called them sometimes—it didn't even sting the eyes or irritate the nasal membranes, but even so the body remembered a different time, when it didn't have to process this shit. Hints of the old respiratory ailments, the pharyngitis and talematangi, resurfaced among the colonists when the halogen fronts blew through, and even the kids who were born here—if “born” was the right word—got cranky and indoorsy. But the walk was mercifully short.
The palace itself was perched on a natural bench of native granite, just above the steeply sloping beach. This too was a bad idea in retrospect, because the ocean level had been on a steady rise ever since the colonists had arrived—not from their own activity but as part of the natural ebb and flow of the planet. Now, alas, the high-tide beach was half its former size, and it would've been better to have blasted the shelf with carbon subnukes and pulled the slope back another thirty meters or so.
Live and learn.
Backupsville, at least, had more sense and planning behind it, and the next city would be better still. Not that Conrad had all that much say in the top-level city planning or anything, but he recognized that his architecture did influence the landscape, and thus the layout decisions of the Senate and the city councils.
And decade by decade, the lessons really did pile up, and he didn't have to be a genius—fortunately!—to internalize them, if only as rules of thumb. Conrad smiled to himself. The next time I colonize a planet, I'll know how it's done. Ha!
The city's vegetation was sparse. There were irrigated gardens in the hills to the west, and the Bay Islands were the usual riot of green and brown, where alien and “native” vegetation wrestled for the best soil, the best access to sunlight. And here in town there were potted palms, a few as high as four meters, and troughed red bromide bushes spreading half as wide as a tuberail car. But most people in town had given up trying to grow anything in the ground itself. The bedrock was shallow here, the soil coarse and crystalline and full of pebbles, more like beach sand than potting soil.
But Bascal, echoing his father, had stubbornly surrounded the palace with faxed soil, which probably had to be refreshed once or twice a year lest it wash away or soak down into the sand or turn too acidic or something. So the palace itself stood out above an oasis of palms and vanilla shrubs, grasses and sweet potato creepers.
Anyway, the Beach Palace was kind of pretty in the noontime pids of a sunny day (“late spring,” if you will), its translucent tiles of white and red shooting tiny rainbows every which way, but in the afterpids of a mustard day like today (a stormy autumn?), it just looked foolish. The front walkway was of large, round paving stones—nonprogrammable—cut from the colony's first quarry in the hills during the early phases of Domesville's construction. The whole building was only two or three times the size of an ordinary family house, and like the beach palaces of Bascal's native Tonga, it reached for the sky only symbolically, with a couple of three-story towers at opposite corners.
The front entrance was even more humble: a simple rectangle of wellwood set in a frame of that same ugly white tile. Fortunately the door knew him, and opened wide without his having to say anything. He strode inside, where the light was brighter, with more of the blues and whites that the eye began to crave on these brownest of days.
“Greetings and welcome, First Architect Mursk,” the palace said. “His majesty is indisposed at the moment, but if you wait a few minutes I will print a fresh copy of him for you. Please, make yourself at home.”