I reached out and touched it. It was cool and smoothed by the thin winds, yet sensuous under my fingers. The convoluted rills of what had to be drapery but just as easily could have been huge folded wings slid under my palm as I touched time itself.
A burst of distant laughter brought me back from wherever I had been. Already Brian Thorne was imagining what it would cost and how it might be taken back to Earth; but Diego Braddock was saying no, leave it here. Leave all of the Martian finds here. If people want to see them let them come here. You don’t put the Grand Canyon in a trailer and take it around to show.
I laughed at myself. Brian Thorne could afford to come here, but 99.9 percent of the world could not. Would they know what they saw if they saw it? Did I know what I saw? All my life I had been hearing the statements in the museums. “He was the crazy one, you know. Cut off his ear to give it to some (whisper!) prostitute? ”
“Left his wife and family and went off to paint in the South Pacific, he did. But look at him! Can’t even paint the sand right. When Wilma and I were down there last year with Tahiti Tours we took some stereos of what it really looks like!”
“He was a sort of dwarf, you know. Drank something called absinthe that rots your brain like headpoppers.”
“Old Pablo really had ’em all fooled, he did! They’d buy anything he put his name to!”
“The intrinsic value of the negative space is offset by the chromatic change in the positive area, as anyone can see. What the artist meant to say here, in this gray, undulating section, is that the innate nature of man is that of violence and self-defeat. In my opinion . . .”
“Isn’t that cute?”
“I’d buy it if it was in blues. I like blue. Would go well with the new Lifestyle furniture, wouldn’t it, honey?”
“My four-year-old robot can do that well!”
I shook my head. Probably some lice-ridden, fur-clad grump huddled in the Trois-Frères cave grumbled that Ogg was messing up the nice clean limestone walls with his scratchings, and anyway that didn’t look a bit like Grunt, the Boar-Killer.
The Colossus of Mars.
I looked up at it again. I think you’re safe from that great devourer of art, Brian Thorne.
Nova took my hand. “C’mon, everyone’s going to the Redplanet Inn.”
I raised my eyebrows. The Redplanet Inn was the most notorious restaurant, gambling hall, hotel, and whorehouse in over forty-eight million miles.
“Oh, come on. Everyone goes there.”
I went with her down the street, past several assay offices, a sandcat repair shop, and a Bureau of Martian Affairs office. We went through a lock and into another dome, a sort of vast parking lot for sandcats, capsule trailers, big-wheeled prime movers, digger gear, and scooters. In the center was a repair complex and spare parts storage. Nova took me along the left wall, curving around toward a side lock. I looked at the battered, tough little vehicles and saw one lettered Nova III sitting between Uschi Luv and Le Zombie. Further on I saw Miss Nova neatly lettered on a big Catepillar gouger. The whole left side had been sandblasted down to the bare metal but the name had been carefully repainted.
Nova was indeed known in these parts.
There is something about certain machinery, certain tools, that is beautifuclass="underline" A sculptor’s mallet, the 1860 .44-caliber Army Colt, the General Electronic C-model fusion plant, the World War II Jeep, the Randall version of the Bowie knife, the GM Lafitte Class torchship, the Colt .2 laser, certain racing cars, Shark-class personal submarines—all are beautiful examples of a merging of art and function. The rugged, bulging, functional Ford sandcat was one of those beauties. No artist designed it, no stylist smoothed over its features with a chocolate coating of thin steel and chrome striping. Few could afford to ship anything but the bare necessities this far, and already the cost of each sandcat was several times the cost of the most expensive scratch-built Sahara racer. But they had turned out to be a triumph of unadorned beauty, generating a certain affection in their owners. They worked, they responded, they had personalities. Any craftsman knows what it is like to have the right tool for the right job, and the miners of Mars knew they had the right tool.
I dawdled behind Nova, inspecting personal modifications, enjoying touching the machines as much as I enjoyed touching a Henry Moore or a Gene Lamont. I saw Nova looking at me with a quizzical smile from the opened lock and I hurried after her.
All my life it has been difficult to explain to others that all art is not on museum walls or in concert halls. A freshly fallen leaf in the gutter, a tool worn to the hand of its user, reflections of a megalopolis in the mirrored side of a building, a distant archotolog pyramid against the sunset were all things that had pleased me as much as a Goya or Piranesi’s fanciful engravings or Turandot. A cascade of blonde hair across a bare golden back or the esoterica washed up by the tide delighted me as much as a Praxiteles fragment or a performance of Ten Worlds by Kerrigan.
I suppose some of those things are not art, but beauty, and perhaps something becomes art only when it is touched by the hand or mind of man. But beauty is as much a part of man as his ugliness, his madness, his darkness. To me the ultimate beauty was that of the person, the completeness, not only the cosmetic exterior but the more important interior.
I had found it once in Madelon.
Was I close to it again?
The years of natural caution had prevented me from exposing myself beyond a certain point with Nova. Perhaps it was the secret of the Thorne-Braddock impersonation, perhaps it was the reluctance to once again be hurt. Perhaps it was everything, known and unknown. I grinned and the dour thoughts that had flooded my mind melted away. “Nice,” I said and patted a pockmarked sandcat. She made an expression that was in casual agreement but relegated it all to the everyday. I felt faintly patronized.
The next dome was a noisy one. It was not as large as the first dome, but it was more thickly populated. Various companies and guilds and unions operated “hotels” for their members and employees. Laser-cut letters in one immense sandblock wall announced to all it was the Martian Miners Union Hall and Hostel. Next to it, an imbedded mosaic of semiprecious stones proclaimed the Elysium Tripper. Three yellow-clad men lurched from the entrance as we passed, their faces flushed and their eyes dilated.
An incoherent growl of lust came from the biggest one, almost drowning out the redhead’s “Well, hello there, pretty one!” They aimed for us and canted to the right, laughing.
“Haw, Nikolai, you can’t navigate any better here than you can out on the Cimmerian!” The redhead laughed at the bigger man, whose face clouded as he pulled his gaze away from Nova’s figure. He refocused on the laughing redhead and without warning he struck him by the ear with a meaty fist. The slighter man reeled and fell to one knee.