“And today?” I prompted.
“Today the artist who cannot master electronics has a difficult time in many of the arts. Leonardo da Vinci could have, but probably not Michelangelo. There are many fine artists born out of their time, in both directions.”
I asked a question I had often asked artists working in nontraditional media. “Why is the sensatron such a good medium for you?”
“It is immensely versatile. A penline can only do a certain number of things and hint at others. An oil painting is static. It attempts to be real but is a frozen moment. But sometimes frozen moments are better than motion. A motion picture, a tape, a play all convey a variety of meanings and emotions, even changes of location and perspective. As such they are very good tools. The more you can communicate the better. With the power of the sensatron you can transmit to the viewer such emotions, such feelings, that he becomes a participant, not just a viewer. Involvement. Commitment. I wouldn’t do a sensatron to communicate some things, just because it’s so much work and the communication minor. But the sensatron units can do almost anything any other art form can do. That’s why I like it. Not because it’s the fashionable art form right now.”
“You’ve had no trouble getting your first license?” I asked.
“No, the Guggenheim people fixed it.” He shook his head. “The idea of having to have a license to do a piece of art seems bizarre.” He lifted his hand before I spoke. “Yeah, I know. If they didn’t watch who had control of alpha and omega projectors we’d be trooping to the polls to vote for a dictator and not even know we didn’t want to. Or so they think.”
“It’s a powerful force, difficult to fight. Your own brain is telling you to buy, buy, buy, use, use, use, and that’s pretty hard to fight. Think of it like prescription drugs.”
He nodded his head. “Can’t you just see it? ‘I’m sorry, Michelangelo, but this piece of Carrara marble needs a priority IX
license and you have only a IV.’ And Michelangelo says, ‘But I want to do this statue of David, see? Big, tall boy, with a sling, kinda sullen looking. It isn’t because he’ll be nude, is it?’ ‘You just go to the Art Control Board in beautiful downtown Florence, Signor Buonarroti, and fil out the papers in triplicate, last name first, first name last. And remember neatness counts. Speak to Pope Julius, maybe he can fix it for you.’ ”
We laughed gently in the night. “But art and technology are coexisting more now than ever,” I said.
“Oh, I understand,” Mike sighed, “but I don’t have to like it.” I thought about the Pornotron someone had given me, hanging from the ceiling of my Moscow apartment. One night with a healthy blonde clarinetist had been enough to convince me I didn’t need artificial enhancement of my sexual pleasures. It was like being force-fed your favorite dessert.
We lapsed into silence. The ancient city murmured at us. I thought about Madelon.
“I still want you to do that portrait of someone very close to me.”
I reminded him.
“Soon. I want to do a cube on a girl I know first. But I must find a new place to work. They bother me there, now that they found where I am.”
I mentioned my villa on Sikinos, in the Aegean, and Mike seemed interested, so I offered it to him. “There’s an ancient grain storage there you could use as a studio. They have a controlled plasma fusion plant so there would be as much power as you need. There’s a house, just the couple that takes care of it, and a very small village nearby. I’d be honored if you’d use it.”
He accepted the offer graciously and I talked of Sikinos and its history for awhile.
“The very old civilizations interest me the most,” Mike said.
“Babylon, Assyria, Sumer, Egypt, the valley of the Euphrates. Crete seems like a newcomer to me. Everything was new then. There was everything to invent, to see, to believe. The gods were not parted into Christianity and all the others then. There was a god, a belief for everyone, big and small. It was not God and the Anti-gods. Life was simpler then.”
“Also more desperate,” I said. “Despotic kings. Disease. Ignorance. Superstition. There was everything to invent, all right, because nothing much had been invented.”
“You’re confusing technology with progress. They had clean air, new lands, freshness. The world wasn’t used up then.”
“You’re a pioneer, Mike,” I said. “You’re working in a totally new medium.”
He laughed and took a gulp of wine. “Not really. All art began as science and all science began as art. The engineers were using the sensatrons before the artists. Before that there were a dozen lines of thought and invention that crossed at one point to become sensatrons. The sensatrons just happen to be a better medium to say certain things. To say other things a pen drawing or a poem or a motion picture might be best. Or even not to say it at all.”
I laughed and said, “The artist doesn’t see things, he sees himself.”
Mike smiled and stared for a long time at the columned structure on the hill. “Yes, he certainly does,” he said softly.
“Is that why you do women so well?” I asked. “Do you see in them what you want to see, those facets of ‘you’ that interest you?”
He turned his shaggy dark head and looked at me. “I thought you were some kind of big businessman, Brian. You sound like an artist to me.”
“I am. Both. A businessman with a talent for money and an artist with no talent at all.”
“There are a lot of artists without talent. They use persistence instead.”
“I often wish they wouldn’t,” I grumbled. “Everyone thinks he’s an artist. If I have any talent at all, it’d be to realize I have none. However, I am a first class appreciator. That’s why I want you to do a cube of my friend.”
“Persistence, see?” He laughed. “I’m going to do a very erotic nude while I’m on Sikinos. Afterwards, perhaps, I’ll want to do something more calmly. Perhaps then I’ll do your friend, if she interests me.”
“She might not be so calming. She’s . . . an original.”
We left it at that and I told him to contact my office in Athens when he was ready to go to the island and that they would arrange everything.
I found out later, almost by accident, from a friend, that Mike had been “drafted” temporarily to work on something called the Guardian Project. I put in a vidcall and found a wall of red tape and security preventing me from talking to him on Station Three, the space medicine research satellite. Luckily, I knew a bluesky general who shared my passion for Eskimo sculpture and old Louis L’Amour westerns. He set it up and I caught Mike coming off duty.
“What do they have you doing, a portrait of the commanding honcho?”
He smiled wearily and slumped on the bunk, kicking the pickup around with his foot to put himself within range. “Nothing that easy. Guardian is Skyshield all over again, only on priority uno. They rotated everyone out of here for observation and brought in fresh blood. They seemed to think I could help.” He looked tired and distracted.