This portrait also depicted a very old man. Where Nomun's aged appearance had seemed to derive from indifference, this man's antiquity was displayed triumphantly, a badge of accomplishment, as if he had survived from a time so ancient that attaining a great age was a notable feat. Extravagant wrinkles seamed every square centimeter of his skin, a seared and arid landscape, dominated by great magenta eyes, glittering with fey energy. Oddly, his mouth was wide and red, the mouth of a much younger man. He wore a swirling cape of green stonesilk; his huge, knobby hands appeared to grip the bottom of the holofield, as though he might at any moment hurl himself forth into Arriangel's reality. Behind him a hundred tiny, diamond-shaped windows writhed with movement, each displaying a different minuscule scene. Before Arriangel could lean close enough to see what events transpired in the tiny windows, Ondine flicked the switch, and the old man seemed to swoop toward her, thrusting his face into hers, a wild smile twitching at his incongruously youthful mouth.
"Hah!" he shouted gleefully. "What's this, my beautiful Ondine? A customer for the Flesh Tinker's knife, eh? Eh?"
Arriangel shrank away, though she detected no menace at all in the Flesh Tinker's cold, powerful voice.
Ondine smiled and shook her head. "No, her beauty is currently satisfactory to her, I think."
The old man's image withdrew into the holofield's plane and struck a disdainful pose. "How vulgar," he said.
Ondine switched him off and moved to the next portrait: a mech shaped to resemble one of the black lords of Jaworld. His deeds were recorded in angular lightning bolts behind him, and the zigzagging windows were peopled by primitively drawn figures of humans and animals, who seemed to act out mythic events.
Next to the mech was one of the ephemeral sapients of Snow, human-seeming but for her elongated body and great cracked-crystal eyes. Beyond her was a mutated human child, scaled with plates of dense, glimmery chitin, who grinned cheerfully with a lipless mouth.
Ondine called no more of her portraits to life. She drifted slowly around the perimeter of the gallery, seemingly oblivious to Arriangel, who followed in a fog of confusion and intrigue.
"You'd have to stay here for a month or two," said Ondine. "I demand at least that much commitment from my subjects."
The viewpoint shifted and spun away from Arriangel. It circled the two women, so that the portraits flowed past in all their glorious diversity, until the two slender figures seemed to stand in a whirlwind of halfglimpsed faces, color and expression melting into a stream of humanity, infinitely rich, infinitely varied.
"Oh, very nice," said Tafilis. "Do you suppose the Ondine portrait still exists somewhere? Here's a fine idea: somehow we get access to the portrait, install it in your girl's quarters... and watch love bloom. It's your only chance, Brother." He laughed his unpleasant laugh.
Arriangel spent hours surrounded by the ruby-gleaming lenses of Ondine's holocameras, wearing at the nape of her neck the heavy, cold weight of a cortical exciter. The exciter twisted her face into a million different expressions, while leaving her thoughts in a state of chill abstraction. She found it a very strange sensation, but it allowed her a space of time for watching Ondine.
The artist moved about the studio with unfailing grace, always composed, always elegant, always beautiful in an unselfconscious style that Arriangel found fascinating. All of her friends who could claim gre.it beauty seemed to put that beauty at the center of their lives, so that in every glance their eyes said: I know that you see me.
But not Ondine; she had escaped a trap whose existence Arriangel had not before perceived.
Ondine was admirable in other ways. Arriangel gradually came to a deep appreciation of Ondine's achievements as an artist. Occasionally Ondine would permit her to wander through the gallery she had first shown her, and Arriangel began to understand what marvelous objects the portraits were. To think that Ondine had captured these great souls so perfectly that they had survived intact their centuries of imprisonment in the holofields... alone with the memories of their tumultuous lives... It seemed unimaginable.
When she realized the degree to which the portraits were conscious and self-aware, Arriangel felt a chill, and seriously considered canceling the commission. What would it be like, to live forever with a synthetic reflection of herself — no matter how artfully contrived? Would her portrait someday reproach her for permitting its existence?
She wanted to speak to Ondine about her misgivings, but she could not articulate her misgivings in any way that didn't seem puerile and shallow. Somehow the artist divined her uneasiness. She took Arriangel into her tiny, warm kitchen.
"You're having second thoughts?” asked Ondine over cups of fragrant tea.
"It's frightening... to think of a person much like myself, trapped forever in a web of circuitry... "
Ondine smiled. "You'd be surprised how few of my clients ever think about it. It's much to your credit that the thought has occurred to you."
"But. . . isn’t it dreadful, for the portrait?"
"It can be," Ondine said. "It depends on the client. Some clients put the portraits in a vault; they commission them only to demonstrate their status, and find the portraits a personal embarrassment - or worse. Those portraits do have dreadful existences. But others do better. My portrait of Ambrin, the great dream designer, for instance; it wrote a novel that was moderately successful, and spoke to me about a portrait of itself. It didn't have the money, however." She laughed, for the first time.
This was much too bizarre a concept for Arriangel to grasp. She shook her head. "Then, you make people."
"Oh no. My portraits are merely objects of contemplation; you mustn't think of them as people."
ONCE, AFTER a particularly trying session, while Ondine s strong hands massaged life back into Arriangel s aching facial muscles, she asked, "What will you fill my windows with? After all, I'm so young. Nothing of note has ever happened to me. In fact, I can't understand why you agreed to do my portrait."
Ondine shrugged. "Larimone offered me a magnificent fee.
Arriangel felt a pang of humiliation. "Really? That's the only reason?"
Ondine smiled. "Well, no. For one thing, you're an astonishingly beautiful child... and of late I've neglected the simple charms of ungilded loveliness. Actually, I justify this on this basis of challenge. Who but Ondine would attempt to make great art from such formless material?
Arriangel bit her lip, and asked no more questions that day.
After Ondine finished her physical recording, she put Arriangel under a probe, and swam Arriangel's holomnemonic ocean, trolling for experience. Now it was Ondine who seemed exhausted by each new session, and her face grew a bit pale and strained.
"Am I so disappointing?" asked Arriangel.
Ondine rubbed at her temples. "No. In fact, I find more intensity in you than I had expected. It's always so. Sometimes I think that I'd find the same passions in the dullest cipher of the darkest corridors. Perhaps we all live lives of great drama in our hearts."
Arriangel found this idea a delightfully radical one; in fact, she was delighted by every aspect of Ondine, and soon came to recognize that she had developed an infatuation for the artist. With that realization, she spent even more time gazing wistfully at her.