The Virgin of the Andes.
I had no intention of spreading the pompous Dabney’s unctuous features across the sky. Not even the Norte Americanos deserved that. Instead I had drawn a picture from my heart, from my childhood memories of the crude paintings that adorned the whitewashed walls of my village church.
You must understand that it was years before I myself saw my creation in the way it was meant to be seen, from the ground. All I had to go on that day was the little screen of my comm system, and even there I was seeing the Virgin backwards, like looking at a stained glass window from outside the cathedral.
Everyone was caught by surprise. A few startled gringos tried to photograph the picture that suddenly appeared over their heads at sunset, but none of the photos showed the true size or scope or even the actual colors of my Virgin. The colors especially were impossible to capture, they were so pale and shimmering and subtly shifting each moment. By the time television stations realized what was happening and dispatched their mobile news units, the Virgin had disappeared into the darkness of night.
All of North America went into startled, shocked turmoil. Then the word spread all across the world.
Ionosphere paintings last only for those precious few minutes of twilight, of course. Once the Sun dips below the horizon, the delicate electrical effects that create the subtle colors quickly disappear, and the picture fades into nothingness.
Except that the information which created the picture is stored in a computer, gracias a Dios. Many years later, when it was safe for me to return to Earth, I allowed the university to paint my Virgin over the skies of my native land. I saw it at last the way it was meant to be seen. It was beautiful, more beautiful than anything I have ever done since.
But that was not to happen for many years. As Sam and I watched my Virgin fade into darkness he turned to me with a happy grin.
“Now,” he said cheerfully, “the shit hits the fan.”
And indeed it did. Virtually every lawyer in the solar system became involved in the suits, countersuits, and counter-countersuits. Dabney and his Moralists claimed that Sam had violated their contract. Sam claimed that the contract specifically gave him artistic license, and indeed those words were buried in one of the sub-sub-clauses on the next-to-last page of that thick legal document. The advertising industry was thunderstruck. Environmentalists from pole to pole screamed and went to court, which prompted art critics and the entire apparatus of “fine art”—the museums, magazines, charitable associations, social clubs, wealthy patrons and even government agencies—to come to the defense of a lonely young artist that none of them had ever heard of before: Elverda Apacheta. Me!
Sam and I paid scant attention to the legal squabbles. We were sailing on my asteroid past the Moralists’ half-finished Eden and out far beyond Earth’s orbit. Sam’s “Lazy Fairy” was crammed to its sizable capacity with propellants for the nuclear rockets attached to The Rememberer. He jiggered the propulsion engineers’ computer program so that my asteroid headed for deep space, out past even the orbit of Mars, out to the Belt where its brother and sister asteroids orbited by the millions.
When the Moralists’ engineers tried to come out and intercept “their” runaway, Sam gleefully informed them:
“This object is a derelict, under the definition stated in the IAA’s regulations of space commerce. It is heading for deep space, and any attempt to intercept it or change its course will be regarded by the IAA and the world government as an act of piracy!”
By the time the Moralists’ lawyers came to the conclusion that Sam was bluffing, we were moving fast enough and far enough so that Dabney decided it would not be worthwhile trying to recover my asteroid. The Rememberer sailed out to the Asteroid Belt, half a dozen propulsion engineers were fired by the Moralists (and immediately hired by S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited) and Sam and I spent more than a year together.
“And that is how I became famous.” Elverda Apacheta smiled slightly, as if someone had paid her a compliment she did not deserve. “Even though I am a sculptress, I am known to the public for that one painting. Like Michelangelo and the Sistine ceiling.”
Jade asked, “And Sam? You say he spent more than a year with you on your asteroid?”
Now the sculptress laughed, a rich throaty sound. “Yes, I know it sounds strange to imagine Sam staying in one place for two days on end, let alone three hundred and eighty. But he did. He stayed with me that long.”
“That’s … unusual.”
“You must realize that half the solar system’s lawyers were looking for Sam. It was a good time for him to be unavailable. Besides, he wanted to see the Asteroid Belt for himself. You may recall that he made and lost several fortunes out there.”
“Yes, I know,” said Jade.
Elverda Apacheta nodded slowly, remembering. “It was a stormy time, cooped up in my little workshop. We both had other demons driving us: Sam wanted to be the first entrepreneur to set up operations in the Asteroid Belt….”
“And he was,” Jade murmured.
“Yes, he was. And I had my own work. My art.”
“Which is admired and adored everywhere.”
“Perhaps so,” admitted the sculptress, “but still I receive requests to produce the Virgin of the Andes. No matter what I do, that painting will haunt me forever.”
“The Rememberer is the most popular work of art off-Earth. Every year thousands of people make the pilgrimage. Your people will never be forgotten.”
“Perhaps more tourists would go to see it if it were in a lower orbit,” the sculptress mused. “Sam worked it out so that it swung through the Asteroid Belt, returned to Earth’s vicinity, and was captured into a high orbit, about twelve thousand kilometers up. He was afraid of bringing it closer; he said his calculations were not so exact and he feared bringing it so close that it would hit the Earth.”
“Still, it’s regarded as a holy shrine and one of the greatest works of art anywhere,” Jade said.
“But it’s rather difficult for people to get to.” Elverda Apacheta’s smooth brow knitted slightly in an anxious little frown. “I have asked the IAA to bring it closer, down to where the tourist hotels orbit, but they have not acted on my request as yet.”
“You know how slow bureaucracies are,” said-Jade.
The sculptress sighed. “I only hope I live long enough for them to make their decision.”
“Did the Moralists try to recapture your asteroid?”
“Oh no. That was the beauty of Sam’s scheme. By pushing The Rememberer into such a high-velocity orbit, he made it too expensive for the Moralists to go chasing after us. They screamed and sued, but finally they settled on another one of the Aten group. More than one, I believe.”
“And Sam left you while you were still coasting out in the Belt?”
She smiled sadly. “Yes. We quarreled a lot, of course. It was not entirely a honeymoon trip. Finally, he detached his ship to investigate some of the smaller asteroids that we had discovered. He said he wanted to register a priority in their discovery. ‘It’s the only way I’ll ever get my name in the history books,’ he told me. That was the last I saw of him.”
“No further contact at all?”
“Oh, we called each other. We spent hours talking. But he never came back to me.” Elverda Apacheta looked away from Jade, toward the view of Earth in the lounge’s lone window. “In a way I was almost glad of it. Sam was very intense, and so was I. We were not meant to stay together for very long.”