"Circle today," Crankenshaft said. Then he headed across the drafty studio to a console in the corner where the two holo-walls met.
Jato looked at Silicate and she looked back, as cool and as smooth as stone. Then she too walked away, leaving the studio via a slit in a thermoplastic wall.
A gust rumpled Jato’s hair and he shivered, wrapping his arms around his body. "Do you have a jacket?" he asked.
Crankenshaft didn’t answer, he just stooped over his console and went to work. So Jato waited, trying to clear out the haze left in his mind by the sedative.
A globe nudged his shoulder. When he stayed put, it pushed harder. "Flame off," he muttered.
A syringe extended out of the globe.
Still intent on his console, Crankenshaft said, "It shoots a heat stimulant. A strong specimen such as yourself might tolerate it for ten minutes before going into shock."
Jato scowled. Where did Crankenshaft come up with this sick stuff? He looked at the globe, at Crankenshaft, at the globe again. With Crankenshaft he used care in choosing his battles. This one wasn’t worth it.
He took off his boots and went to the pool. The knee-deep water was cool today, but at least no ice crusted the surface. He waded to the truncated cone and climbed up onto it, then sat cross-legged, hugging his arms to his chest for warmth.
"Move ten centimeters to the north," Crankenshaft said.
Jato moved over. "Can you warm it up in here?"
Crankenshaft sat down at his console, concentrating on whatever he was doing. So Jato moved to the south side of the cone.
Crankenshaft looked around. "Move to the other side."
"Turn on the heat," Jato said.
"Move."
"After you turn on the heat."
Stalemate.
Reaching back to the console, Crankenshaft touched a panel. A globe whirred behind Jato and he heard a syringe hiss. Heat flared in his biceps, spreading fast, up his shoulder and down his arm.
"Hot enough?" Crankenshaft asked.
It was excruciating, but Jato had no intention of letting on how much it bothered him. He simply shrugged. "What will you do? Put your model into shock because he objects to freezing?"
A muscle under Crankenshaft eye twitched. He went back to work, ignoring Jato again. However, the room warmed and the burning in Jato’s muscles cooled. Either Crankenshaft had lied or else the drone had delivered an antidote with the poison, probably in a bio-sheath that dissolved after a few minutes in the blood.
Over the next few hours the wind dried Jato’s clothes. Silicate came in once to bring Crankenshaft a meal on a stone platter. Jato wondered about her, always attentive, always silent. Did she create her own art? Most Dreamers did, even those who worked other jobs. Silicate’s only occupation seemed to be waiting on Crankenshaft. But then, Jato doubted Crankenshaft would tolerate artistic competition in his own household.
Finally Crankenshaft stood up, rolling his shoulders to ease the muscles. "You can go," he said, and left the studio.
Just like that. You can go. Get out of my house. Clenching his teeth, Jato slid off the cone and limped across the pool, sore from sitting so long. After coaxing his boots on under his wet trousers, he went to a door in the corner of the studio where the window-wall met one of the thermoplastic walls.
Icy wind greeted him outside. He stood at the top of a staircase that spiraled down the cliff Crankenshaft owned. The city glimmered far below, and beyond it ragged mountains stretched into the darkness. Millennia ago a marauding asteroid had struck the planet, distorting it into a blunt teardrop that lay on its side, its axis pointed at Quatrefoil, the star it orbited. Although Ansatz was almost tidally locked with Quatrefoil, it wobbled enough so most of its surface received at least a little sunlight. Night reigned supreme only here in this small region around the pole.
Crankenshaft’s estate was high enough to touch the transition zone between the human-made pocket of calm around Nightingale and the violent winds that swept Ansatz. Yet despite the long drop to the plateau, the staircase had no protection, not even a rail. Another of Crankenshaft’s "quirks." After all, he never used these stairs.
Jato grimaced. When he came willingly, Crankenshaft always had a flycar waiting to take him home. Today he would have to go back inside and ask for a ride, a prospect he found as appealing as eating rocks.
So he went down the stairs, stepping with care, always aware of the chasm of air. Around and around the spiral he went, never looking around too much, lest it throw off his balance. He wondered how he would appear to someone down in the city. Perhaps like a mote descending a stone DNA helix on the face of a massive cliff.
The helix image caught his mind. It would make an intriguing sculpture. He could go to the library and find a text on DNA. It would have to be a holobook, though, rather than anything on the computer.
Before Jato had come to Ansatz, his computer illiteracy hadn’t mattered. As the oldest son of a water-tube farmer on Sandstorm, he hadn’t been able to afford web access, let alone a console. Although everyone here in Nightingale had access to the city web, it did him little good. However, he had figured out how to tell a console in the library to print books.
He doubted he would try the helix sculpture, though. Reading could only give information, not talent. One thing he had to say for Crankenshaft: the man was brilliant. Jato could never imagine him giving away his stratospherically-priced work for a Dream. Besides, what Dream would he find pleasant? Pulling wings off bugs, maybe.
Jato scowled. A few Dreamers high in Nightingale’s city government knew Crankenshaft had set him up. They framed him for a crime so brutal it would have meant execution or personality reconfiguration anywhere else. Imperialate law was harsh: an escaped convict fleeing into a new jurisdiction could be resentenced there for his crime. That often-denounced law was intended to ease the morass of extradition problems that arose as more and more planets came under Imperial rule. But it let Crankenshaft blackmail him; if Jato escaped Nightingale, he was subject to death or a brain wipe.
Crankenshaft’s work was known across a thousand star systems. He was a genius among geniuses, and on Ansatz that translated into power. Whatever he wanted for his art, he was given.
Including Jato.
Part II: Dream Debt
Jato lay in bed, unable to sleep. He had dimmed the lights until only faint images of sand-swept fields softened the walls, holoart he had created himself, memories of his home.
Even after eight years, he still found this room remarkable. He had grown up in a two-room dustshack his family shared with two other families. Here he had, all to himself, a bed with a quilt, a circular bureau, a mirror, a bathroom, and soft rugs for the floor. The Dreamers charged no rent and gave him a living stipend. His medical care was free, including the light panels and vitamin supplements his sun-starved body craved.
Tonight the room felt emptier than usual. He gave up trying to sleep and went to the bureau, a round piece of furniture that rotated. He removed his statue from the top drawer. He had come to Ansatz hoping for a miracle, to trade for a fabulous treasure. He had his own dreams then, ones he hoped to achieve by selling such a masterpiece: a farm of his own, a business, a better home for his family, well-deserved retirement for his parents, a wife and children for himself. A life.
He had never intended to make art. Still, living in Nightingale, how could a person deny the pull to create? The statue had taken years to finish and he kept it hidden now, knowing how lacking the Dreamers would find his attempts. He liked it, though.
To get the stone he wanted, he had climbed down windscoured cliffs below Nightingale, into crevices lost in the night-dark shadows. There he cut a chunk of black marble no human hand had ever before touched. Back in his rooms, he fashioned it into a bird with its wings spread wide, taloned feet beneath its body, supported by a stand carved from the same stone. Next he made clay copies of it. He spent several years cutting facets into the copies, redoing them until he was satisfied. Then he carved the facets into the statue and inlaid them with crystalline glitter.