There was another gallery where Kitty invariably lingered, though it was perhaps the creepiest of all the installations from that century. It was a simulated town house living room from eighty years ago with all the period furnishings and decoration intact. Standing next to a table piled high with wrapped gifts was a wedding couple, a bride and groom in all their formal finery, posing for their wedding simulacrum. They were flush with happiness, standing very still, and completely unaware that they weren’t real. The real wedding couple had broken their pose, returned to their guests, and lived out their lives a long time ago. It took the sim couple about a half hour to work this information out for themselves, an agonizing process, after which the museum staff reset them and started the whole thing over again. It was chilling, and Kitty could watch their repeating, painful revelation for hours—but not today. Kitty pushed on farther into the past, to the galleries of twentieth-century art. Here the work was tame by comparison. Statues that didn’t move and flat pictures that didn’t evolve. It was in this century that Samson Harger first made a name for himself. And it was here that she found him fast asleep in his lifechair in front of a wall-sized canvas of his own creation. Despite the chair’s airfiltering system, his odor had cleared other patrons from the gallery.
Kitty sat on a bench next to the chair. “Was he awake when you got here?” she said.
“Yes,” said Belt Hubert.
The canvas before her filled her entire field of view. Four large slashes of black paint divided five slanting fields of raw, chaotic color built up in dozens of layers. It looked to Kitty like a recording of neural frenzy.
“I wasn’t aware that Sam was an artist,” Belt Hubert said. “I am researching him on the WAD. He was quite famous.” Kitty seemed confused, and Belt Hubert explained: “I contain Sam’s history only in outline form and only for the last twenty years.”
“Why don’t you access his archives?”
“I don’t possess the access codes. Hubert has them.”
“I see. Well, this picture predates Hubert. It even predates Skippy.”
“Who is Skippy?”
“You, I think. Sam’s valet when I first met him, before there were mentars. Sam was still an artist then. Or at least he painted a portrait. It was much better than this—this mess. He showed it to me when he hired me.”
“Hired you to do what?”
Kitty tousled the few sprigs of hair remaining on Samson’s sleepy head, then stretched out on the padded bench and rested her head in her arms. “I was a grownup then. I had earned a degree in microhab landscape engineering, which is a fancy term for flower gardening for rich people. I started my own microhab maintenance service and was building my client base. My first big break was this gig for some affs high in an RT. They had a gorgeous little boreal rain forest microhab in a twelve-cubic-meter glassine bubble, with a fully self-contained atmosphere and hydrosphere. It was a little gem, with fiddlehead ferns, mushrooms, lichen, moss, devil’s club, a half-dozen kinds of berries, wild cucumber, and dwarf Sitka spruce—you name it—monkeyflower, spring beauty, saxifrage. It had many edible varieties, and my clients used it as an exotic salad and herb garden. It even had some fauna: mosquitoes, spiders, voles, birds. Quite the balancing act keeping it all in harmony. I was up there almost every day working on it.
“One day I was programming the resident scuppers—you couldn’t actually go inside the hab, and you had to do everything by remote—and there was a loud party in progress in a condo across the sun shaft. I didn’t pay it any attention until I smelled this really foul odor. I panicked because I thought there was something wrong with the hab. But the smell was coming from across the sun shaft.
“There was this sickly looking man leaning on the railing watching me. He’d come out from the party and was all alone. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him. He had me tell him the Latin names for all of the species in the hab, and he said he might hire me to do his own atrium. He said, ‘Give me some time to think about it.’
“Well, the next time I returned, all his windows were opaqued. They stayed that way for a long time—years. Eventually I forgot about him. I was very busy; I had so much work that I employed four of my housemeets to help keep up. Kodiak was still a real charter then. Also, I had just discovered retroaging and how much fun it is. At first I was afraid my microhab business would suffer if I was a kid, but just the opposite happened. The younger I got, the better my business. There’s something about little girls and flowers that’s magical.
“So ten years go by—ten years—and I’m up in the RT tending the boreal microhab as usual—it was quadrupled in size by then—and I notice the windows across the way are clear. I figure the place has been sold or something, but no, the door opens and out comes the same stinky fellow. He looks at the hab and then at me, and he says, ‘Well, I’ve thought about it. When can you start?’”
“That’s quite a story,” Belt Hubert said.
“You bet.” Kitty jumped off the bench and headed for the exit. “Come on. Let’s go to the park. I can at least get a half day of work in. He’ll sleep through it.”
THROUGH STEALTH AND patience, the Blue Team passed through the gatehouse into the clinic grounds without detection. Once inside, the Blue Team bee’s comm with LOG2 was cut, and it was once more operating on its own recognizance. It quickly located the prize. The bee took up a covert position overlooking a transparent container full of a liquid biomass conductor in which the prize was suspended. The bee sent its escort on a series of solo reconnaissance flights to explore and map the compound. Each time the wasp returned, it dumped its data to the bee.
The bee, meanwhile, analyzed the clinic’s command and control structure, the various local nets, and the olfactory and mote broadcasting systems. It paid special attention to the campus simiverse and diverse hollyholo population. It mined its growing pool of data and fed it to its scenario mill to determine the best way to facilitate the prize’s liberation. The difficulty of its task was compounded by huge gaps in its knowledge base. The prize was attached to unknown machinery. Human workers of unknown friendliness reached into its container and applied unknown objects to it. Chemicals of unknown composition bubbled through the liquid conductor. Meanwhile, a holofied simulacrum of the prize expressed human distress with an uninterrupted cry. Any or all of this might be sinister and require counteraction, but Blue Team Bee could not judge for itself, and since it could not contact LOG2, it did nothing but create a blind spot atop a ceiling beam in the cottage where it hid. From its invisible vantage point, it monitored clinic chatter and waited for some overt action threshold to be crossed.
3.12
It had been forty-eight hours since Fred launched the Book of Russ, and he was curious about its reception by russdom. He could have checked on it from anywhere with his skullcap and visor, but that would require Marcus’s intercession. So, although it was his day off, he returned to the BB of R for a fresh datapin and a quiet booth. Marcus provided these with no comment. Checking the HUL stats in the booth, Fred was at first encouraged to learn that his Book of Russ had already been seen by over one hundred thousand russes. However, none of these many russes had seen fit to add their own threads or tails to it. Nor, indeed, bothered to post a rebuttal. It was as though his true confession had sunk without a ripple. He had not expected to change russ attitudes overnight, but to be totally ignored?