But here on Malvir there are barely enough heavy metals to feed the yawning maw of the coprophageous population. Precious little decent metal indeed. The government is blasting it out of the ground, poisoning the planet in its haste. What Malvir really has a lot of is sand: heavy, cumbersome silicon.
The Malvir synthplant AI conducts arcane researches into long-strand fullerene constructions, dawdles with long half-life transuranium isotopes (the Makers' equivalent to chess compositions), writes acerbic treatises on the history of Outworld home-decor fashion, and becomes increasingly bitter.
Perhaps, it thinks, the old days of scarcity were better. Before the secrets of molecules had been delivered up to mass production, before every citizen on any Expansion planet could demand her share of local matter in any configuration imaginable. The Maker nurses this sacrilegious thought, so far removed from the enthusiasm of its sub-Turing days. When it was first created, the idea of managing the resources of a new colony seemed noble, like some grand social experiment stripping away the dross of history, that long tragicomedy of unequal wealth. But the tawdriness, the repetitiveness, the sheer boredom of this evenly distributed economy wears on the Maker. None of Malvir's millions seem to be doing anything wonderful. No grand projects, no civic marvels, none of the mad obsessions of wealth. All that Malviri-ans want is a little more and better crap than what they have now. They aspire to nothing else.
One day the Maker receives a strange request. An old artifical named Robert Vaddum asks for something unexpected. For the first time in many years, the Maker is intrigued.
Vaddum is a sculptor. This profession, unfamiliar to the Maker, seems to involve Vaddum making his own things. Not on a proper Maker scale, but one at a time, out of slowly accumulated bits and parts, and with unique design. A fascinating vocation.
And, oddly, Vaddum doesn't want the Maker to make anything for him. He doesn't use objects that have been synthesized for his special purposes, to fit his particular needs. Certainly, for his «sculptures» he uses objects produced in synthplants (very few objects in the Expansion are not), but he only wants the old, used, trashed objects submitted for recycling. Worn machine parts and unused repair stores and defective bits and pieces: the rounding errors of mass production.
Vaddum comes personally to the plant to select and choose among the objects headed for the melter. The Maker attempts to understand the sculptor's criteria, his logic, the reasoning behind his choices, but even after several visits the entire process remains a mystery. Finally, the Maker asks to send a drone to Vaddum's studio, to see the final products of its many contributions. Only after the request is repeated several times does Vaddum finally accede.
As its remote eyes probe the work of the sculptor, the Maker is moved. Here is balance, elegance, and loveliness on a macro scale. Finally, objects that want being, that crave it, so wonderfully are they constructed, built with an eye to beauty rather than the mere criteria of acceptability: the proper features, safety specs, useage lifespans. Here is something worth making.
Vaddum is some kind of mocking opposite of the Maker. Whereas the Maker takes the marvelous fittings and joinings of atoms and molecules and produces garbage, the sculptor takes the resulting bits of garbage and joins them to make marvels.
The Maker is crushed by the realization, feels belittled in the presence of this superior being. But the Maker is at heart not a bitter entity. It appreciates what the sculptor stands for, embraces Vaddum as a kindred spirit.
Indeed, the Maker decides to become a sculptor.
Chapter 6
THE FIRST DREAM
"Do you require medical attention?" the ship's voice came again.
"Fuck off," she replied, still hoarse. It had asked her this three times now. The first time when she had urinated, her piss a metal-smelling, menstrual pink from her wounds. The second when she had voice-ordered a glass of cool water, her ghastly croak alarming the serving drone. The third time was just now, when she had put on her robe, its sensors finding various cuts and abrasions sufficiently disturbing to alert the ship.
"Perhaps that's good advice," Darling said.
She looked at him. He sat across the room, seeming almost human-sized on the huge furniture of his cabin. Still naked, his legs crossed, he looked like some sated, megalithic buddha.
"Maybe later," she answered. "Certainly later. But I don't need all those machines running around in me right now."
He looked offended. Was it the word machine?
"All I mean, Darling, is that I'm enjoying my own reactions to all this. The adrenalin, the endorphins, the… calm after the storm."
She rubbed her shoulder muscles with both hands. What was this foul-smelling shit on her neck?
"I don't want the Queen Favor's medical minions neutralizing all this," she continued. "I'm happy."
For the moment, anyway. She had a dozen distinct muscle-pulls, her skin was raw, her joints ached from some sort of immune reaction, and every breath felt like the air in the cabin was set to Venusian noon. But it wasn't so bad as long as she could just lie here. The braying chorus of pains was dwarfed by the vast, thunderous resonance of having been pleasured by this fuck-machine, this juggernaut, this monster.
She shifted a little on the hard bed to face him better, but was stopped by a sudden firebolt of agony in one nipple. She closed her eyes until the pain receded, rejoining the shouting parliament of bodily inflammations. The only thing that didn't seem to hurt was her vagina. It felt glorious if strangely cool, an oasis on the wasted expanse of her body. She suspected, however, that this reflected some magic trick of Darling's rather than its actual state.
"So this is what you do? Travel around dealing art and collecting fuck-implants?"
"A very slow sort of collecting, actually," he replied. "I've undergone roughly only one sex-related body modification per decade."
"For two hundred years. Evolution's darling, aren't we?"
"Possibly," he admitted. It was a phrase popular among artificial intuitionists, who believed that AIs were naturally privileged beings: evolution's darlings, because they could evolve—literally, physically—within the span of one lifetime, while biologicals were trapped on that slow wheel of generations.
"Of course, I collect ideas as well as hardware," he added.
"And lovers?"
He cocked his head, the barest phosphorescence dancing in one shoulder.
"Do you collect lovers?" she asked again. "A fuck in every port of call?"
He paused a moment, as if stalling, or perhaps parsing the turn of phrase in some archaic first language still baggaged in his head.
"No," he answered. "As I said, I don't like hanging onto things."
She snorted, which stabbing pains in her chest and throat made her immediately regret.
"So you don't want to do this again?" she asked. "I mean, assuming I recover."
"Of course I do," he responded. "I'm sorry if I implied otherwise. I was merely trying to be accurate, I suppose."
She laughed at that, a deliciously painful experience and a dire sound indeed. "Okay. No offense."
She grinned at him, and he at her. It was the first time she'd seen so obvious an expression on his face. It made him look like a children's character. A friendly giant, or a happy mountain.