The Maker creates a host of nanomachines that spread out into the sands around its synthplant home. Like earthworms, they leave the soil transformed in their wake, doping the silicon with a touch of arsenic and weaving into it the gates and paths of logic. From disorganized, meaningless desert they make parallel processors, logical circuitry, volatile storage elements, and, near the surface, a layer of windblown photocells to capture the necessary power. For a radius of fifteen kilometers about the Maker a vast, crude computer is created, dedicated to solving a single problem: how to copy a sculptor.
While its secondaries whittle away at welfare housing, birdshit umbrellas, and anti-desertification walls, the Maker's primary processor guides this huge, unwieldy device in its investigations, pursuing every relevant nuance of metaspace research with messianic singlemindedness.
After almost two decades of calculation, single-minded determination, and some very good luck, the effort is finally rewarded. The Maker makes a copy.
Robert Vaddum himself is too valuable to risk in an experiment, so the materials manager of the Maker's physical plant, one Oscar Vale, is selected to make secret history. A body-upgrade addict, Vale is constantly under the vibraknife, the laser scalpel, the spot-welder. His regular visits to a bodyworks shop secretly owned by the Maker allow several copies of Vale to be attempted. The last is a perfect copy, its Turing Quotient exactly matching the original Oscar Vale's.
The Maker is gleeful. Finally, its artistic life has meaning.
Now to make another sculptor.
To create a Creator.
The face of Malvir will soon change. The Blast is months away.
Chapter 11
CRITIQUE
Darling reached the outskirts of the city proper as the sun was beginning to set. Here the walled streets grew narrower, choked with ground traffic and umbrella-wielding pedestrians. It never rained on Malvir, but the uric acid excreted by some of the flying scavengers was highly caustic. Darling glanced at his arms and shoulders to find a few telltale patches of white. Yes, Malvir had slid in these last twenty years. Perhaps it was time to find lodgings.
He direct-interfaced the city's tourism AI and asked for a hotel; first class, but not too ostentatious. If Vaddum was alive, Darling didn't want the old sculptor to find him in the lap of luxury.
The AI returned an address and routemap. The prices seemed high, but Darling had long demanded unlimited expenses for his services. He followed the map into the center of the city. Around a corner, the hotel came into view, outlined in his visual field with the virtual red of destination.
Darling stared up at the towering structure with surprise. It was hardly inconspicuous. He considered complaining to the tourism AI, but he let his ire fade. Perhaps there was local knowledge at work here. Often, the largest and oldest hotels in a city had a genteel shabbiness about them quite distinct from the first impression they made.
The edifice was certainly awesome. He had first noticed it from kilometers out: a host of straight, tall towers, their only decoration the spheres of wheeling birds around them. He wondered if the birds were trained; the spinning clouds of avians seemed organized with architectural intent. Each of the hotel's towers was surrounded by a distinct spheroidal cluster of birds. Were they lured up there by sound? Food? Some trick played on their magnetic navigation? At least there was a noticeable absence of flying creatures here in the streets around the hotel, a welcome relief.
He stepped inside and found a drone, fluent in Diplomatique, waiting to take him to his room.
A few feet from the elevator, having finally convinced the drone that there was no luggage to be carried and having waved off insistent offers to remove the birdshit, Darling stopped short. In a millisecond: the tertiary processors that handled the periphery of his 270-degree vision (when they had nothing better to do) sounded an alarm of recognition, medium probability. His secondaries responded, shunting a few thousand extra rods and cones into the corner of one eye, putting on hold for a moment one of the scheduled blinks Darling's eyes periodically engaged in to make him less intimidating and to perform nano-maintenance on his sensitive and expensive art-dealer's lenses. Confirming the recognition, the secondaries informed his primary processors of the event. Darling stopped moving, direct interfaced the elevator to hold, and turned.
Across the lobby, wearing the undersized suit in primary yellow for which he was famous (although he was known occasionally to don a blue or red version) was Duke Zimivic. A small valet drone hovered around the little man, breaking down a few splotches of birdshit with a whining spray.
Zimivic returned his gaze with a malevolent smile, and Darling's secondary processors allowed the delayed blink to proceed.
The man walked quickly over, the valet drone trailing him like a toy balloon strung to a child's wrist. Zimivic had always explained that his too-small suits were tailored to give the impression of an eager, healthy child, as if the tight fit were the result of a recent growth spurt. The last few decades had turned the conceit grotesque.
"My dear Darling," the little man shouted at a volume intended to embarrass. "What great luck meeting you!"
"Perhaps not luck. Perhaps not chance at all," Darling replied. Zimivic Gallery held the largest private collection of Vaddums. It was inconceivable that he was here for any reason except the new piece.
"Yes, yes," answered the man, rubbing his palms together. His valet drone reached its station again and resumed its work.
"I see you also neglected to bring an umbrella," noted Darling.
"They said it never rained! I believed them," Zimivic said sadly.
"One never knows what advice to take," Darling sympathized.
Questions and scenarios filled his mind: Had Zimivic also spotted the anachronism in the new piece? Did he too suspect that Vaddum was alive? It was possible that he had missed the anachronism, and thought the sculpture a posthumous discovery. Or perhaps Zimivic believed the piece was a fake, and was willing to broker it anyway. If the forgery were never discovered, he would make a huge profit. If a scandal resulted, he would suffer some embarrassment, but the value of his real Vaddums would benefit from the publicity. It was the sort of game the little man loved to play. It was long suspected in the art world that at least one of Zimivic's young proteges had died a dramatic, extraordinarily painful death (imagine one's nano immune-boosters rejecting every organ, from eyeballs to epidermus, all at once) not so much by accident as to increase her flagging sales. Of course, some of Darling's friends believed that Zimivic himself had started that rumor, the better to leverage the tragedy and to cement his own reputation as a twisted genius.
It had occurred to Darling that both versions of the old tale might be valid, Zimivic spreading a rumor that was the awful truth, making sure credit fell where it was due.
The little man nodded his head and smiled deviously, as if he were a mindreader.
"Perhaps you and I have some business to discuss," Zimivic said.
"We do," Darling said shortly. If there were two agents here, two bidders, there might be more. It would be better to share information than remain in the dark. Zimivic could never be called an ally, but he might make a useful foil.