But they were Vaddums.
It was even harder keeping the old man's secret now that she was representing him. Of course, she'd written her missives to the HC galleries very carefully, never using the word posthumous, merely "undiscovered." That was true, wasn't it? The man's very existence was undiscovered. Surely his sculptures fit the same category.
And of course, it didn't really hurt that Vaddum's continued non-existence increased the value of sculptures by a factor of five or so. Didn't hurt at all.
However, there was that delicate matter of two «undiscovered» Vaddums appearing at once. Such a find would have been too much for the art world to swallow. So it was necessary to deal with two buyers, to swear each to secrecy. (That hadn't been hard. The gallery avatars had practically insisted on it. Well, Hirata thought, the smell of profits had made them complicit in their own deception.)
Strange that one of them, that man Zimivic, whose avatar was so frantically animated and strangely yellow, had disappeared. He had arrived days ago, but his local DI address was offline. Not cancelled, forwarded, or officially terminated; just gone. Very strange, and very bad manners.
But at least Darling was coming—his was a legendary name in school, two centuries of exotic and unexpected finds—and representing no less than Reginald Fowdy! And he had even brought an associate these hundreds of light-years; probably some clever young protege, or perhaps even a buyer, descended from some fantastically wealthy clan, so great a Vaddum fan that she was here to strike a deal in person before the work was exhibited.
Hirata rolled her asking price around in her mouth, practicing the saying of it, so that she wouldn't stumble when the moment came. The magnitude of the unspoken number made her salivate.
And it would be good for Beatrix to see a woman from the HC.
Her upbringing had been so deprived; she needed a touch of sophistication to go along with the inarticulate Zen machinism the sculptor was always mumbling. But where was the child?
Through the windows and transparent floor of the limousine, Malvir showed a two decade advance in its inevitable redesertification. Darling sighed. The sands had lost their scrubby grasses. No longer held fast by these deep-rooted succulents, the dunes were shaped by the arciform geometries of the wind. Even the high walls of the housing estates passing below Darling's limo had sinuous curves that revealed the math of erosion, the bowed shapes of great dams or barrier isles.
Like many Outworlds, Malvir had traded environmental integrity for quick development, using beam mining to extract the heavy elements necessary for consumer wealth. But Malvir hadn't started with a big enough stake to play that particular game. The mining had ejected giant quantities of nutrient-laden matter into the atmosphere, which the planet's wispy hydrosphere would be centuries reclaiming. And then the Blast Event had thrown up another insult to the skies. The obscene scar of it had been visible from the moment they'd reached cruising altitude.
It was certainly a desert planet now. The only plants that Darling could see below were those imprisoned in the verdant confines of radial irrigation.
But everything could be turned to profit. The city had welcomed the birds who'd fled the dead countryside, incorporated aviana into its architecture, its mythology, its tourist slogans. Perhaps the dunes would become an attraction on their own.
While Darling pondered this sad process with his primary processor, his secondaries jousted with Mira's dress. She had removed a layer of the fractal painting/weapon/intelligence that hung on the wall of her suite. Darling had suspected she'd used the device to paralyze the Warden, an impressive feat, but the extent of its monstrous sophistication had escaped him. Now Mira was wrapped in its dazzling embrace. Having made a dress of sorts from the scintillating object, she thoroughly baffled his eyes and other EM senses. His sensory strands were able to return some useful data, but the dress responded aggressively to their touch, attempting to confuse and compromise their inherent intelligence. Apparently, the mysterious substance was jealous of its secrets.
Underneath these petty distractions, however, he was anxious. As the limo began to descend, he felt a gnawing engine in his core, a build-up of tearing energies and metaspace distortions: excitement pure and simple.
Within a few minutes, he would see a new Vaddum.
Or perhaps an extraordinary forgery: a robbery not only of style, method, and artistry, but of soul.
From the air, the Flex Gallery looked like any of the hundreds of Outworld arts centers Darling had plumbed on his travels. It followed the general plan: large and simple, made of unpig-mented native materials and glassene. The low cost of living in struggling economies drew many artists to the Expansion's margins, and severe locales like Malvir's were conducive to the work of artists from mystical, naturalist, and transcendentalist schools. The presence of a major sculptor like Vaddum supplied the battery for the magnet. Darling wondered how many unknown, worthy visions had perished in the Blast Event.
Or had they too been spared? Recorded? Stolen.
Beatrix finally arrived, lumbering toward the house in her slow, deliberate gait, somehow both clumsy and elegant at the same time. Hirata smiled at her reeling form and decided not to scold. Better not to upset her, better to let the child appreciate the HC visitors.
Moments later, Darling's limo announced its approach.
They stood there together, Hirata's hand resting on the sun-warmed metal of Beatrix's torque extension, and watched the air-car (it was huge) descend into the dusty yard before the gallery. Hirata noted with pleasure the gaping stares of her neighbors; perhaps now they would understand what culture meant, realize that this gallery was not merely the vain hobby of a mad off-worlder. She just wished the stunned locals could be a bit more discreet about their amazement; she didn't want the two visitors from the HC to see quite what a peripheral, marginal, Outy neighborhood she'd wound up in.
Hirata shielded her eyes from the dust kicked up by the car's impellers. Fortunately, she was wearing her Chal'le dress: the fullerene-beaded creation would clean itself even as she stood here. Beatrix made a whistling sound at the car and waved her primary arm, and Hirata stroked the torque extension fondly. It was for Beatrix, his clever girl, that the sculptor had finally relented.
When the limo's passenger cabin unfolded, Harita allowed herself to gasp. She was prepared for Darling's appearance. His odd and impressive body choice was well known in art circles. But the woman who emerged next to him was so… elegant. She was dwarfed by her huge companion. She had that precise beauty of the very small, her flawless features like those of a girl in a Ferix brush painting: a few careless, perfect strokes executed in some exact ratio of loveliness. Her body shape was like a fashion illustrator's glyph for Woman: a sensuous curve of pure Line from breasts to hips, uninterrupted by the exigencies of detail or gravity.
And her dress. Its shape was merely a simple sheath for her body, but something in the way it caught the early sunlight, or how its pattern matched the swirling motes of dust settling around the aircar, or the contrast between its colors and those of the desert hills behind her, was simply… perfect. Hirata tried to take the garment's measure with her eyes, to find a phrase or comparison that would grasp its beauty, but each time she blinked the garment seemed changed, shifted like a sunset's colors when one looks away even for a moment.
She was still staring, still dumbly rapt when the woman, suddenly only a meter away, said:
"Hirata Flex? We're the people from Fowdy Arts. How do you do?"
It took the utterance of her own name to shake Hirata from her fugue.