“Take a little water?” Daniel croaked.
“No, thanks.”
Daniel sipped collected dew from a leaf-shaped cup.
“What’s new, Daniel?”
“New,” Daniel mused. “Oh, there’s always something new. Do something about the sky, they say. Clean it up. With spores.”
“Spores,” she said.
He drank more water, wiped his fantastically furrowed brow, and seemed to rally. “Yes, the sky will be the color of fungus for a while. Should make for some interesting sunsets. Atmospheric repair techniques. Very useful. Very farsighted, very wise. Good husbandry practice.” Daniel was trying hard to talk to her in a language she could understand. They were both bipedal creatures who walked beneath the sky, who lived in the world of daylight. That was a kind of commonality.
“I can’t believe the polity would really try a scheme like seeding the sky with fungus. I didn’t think the polity had that much imagination anymore.”
“Well, they don’t have imagination, but it’s not their idea. Other people hurt the sky in the first place. It’s a response. New monster versus old monstrosity. We are as gods, Mia. We might as well get good at it.”
“Are you a monster, Daniel? Whoever told you you were a god?”
“What do you think?”
He turned his lumpish back on her, left the hut, and went back to his work. He was a god, she decided. He hadn’t been a god when he’d been with her. He’d been her man then, a good man. He wasn’t a man any longer. Daniel was a very primitive god. A very small-scale god. A primitive steam-engine god. An amphibian god dutifully slogging the mud for some coming race of reptiles. A very minor god, maybe something like a garden gnome, a dryad, a tommy-knocker. He’d done his best with the allowable technology, but the allowable technology was just barely enough. Machines were so evanescent. Machines just flitted through the fabric of the universe like a fit through the brain of God, and in their wake people stopped being people. But people didn’t stop going on.
“I need to take your picture, Daniel,” she told him. “Stand under the light for me.”
He didn’t seem to mind. She lifted the new camera. She framed him. She knew suddenly that this was it. This was going to be her first really good picture. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, in that astonishing landscape that he called his face. The starkness of a living soul placed far beyond necessity. She understood the two of them and the world revolving, all whole and all at once, in a bright hot blaze. Her first true picture. So real and beautiful.
The camera clicked.