“Her taste was a lot of brown and green.”
That was true. Along with occasional greens and golds in the paintings, alien greens, yellowy Earth greens like the lawn outside, like the plants in the vivarium, when every green growing thing native to the planet was tinged with blue and gray, and the ground was red. “Maybe I should do green and brown in this room, her green, water green. Old Earth brown. Oh, just make it fit, Sam.”
“I told you, I’m no decorator. I’m really not.”
“But you knew how to look at the paintings in the warehouse. You’ll know what to do with them. Surprise me.”
“That’s too many surprises, Ari.”
“No such thing,” she said suddenly, and remembered the first Ari saying, out of Base One, “ There are people who aren’t surprised because they don’t notice what’s surprising in the world and they just never wonder. And there are, much rarer, people who aren’t surprised because they always see what’s coming. When you’re a child, you’re surprised by most things. It gets rarer as the years pass. Surprises keep us sane. They set us into new territory. They give us something to think about, when same old things have been the rule. You can go to sleep for years with the same old things. Sleep can eat away at your life. And sleep can be dangerous.”
Not always good things, but maybe–maybe it was good for her to meet some things she hadn’t planned.
And paint was cheap…until it made a thousand‑year‑old painting.
“No such thing, Sam. You’re king of surprises. You do it all. You pick.”
“You’re going to hate it!”
“I’ve never hated anything you’ve ever done. Don’t hold back. Give me the best place you can, with whatever of her stuff fits, and bring all the hidden stuff out where people can see it.”
“All right.” Sam said, and together they walked out of her apartment and on down the corridor, past scaffolding and into the vicinity of a good deal of cutting and banging–past doors that would belong to people she’d grown up with, and then downstairs by yet another scissor‑lift.
There was space for shops, besides the security quarters and wing admin–little hole‑in‑the wall shops where she and all the people who had a right to be here, and their staffs, could do something she didn’t ever get to do in the tight security Reseune had now, and just go shopping–well, at least they could order something to be in one of these shops and go down and look at it before they bought it off catalog: that was almostlike shopping.
There’d be a nice little snack shop and breakfast place, which would turn into a nice evening restaurant. It would cater, too, with special attention to security. That was all planned.
There’d be a men’s shop, for Yanni and Frank, and Justin and Grant, and Sam and Pavel, when they got back from Strassenberg, and Amy’s Quentin, what time Quentin wasn’t, like Florian and Catlin, in uniform. And there’d be a few conference and gathering rooms for anybody that needed them.
They could use one of those conference rooms for displays–for art, she thought suddenly.
“We can have a museum in Alpha Wing,” she decided. “We can have our own museum. A little one, for some of the paintings. We can have another over in the Admin Wing, where they’ll be safe. I think that’s a good thing. Sam, you can do it–”
“A museum?”
“The first Ari knew people who’d seen the world built. They’re all dead, now. We’re the first generation that doesn’t know anything about Cyteen before there were people here. And all their things, if they aren’t in archive, are just going away, thrown in the cycler. A virtual museum’s a good thing. You can look that up any time you want, but you have to ask for the displays–and you have to know to ask. You need to know what you’re looking for in the first place to look something up, and that necessarily slants it, doesn’t it?”
“Slants it, too,” Sam said, “if somebody picks out what you’ll see.”
“Someone’s always picking for us. But the people who painted those paintings did their own picking about what to paint. You can see the virtuals. You can get any repro you want, if you want to put your hands on it, but if you want to get surprises, that you didn’t askto be face to face with, maybe that’s the idea. You’re right. Maybe I should look at what I don’t expect. It’s why I decided I want the first Ari’s stuff. Maybe it ought to be like that for other people. They need to be surprised. And we need to haul some of the stuff out of the warehouses before it goes into the cyclers and just have it for people to look at. We’re the generation that doesn’t remember the beginning. Maybe we need to look hard.”
Sam stopped still and looked at her a long moment. “Sometimes you don’t make thorough sense, but you always seem like you do.”
She laughed. Not many people would tell her she babbled. She knew she did. She saw things in her head, saw things she didn’t have vocabulary for. The first Ari, people said, had been very spare with words. The first Ari had had ideas in her head, too, which didn’t have words. The first Ari didn’t habitually let those things out. She, on the other hand, tried to talk to the people she thought would understand. And she babbled thorough nonsense, and amused Sam.
“You see through me,” she said to Sam.
“I try to see into your head,” Sam said. “You’re awake all the time, you know that. You’re the most incredibly awake person I know. You want a museum in Admin, sure, you get Yanni Schwartz to agree and give me space, and I’ll figure how to do it. I have to go the slow way and look up things like a regular guy, but you’ll get your museum.”
“I’m not about museums,” she said, “I’m not supposed to be, at any rate. It’s just a side thought. I have to do so many other things. God, Sam. I’m studying. I’m studying all day long. I’m learning the things I’m supposed to, psych, and design, and genetics, and I spend so long at deepstudy I’m starting to go into deepstate without the damn pills, sometimes so I don’t even know I’m doing it. But when I have thoughts that aren’t on‑topic I have to shed them, I just have to turn them loose and shed them or go crazy, because I haven’t got time to do them, and my museum is a thought like that. I had it. I want to get rid of it but I don’t want to lose it, and I’m going to be busy, so you do it, Sam.”
“Ari.” He reached out and gripped her shoulders–a contact Florian and Catlin would allow very few people–and kissed her on the forehead. “Take a break, Ari. Take a day off and take a break.”
She sighed, rested her hands on his arms, looked him closely in the eyes. “You’re a genius, you know it. You really are.”
“That’s a laugh.” He dropped the contact. “That’s the last thing I am.”
“I know it when I see it. You are. Always were. Sam, Take care of yourself. I mean that.”
“Is there any special reason you should say that?”
“Selfishness. I need you. I’ll always need you. I’ll think of you when I’m studying that wretched population equation till my eyes cross.”
Second kiss, this one on the cheek. Like a brother, if she’d been born with one. She’d never had sex with Sam. Never would. That wasn’t the way they were with each other. “You just take care of yourself, Ari, hear me? You’re going too hard, again. But what’s new about that?”
She was so tired, she felt tears start in her eyes, but she wouldn’t shed them. She laughed, instead. “I’m paying for this place,” she said, “or I will. I’m starting real work. High time I earn my keep, I say. You’ll see.”