It was a beautiful day. The sun was high and, to her back, the air fresh with no trace of wind. Cloud lay to the west, high up, over the shining ocean, a faint, wispy cirrus feathering the deep blue of the sky. It was beautiful, simply beautiful, yet for once she felt no connection to that beauty, no resonance within herself; as if some part of her had died, or fallen fast asleep.
A week had passed since the incident at the Graduation Ball, but she had still to come to terms with what had happened. When she thought of it, it seemed strange, unreal, as if it had happened to someone else, or in some other life. Yet what concerned her more was the constant, nagging sense of unease she had felt these past few weeks; that sense that things were wrong, seriously wrong, with the balance of her life.
As far as Lieutenant Bachman was concerned, her father had smoothed things over, just as he'd said he would. Even so, she had slept badly this last week, haunted by dreams in which she was a machine, a dreadful spinning thing with blades for arms, scything down whoever strayed across her blind, erratic path. .
And where was her softer self in these dreams? Where was the girl she knew existed beneath that hard metallic shell? Nowhere. There was no sign of her; of the girl she felt she ought to have been. Or was it true what her father had said that night? Was it simply that they were made of sterner stuff? Of iron?
Of all this she had said nothing. At home, she had acted as though nothing were happening deep within her. As if it were all done with and forgotten. Yet she knew it was far from over, for she was undergoing a change—a change as profound and as radical as any being suffered by the greater world beyond her. And maybe there was even some connection. Maybe the change in her mirrored that outer change—was some strange kind of recognition of the reality of events?
She looked down at herself, at the simple dark blue one-piece she was wearing. It was what she always wore when she accompanied her father, its neat, military cut fitting in with her surroundings. Yet today it felt different. Today it felt wrong. ' "Jelka?"
She turned, surprised, facing her father.
"I didn't hear you ..."
"No . . ." He smiled and reached out, holding her upper arm gently with his bright, golden hand. "You were miles away, weren't you? What were you thinking of, my love?"
She looked down. "That I'll miss you," she said, hiding behind the partial truth.
"And I you," he said, drawing her close and embracing her. "But it won't be long. Ten days at most. Oh, and guess who I'll be seeing?"
She shrugged, unable to guess.
"Shih Ward . . . you know, young Kim, the Claybom lad ... the scientist."
"You're seeing him?"
He held up a small white envelope. "I'm having lunch with him, it seems. Li Yuan wants me to deliver this personally. The gods know what it is, but it'll be nice to see the young fellow again."
"I. . ." She licked at her lips, wanting to say something, to give him some message to pass on, then shook her head. "I'll miss you," she said finally, hugging him tightly. "I'll miss you a lot."
He grinned. "Now, now. You'll be all right, my boy." Then, realizing what he'd said, he laughed. "Now, why did I say that, eh?"
"I don't know," she said quietly, burying her head in his chest. "I really don't know."
THE CANVAS filled the end wall of the studio, dominating the room. It was not merely that it dwarfed the other paintings—for the new piece was easily ten, maybe twenty times the size of the artist's earlier work—it was the color, the richness, the sheer scale of the composition that caught the eye and drew it in.
To the left of the canvas, what seemed at first glance to be a huge, silver-white mountain resolved itself into a tangle of bodies, some human, some mechanical, the metallic figures unexpectedly soft and melting, those of flesh hard, almost brutal in their angularity. Looking more closely, it could be seen that this great mound of bodies was formed of two great chains, linked hand to hand, like a gigantic coil of anchor rope, the whole thing spiraling upward into the blue-black darkness of deep space at the top right of the canvas: a huge double helix of men and machines, twisting about itself, striving toward a single, brilliant point of light.
In the foreground, beneath the toppling mass of bodies, was the great ocean, the Atlantic, incongruously calm, its surface shimmering in the sunlight. Yet beneath its placid skin could be discerned the forms of ancient ruins—of Han temples and pagodas, of stone dragons and palaces and the skeletal framework of a rotting imperial junk.
It was shan shui—"mountains and water"—but shan shui transformed. This was the new art. An art of symbiosis and technological aspiration that was the cultural embodiment of the old Dispersionist ideals: Futur-Kunst, or Science-Art, as it was called. And Hey-demeier, the artist, was its leading exponent.
Old Man Lever stood before the painting, some twenty ch'i back, his face creased into an intense frown. He had brought* Heydemeier over from Europe six months back and installed him here, giving him whatever he needed to pursue his art. And this—this immense vision in oils—was the first fruit of that investment.
He turned to Heydemeier and nodded. "It's good. Very good indeed. What is it called?"
Heydemeier drew at the thin black cigarette and gave a tight smile of satisfaction. "I'm glad you like it, Shih Lever. I've called it 'The New World.'"
Lever laughed briefly. "That's good. I like that. But why so big?"
Heydemeier moved past the old man, going right up to the canvas. For a while he studied the fine detail of the picture, brushing the surface of it lightly with the fingertips of one hand, then he turned back, facing Lever.
"To be honest with you, Shih Lever, I wasn't sure it would work, coming here to America. I thought it might be a step backward. But there's something very different about this place. It's more alive here than in Europe. You get the feeling that this is where the future is."
Lever was studying the young man hawkishly. "And that's where this comes from?"
"Partly." Heydemeier drew on the cigarette again. "Now that it exists I realize that this was what I was always striving for, even in the smaller works. What was lacking was a sense of space—of outwardness. Being here, away from the confinement of Europe, freed that. Allowed it, if you like."
"I can see that."
Heydemeier half turned, indicating the great swirl of bodies. "So. There it is, Shih Lever. Yours. As we agreed."
Lever smiled. "It's an important work, Shih Heydemeier. I don't need experts or advisors to tell me that. I can see it with my own eyes. It's a masterpiece. Maybe the start of something wholly new, wouldn't you say?"
Heydemeier looked down, trying to conceal his pleasure at the old man's words, but Lever could see that he had touched his weak point—his vanity. He smiled inwardly and pressed on.
"I mentioned my advisors. Well, to be frank with you, Shih Heydemeier, it was on their word that you came here. They said you were the best. Without equal, and with your best work ahead of you. So it has proved. And that's good. I can use that. I like working with the best. In everything."
Lever went across, standing there face to.face with the artist. "You're a clever man, Ernst Heydemeier. You understand how things are—how they work. So you'll not take offense when I say that my interest in you was strictly commercial. A Company like mine—like ImmVac—needs its showpieces, its cultural totems, if you like. And the more prestigious those totems, the better. They give a Company great face. But this. . ." He reached out and gently touched the surface of the painting, a look of genuine awe in his face. "This goes beyond that. This transcends what I asked of you."
Heydemeier turned, looking back at his work. "Maybe. But it makes you wonder sometimes . . . Whether you'll ever create anything half as good again. Whether you can ever make something more . . . original."