The Angels of Our Better Beasts

by Jerome Stueart

  She rests her head on her hands, and with half-lidded eyes gives a small bumblebee laugh, almost talking to her hands as much as to you. “You tell the story of humankind in the cosmos. You were born when we moved away from Mars, and the rest of your life has been movement, moving around the planets even as we did, telling our story.”

  You say, “And now I am not telling a moving story. I’m telling a different one. Now it is making a life. Just as the rest of these wanderers did. We settle. Every artist eventually roots and tells the story of a people and a place.”

  She hasn’t heard you. “I do not know how you create art out of so much chaos. You make us look beautiful and meaningful.”

  You look at Ajax. He looks below the balcony, beyond the sheer shielding to the moon below. How much like the stars all the craters look.

  She whispers into her hands as if they are a cup for her words. Beautiful and meaningful.

  >?

  Over the next several months, you work on a new project with the help of three other talented artists who work on Aethon. They operate out of a parlour on the Pavilion side, nestled among other shops where miners spend their pay, and they, too, are always busy creating art. On their wall hangs a painting that you painted, of the three of them leaning over the miners, interpreting their dreams for them. Many times the four of you have talked to each other, sometimes sharing art and designs, learning from each other. Many times small versions of your work have ended up on the arms of miners, and that’s why you are there to visit the Swordsman, the Quilter, and the Harpoon.

  Today, you open up the large black portfolio case and lay plans across their table for a project for which you need their help. They take a break from their own art, their customers rest, and you show them The History of our Sol on the Arms That Built It.

  They stand around your designs for a multi-panel work—a collaboration with them. The Quilter puts her hand to her mouth. The Swordsman inhales deeply. The Harpoon calls out instinctively.

  You say, “Any miner who wants to participate should be encouraged. But I will not enlist anyone. It’s all voluntary. I don’t want to be accused of using miners as things. Inevitably that will happen, but we will remind them that the miners chose to complete the project with me—and we put their names on the artwork as well. Once we know how many will want to be part of this, that will tell us the scope of the project—how many months, how many arms. But there won’t be a painting that correlates with this. It can only be seen if the men and women stand, or even sit, together, which makes it unique. Which makes it valuable.”

  You are designing the entire history of human endeavour through the solar system on the arms of the miners, each containing a piece of the whole—an expanse of progress from Earth through Mars and the Belt, through Saturn and Jupiter; through the cities they created, the moons they mined; through Uranus, Pluto, the base on Charon, reaching to Enkidu, the wild planet that hovers on the very edge of Sol.

  The Swordsman strokes his long black beard and asks, “And what about miners who already have a tattoo on their arm?”

  “We could incorporate their design into the work, altering it to fit with the overall painting, if they want. I think that will add your own art, and their own personality, into the work. It is about them.” You take a step back. “In every way this should be about them as much as it is about the painting. They are integral, and not just a canvas.”

  The customers are now around the table, looking. “So my Chinese dragon can be a part of this?”

  You nod. “Yes, that would be perfect. Everything will add to the design. It will be a multi-layered work, but it will take time, at no cost to you.”

  “But no one will buy this work. They can’t possibly buy hundreds of miners. Why not do something that will sell?”

  You smile, as this is the core of your plan. “They won’t buy it, no, but Eustachi Group are sworn to protect all my work. The miners will be carrying my work with them, on them. They will then have to protect the miners for as long as they live.”

  “And we can travel?”

  “Oh yes, I have a feeling that anyone who signs up will be doing a lot of travel—at the cost of Eustachi. The Ceintures, the Starred Balconies, you will see the system by the time this show is done, you can be assured of this!”

  The man smiles. “My girlfriend will be keen on this. My mate, too.

  You turn to the Swordsman. “We should document how we do it, film it, for authentication purposes.”

  “You should be part of each segment of the process, from design to application,” the Quilter says.

  “And with that I will need your help.”

  The horrible thought weighs over the table like a stone about to drop, that to give the miners value it must be inscribed. There is a moment where no one speaks, the truth of that sinking in.

  “I’d be beefin’ honoured,” says the Harpoon, reaching across the table and holding your hand. “Let’s ink it.”

  You expect there will be thirty men and women who sign up, but there are hundreds. The artists never balk, and once you have a secure number, you design The History of our Sol for their arms. With the help of the artists, you create a painting that is 200 feet long, made up of the arms of the miners on average six inches across. Sometimes you sign your signature into each arm with a needle and ink, as part of the design, showing the movement from Earth to Mars and to the very boundaries, the cities, the mining colonies, the workers themselves, aching and lifting, pushing metal into place for others to live well.

  >?

  “Auguste,” Ajax asks when he hears of this, “what will they do about their jobs if they leave to go on these art tours?”

  “The touring schedule doesn’t have to be long. They offered to use vacation time. The important part is that they will be looked after for the rest of their lives.”

  “You know this?”

  “It’s in the contract.”

  “The way you’re interpreting the contract.”

  “They will have my work on their arms—there’ll be no denying that.”

  “No, there’s no denying that. But what if they lose something big? They aren’t you. They can’t risk without punishment. The work here will suffer. Helios will not be happy.”

  “But I am securing their future.”

  “I know. But you are trading their present for it.”

  “It’s their choice.”

  “Do they know the choice?”

  You don’t answer because you don’t know if they do. Only now are you realizing what you may have done.

  Ajax can see he’s disturbed you. He stands up. “You came for a quiet life, but look at you. You are touching everyone with fame, and it is unpredictable. You are making people angry with your art. Is this what you want? Is it worth it?”

  You think he means, Are we worth it?

  “It’s easy to be an artist passing through, but it’s false and it’s lonely.” Ajax reaches around you. “It’s hard being an artist in a place, grounded. Monet at Giverny; Renoir at Cagnes-Sur-Mer; Benton in Kansas City—especially Benton. It is hard not to tell the story of the people around you, for good or bad. Art can’t stay above a place where the artist has chosen to live. It just can’t. It has to root, too. I am living with you, together. That means everything we experience is part of my art.”

  You let him enfold you for a while, and then you quietly reach out and sneak one of the rapidly diminishing honey sesame almonds.

  >?

  Seven months later, you ask Eustachi Group for five Moonlines to come and pick up your latest show. Eustachi tells you that the museum on Archimedes on Mars has already asked for it, and you can certainly guarantee several shows on Earth, Antigone, the Ceinture. You ask for Eustachi and the museum to take special care of the work, that this work is fragile.

  You will not be coming, no, to see
that the work is properly installed. “The people I am sending with the work will help you install it.” You warn them, “It will be controversial.”

  “Good. I’m sure that will be a bonus to them. Controversies pack people in.” He is so excited. Instead of your piecemeal work, a collection that takes five Moonlines to transport is an event.

  The Moonlines arrive and 169 miners board them, carrying luggage for their extended vacations, their tour through Sol, with their boyfriends, their girlfriends, their friends, smiling and waving at you, hugging you for giving them this opportunity to see the worlds. Standing with them are the Swordsman, the Quilter, and the Harpoon, promising to speak on your behalf wherever they go. You stand with Ajax at the platform, and he doesn’t have to whisper the warnings into your ear, not right now, that this will cause more trouble.

  “It’s not a strike,” you tell him later.

  “They aren’t working,” he says.

  They go to Saturn, where they will all board a system cruiser to Mars. You wish you could go with them—just to see the faces of the gallery officials when they ask where the paintings are. To see Eustachi, hoping to be there to personally care for the paintings, and not seeing them at first. Asking, Where are the paintings? And hearing the Swordsman tell them that they will reveal the paintings when they get to the gallery. How they must be feeling when 169 miners come into the gallery, line up, and take off their shirts, revealing one long history, that of the system from arm to arm to arm. What did they say? Did Ernest Eustachi bat an eye at your cleverness? You can imagine him—he loves your work—recovering quickly from the initial shock as the miners ready the line, as he sees what you and the Swordsman, the Quilter, and the Harpoon have done. He will examine them for your signature, your style, but he knows it. He will see the universe beyond their arms because the three artists are that good, and he will see the ships, and the people and the moons and the bases, and the building of the mines, and the building of the colonies.

  And then, the miners will speak.

  “I remember coming to the colony when I was eighteen,” one of them will say.

  Another one will begin her story. “I’ve hauled salt water from the great crevice we call the Mouth for three years now. Ice pebbles under my feet crunch like gravel whenever we inspect the drones.”

  And then another person: “Mars sent a crew of sixty-one pioneers to Saturn in 2062.”

  Occasionally, they will stop and say, This is the History of Our Sol on the Arms that Built It. But they won’t just recite these lines; they will also talk with people, tell their stories, interact, because they are as much the painting as the tattoo—as much the history as the History.

  The gallery officials—there will be close to forty or fifty of them—might think it brilliant, but they will also recognize the cost. They will recognize your work, and more importantly, they will understand what you are saying, and what the miners are saying about their part in the building of the worlds as we know them. It will be filmed.

  You will hear about it from Eustachi when they realize they have to cover the safety of those paintings, those miners, for the life of the miner.

  “You cannot ask us to insure people as if they are works of art. We cannot take care of them for the rest of their lives just because you decided to paint on them.”

  “You already agreed,” you will tell them. “In the contract, you insured these works. Now you have to protect them wherever they go.”

  “Renault, I think the mining colony has damaged your mind.”

  You laugh it off now, but he will do something about that. They cannot pay for the tour of the solar system for close to 200 people for a year, and they have no means to support 200 people for the rest of their lives.

  Helios representatives can barely speak to you without yelling through their videophones. Their employees are not working, are not harvesting the water and air to deliver to Callisto or Saturn because they are being used to make a statement? You have gone too far, they tell you, and they mean it. They intend to make Eustachi pay for the lost earnings since they have kidnapped 169 miners. How could you be so careless with their property?

  “They’re not your property,” you say.

  “No, it appears they are the property of Eustachi now. Congratulations—you’ve just shifted assets. Eustachi has stolen our property. We intend to press intersystem charges on both you and your management company for loss of income and assets.”

  “We didn’t conscript them. They volunteered.”

  “Then they just changed jobs. Hope you can give them years’ worth of work. In effect, you’ve just destroyed their livelihood. They can’t afford to be activists, Mr. Renault. You can.”

  “You are mistaken, sir,” you tell him. “The miners are doing more good for Helios on this small goodwill tour than they are doing here in this mine.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says the people who see this show. Read the reviews, talk to the people before you take action, or you’ll find that your profit margins may suddenly go down when they were going up.”

  “You are living on Helios property. I want you off the colony or you will be taken off by force. Do you understand?”

  “Mr. Salazar, I guarantee you, you will benefit more from this than anyone else. You should wait a few weeks.”

  “By force!” he says and ends the transmission.

  >?

  He doesn’t understand what you have done. By giving them value, you’ve increased the value of Helios. Eustachi Group will not be liable for the men forever, but they will insure them as they have insured you. This is all you wanted. For someone to see these men and women as the world sees you—to ascribe the same value to them. An equity of vision.

  “But you did trick them,” Ajax says, with a hint of anger. You are staring out at the ever-changing atmosphere of Jupiter, a swirl of color—Jupiter was like oil paints, all mixing, blending into one another.

  “I have good intentions,” you say quietly to the moon.

  “You should have talked to me about this project. Those are my men.”

  “They own themselves,” you say, adding, “don’t you think?”

  He runs the dishes under the micro-atomizer, which hums.

  “Auguste, this was irresponsible of you. You can’t take people and make them your message—”

  “I didn’t. I asked. They volunteered. I’m trying to do something for them. I’m trying to—”

  “I am too. I’m employing them for ten or twenty years. I’m responsible for keeping production up here at Aethon. Those men committed to me, and I committed to Helios. They are under my command. You can’t just do what you want here without permission.”

  “Without your permission,” you say.

  He slams down his hand on the counter. “Dammit, yes. My permission. I earned this position and god knows I have to answer for the decisions that are made here. I have to ask permission. It’s the way things work when you’re not a celebrity. You can’t just write fame on people and expect it to change everything. Fame is a crazy thing. I don’t know how you live with it, and it worked well for us, yes, before, but now . . . I’m afraid. I’m afraid it’s going to do mess everything up.”

  You are listening, but you are not looking at him. You are thinking about the moons of Uranus. It’s not that you want to go there. It’s just that all the moons are named after Shakespeare characters, all the moons of Uranus but two. Twenty-seven characters all mixed up from stories running into each other again and again, just passing by. Hello. Oh hello, Caliban, Desdemona says, have you seen Ophelia? You once saw a play on Philostratus by Hobii Andropolis, Uranean playwright, born and raised, very nice fellow that used to put olives on his fingertips—but the play had all the moons of Uranus in it like they were in a Shakespeare play, and Andropolis had them revolving around the stage just as they do in space and asked t
hem to only speak lines they would give from their respective plays and it was quite profound. Puck meeting Cupid, Portia meeting Rosalind, Prospero talking to Lear. Every night the play was different. But it matched the ‘movement of the spheres.’ You look at the faded giant of Jupiter in the distance. You feel like a revolving Prospero, always running into people and revolving away, passing things by, and you’d like to stay longer, but you never could. Until now. And now you may have messed it up.

  “I’m sorry,” you say.

  “No one was listening to us before you came,” Ajax says, coming up behind you, calmer now. “Now we are getting more and more heard—but I’m not sure what they’re going to do about what they hear.”

  “Is it my fault that I can’t stop being who I am?”

  “Is that what you’re gonna tell Helios when those men skip Aethon?”

  “I gave them a gift for their retirement.”

  “You gave them a way out. You let them all uproot.”

  “I let them fly,” you say matter-of-factly.

  “Now we see how long they’ll fly before they fall.”

  >?

  A few weeks later, Ajax is down under the crust for an extended haul. You are alone in the room, working on a study of Ganymede from photoscans you took from a sitejet you went up in the previous week. The starry, pocked surface still calls to you. You paint a golden eagle circling the moon, like the golden birds carrying the ashes of the men who have died. But this eagle is the god Zeus searching for his lover Ganymede.

  A series of timpani sounds, and you are leaning over the video screen to answer a call. Marie sends you an urgent recorded message. Her voice sounds frantic. She cannot calm down. She is so sorry, so sorry. “The Helios ship Abraxas is already on its way to you. I’ve just found out Ajax is going to be arrested.” As the superintendent who okayed The History of Our Sol using Helios workers, he is liable for the lost work, the lost pay, and they want to remove him from his position. Or they want to remind you not to be so political with your work. Either way, it scares you.