On the sixth night of Echo’s illness, River knew the end was near. Echo could no longer move his arms or legs; he could barely swivel his head. They had spent the day talking about little things, and River had yet to ask the question that truly frightened him.
“Will I get sick?”
The night was particularly quiet, and Echo’s blue eyes still glowed softly.
“No,” said Echo. “Don’t worry about that.”
River sat at the base of the chair, like he’d done so many times when his father sat in it. The pipe still rested on the table, unused since that first time River smoked it. The hearth was cold.
“Echo, are you lying to me? You do lie sometimes.”
Echo was completely still. “I protect you,” he said.
“So, is that the same as lying sometimes?”
“Parents love their children very much. Professor Nous wanted me to look after you. I hope I’ve taught you enough.”
“You’ve taught me everything,” said River. “But I’m afraid.”
“You won’t get sick, River.”
River didn’t know if Echo was telling the truth. “Tell me about the day you were born. I like that story.”
Echo liked the story too. “I was born like all humatons are born,” he said. “I was made in the mechaworks and brought to life by a piece of your fingernail and a tiny drop of blood . . .”
River listened, entranced. Echo had always been a very good storyteller.
* * * * *
Two days after Echo died, River dragged him on a cart to the gate at Concourse Square. He had dressed his friend in his beloved velvet cape and decorated his arms with bracelets Echo had collected over the years. Once again he rigged up the ropes and hoisted Echo onto the catwalk, standing him up beside the humaton with the blond hair. He didn’t bother giving Echo a weapon. The enemy hadn’t come, and River knew they never would while he was alive. It had been nearly a week since he had come to the gate, and River stood on the catwalk waiting for the sun to go down and the campfires to arrive.
“I’m here!” he shouted to the hills. “It’s just me but I’m not gonna die! Not ever, ’cause I’m the king!”
He tried to sound defiant but felt empty inside. Not weak. Not sick. Just empty. He watched the sun die behind the hills and the shadows creep across the city. Straight in front of him, a single campfire came to life in the distance.
“Still there,” River muttered.
He waited for the other fires to join the first. The minutes passed and the clock in the concourse chimed, but no other fires appeared. Instead the single fire grew and grew, like one of the bonfires he’d lit with Echo, soon glowing so brightly it was hard to look upon. The strangeness of it perplexed River. He thought it might be a threat, but nothing about it was frightening. In fact it was beautiful, like a beacon, and he was glad he’d brought Echo to see it.
“What are they doing?” he asked as if Echo could hear him.
He wondered if they knew he was alone on the wall, and that the humatons around him were all just metal containers now, like cans or buckets.
“They’ve been watching us so long . . .”
River squinted at the fire.
“Waiting for me to die . . .”
They were always watching—everything he did.
“Or . . . watching me live?”
Suddenly he wished he’d paid more attention to Echo’s lessons. People communicated with fire; he remembered that, at least. He remembered a story about a queen who died, and how her body had been laid on a pyre and set aflame, and how the people watched the flames and cried because they missed her. River put his hand over his heart and wondered if it was broken.
He moved in close to Echo’s cold body and put his arm around his dead friend’s shoulder. He smelled the pipe smoke on Echo’s velvet cape. He remembered the day when the plague came, and how afraid he was, and how his mother and father were frantic, and how the city was full of screams. And how Echo, peaceful and composed, had taken the book with the monsters in it off the shelf and explained it all to him . . .
Like it was just another story.
A Dichotomy of Paradigms
Mary Robinette Kowal
Ducking through the hatch of the interstellar frigate Triumphant Beast Descending, Patrick stepped into the captain's quarters. She stood by a console mounted on the wall, with her hands on her hips in the sort of unthinking grace that made him itch to start painting.
Not that he was going to be able to do that yet. They were waiting in the flight path for the Creative Fire, which was carrying an original Picacio that was worth more money than God. Captain Dauntless had on the same snug space compression suit that most of her crew wore, ready for boarding when their target ship dropped out of its tesseract field.
“I was thinking about adding something to my suit, so you could distinguish me from the others.” She turned and held up a bandolier made of heavy braided leather. It had a sequence of small guns clipped to it, which looked like throwbacks to derringers but were really single-shot blasters. The power supply was too small to get off more than one shot before needing to recharge.
He considered for a moment, trying to imagine what the boarding process would actually be like. Smoke? It would be nice to have that sort of atmosphere for her portrait. “How were you thinking of wearing it?”
She draped it over her shoulder like it was some beauty queen's sash. “Well?”
He pretended to consider, but really, anything his client wanted would be fine by him. In this case, fortunately, the bandolier would be a good addition. Even though the suit helmets were clear, it would help draw the eye to her. “I think that would be an excellent choice.”
“Good.” Then she spun back to the console. “Now tell me what you think of this.” And she began to read from the screen.
“Patrick Windlass's latest portrait, done in his 'in the moment' style betrays all the symptoms of a hack. The hasty brush strokes, which could give the painting vitality in the hands of another, here are nothing more than gimmickry.”
Goddamnit. This is why he avoided the reviews. A hack? Gimmickry? When you could matter-print anything, the price on unique objects and experiences meant that artists were finally paid what they were worth. And Patrick's particular skill was painting fast and under any circumstances.
He pasted a smile on his face. “One learns not to be wounded by those who don't understand one's art.”
“Yeah, well, at the moment, I'm wondering why I'm hiring you if it's going to get a bad review. Convince me it's worth keeping you.”
Well . . . shit. Usually having to pay a deposit was enough, but no . . . he had to go and accept a commission from the infamous Captain Dauntless. “Of course, though I am surprised you lend any credence to someone else's taste. You wanted a portrait with your pirates attacking a ship to cement your status as a terror of space.” As if having a painting would make anyone believe her name were really “Dauntless.” She’d probably been born a Maude.
“Yeah. Vid will do that.”
“Vid will show the facts, but not the emotion. You need an artist for that. You sought me for reasons that have not changed because of this petty reviewer. No one else has my ability to paint while in motion, under any circumstances, and capture a composite of the experience.”
“Which this lady is saying is a gimmick.”
He kept the smile steady, though his teeth ground together before he spoke. “Other artists are merely jealous of what my skill allows me to do and of the clients who seek my work. I have painted General Dahl while on the battlefield in the mountains on New Pluto. I was trusted to paint the final dance of Maria Amazonia before her retirement from zero-g ballet. The President of Uusi Suomi hired me to create his official portrait, which I did while he toured the Frozen Catacombs of Death. A gimmick? No. That is skill.” Pure, unfettered skill, thank you very much. And if it happened to be harnessed to meet current market needs for “unique” art then there wa
s no shame in that. None. He was not a hack.
“That all sounds fancy enough but—”
A klaxon went off, saving him from answering her doubt. Captain Dauntless ran past him as if he didn’t even exist. She sprinted toward the bridge trailing a string of curses behind her.
“What is it?” He started after her.
Another crew member answered him as she ran past toward the shuttle bay. “The Creative Fire is early.”
Patrick skidded to a halt and spun back toward his cabin. He was going to need his easel.
* * * * *
There was an appalling lack of smoke on the ship they boarded. The interior curving corridors had little to distinguish them from any other ship, except for the bodies strewn on the floor. A pair of burly guards flanked him as they moved through the cramped corridors of the ship that the pirates had attacked. Their sole job was to give him room to work.
Patrick stepped over the bleeding corpse of a spacer and tried not to see it. He swallowed against the nausea. Inside his helmet, his breath hissed in his ears, stinking of the curry he’d had for lunch. This was like being a war journalist. Right? You couldn't let the dead affect you.
Right . . . except in a war everyone had signed up to be there. These people had been minding their own business and— He wrestled his mind to a halt before he lost his lunch. He had a job to do, even if he was “a hack.”
His Stedi-Easel 5000 balanced in front of Patrick as he followed the captain. Without it, he would never have been able to paint on the fly like this. It was strapped around his waist and used a set of gyroscopes to maintain the canvas at a perfect level relationship to his body. He wore it at a slight angle, so he could see past to his subject, but even so his vision was limited.
Patrick shoved his fan brush back into the holster on his utility belt and whipped out the #8 sable. Sliding it through the seal on the vacu-palette, he loaded Mars black on the brush and tried to capture the line of the captain’s shoulder as she leveled a blaster at one of the passengers. God. Why did she have to keep looking back and smiling at him? This was not at all the “in the moment” painting that he was known for. Usually he'd build the painting from the entire experience, working out the composition and the pose as he went in a compilation of moments. Dauntless kept practically posing. Like the way she pulled the passenger toward her—
He knew that passenger.
Patrick fumbled the brush and laid a hard streak of black down the page. Captain Dauntless was holding his mentor. He hadn’t seen Lila Kirkland since he left the art academy back in '47. He shook his head and holstered the #8. It didn’t matter.
The subject of the painting was Captain Dauntless, and right now, he had a line of paint down the canvas. He snatched a rag from his utility belt and smudged the wet paint into smoke. There wasn’t actually smoke in the corridor, but there should be. Goddammit, this was a space battle. With pirates! There should be smoke.
Or was that the hack talking? The artist who just had a series of gimmicks. He bit his lip and pushed the paint into swirls of light and shadow.
“Patrick?” The easel must have been what caught her attention, because right now Lila Kirkland was staring at him instead of the gun pointing at her chest.
He cleared his throat and had the Pavlovian response of sweat and a cracked voice. “Ma’am?”
Captain Dauntless frowned and shook the older woman. “Hey—no chatter or I end you.”
“No—” Patrick bit off the rest of his reply as she glared at him. What was he doing? He'd just seen Dauntless kill half a dozen people because they were in the wrong place, and he was trying to make her angry? But . . . but this was Lila Kirkland. He knew her. She'd trained him. He swallowed. “It’s better with a victim—a living victim—in the painting. It shows you dominating and represents man’s essential inhumanity to man, which is so endemic of our modern era.” God—that sort of pseudo art babble had always made Professor Kirkland furious in his Academy days, but clients ate it up. “Also, the essential contrast between your youth and her age better represents the vitality of conquest against a stagnant society.”
Professor Kirkland's pained eye roll could have been scripted. His fingers itched. His description had been a ploy to keep Dauntless from killing the older woman, but by God . . . that would be a good painting. He reached for the #8 and said something he thought he'd never say. “Just hold that pose, okay?”
Captain Dauntless sneered, but she held the pose.
Of course, that also meant she was still holding a gun on Professor Kirkland. Patrick worked with the speed that allowed him to do this—to paint on site—while in the far corridors other crew members finished rounding up stragglers. As he slid his brush over the canvas to create the smooth dome of Captain Dauntless’s helmet, he cleared his throat again. “You know . . . that’s Lila Kirkland.”
“Who?” Captain Dauntless raised an eyebrow, and he switched to working on her face to catch the expression.
“The artist. Painted Sunday in the Martian Canals with Bradbury.” It was only one of the most pivotal pieces of post-post-retro modern art and kicked off an entire punch card punk movement. Dauntless just looked at him as blankly as if he’d started chewing cud. He mentally kicked himself. Remember who the client is and speak her language. “It sold for over two million solar.”
That got Dauntless to give a low whistle, which fogged the inside of her faceplate for a moment. He moved from painting her face to catching the line of Professor Kirkland’s jaw on the canvas.
“If she gave a good review . . . more people would see your portrait.” Patrick stared at the painting, willing Dauntless to care about publicity. That had to be why she hired him, right? Why she had that stupid name? It had to be enough to let her keep Professor Kirkland alive.
“You think she would?”
“Maybe.” He stared at the canvas and knew the answer would be “no.” He was a hack and always had been. “She taught me everything I know.”
“So . . . it would be a favor to you to let her live?”
He lifted the brush from the canvas. “Yes.”
“Then you can talk about giving me the painting for a better price.” She bared her teeth and raised the blaster higher.
“Absolutely.”
“If it gets a good review.”
He swallowed and stared at Lila Kirkland, begging her to lie about art, just once in her life. “I’ll do my best to make sure it does.”
The first thing he did was paint over the smoke. And then he started to paint in earnest.
* * * * *
The fighting had quieted to the point that they clearly had control of the ship. Captain Dauntless continued to hold the pose—something he’d never asked a client to do before—while crew members came to her with reports. Her arm with the blaster sagged with fatigue, the point drifting from Professor Kirkland’s chest to her midriff. It would be just as deadly either way.
Patrick lifted his brush from the canvas and slid the viewing lens over his face. You couldn’t back away from a Stedi-Easel, because it was strapped to you, but the lens gave him the illusion of stepping back to view the painting at a distance.
On the canvas, Captain Dauntless stood with her shoulders back and the bandolier draped over her compression suit. Behind her, the long corridor of the ship vanished in a curve. Splashes of red and black showed where bodies had been, but no smoke masked the crisp lines, so everything seemed to be anchored around her. Leaning against one wall, as the only element of softness in the painting, was a captive. Dauntless held the woman by one arm, while the victim's other hand pressed flat against the wall, almost in supplication. The woman stared out of the picture, as if she were the subject instead of the captain. She seemed to be pleading with the viewer.
Patrick tapped his brush against the edge of the canvas. It wasn’t who he’d been hired to paint, but . . . it was the right painting. He should wipe it and make Dauntless the focus again. But it was right. It was probably the b
est thing he’d painted in years, and God, that was a depressing thought.
“Are you finished yet?”
He slid the viewing lens out of the way, hesitated for a moment, and signed the painting. “Yes.”
Slipping the release on the Stedi-Easel, he pivoted the canvas to face Captain Dauntless but he watched Professor Kirkland.
“My boobs should be bigger.”
Patrick snapped his gaze back to Captain Dauntless. “Pardon?”
“The bandolier. It’s making me look flat.”
“Oh.” He made a show of thinking about his client's input. They always had some. “I can adjust that but . . . I wanted to demonstrate your power and not let the viewers’ perception of your femininity get in the way of your abilities and mastery of space. By catering to the expectations of body images, we risk presenting the idea that a woman must use her appearance for domination, but that has not been what I’ve witnessed in the time spent with you. No, madam. Your strength is within.”
Professor Kirkland coughed.
Patrick hurried on. “But if you would like, I can definitely adjust the bandolier to make your other assets more . . . present.”
“Maybe . . .” She turned to Professor Kirkland and jerked her chin at the painting. “What do you think? Going to give it a good review?”
“May I?” Professor Kirkland pulled her hand from the wall and gestured to the painting. Despite her apparent calm, a slight tremor shook her hand. When she painted, her hands had always been so steady, so confident.
“Sure. But don’t try anything. I’ve got crew crawling the ship.” Dauntless released the older woman and kept the blaster trained on her.
“Of course.” The professor straightened, stretching her shoulders in a gesture he remembered from art school. The critique was coming.
The bodyguards assigned to cover Patrick shifted their weight as if evaluating the aging artist for possible threats. There was no way they could be prepared for her raking wit during a critique. No hired gun could protect him from that.
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