Nevertheless, She Persisted

by Mindy Klasky

  “When did you change your style, Nina?” asked Frewer.

  “Well, you know I’ve been trying very hard to develop a style of my own,” I answered eagerly. “This is what I came up with.”

  He frowned. “I’m just a little puzzled. You told me you didn’t have any interest in realism.”

  I goggled at him. A woman with five arms—realism? I turned to Pavlova and goggled again. She didn’t have five arms, she had two. Two graceful, symmetrical, very normal arms that went with her graceful, symmetrical, very normal body. And she was strikingly familiar.

  Dazed, I crossed to Petrucchio’s pallet and gingerly tugged off his sheet. So much for high art. My beautiful, twisted, deadly mime was now a rounded, whimsical clown. Even the dagger was gone. In its place was an old-fashioned bicycle horn.

  “These pieces are really quite a departure from the first one,” commented Hirasuna. “Is this your entire collection?”

  “Uh,” I said. “Yes… Right now anyway. Uh, these were sort of an experiment. They’re not representative. Like I said, I’m searching for my own style.”

  Hirasuna nodded.

  “Your technique is flawless,” said Ripley encouragingly.

  “Thanks,” I said and wondered if I should try to explain about nannies and default patterns.

  The Committee held a brief conference on my rear balcony, then left, leaving me alone with Professor Frewer. He looked almost as confused as I felt.

  “Nina, this wasn’t a real good time for a dramatic change in artistic direction. I showed the Committee your sketches. They expected…something quite different.”

  “So did I,” I murmured.

  He glanced back toward the studio. “The realistic pieces are nice,” he said (in that way that makes “nice” sound like “god-awful”), “but they’re not exceptional. And they have to be to warrant a grant and a residency.”

  “What about Fred?” I asked desperately.

  “Fred?”

  “Man in Anguish?”

  He looked at it, pulling his lip and squinting. “Well, it’s interesting but… I don’t know, there’s something…wrong about it. It seems…out of balance, somehow.”

  I don’t believe this, I thought. “So, no grant? No residency?”

  He looked sympathetic. “I know you’re capable of better work, Nina. Look, do you think you’re going to have some more pieces ready for your opening?”

  “I—I hope so,” I said dubiously.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t look so defeated. The Committee won’t complete its evaluations for another two weeks. If you can have some new work at the opening, I’ll make sure they see it.”

  When he was gone, I sat on the sofa with my head spinning. Okay, so I had a second chance. The first thing I had to do was get rid of those damned nano-vandals. I called Eugene. He still wasn’t home. I left a frantic question (How long do these things live?) and an obscene message on the ’corder and snapped off the vucom.

  Damn! How was I supposed to get any work done with thousands of little art critics rearranging everything to their default patterns? And what patterns! A dolly-dancer and a circus clown. Where the heck did they get—

  My eyes focused on the cover of an art magazine on the coffee table. One of Degas’s pink and blue ballerinas gazed back at me. I looked at my statue. The pose was identical.

  Okay. Default pattern number one. But I knew I didn’t have any art magazines with clowns on them.

  “O-oh!” I groaned and smacked my forehead with the heel of my hand. The only clown in this apartment besides me was the stuffed one on my bed.

  I hid the magazines, the clown, every piece of brick-a-brack I owned. Alas, the nannies simply looked elsewhere for “inspiration.” Every surreal form I made, they painstakingly herded into the epitome of bland. At one point, I had a two hundred pound ottoman and a clay replica of a macrame wall-hanging I forgot to take down and hide.

  In the midst of defeat, a light went on. I was galvanized. Cackling like a banshee, I tore around the kitchenette strewing garbage-y tidbits all over the floor—coffee grounds, egg shells, old dead alfalfa sprouts—you name it, I strewed it. I created a mess of such epic proportions, an army of vacbots would have mutinied at the sight of it. Then, while the nannies were busily attacking that, I attacked Pavlova and Petrucchio and reduced them to their component clay lumps. In their place, I erected a huge form that pushed the very limits of the surreal. (Just in case, I thought.)

  When I finished, I was ravenous and thirsty and had a hell of a headache. I got myself a soda pop and went back to assess my work. I stepped over a self-stacking pile of art clippings and a herd of dust bunnies that was making its way back to the recyc and flopped down on the steps between the living room and the studio. What I had here was definitely different. It was part man, part mountain, and part Gaudi cathedral. It looked almost, but not quite, like fire that had been magicked into stone. I liked it. In fact, I thought it was probably the best work I’d ever done—except maybe for poor Petrucchio. While I was sitting there, patting myself on the back, I saw it start. A smooth patch became slightly pocked, a small hole enlarged itself. The nannies were on the move.

  I jumped to my feet. “Dammit, no!” I shrieked. “Stop it! Stop, you stupid nannies! That’s not an accident—it’s ART!”

  They ignored me.

  Snarling, I launched myself across the room to my workbench, grabbed a couple of lumps of fresh clay and hurled them in the general direction of the nannies. A lot of other stuff followed, a big bowl full of pebbles, a trayful of seashells, some handfuls of colored glass chips, a lot more clay.

  “It’s not broken, for God’s sake!” I cried. “Don’t fix it!”

  Sobbing frantically, I ripped at the pile of magazine clippings I’d hidden on the top shelf of my workbench, sending a litter of paper to join all the other crap on the floor. Maybe while they were busy with that, I could move my beautiful whatever-it-was out of the nannies’ way. But they weren’t to be distracted. Tiny changes continued to edit the surface of my creation even as the new junk began to stir. They’d just deployed their ranks—probably replicated or whatever it was they did.

  Oh, for a vacbot! I’d suck them all up and— and…

  “Damn you, Eugene Bulinsky!” I cried passionately and sailed across the apartment to the vucom. He was not answering. I left a frantic, pleading, vicious message in which murder and suicide figured prominently. Then I sat down to have a good cry. Many teardrops later, I looked up, bleary-eyed, to see what the nannies had done to my career.

  I stared. Then I pulled myself to my feet and moved dazedly back into the studio. My Zubin masterpiece had kept the shape I gave it, but the nannies had added some stylistic nuances. In fact, the pocked and scarified surface of the thing looked much more interesting. It had pebbles and seashells and bits of glass embedded in it, and it sparkled like the crown jewels under the studio lights. Even as I watched, a tiny, dried-out husk of a starfish crawled into place among the sand encrusting its base.

  I stared at it until the activity seemed to be at an end, then circumambulated it slowly. It was magnificent, imposing, dream-like. Except for the towel draped across the pebbly “beach.”

  “For pity’s sake, you guys,” I complained. “Couldn’t you at least’ve shoved it out of the way?” I reached for the towel and yelped as my fingers met clay instead of cloth. “Holy mackerel, it’s perfect!”

  Perfect, except for the finger prints I’d just left in the fleecy-looking surface. The nannies quickly fixed it.

  I shoved a neat stack of magazine clippings aside and perched on the workbench. This was incredible—the achingly weird and the boringly mundane combined in the same stupendous work of art. And it was all mine… Well, at least, most of it was.

  “Oh, you beautiful nannies,” I breathed. “Where did you get this one?” It had to be something fairly close at hand.

  I glanced down at the stack of clippings. On the bottom was the front p
age of a travel rag surmounted by a neat pile of smaller pictures that hadn’t made it into my “morgue” yet. The caption on the front page read: Ski and Scuba Among Australia’s Coral Castles. I moved the clippings so I could see it better. That was a coral castle, all right—right down to its embedded inhabitants. An inset showed a sun-washed beach. I looked at the clippings in my right hand—Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona was right on top. My eyes moved back to my—okay, our—sculpture. It was an almost perfect compromise between the similar yet distinct patterns in the photos.

  I frowned. Where the heck had the towel come from? I turned over the Gaudi and laughed aloud. A beautiful, fleecy bath towel dominated the half-page. It was an ad for a Bloomie’s white sale.

  Two days and a lot of clay, junk and magazine clippings later, I and my team of apprentices had a gallery annex-full of Zubin magic to show the world. It was a true team effort: I laid the foundation of surreality, offered the mega-nannies some raw materials and several “inspirational patterns,” and they did their best to make sense out of it all.

  I had to admit, I’d never worked so hard in my life or felt so creative. As I pushed myself to drag more and more original forms out of the ether, I realized that I had default patterns, too—and up until now, they’d been damn boring. But no more.

  And as an added bonus, other people seemed to find them interesting, too. By the time the Selection Committee came into the Gallery on Saturday morning, I’d already sold two pieces.

  “Oh, Nina!” whispered Professor Frewer in my ear. “This is more like it! Look, even Hirasuna is impressed.”

  She certainly seemed to be. She was nodding and scribbling like crazy. When she reached out and tried to pick up the towel at the base of Cosmic Castle, she even smiled. (Grant, ho!)

  “Quite remarkable,” she told me as they were leaving. “The juxtaposition of real and surreal is…magical. What inspired you to take such a dramatic artistic direction?”

  I shrugged. “Well, like I said before, I was just seeking my own style. You know, my own natural…default patterns.” I smiled brightly.

  “Well, you seem to have found them,” said Mr. Ripley. He shook my hand.

  Old, gruff Professor Goodwin shook it, too, hard enough to make his jowls shake. “Ahem. Good work, young lady,” he said.

  Professor Frewer hugged me, looking like a proud papa seeing his precocious precious off to college. I was rocking back on my heels, mentally counting my earnings, when Eugene came in. He looked like he’d run all the way from Swampscott.

  “Nina! Gosh, Nina, I swear I just got around to looking at my messages this morning. I was sort of distracted. I’m really sorry about all this.” He ran a hand through his rambunctious hair.

  Eugene, in case you hadn’t noticed, was always distracted. I think Distracted was his middle name. It was mean of me, but I decided to put him through the ringer for all the agony I’d been through on the road to victory. I scowled at him.

  “And just where the hell were you, Mr. Bulinsky, while I was being held hostage by your nano-terrorists?”

  He blushed and actually scuffed the floor with his foot. I’d never seen anyone do that before. “I was out hawking Bulinsky Mega-Nannies, trying to generate some interest in my programming.”

  “Hmmm,” I said sourly. “And did you?”

  He scuffed again. “Yeah, actually, I did. Now, I kind of wish I hadn’t. Gosh, Nina, I’m sorry they screwed up your artwork.”

  “Eugene Bulinsky, I want you to see exactly what your little beasties did to my artwork.” I led him into the annex (the Zubin Wing, I liked to call it) and stood him in front of the Castle.

  “Oh, gosh,” he said. He pushed his glasses up, then took them off and cleaned them. “Oh, Nina, I’m sorry. Is this terrible?”

  “Terrible?” I laughed out loud, then planted a wet one on his forehead. “Euge, you dwit, it’s incredible! I’ve sold three pieces since we opened this morning. And in about two weeks, I’ll be a granted resident of Boston University of Arts and Technologies.”

  He looked hopeful. “You mean, I’m not going to have to take my nannies back and reprogram them?”

  “Reprogram them? Euge! Eugene!” I tweaked both his cheeks. “Let me remind you of an old bit of wisdom: If the default pattern is in working order, reprogramming would be counter-productive.” I linked my arm through his and rocked back on my heels, surveying my magic kingdom. “In other words, Eugene: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  Chatauqua

  Nancy Jane Moore

  My wristband pinged. A text from Irene, sent hours back, just now getting through: “Keryn: Bus not running. Lost many to Dorcas virus, but contagion has passed. We need help.” GPS coordinates were attached, showing them in the hills outside Coalinga. Two hundred miles from Berkeley.

  Without treatment, Dorcas virus kills half the people who get it. It first hit epidemic status in rural areas of Central America. The bus often traveled along the US/Mexico border; likely they picked it up before useful information about it spread online, given the spotty internet in such regions. Before the virus reached the Bay Area, medical researchers had found it was transmitted by bodily contact—not airborne—and that an already developed antiviral reduced the death toll to ten percent. A good public health response had blocked the spread in the Bay Area and other functioning urban regions, but the epidemic had left a horrible toll in more rural parts of the country.

  I pinged Naheem at the hospital and Amanda in security to get help putting together a rescue trip. If Irene said there was no contagion on the bus, there wasn’t, but the virus could still be active in the area around Coalinga and other places between here and there. And there could be trouble even without the virus. The current drought has wiped out most of the farms and other work south of San Jose, leaving it with a mix of survivalists, gangs, and communes—some foolish, some benign, many dangerous. Best to be prepared for anything.

  Fortunately, both medical and security were willing to help, because I was going no matter what. I owe everything to Irene.

  We traveled in one of the university’s field work vehicles, a boxy truck covered with PV that could travel up anything that might pass for a road. It held an ambulance’s worth of medical equipment, sleeping bags and tents, multiple barrels of water, and several weeks worth of freeze-dried food. The university didn’t want its people to die if they got stuck outside civilization.

  Lin, one of Amanda’s security team who was also a paramedic, drove. Since the old federal highway system crumbled from lack of maintenance, people in the Bay Area have stopped driving much. Many don’t know how; between expanded public transit and the convenience of bicycling, few find the need. I learned to drive on the bus, but that was twenty years ago. I’m rusty.

  We made our way south through Oakland on International Boulevard, which is in pretty good shape—though slow—because of the buses that run along it. It’s a two-lane road, with community gardens and mini-parks in what were once extra lanes and parking spots. Solar panels top every roof, and each building—residential, retail, old warehouse or factory turned into some combination of the two—has a huge water tank set up to collect run-off from the roof during the rainy season. One of the reasons the Bay Area survived the parade of systemic crashes of the 2040s and ’50s was that it had already put in place renewable energy sources and water systems.

  Only the four of us went—a minimum crew for leaving the city. The university preferred sending larger teams when people left the safe confines of Berkeley and Oakland, but it was a month to spring graduation and many students and teachers were out in the field finishing projects. They had few people to spare. Still, we had support and permission. I’m not the only researcher at the university with ties to the bus, and I’d reached out to Naheem and Amanda in particular because I knew they’d had crew or students who’d come to Berkeley by way of Irene. That got us to telling stories about her.

  “The most intuitive guard
s I’ve ever had were people Irene referred to us,” Amanda said. “I’m not sure how they developed those skills. I didn’t want to ask, for fear I’d find out something the university couldn’t ignore.”

  Naheem laughed. “Yeah. I had two women several years back in the nurse/midwife program who probably got their background practicing medicine without a license. They should have been training as MDs, but they wanted a faster program so they could get back to the people who needed them.” He turned to me. “You seem to know her better than the rest of us. How’d you meet Irene?”

  “I grew up on the bus.”

  “You grew up with Travelers?” he said.

  I nodded.

  Travelers is the name Berkeley anthropologist Grace Wong gave to the various groups who took to moving around the country in old buses and RVs, offering entertainment and education to people who live in the places civilization forgot. She documented a troupe who travels the Great Plains, another in old Appalachia, some in the Old South and in New England. In Louisiana they are keeping Zydeco and Cajun music alive; one in Alaska documents those among the indigenous who still manage to fish despite the warming waters. These forgotten places have their own cultures, their own ways worth saving, and the Travelers collect those even as they entertain and educate.

  The bus I grew up on was called the Chatauqua Frontera—“chatauqua” because Irene, who was there from the beginning, liked the reference back to the nineteenth century educational movement of the same name, and “frontera” because a lot of the travel was along the US/Mexican border, though the bus did range up through California to the Pacific Northwest from time to time. Like most Travelers, they brought entertainment—plays, music, storytelling—along with news. They held workshops on everything from computer programming to the latest wrinkles in growing food with minimal water to making wooden toys. And here and there, they collected people who needed help or who had something that should be shared with a wider audience.