by Heide Goody
Mary, like Rufus Jaffle and Claire and all those others on higher Jaffle systems were all privileged, or (as I had come to realise) normal, fully functioning humans. The injustice of it was astounding. I found I was gripping my hands into tight fists. I’d dug my nails into my palms and left deep red nail marks. I could feel my face set in a grim frown.
“Not a fan of religious art, huh?” Helberg said.
I shook my head and tried to dispel my mood. We moved on.
Helberg was right about the perspective, these painters had made their scenes look a lot more realistic, although not quite in the same way as Dogs playing Poker.
We turned a corner. “Oh, crumbs!” I said.
We were faced with a room that was almost entirely filled with naked people. I wasn’t used to seeing other people without their clothes, and there were dozens of them.
Helberg moved through the room, gazing at them fondly. “Stunning, aren’t they?”
I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the pictures or breasts.
There were male nudes as well, and I took the opportunity to take a long hard look at how the painter had carefully captured the muscle definition and curls of hair. It was a pleasing sight. The penises were not as captivating as I’d expected them to be. I recalled what I had learned of sex in my earlier education and my more recent, circumspect research. I didn’t think any of these tiny penises would be up to the task for which they were intended.
“Getting an eyeful of wangs?” he said.
I blushed. “I researched the sex act.”
“The sex act,” he said, amused.
“And I really don’t see how a penis could penetrate anything. Look how small they all are.”
“Tiny dicks were very much in vogue back then.”
“But even…” I gazed around, looking for an example that more closely matched the images I had seen in my research. I started to make size gestures with my hand and Helberg grinned.
You need to research erections,” he said. “I think you’ll be impressed with the transformation that takes place between a flaccid—”
“Woah,” I said, automatically jipping erections. I looked at the penises in the room with new interest. Who could imagine they could spring into life like that? “Do they all do that?” I asked, astounded.
“These are just paintings,” he pointed out.
“Gosh,” I said. A funny feeling came over me, and not just the thrill of education. I looked at Helberg, the only actual man in the room. He caught me looking.
“Were you looking for a practical demonstration?” he asked wryly and walked on.
We moved through many more galleries. I started to get an idea of just how big this place was.
“Are all of the paintings here?” I asked.
“All of what paintings?”
“All of them. There are a lot.”
Helberg turned to me, his eyebrows high. “No, there are lots more. Luckily, most galleries are still open. There are places like this in most major cities.”
I tried to picture the scale of that, and found it really strange that people like Hattie and me could spend our whole lives never seeing any art at all. “Are these places only for people on higher Jaffle packages?”
Helberg laughed. “Well, this place and most of the big art galleries kind of predate Jaffle. But there’s a point to be debated. Some of the people who built these great halls of art, and the rich patrons who financed them, wanted to keep them sort of exclusive. Like the great art of the world needed protecting from the hoi polloi.”
“Figures,” I said.
“But others, just as rich, just as powerful, thought that places like these should be made open to all. That if you built great museums and art galleries and you invited the common people in, then—” He clutched at the air in search of words. “—people, everyone, would be enriched and elevated by the experience.”
“Huh.”
“Back then not everyone thought the lower classes should be happy with less. Not everyone would be satisfied with beans and Mr Smiley.”
I perceived a jibe and elbowed him.
“Have you got any idea of the type of picture you’d like to see more of?” Helberg asked. “I’ve done a lot of talking. Perhaps we should let some of the pictures speak for themselves.”
“How about some pictures with animals?” I suggested. I wondered if dogs participated in any other fanciful pastimes in paintings.
“Right, let’s have a look at the Victorians. They loved animal pictures.”
I followed Helberg as he wove down a series of corridors. We passed through a room filled with stone bodies. I would need to come back and look at that.
“Here we are. You’ll find animals in here.”
We went into a gallery crowded with smaller and more densely packed pictures. I stopped to look at one. It showed a sheep on a snowy, desolate landscape. At its feet was a dead lamb. The sheep had its head raised and seemed to be crying into the leaden sky for its lost child. Crows crowded around, their hungry gaze fixed upon the dead lamb.
I burst into tears. Literally. I went from “What’s that?” to tears pouring down my face in under five seconds. “That’s awful,” I sniffled.
“It’s called Anguish,” said Helberg. “Schenk painted a lot of animal schemes.”
“No.” I shook my head, trying to dislodge that horrible image. “Make it stop.”
“Hey, Alice, it’s all right.” Helberg put a tentative hand on my arm. I didn’t recoil from his touch. “Come and sit down.”
We sat on the bench. I eyed the painting and shook my head at the unfairness. “That poor sheep. Why didn’t the artist help it rather than just painting it?”
Helberg seemed surprised at my question. “Well, it’s possible he did. Paintings take days. Who knows what happens in the moment. The detail has been lost to history. It’s quite probable that the event never even occurred. Not like that, anyway.”
I sniffed. I wasn’t sure I could go on. I thought about the dead lamb. I thought about the dead mouse under Levi’s boot. I could picture it clearly in my mind’s eye even though I never actually saw it. “Surely, art is supposed to make us happy? Why would someone paint about sad things?”
Helberg gave me a small smile. It was a much nicer smile. “Art can make us happy, but it also challenges us, and stretches our experience. When would you ever have the chance to empathise with a sheep in your normal day-to-day existence?”
Empathise? It stunned me to realise that he was right. I looked up at Schenk’s sheep and gave it a small nod of respect.
“Come on.” I stood up. “Let’s do more art.”
I enjoyed the animals. The dogs from the old days were a different shape, I realised. They were either small enough to fit up a lady’s sleeve or they were long-legged things which stood with horses and ran behind carriages, for some reason. None of them pooped; at least not in the pictures.
Something clicked in my mind. “IFPA.”
“Gesundheit,” said Helberg.
“I wasn’t sneezing. I was—”
“The animal charity. I know. Overcome with a sudden urge to make a donation?”
“There’s a charity gala.”
“You don’t have to make a donation in person.”
In the borrowed memory from Rufus Jaffle, Henderson mentioned Rufus would be at a charity gala on the fifteenth. If the International Federation for the Protection of Animals had an upcoming gala, then I could go there to find Rufus. Jipping for more information was not hard. Jaffle Tech was indeed holding a gala in aid of IFPA, over on the ocean side of the city. As long as I could avoid the brain scan until then, I’d be able to get to Rufus and some answers.
Then I saw the event was a private corporate affair, mentioned in the events pages of news feeds and not open to the public. All the way home, I jipped for ways of getting a ticket but there didn’t seem to be an option for buying one.
I sighed as we walked back into the Shangri
-La Towers apartment complex.
“Hey, cheer up,” said Helberg. “The wonderful thing about art is that it’s an experience you can take away with you and…” He gestured, with an unconscious playfulness, to join him in his office. “I have an idea that might help you.” I stepped past my boxes of flowers which still cluttered the lobby.
He reached up to a shelf and placed an oily heap of scrap onto the floor. It looked like all of the other heaps of scrap that he had around the place.
I looked at him. I had no idea what I was supposed to say, so I said “Um.”
“This is Chuckie Egg.”
“Is it?”
“He’s my next bot project.”
I stared at the thing. I’d seen bots before and they did not look like this. Even Helberg’s craziest bots had plastic covers and you could usually tell the front from the back.
“Hang on,” he said, as if he knew what I was thinking. “The cover’s around here somewhere.” He clipped a shell onto it, and it had a form. It wasn’t a sensible form, but it looked a bit more like a bot.
“What does it do?” I asked.
“Well, that’s what I thought we could talk about. I reckon we can program it to do painting. It won’t be able to create masterpieces like we saw in the gallery, but if we want to redecorate the place, then Chuckie Egg can do a lot of the legwork.
“Wow! That sounds amazing. We tell Chuckie Egg to paint all of the doors a different colour and off it goes?”
“Yup. I’ll need to add an extension arm for it to reach the top. I’ll have it ready by tomorrow. Or…” He giggled. Patrick Helberg giggled. That wasn’t really something I’d seen him do before. He’d chuckled darkly. He’d leered. He’d grinned. He’d shown faint flickerings of human warmth. But giggle?
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “You head off. I’ve got things to do.”
***
Chapter 18 – 6th June – 13 days until Operation Sunrise
In the morning, Helberg called me. He didn’t jip me like an ordinary person, but put a voice call through to our apartment. Hattie got to it before me. She came into my bedroom.
“Helberg wants you to look out of the window,” she said flatly.
She was still angry with me. I had spilled paint on one of her precious Smiley Tots. I might as well have stabbed one in the face the way Hattie was reacting.
“Why does he want me to do that?” I asked.
“That’s the message: look out the window.” Hattie made a point of looking casually towards my window but not looking out, and left.
I slipped out of bed and crossed to the window. Square of sky above, neighbour’s apartments across the other side and then…
“Crumbs!”
The quadrangle below was being transformed into a picture of me. It was so clearly and obviously me, pinpoint perfect, but for the life of me I couldn’t see how it had been executed, until I saw the wobbly white dome cover of a bot. Chuckie Egg had a robot fist full of flowers – I guessed fuchsias from their colour – and was lying strips on the ground to make the edge of my cheek. Reds and purples and greens and browns and somehow the whole thing worked.
It was me.
I ran downstairs in my night clothes and burst into Helberg’s office. “Oh, my goodness,” I exclaimed. “How did you do that?”
Helberg slurped on the carton of greasy noodles he was apparently having for breakfast.
“Very simple really, O valued tenant. Screen grab of you from the security cameras. Turned it into a map for Chuckie Egg. I downloaded him a simple colour recognition and compositing program, gave him his palette of dead flowers and…” He gestured expansively with his chopsticks as though the whole thing was nothing at all.
“Did you have to kill all my flowers?” I said. The remaining, unused flowers were still piled up in boxes by Helberg’s office, and the gorgeous fragrance had diminished, replaced by an undercurrent of something unpleasant.
“You know the difference between a cut flower and a living plant?” he asked.
It felt like a trick question. When he phrased it like that, it seemed as though I ought to have realised flowers were alive when they were attached to plants, and not alive once they were cut. It had never occurred to me to consider it that way.
“Ri-iight,” I said. “So for making a garden, you need the living sort?”
He nodded.
I looked at the boxes and sighed. These were not going to be useful.
It was as if he could read my mind. “On a positive note, all the flowers Chuckie Egg’s been throwing around will compost nicely.”
“Compost?”
“You’ll want to learn all about composting if you’re to become a gardener. Look it up and I think you’ll see what can be done with all of these flowers.”
He was right. Compost was definitely on the cards. It helped with soil structure, which sounded important.
“What about plants then?” I asked. “We need to turn the quadrangle into a garden for everyone to enjoy.”
“Everyone?” he echoed. “What do you know about digging? Let me find some tools and show you what you need to do. When the digging is all done, we’ll get some plants delivered.”
I beamed at him.
It turned out that digging was really hard work, yet strangely satisfying. Helberg kept trying to pretend his involvement was purely managerial and that things would go better if he just offered guidance from the side-lines, but I made it very clear he owed his tenants this community garden. Eventually he sighed and joined me outside. We dug the flower portrait of me into the soil. Yes, we were destroying a beautiful thing, but it was never going to last. It created an unusual feeling in me, neither sad nor happy. I struggled to explain it to Helberg.
“I know that the flowers were dying anyway, but I feel odd destroying them.”
“Maybe one of the things people like about cut flowers is that it’s a transient thing,” he said. “A reminder that beauty, life, all of it is a temporary thing. Ephemeral.”
I jipped my literary booster. “That’s a nice word,” I said.
“Isn’t it.” He made a compost bin out of some of the discarded wood and piled the weeds I dug out into it.
“So when compost happens, tiny organisms eat up all of the waste and make new soil,” I said. I kept jipping more detail about compost, because it was so fascinating. “So even that poor dead lamb from the gallery would eventually decay and become soil?”
Helberg looked alarmed for a moment. “If you put whole carcasses on there it would get very smelly,” he said.
“I haven’t got any carcasses,” I said. “I just mean in theory.”
He looked relieved, and nodded. “Yep. Circle of life.”
I wondered what the soil under my feet had come from. Had living things decomposed to form all of this? How many things would that be? It was slightly overwhelming.
The digging left my arms tired and my hands dirty, but I loved it. Eventually it was all done and Helberg said we were ready for some plants. We went to his office where he asked me lots of confusing questions about the kinds of plants we should get. It seemed as though there was quite a choice. He sketched out a rough plan on the whiteboard and we talked about what should go where.
“What about bacon?” he asked, pointing at my to-do list, which he hadn’t rubbed off.
“I still haven’t got any,” I admitted.
“We could include a barbecue area.” He indicated a corner of the garden. “It’s sheltered here, you could install a barbecue and a small seating area.”
“Barbecue,” I said, jipping it hastily. “Oh. It’s a cooking device used out of doors.” It might be a useful way to try cooking.
Helberg nodded as if he was concentrating. He did that strange thing again: sort of jipping out loud. “Order interface. Sending list for delivery within two hours.”
I wanted to get to the bottom of why he did that, but I had work to do.
“I
’ll invite everyone down this evening,” I said. “This is going to blow them away. Did you order some bacon as well?”
He nodded.
“Fantastic!”
I composed an invite and jipped it to all residents:
You are all invited to a bacon sandwich barbecue party to celebrate the opening of the new community garden.
Venue: Central area
Time: 1800
As soon as the goods delivery arrived, Helberg got to work putting the barbecue together while I put the plants in the ground.
I planted broad Abelia shrubs, handling them carefully so as not to damage their pink bell-shaped flowers. I installed rows of weighty aloe plants with their stiff jagged leaves. I created an arrangement of echium, escallonia, salvia. I filled in gaps with hardy sedums, their leaves so dark as to almost appear grey – not the dull grey of the rest of my world but a subtle and beautiful dustiness.
I had to add water to them, which is all part of the care that plants need. I had a special device called a watering can which sprinkled water in a little shower, so that I could make sure each one had a drink.
I felt unbelievably happy.
***
Six o’clock arrived and the curious tenants started to drift down to see what we were doing.
“Well Alice, I’m sure I don’t know what you’re doing. Have you seen the state of this place?” said Swanager. She was pointing at the compost area.
“Don’t dwell on that,” I said. “Take a look at the plants. Aren’t they amazing?”
“You did this?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“No wonder you got dirt on your shoes.”
I swallowed down the mild anger she provoked in me. She didn’t know any better. It was up to me to try and stimulate some sort of response. I was convinced that I could make people on Jaffle Standard sit up and see what they were missing.
“If the garden does nothing for you, wait until you taste the bacon,” I said. “Can you smell that?” Helberg had some bacon on the barbecue and the smell was amazing.
Swanager turned her nose up, but it wasn’t the appreciative sniff that I’d been expecting, it was the expression of someone who’d seen something appalling.
