died a couple of thousand deaths. "No. And I'd like to."
She opened up the small locket she wore around her neck, took out her
portfolio, and
handed it to me. I took out my pocket reader, slid her portfolio into the slot
on the back, and raised it to my eyes.
"Look at the last ten especially," she said. "Remember the aurocs-de-mer?"
"They're hard to forget."
"That's the last ten."
I pressed the codes to see the last ten paintings; Aimeric and Bruce were
gabbling on about somebody's dead third cousin.
"If you hate them and think they're really terrible lie," Bieris said. I
glanced up from the eyepiece and she had that bent grin I remembered from
childhood and schooldays.
When had I seen her smiling like that last? Maybe graduation day
when the faculty toilets had suddenly erupted just when they were all in
there putting on their formal robes. And where had that side of Bieris gone
when she got involved in finamor with
Aimeric?
Thinking of that in my career of six entendedoras, what had any of
them actually thought about me?
What were their memories like?
I doubt Bieris knew my thoughts, but she could see I was thinking, so she
waited a long breath before pointing to the reader I still held.
I put the reader to my face. My breath slowly sighed out. The
painting was extraordinarily well done; I realized with a guilty start that
if Bieris had been male, she'd have been ranked with the very best of
the jovent painters. And its quality was not merely in clarity of
composition or simple technique, though both were superb, but in the sharp
intelligence of its seeing. I could almost feel my own memory of the day slide
away as this took its place. It was Bieris who had truly seen the huge herd
that poured over the riverbank, the soft reds, browns, and yellows of the
plains.
I flipped to the next painting and looked out across the plains to the first
rising smoke of the oncoming fire; to the next and saw a terrified
auroc-de-mer struggling in the mud;
and on through them. It would take many repeat visits for me to really say I
understood the work.
As always when praising art, I began to speak in Occitan, and then
stopped, strangling conventional forms in my throat there didn't seem to be
any words for the way these paintings made me feel. There was
something missing in the Occitan perception
Page 46
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
I raised the reader to my eyes again, and flipped back to the first one, and
there in the background was the shining specular blur of red sunlight
bouncing off the pipelines feeding the polar glaciers. In the next, the
auroc-de-mer died framed by the scaffolding that carried the muck pipeline
into the areas being planted in forests.
Her wide landscape of the great intrusion of plains into the gorge revealed,
on the horizon, a blue-white plume dancing in the red sky hydrogen from the
ocean, brought five hundred km by pipeline and burned to get water into the
air in the huge dry basin around the South Pole. The rocks themselves in the
gorge showed the not-yet-weathered melting and glass fragments from the
many directed meteor impacts that had been needed to give the basin an
outlet to the sea.
In other paintings the power lines for the heaters that kept permafrost from
forming, the concrete baffles that slowed and bent the Great Polar River so
that it flowed like a much older stream, and even the high dams on
the mountain gorges were clearly visible. You could look through four
centuries of Occitan landscapes and never see one of those things. Every
painting of the South Pole I had ever seen had shown trees bending
over the river, little lakes and pools lying everywhere, and forests
on the
distant mountains the way it would look in four hundred years when it was
done, not the way it was today.
When I looked up at her, it was with the painful realization that she was more
artist than I would ever be, and that if I would have anything to brag about
from my jovent days, it would be my friendship with her.
"We talked about it," she said. "On Wilson, people want paintings of what
everything will be like when the terra-forming is complete."
"But Bieris here on Caledony, there's no art at all, and ... these are
spectacular! Back home such an exhibit that could make your career!" A thought
struck me. "Have you shown Aimeric?"
She made a face. "You must be joking."
I dropped the subject. "So if you're painting like this, why are you hanging
around here as a farmhand?"
She grimaced at me. "Then you haven't really seen Sodom Basin, either."
At least I knew the right thing to say. "No, I haven't. Tell me. Or if you
can't tell me, I'll just wait for the paintings."
"You might have to wait for the paintings to fully explain it," she warned.
"But it's the light, and the reflections off the snow on the Pessimals, and
how green everything is "
"But what is it you can see as a farmhand that you can't see by just being
there in your off hours? Or do you just want to avoid the trip every day?"
All of a sudden, finally, she was really smiling at me in a way I couldn't
remember since puberty had hit us both. I liked that more than I
could have said. "You do understand," she said.
"A little, maybe. Explain it slowly, in little words, companhona."
It was a silly word to use, one that just slipped out the feminine of
our word for a close friend, but in [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]