Cosmocopia (8 page)

Together, Lazorg and Crutchsump hauled the dead volvox back to the wain and heaved it aboard. They rested, panting, against the sides of the wagon, before refreshing themselves with some livewater.

“This one alone will net us a hefty sum,” said Crutchsump. “Shall we call it a day?”

Shading his eyes, Lazorg looked to the sunny skies. Another volvox, only a distant dot, seemed to be heading their way.

“No, we made a long trip out here. Let’s get the most for our efforts. And besides, I need my freedom as soon as possible—to paint.”

5. The Ideation Maker

PIRKLE RUSHED PAST AND got underfoot as Crutchsump, burdened with string bags full of groceries, descended the grit-strewn stairs to her flat, nearly causing his mistress to fall. But the bone scavenger recovered herself with a natural agility, and remonstrated with the wurzel.

“Pirkle! What’s the matter with you! Calm down!”

But the wurzel did not heed her words. Instead, he was capering about as if on the scent of some tasty quarry. A symphony of buzzes issued from his various diaphragms and sonic membranes.

As Crutchsump laid a hand on the doorknob, her own olfactory pits registered odd smells emanating from beyond the door. From inside the flat came explosive grunts and wordless exclamations.

Hastily, Crutchsump opened the door and entered, calling, “Lazorg! What’s the trouble!”

The privacy curtain was drawn, dividing the room in half, and Lazorg’s coarse cries issued from behind the drapes.

Pirkle darted below and past the barrier, buzzing furiously.

Crutchsump dropped the groceries and dashed the curtains apart.

Besieged by the jack-legged wurzel but ignoring the creature, Lazorg stood before an odd apparatus, the likes of which Crutchsump had never before seen.

A piece of cheap white shirt cloth had been stretched tight and nailed securely across an old window-frame. That assemblage had been propped at head-height on an improvised tripod of sticks lashed together with twine.

Lazorg held a cracked dinner plate in one hand. The plate was heaped with a variety of gelatinous colored stuffs. These mixtures were the source of the odd odors. In his other hand, Lazorg flourished a stick with a clump of longish animal whiskers bound to its tip with thread.

Even as Crutchsump watched, Lazorg continued what he had been doing. He furiously scooped up portions of the colored stuffs onto his whiskery stick, then stabbed at the cloth, smearing trails across the already-clotted fabric.

Lazorgs’s angry grunts cohered into words. “Damn you! Come together! Take shape! Obey me! Show yourselves! Why can’t I
see
!”

Crutchsump tentatively approached Lazorg. When she laid a hand gently on his arm, he finally registered her presence, as if waking from a dream. He ceased stabbing the cloth. His eyes betrayed his immense agitation. Suddenly, he dropped his tools and clung to her, weeping.

Awkwardly, Crutchsump patted Lazorg’s broad back. The big weight of him felt solid and comfortable in her arms, natural and acceptable—intimate.

This was the first time they had so embraced.

Reminded inescapably of past intimacies—mostly hurried, casual couplings with acquaintances of the Telerpeton slum at her own hardscrabble level, all now far in the past—Crutchsump half expected to feel Lazorg’s throbbing introciptor resting on her shoulder, just as hers now did on his, token of intercourse to come. The lack of any such mate to her organ left her emotions feeling thwarted, prevented them from attaining a higher stage.

Gradually Lazorg ceased his tears, and Crutchsump relinquished his embrace. She felt free to question him.

“Whatever were you trying to do?”

“I was trying to paint!”

“Painting is smearing smelly stuff on cloth?”

“Not smearing. Oh, yes, I was smearing madly at the end. But that’s just because I was so frustrated. Painting is carefully applying color to make a representation of something.”

“A representation? You mean, the way an ideation can represent a real object? But any ideation has to have the same number of dimensions as whatever it represents. How could something flat stand for something tangible?”

“It can, it just can! At least, it can where I come from. But here—here, I can’t make lines do what I want. I literally can’t see shapes on the canvas. Nothing coheres in my vision. It’s all just random blotches.”

“There’s simply no way to make something of lesser dimensions stand in for something of higher dimensions. Every child knows that.”

“I’m more foolish than a child then.”

“This matter is important to you? You can’t be happy with our current security?”

Since the day they had captured their first volvox of many, Lazorg and Crutchsump had enjoyed a much higher standard of living—nicer clothes, better food in greater quantities—thanks to Rheaume paying them well for exclusive rights to the rare blimp bones. Crutchsump had dared to begin to imagine moving from these shabby quarters, this benighted neighborhood of her birth and childhood and maturity. Perhaps some job opportunities less rude and objectionable would even present themselves with the change of scenery, a new career before she became too old and tired to scavenge bones. Then she and Lazorg could—

Could what? She never managed to envision any aspect of their new life beyond a finer apartment.

And what guaranteed that the ex-monster would even stay with her, once he got his feet fully beneath him?

But now Crutchsump pondered instead Lazorg’s obvious sincerity and puzzlement and drive to achieve his odd dreams.

“Plainly you believe in the possibility of this thing called ‘painting.’ But just as plainly, it doesn’t exist here. So we’ll have to see Palisander to solve the contradiction.”

Lazorg’s eyes brightened and his voice lifted. “That’s a fine idea! Let’s go now!”

“One moment. Let me clean up this mess.”

Crutchsump bent to pick up the fragments of the plate which had shattered on the hard floor when Lazorg dropped it. Her fingers came into contact with some of the substances thereon, and she brought them to the olfactory pits under her caul and behind her ears.

“Is this fish paste? And what else?”

“Oh, various foodstuffs from the market that exhibited the colors I wanted. All blended together to make the crudest paint.”

Crutchsump clucked her tongue. “Well, maybe at least we can salvage some condiments out of this artform of yours.”

A poor but proud and presentable family of six occupied the anteroom of the Cosmocopian temple where Palisander reigned. The parents were dedicating several sheafs of pungent chorny-scented incense in front of the model of the Cosmocopia, while the older children hung back. Rather irreverently the kids picked at the wax drips hanging like stalactites from the candelabra, at the same time they responsibly held the hands of the younger siblings. But then a guardian child pressed a blob of warm wax against the arm of another, causing the younger one to begin crying.

Lazorg chuckled. Crutchsump kicked his ankle.

The chagrined parents turned around to hush their children and hustle them out of the shrine. On the front of one of the parents was a smallish papoose-like carrier, its hypothetical rider concealed.

After the family had departed, Lazorg said, “What did that mother have strapped to her chest?”

“That was the father. Couldn’t you tell by the smaller size of his introciptor, relative to his mate’s?”

“I don’t have the same upbringing as you. I can’t gauge such things quickly and instinctively. Besides, I didn’t want to stare.”

“So long as a person’s caul is securely in place, there’s no way to embarrass someone with a look. As for the carrier—it held a newborn.”

“I would have liked to see that.”

“They can’t be exposed for too long during the first week after birth. They need protection.”

“Oh. Well, let’s go see our neighborhood noetic.”

Clatter of bead curtain and scent of a more rarefied private incense preceded their entry into the back room.

Palisander was taking his midday meal, caul knotted above his upper lip. He waved a spoon at his visitors, inviting them to take a seat on the floor, then licked the utensil clean.

“Ah, such exquisite looby porridge Lindfors makes! But it’s not cheap, no, not cheap at all….”

Crutchsump heeded the not-so-subtle prompting and deposited a handful of scintilla into a hammered brass plate meant for such offerings that would support Palisander and the shrine. She could hardly begrudge the noetic’s abstemious needs.

“Now,” said Palisander, after the coins had clinked, “what brings you two here today? Is it marital advice you need, perhaps? The whole district is buzzing about your new arrangements, Crutchsump. That Rheaume is a gossip! I know there’s been no official enactment of vows between you, but as you well know, relations are naturally looser here in the Telerpeton. After all, we live far from the Grand Shrine at Shamoo, and the salons of Arcuze!”

Crutchsump tried to interrupt the mistaken flow of advice, but Palisander rushed on.

“Lazorg, pay heed! I suspect your alien trepidations are at fault here, the burr beneath the saddle. You’ve got a splendid mate in Crutchsump. How many beings would have taken pity on a disquietingly crippled exile from another plane and offered them shelter and a shared bed? And you physically unable to satisfy her natural desires, like any normal husband! What a paragon she is! You must cherish her and do your best to be a good spouse, despite any minor differences of temperament, any ordinary hardship which circumstances might erect in your way.”

Palisander wound down his peroration and awaited a grateful word.

Crutchsump felt herself blushing beneath her caul. Lazorg exhibited only a stolid quiet, although he could be seen to fidget slightly.

“Honored Noetic,” Crutchsump finally began, “while we appreciate receiving your wisdom, our actual errand is at cross-purposes to your sound advice. Lazorg, please explain….”

Lazorg began to lecture on his native-plane artform known as “painting.” Palisander listened attentively, as Lazorg grew more and more animated, describing the glory of colors and lines arrayed linearly on a flat surface to simulate substantiality. When the visitor from far beyond Sidetrack City had finished, Palisander pondered his words silently for a time, then spoke.

“I can vaguely envision the technics you describe. But the physics of this world simply does not allow the creation of such representations. Or it may be that the physiology of our bodies, the capabilities of our senses, the interior conjunctions of our mind, are at fault. But in either case, your quest is a futile one, and you would be well advised to abandon it, before you bring more useless grief upon yourself.”

Lazorg clutched his head. “But what shall I do instead! I’ve been given a second life, but for what? To collect bones in the street?”

Crutchsump felt a brief flare of guilt and indignation at Lazorg’s demeaning of her profession. But she released the irksome emotion before it could fester.

Lazorg released his grip on his skull. “Maybe I could sculpt! That’s it! I’ll sculpt!”

Crutchsump eyed Palisander, who returned her baffled gaze.

“‘Sculpt?’ What is it, to ‘sculpt?’”

Lazorg jumped up and loosed a wordless howl before recovering himself. “Don’t tell me you don’t know sculpting! I’ve seen sculptures everywhere. You’ve got one right outside your doorway here. The model of the Cosmocopia—”

“Oh, you mean ideations. Do you not know how ideations are produced?”

Lazorg sunk back down to the floor. “Not another quirky aspect of this place. Please, I can’t take it. …”

Palisander had reached around and was rummaging under his bed. He pulled out a long wooden wand with an obvious hand-grip at one end and a set of curious irregular protuberances near the pointed tip.

“This is a tranche. It’s not a very good one, I’m afraid, because I’m not a very good ideator. Strictly an amateur. Watch.”

Palisander lofted the tranche and began poking at the empty air. The tranche met no obvious resistance to its prodding—until Palisander hit a certain spot. There, the tranche seemed to catch and hang.

“An interstitial node. They’re everywhere, really.”

The tip of the tranche disappeared into some subtle flaw newly opened up in spacetime. Palisander worked the invisible tip about for a time, then withdrew it.

Attached to the tip of the tranche was a sizable blob of glowing ivory stuff.

“Cosmocopian nacre. Now, watch!”

Palisander continued to maneuver the tranche with blob attached in a circuitous path through the air: dipping, weaving, bobbing.

Lazorg appeared fascinated. The performance, thought Crutchsump, who had not often enjoyed the leisure time to watch ideators publicly create since the days when she was a carefree child, had something of a dance about it, something of a glassblower’s actions, and something of the drunken flight of a swamp bee.

“This is the stage where skill and artistry are most involved. The physical dexterity of the ideator must be matched and complemented by his mental acuity and emotional sensitivities, projected through the tranche, as he imposes his vision on the nacre.”

The blob gradually began to take on an altered shape and coloration. The conclusion to the process was signaled by the completed object detaching itself from the now-clean tranche and falling to the floor, where it clunked and bounced but did not break.

Lazorg shifted his rump to reach and claim the ideation. He held it in his palm, and Crutchsump could discern that it was a crude model of the Cosmocopia, like the grander one out front.

“You can see that I was not being merely self-effacing when I claimed amateur status. Compared to the genuine Arbogast creation out front, this trinket is a muddy lump. But you may feel free to take it with you, as an expression of my concern for you. Now, if there’s nothing else troubling you …?”

Lazorg said, “This fellow Arbogast—He lives locally?”

“Yes. He’s Telerpeton’s most famous ideator. He could certainly afford to make his lodgings in a more exclusive neighborhood, but he retains an affection for the district of his birth. He donated the ideation up front out of the goodness of his heart!”