The Sam Gunn Omnibus (80 page)

Sam’s face appeared on the screen,
a half-guilty boyish grin on his face. “Still mad at me?”

“No, not really.” And I realized it
was true even as I spoke the words. I was angry at Dabney and his smug Moralist
power; angry at myself, mostly, for wanting to carve The Rememberer so much
that I was willing to let them do whatever they wanted, so long as they left me
alone.

“Good,” said Sam. “Want me to bring
some breakfast over to you?”

I
shook my head. “I
think not.”

“Got to make a course change in
another couple hours,” he said. “So I can bring this can of worms to Eden.”

“I know.” He would be leaving me,
and I could not blame him if he never returned. Still, it was impossible for me
to allow him to come close to me. Not now. Not this soon after the deal he had
struck. I knew he had done it for me, although I also knew he had his own
reasons, as well.

“Listen—I can get somebody else do
design the pictures for the Moralists. You don’t have to do it.”

He was trying to be kind to me, I knew.
But my anger did not abate. “Who draws the pictures doesn’t matter, Sam. It’s
the fact that the advertisements will be spread across the sky. For
them.
That disgusts me.”

“I’m doing this for you, kid.”

“And for the profits,” I snapped. “Tell
the whole truth.”

“Yep, there’s a pot full of money
in it,” Sam admitted. “You wouldn’t have to depend on your university grant
anymore.”

“Never!” I spat.

He grinned at me. “That’s my girl.
I would’ve been disappointed if you agreed to it. But I had to ask, had to give
you the first shot at the money.”

Money. Art and money are always
bound together, no matter what you do. The artist must eat. Must breathe. And
that requires money.

But I stubbornly refused to give in
to the temptation. I would
not
help that slithering
Dabney to spread his advertising filth across the world’s sky. Never.

Or so I thought.

THINGS HAPPENED SO
fast over the next few weeks that,
to this day, I am not entirely certain how the chain of events began. Who did
what to whom. I am only certain of one thing: Dabney had no intention of
carrying out his part of the bargain he had struck with Sam, and he never did.

I
was alone again,
and missing Sam terribly. For three years I had lived in isolation without a
tear or a regret. I had even relished the solitude, the freedom from the need
to adjust my behavior to the expectations of others. Sam had burst into my life
like a joyful energetic skyrocket, showering pretty sparks everywhere. And now
that he was gone, I missed him. I feared I would never see him again, and I knew
if he forgot me it would be my own fault.

Suddenly my sorrowing loneliness
was shattered by the arrival of a team of two dozen propulsion engineers, with
legal documents that stated they were empowered to move my asteroid to Eden,
where it was to be broken up and used as structural material for the Moralists’
habitat.

Without thinking twice I put in a
frantic call for Sam. It turned out he was halfway around the Earth’s orbit. He
had delivered his worms to Eden and was now on his way back to the Moon to pick
up electronics components for a new construction site at the L-4 libration
point.

There were no relay stations around
Earth’s orbit in those days. My call had to fight past the Sun’s coronal
interference. Sam’s image, when he came onto my comm screen, was shimmering and
flecked with pinpoint bursts of light, like an old hologram.

As soon as he said hello I unloaded
my tale of woe in a single burst of unrelieved fury and fear.

“They’re taking possession of the
asteroid!” I finished. “I told you they couldn’t be trusted!”

For once in his life Sam was silent
and thoughtful. I watched his expression change from mild curiosity to shocked
surprise and then to a jaw-clenched anger as my words reached him.

At last he said, “Don’t go off the
deep end. Give me a few hours to look into this. I’ll call you back.”

It took almost forty-eight hours. I
was frantic, my emotions swinging like a pendulum between the desire to hide myself
or run away altogether and the growing urge to take one of the high-powered
lasers I used for rock carving and slice the propulsion team into bite-sized
chunks of bloody dead meat.

I
tried to reach
Sam a thousand times during those maddening horrible hours of waiting. Always I
got one of the crew members from his ship, or a staff person from his
headquarters at the Earth View Hotel. Always they gave me the same message: “Sam’s
looking into the problem for you. He said he’ll call you as soon as he gets
everything straightened out.”

When he finally did call me, I was
exhausted and ready for a straitjacket.

“It doesn’t look good,” said his
wavering, tight-lipped image. Without waiting for me to respond, Sam outlined
the situation.

The Right Reverend Virtue T. Dabney
(his T stood for Truthful, it turned out!) had screwed us both. The Moralists
never withdrew their claim from the IAA’s arbitration board, and the board had
decided in their favor, as Dabney had expected. The Moralists had the right to
take my asteroid and use it as construction material.

Worse still, Sam’s cargo of worms
had arrived at Eden in fine, slimy, wriggling earthwormy health. And even worse
than that, Sam had signed the contract to produce the ionospheric
advertisements for the Moralist Sect. The deal was set, as legal and legitimate
as an act of the world congress.

“If I don’t go through with the
ads,” Sam said, strangely morose, “the bastards can sue me for everything I’ve
got. They’ll wind up owning my hotel, my ships, even the clothes on my back.”

“Isn’t there
anything
we can do?” I pleaded to his image on my screen.

For long minutes he gave no
response, as my words struggled across nearly three hundred million kilometers
to reach him. I hung weightless before the screen, suspended in the middle of my
shabby little compartment while outside I could
feel
the thumps and clangs of the propulsion team attaching their obscene rocket
thrusters and nuclear engines to my asteroid. I felt like a woman surrounded by
rapists, helpless and alone.

I
stared so hard at
Sam’s image in my screen that my eyes began to water. And then I realized that
I was crying.

At last, after a lifetime of agony,
Sam’s face broke into a sly grin. “Y’know, I saw a cartoon once, when I was a
kid. It was in a girlie magazine.”

I
wanted to scream
at him. What does this have to do with my problem? But he went on calmly,
smiling crookedly at his reminiscence, knowing that any objections from me
could not reach him for a quarter of an hour.

“It showed these two guys chained
to the wall of a dungeon, ten feet off the floor. Chained hand and foot. Beards
on them down to their kneecaps. Totally hopeless situation. And one of the
guys—” Sam actually laughed! “—one of the guys has this big stupid grin on his
face and he’s saying, ‘Now here’s my plan.’“

I
felt my lungs
filling themselves with air, getting ready to shriek at his nonsense.

“Now, before you blow your top,”
Sam warned, “let me tell you two things: First, we’re both in this together.
Second—well... here’s my plan.”

He kept on speaking for the next
hour and a half. I never got the chance to object or even get a word in.

THAT
IS H0W I came to paint the first picture in Earth’s ionosphere.

Sam had expected me all along to
draw the advertisements for him. He never planned to use another artist. “Why
should some stranger make all that money?” was his attitude.

While the propulsion engineers
fitted out my asteroid with their nuclear rocket systems and supply ships from
the Moon towed huge spherical tanks of gaseous propellants, Sam relayed the
Rev. Dabney’s rough sketches of what the ionospheric advertisements should look
like.

They were all photographs of Dabney
himself, wrapped in pure white robes with heavenly clouds of gold behind him
and just the hint of a halo adorning his saintly head.

I
would have
trashed them immediately if I had not been aware of Sam’s plan.

The timing had to be perfect. The first
ad was scheduled to be placed over the midwestern section of the United States,
where it could be seen from roughly Ohio to Iowa. If everything went the way
Mountain McGuire and T. Kagashima claimed it would, the picture would drift
slowly westward as the day/night terminator crawled across the Earth’s surface.

Sam himself came to visit me on the
day that the first ad was to be produced. He was in the latest and largest of
his cargo carriers, the
Laissez Faire,
which he jokingly referred to as “The Lazy Fairy.”

My asteroid was already on its way
to Eden. The propulsion engineers had connected the last of their propellant
tanks, turned on their systems, and left me alone to glide slowly, under the
low but steady thrust of the nuclear rockets, to a rendezvous with Eden. They
would return in a few days to make final course corrections and take me off the
asteroid forever.

Sam looked absolutely impish when
he stepped into my compartment. His grin was almost diabolic. My place was an
even bigger mess than usual, what with the sketches for the advertisements
floating here and there and all my other sketches and computer wafers hanging
weightlessly in midair.

“How can you ever find anything in
here?” Sam asked, glancing around.

I
had remained at my
drawing board, behind it actually. It formed something of a defensive shield
for me. I did not want to fling myself into Sam’s arms, no matter how much I really
did want to do it. I couldn’t let him think that I was willing to be his lover
again in return for the help he was giving me. I couldn’t let myself think
that, especially because it was very close to being true.

He gave no indication of expecting
such a reward. He merely eyed me mischievously and asked, “You really want to
go through with this?”

I
did not hesitate
an instant. “Yes!”

He took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m game
if you are. The lawyers have checked everything out. Let’s do it.”

I
slid out from
behind my drawing board and went to the computer. Sam came up beside me and
activated my communications console. For the next half-hour we were all
business, me checking my drawing and Sam connecting with McGuire and Kagashima.

“I’m glad they attached the rockets
and that other junk to the end of the asteroid you haven’t carved yet,” Sam muttered
as we worked. “Would’ve been a crime if they had messed up the work you’ve already
done.”

I
nodded curtly,
not trusting myself to look into his eyes. He was close enough to brush against
my shoulder. I could feel the warmth of his body next to me, even while I sweated
with cold apprehension.

Working together as a team linked
across hundreds of millions of kilometers, Sam, McGuire, Kagashima and I painted
the first picture high in the ionosphere of Earth. From my computer my design
went forth to a set of electron guns on board the same orbiting station that
housed Sam’s hotel. In the comm screen I saw the picture forming across the
flat midsection of North America.

The Virgin of the Andes.

I
had no intention
of spreading the pompous Dabney’s unctuous features across the sky. Not even
the
Norte Americanos
deserved that. Instead I had
drawn a picture from my heart, from my childhood memories of the crude
paintings that adorned the whitewashed walls of my village church.

You must understand that it was
years before I myself saw my creation in the way it was meant to be seen, from
the ground. All I had to go on that day was the little screen of my comm
system, and even there I was seeing the Virgin backwards, like looking at a
stained glass window from outside the cathedral.