The Sam Gunn Omnibus (81 page)

Everyone was caught by surprise. A
few startled gringos tried to photograph the picture that suddenly appeared
over their heads at sunset, but none of the photos showed the true size or
scope or even the actual colors of my Virgin. The colors especially were
impossible to capture, they were so pale and shimmering and subtly shifting
each moment. By the time television stations realized what was happening and
dispatched their mobile news units, the Virgin had disappeared into the
darkness of night.

All of North America went into
startled, shocked turmoil. Then the word spread all across the world.

Ionosphere paintings last only for
those precious few minutes of twilight, of course. Once the Sun dips below the
horizon, the delicate electrical effects that create the subtle colors quickly
disappear, and the picture fades into nothingness.

Except that the
information
which created the picture is stored in a computer,
gracias a
Dios.
Many years later, when it was safe for me to return
to Earth, I allowed the university to paint my Virgin over the skies of my
native land. I saw it at last the way it was meant to be seen. It was
beautiful, more beautiful than anything I have ever done since.

But that was not to happen for many
years. As Sam and I watched my Virgin fade into darkness he turned to me with a
happy grin.

“Now,” he said cheerfully, “the
shit hits the fan.”

And indeed it did. Virtually every
lawyer in the solar system became involved in the suits, countersuits, and
counter-countersuits. Dabney and his Moralists claimed that Sam had violated
their contract. Sam claimed that the contract specifically gave him artistic
license, and indeed those words were buried in one of the sub-sub-clauses on
the next-to-last page of that thick legal document. The advertising industry
was thunderstruck. Environmentalists from pole to pole screamed and went to
court, which prompted art critics and the entire apparatus of “fine art”—the museums,
magazines, charitable associations, social clubs, wealthy patrons and even
government agencies—to come to the defense of a lonely young artist that none
of them had ever heard of before: Elverda Apacheta. Me!

Sam and I paid scant attention to
the legal squabbles. We were sailing on my asteroid past the Moralists’
half-finished Eden and out far beyond Earth’s orbit. Sam’s “Lazy Fairy” was
crammed to its sizable capacity with propellants for the nuclear rockets
attached to The Rememberer. He jiggered the propulsion engineers’ computer
program so that my asteroid headed for deep space, out past even the orbit of
Mars, out to the Belt where its brother and sister asteroids orbited by the millions.

When the Moralists’ engineers tried
to come out and intercept “their” runaway, Sam gleefully informed them:

“This object is a derelict, under
the definition stated in the IAA’s regulations of space commerce. It is heading
for deep space, and any attempt to intercept it or change its course will be
regarded by the IAA and the world government as an act of piracy!”

By the time the Moralists’ lawyers
came to the conclusion that Sam was bluffing, we were moving fast enough and
far enough so that Dabney decided it would not be worthwhile trying to recover
my asteroid. The Rememberer sailed out to the Asteroid Belt, half a dozen
propulsion engineers were fired by the Moralists (and immediately hired by S.
Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited) and Sam and I spent more than a year together.

“AND THAT
IS how I became famous.” Elverda
Apacheta smiled slightly, as if someone had paid her a compliment she did not
deserve. “Even though I am a sculptress, I am known to the public for that one
painting. Like Michelangelo and the Sistine ceiling.”

Jade asked, “And Sam? You say he
spent more than a year with you on your asteroid?”

Now the sculptress laughed, a rich
throaty sound. “Yes, I know it sounds strange to imagine Sam staying in one
place for two days on end, let alone three hundred and eighty. But he did. He
stayed with me that long.”

“That’s ... unusual.”

“You must realize that half the
solar system’s lawyers were looking for Sam. It was a good time for him to be
unavailable. Besides, he wanted to see the Asteroid Belt for himself. You may
recall that he made and lost several fortunes out there.”

“Yes, I know,” said Jade.

Elverda Apacheta nodded slowly,
remembering. “It was a stormy time, cooped up in my little workshop. We both
had other demons driving us: Sam wanted to be the first entrepreneur to set up
operations in the Asteroid Belt....”

“And he was,” Jade murmured.

“Yes, he was. And I had my own
work. My art.”

“Which is admired and adored
everywhere.”

“Perhaps so,” admitted the
sculptress, “but still I receive requests to produce the Virgin of the Andes.
No matter what I do, that painting will haunt me forever.”

“The Rememberer is the most popular
work of art off-Earth. Every year thousands of people make the pilgrimage. Your
people will never be forgotten.”

“Perhaps more tourists would go to
see it if it were in a lower orbit,” the sculptress mused. “Sam worked it out
so that it swung through the Asteroid Belt, returned to Earth’s vicinity, and
was captured into a high orbit, about twelve thousand kilometers up. He was
afraid of bringing it closer; he said his calculations were not so exact and he
feared bringing it so close that it would hit the Earth.”

“Still, it’s regarded as a holy
shrine and one of the greatest works of art anywhere,” Jade said.

“But it’s rather difficult for
people to get to.” Elverda Apacheta’s smooth brow knitted slightly in an
anxious little frown. “I have asked the IAA to bring it closer, down to where
the tourist hotels orbit, but they have not acted on my request as yet.”

“You know how slow bureaucracies
are,” said-Jade.

The sculptress sighed. “I only hope
I live long enough for them to make their decision.”

“Did the Moralists try to recapture
your asteroid?”

“Oh no. That was the beauty of Sam’s
scheme. By pushing The Rememberer into such a high-velocity orbit, he made it
too expensive for the Moralists to go chasing after us. They screamed and sued,
but finally they settled on another one of the Aten group. More than one, I believe.”

“And Sam left you while you were
still coasting out in the Belt?”

She smiled sadly. “Yes. We
quarreled a lot, of course. It was not entirely a honeymoon trip. Finally, he
detached his ship to investigate some of the smaller asteroids that we had
discovered. He said he wanted to register a priority in their discovery. ‘It’s
the only way I’ll ever get my name in the history books,’ he told me. That was
the last I saw of him.”

“No further contact at all?”

“Oh, we called each other. We spent
hours talking. But he never came back to me.” Elverda Apacheta looked away from
Jade, toward the view of Earth in the lounge’s lone window. “In a way I was
almost glad of it. Sam was very intense, and so was I. We were not meant to
stay together for very long.”

Jade said nothing. For long moments
the only sound in the lounge was the faint whisper of air coming through the
ventilating ducts.

“The last time I spoke with him,”
Elverda Apacheta said, “he had a premonition of death.”

Jade felt her entire body tense. “Really?”

“Oh, it was nothing dark and
brooding. That was not Sam’s nature. He merely asked me someday to do a statue
of him exactly as I remembered him, without using a photograph or anything else
for a model. Strictly from memory. He said he would like to have that as his monument
once he is gone.”

“His statue on the Moon.”

The sculptress nodded. “Yes. I did
it in glass. Lunar glass. Have you seen it?”

“It’s beautiful!”

Elverda Apacheta laughed. “It does
not look like Sam at all. He was not a tall, dauntless explorer with a jutting
jaw and steely eyes. But it’s the way he wanted to be, and in a strange sort of
way, inside that funny little body of his, that is the way he really was. So
that is the way I made his statue.”

And she laughed. But the tears in her
eyes were not from joy.

Jade found her own vision blurring.
For the first time since she had found out the truth about her birth, she
realized that Sam Gunn, her own father, would have loved her if he had only
known she existed.

STANDING IN AN ARMORED
PRESSURE SUIT ON THE SHORE OF
the methane sea, Jade aimed her
rented camcorder at the huge fat crescent of Saturn peeking through a rare
break in the clouds that filled the hazy orange sky. The planet was striped
like a faded beach ball, its colors pale, almost delicate tones of yellow and
pink with whitish splotches here and there. The ring system looked like a
scimitar-thin line crossing its bulging middle, though the rings cast a wide
solid shadow on Saturn’s oblate disk.

“Dear Spence,” Jade said into her
helmet microphone. “As you can see, I’ve made it to Titan. And I truly do wish
you were here. It’s eerie, strange and beautiful and kind of scary.”

The clouds scudded across the face
of Saturn, blotting it from view. The sky darkened, and the perpetual gloom of
Titan deepened. Jade turned slightly and focused the camera on the methane sea.
It looked thick, almost oily. Near the horizon a geyser pushed slowly skyward,
a slow-motion fountain of utterly cold liquid nitrogen.

“It only took two months to get
here from Ceres on the high-boost ship. It was expensive, but the university
runs a regularly scheduled service to the campus here. Titan’s become
the
hub for studies of the outer solar system, although there are actually more
people living and working in the Jupiter system. Which is natural, I suppose,
since they discovered those giant whale things living in the Jovian ocean.”

Waves were lapping sluggishly
against the ice rocks on which Jade stood. The whole methane sea seemed to be
heaving itself slowly, reluctantly toward her.

“Tidal shift,” whispered a small
voice in her helmet earphones. “Please return to base.” She was being monitored
by the Titan base’s automated safety cameras, of course.

“The tide’s starting to come in,”
Jade said. “Time for me to get back to the base,” she swung the camera around, “up
on those cliffs. I don’t know how much of it you can see in this murk, but it’s
pretty comfortable—for a short visit. Like a college dormitory, I guess.”

She started walking toward the powered
stairs that climbed up to the cliff top.

“I do wish you were here, Spence.
Or I was there. I miss you. This will be the last interview for the Sam Gunn
biography. I’ll be coming back to Selene after this. It’ll take six months,
even at constant boost, but I’m looking forward to getting back home. Please
video me back as soon as you can.”

Two months of enforced inactivity
aboard the plasma torch ship that had brought her to Titan had given Jade
plenty of time to think about Spence Johansen.

She wanted to end her video message
with “I love you,” but found that she could not. I’m not sure of myself, she
realized. I’m not sure of him. There’ll be time enough for that when I get
back, she told herself. Then she added ruefully, if Spence hasn’t married again
by then.

SOLOMON GOODMAN LOOKED
very young to be a
famous professor and Noble laureate. He’s not much more than thirty, she told
herself.

Unlike most of the other people she
had interviewed, Professor Goodman had no qualms about talking to her. He had
immediately acceded to her request for an interview even before Jade had
reached Ceres, and had personally set her up with a reservation aboard the plasma
torch ship that had brought her out to Titan.

Now she sat in his office. What
looked like a large picture window was actually a smart screen, she realized.
A
beautifully clear image of Saturn showed on it,
obviously taken from a satellite camera above Titan’s perpetual cloud cover.
Jade could see the mysterious spokes in Saturn’s rings and the streaks of pale
colors banding the planet’s oblate body.