Evolution's Darling

Chapter 22

CHILD'S PLAY

They left the gallery quietly, making a game of their silence.

Beatrix led Darling through a half-kilometer of low, repetitive welfare housing, where they accumulated a following of local children, all biological. Some called to Beatrix by name, or offered taunts in a dialect that Darling's translators failed to parse, but all kept a good distance. When the two reached the edge of the hot, featureless sands, their pursuers quickly gave up.

The edge of the Blast Event crater curved toward them as they made directly toward a hill in the distance. They walked in conspiratorial silence, and Darling wasn't sure if the hill were destination or landmark. It had been half consumed by the hard edge of the explosion's radius, and the stresses of its new shape had caused precipitous cracks to form on its craterward edge.

Beatrix moved slowly once they reached the rougher terrain near the crater, picking her way with the deliberate and dainty care of a cat on a crowded mantlepiece.

"With your permission," Darling offered, and lifted her onto his shoulders. She laughed out loud, her legs spreading to straddie his neck. She weighed very little, and skillfully adjusted her torque extension and arms to aid his balance on the rocky path.

When they reached the hill, he offered to let her down, but Beatrix guided him on up with kicks and gestures, like some metal equestrie

They topped a treacherous ridge, probably impassable to humans, and Darling found himself looking down into a deep caldera.

It was forested with sculptures. Vaddums.

Hundreds.

Hirata took Mira to see the second Vaddum.

She led Mira deep into the gallery, to a storage area where hulking shapes lurked under dropcloths. The floor here was dusty; Mira could see where the wind's tendrils reached under the large loading door, painting designs in the invading sand.

The second Vaddum was uncovered, mounted on a lifter frame that hovered a few inches off the ground: out of the dust's immediate reach. To Mira's eye, it wasn't much different from the first except for a flourish of copper spirals bursting from its top.

Hirata looked up at the piece, momentarily distracted from the wiles of Mira's dress. That wouldn't do. Perhaps it was time to enhance their bond.

Mira stood close behind Hirata, letting her hands rest on the swell of the woman's hips. In the darkness, Hirata's breath quickened slightly.

"It's beautiful," Mira whispered, letting the second word send a gust of air against the back of Hirata's neck.

"One of his best," Hirata said, her voice a little strained. Her hands were at her sides, flexing as if unsure where to go. Mira took them in her own, commanding another invisibly thin section of the dress to slip onto them. The layer was thick enough to impell slight pressure to the nerves in the hands, to massage Hirata at the threshold of tactility. She felt Hirata relax as the pulsing substance took a measure of her tension away. But the dress couldn't really work its magic unless Hirata was staring at it.

"Let me speak frankly, though," said Mira, turning Hirata toward her.

Mira smiled when she saw the woman's face. Hirata's eyes were as glassy as ever. The metallic glow of the Vaddum in the dark, silent room had only deepened her trance.

"No artwork is complete without the artist. Isn't it so?"

The woman's eyes were transfixed on Mira's breasts, where the soothing whorls of the dress's pattern had concentrated themselves.

"But Robert is dead…" she muttered.

"Not really dead," Mira answered. She paused for a moment, squeezing Hirata's hands with the edges of her fingernails. A panicked look came into the woman's eye. Mira released the pressure. "His art lives on."

Relief again. A smile and a nod.

Mira let the calm return and deepen in her willing victim, touching cheeks, forehead, the tiny hollow between nose and upper lip. Coated with its substance, the tips of Mira's fingers danced with the seductive patterns of the dress, impressing promises directly onto Hirata's flesh. As an experiment, Mira kissed the woman softly on the lips. Hirata simply smiled in return, the breach of social protocol lost in the warm glow of hypnosis.

"I so wish that I had met him. That I could have talked to him," Mira said, a plaintive note entering her voice. She felt the coating on her hands heat slightly, undergoing a change to become slightly caustic. She touched Hirata on the temples, the lips, and watched a frown bloom.

"Just a few words, a few essential questions about his art," Mira murmured.

She grasped Hirata's wrist, the nail of her thumb pressing harder and harder into soft flesh. In her peripheral vision, she saw the patterns of her dress intensify, become dizzyingly fast. A small, pained sound came from between Hirata's lips.

"But, of course, I never can," Mira added, nodding with acceptance. Again, the dress, her voice, the agents she had released upon Hirata's body soothed the woman, nudged her back toward a relaxed state. Mira reduced her pressure on the captive wrist, and felt a slight movement on her thumb, a fleck of matter crawling from her. She had broken Hirata's skin just enough to admit a tiny splinter of the dress into her bloodstream. It would work there to follow the subtle shifts of tension and release, of itch and scratch, of Vaddum alive and Vaddum gone.

Mira touched Hirata some more, kissed her a few times on the neck and arms, her lips now alive with a host of tiny whirlpools. Hirata waited, silent, for the next change. She was wanting it now, addicted in some small measure to the ebb and flow, needing it as if a pulsing, cycling music held her in its charms.

"But just to see his eyes," Mira said. "Have you ever seen his eyes?"

"Yes." A whisper in the dark.

"Is he alive?" A wave of subtle irritants, pains, tensions, nagging memories of things left undone, of potential unfulfilled. Hirata shook her head, no, no.

"Were they lively eyes?"

Relax. Relax.

You are in good hands.

Darling carried his young rider through the forest, the sun dappling the ground with shadows and reflections cast from the metal trees. The leaves shimmered in the light breeze of the protected basin, and he realized that the new Vaddums were not indoor pieces; they were designed to dance in this measured wind. He saw far better now the trajectory of Vaddum's work, the assembled sculptures providing the missing links between the sculptor's pre-Blast work and the piece in Flex's gallery.

Darling was amazed that so much had been accomplished in seven years. An advantage of being thought dead, he supposed. Or perhaps the whole project was older than the Blast, a hidden garden never offered for sale.

As they walked, Darling detected a presence in the forest. An artificial was following them cautiously, wrapped in military stealth alloys, its AI core so carefully shielded that he could only sense its space-curving effects indirectly; the thin copper leaves of the trees returned only the subtlest clues of its passage.

"Do you feel her?" asked Beatrix when Darling extended his sensory strands. "I thought only I could feel her."

Darling frowned. The child's limited sensory apparatus shouldn't be able to detect the creature. It skirted his probes like a trick of the imagination.

"She follows me, sometimes," Beatrix said. "She's a secret, too, like the sculptor. My secret twin."

More secrets, Darling thought. He kept walking, and the unknown creature followed them.

It took longer than expected.

Hirata Flex must have held the sculptor's confidence for many years, perhaps since before the Blast Event, a conspirator in Vad-dum's copying. The old habit of lying died hard.