Regenesis

And that made her mad. And Mad always made her think.

And she wasn’t like Ya

“So sober, Ari,” Sam said.

“Thinking,” she said, and then thought that she’d used too harsh a tone, too much out of the dark depths of her heart. She set a hand on his shoulder and walked back to safety, Florian and Catlin attending.

Sam led them all back to the scissor‑lift, the someday lift shaft, and sent it back down into what would be the central hallway of the whole complex–right where Sam’s river would run.

“So?” Sam asked.

“Perfect! It’s just perfect!”

He gri

“So,” he said, “do you want to pick out colors?”

“Blue,” she said. “A blue couch. Just so it’s comfortable.”

“Cooler white walls, then, for blue.”

“Violet and cool white walls. Maybe some quiet blue‑greens. Pastel stuff. I want color.”

“That should be pretty,” he said. “Should be real pretty. Are you moving any of her stuff in?”

She gave a little twitch of the shoulders, thoughtless flinch. There was what she lived with. There was some in storage. Historic. Some really nice pieces, imports from Earth. Human history.

But human history had started over again on Cyteen. In cities founded, like Novgorod, mostly by azi, and going on into generations of freedmen–what did old Earth mean to them? What could it mean? Human history this lot of humans hadn’t replicated, had largely forgotten.

She didn’t have as many blank walls in the new place. Not as much room for paintings and sculptures.

And ought she to take those old paintings off her walls and lend them to a museum, or to the University down in Novgorod, and let people study them for what they were and try to figure out what it meant to lay paint on canvas, instead of commands into a computer?

Maybe the old things were important things to know. Maybe somebody should learn how to do it again.

“You’re thinking again,” Sam said. “Is something the matter?”

“No,” she said, and laughed, and laid a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “No. I was just wondering whether we ought to teach azi to paint.”

“To paint.” Sam laughed.

“Pictures. To paint pictures, like the old paintings. I think it might be good for them. Maybe it’s good for people. I think maybe I ought to let some of those paintings out, and see what they think.”

“They are pretty,” Sam said. “I always admired them.”

“They’re pretty. They’re alien as they can be. I can’t imagine trees that thick. That’s just strange. I think people would be looking at that, the green color, and not at the paint.”

“I think you’re actually supposed to,” Sam said, then. “You’re supposed to believe in them, and not the paint.”

“That’s a point.”

“What did you say about my little river? ‘I want to be amazed?’ I think the paintings are like that.”

He never ceased to surprise her. “So what do you think? Should I get into storage? Bring them out?”

He nodded. “I’ve seen them. Some aren’t that pretty. Some are spooky. But you feel something when you look at them.”

“Maybe I shouldlook at more of them,” she said, and found she’d gathered her arms around herself as if she’d met a chill in the air. It wasn’t just paintings. It was the first Ari’s mind. It was the images the first Ari had seen, lived with, picked out to surround herself with, out of everything she could have had. What even the first Ari might have flinched at, and hidden away.

And instead of building, the first Ari had surrounded herself with things out of old Earth. Priceless things…spooky things. Things that weren’t Cyteen.

Trust Sam to have looked at them, when he was about to build this place. With a heart that had no guilt, no preconceptions, he’d looked at them, when probing that deep into the first Ari’s stored artwork was something she’d zealously avoided. She hadn’t wanted to meet them. Hadn’t wanted to be surrounded by the first Ari’s mind, swallowed up, drowned in the first Ari’s acquisitions. She wanted some of her own.

But you felt something, Sam said. And Sam was always in favor of feeling things.

“Hang them all,” she said suddenly. “Hang the ones you like wherever you think they ought to be, in my apartment, in the corridors where people walk.”

“Hey, I’m the builder, not the decorator.”

“You know them, though. You’ve seen them. Hang the really spooky ones in the guest apartments.”

He laughed. “Wicked, Ari.”

She laughed, too. Laughing took the haunt out of her predecessor’s furnishings and made her think–maybe I ought to use more of them. I’m saving Denys’ stuff, and Giraud’s, to bend their successors’ brains into the old mold.

Maybe–it was a sobering thought–maybe I should meet her…finally. She’s the voice of Base One. I’ve always trusted her voice…

So what’s to be afraid of, in seeing what she saw, what she troubled to bring here out of old Earth?

“About the furniture, Sam, herstuff. Don’t strip her old apartment, the one I’m in. We’ll just lock it up, leave it as it was, just like Giraud’s, just like Denys’. With all the pictures that hang there.” In case they didn’t replicate her, but the first Ari, but she didn’t say that to Sam. “But with what’s in storage, if you can use it, never mind my colors–do it.”

“Her taste was a lot of brown and green.”

That was true. Along with occasional greens and golds in the paintings, alien greens, yellowy Earth greens like the lawn outside, like the plants in the vivarium, when every green growing thing native to the planet was tinged with blue and gray, and the ground was red. “Maybe I should do green and brown in this room, her green, water green. Old Earth brown. Oh, just make it fit, Sam.”

“I told you, I’m no decorator. I’m really not.”

“But you knew how to look at the paintings in the warehouse. You’ll know what to do with them. Surprise me.”

“That’s too many surprises, Ari.”

“No such thing,” she said suddenly, and remembered the first Ari saying, out of Base One, “ There are people who aren’t surprised because they don’t notice what’s surprising in the world and they just never wonder. And there are, much rarer, people who aren’t surprised because they always see what’s coming. When you’re a child, you’re surprised by most things. It gets rarer as the years pass. Surprises keep us sane. They set us into new territory. They give us something to think about, when same old things have been the rule. You can go to sleep for years with the same old things. Sleep can eat away at your life. And sleep can be dangerous.”

Not always good things, but maybe–maybe it was good for her to meet some things she hadn’t pla

And paint was cheap…until it made a thousand‑year‑old painting.

“No such thing, Sam. You’re king of surprises. You do it all. You pick.”

“You’re going to hate it!”

“I’ve never hated anything you’ve ever done. Don’t hold back. Give me the best place you can, with whatever of her stuff fits, and bring all the hidden stuff out where people can see it.”

“All right.” Sam said, and together they walked out of her apartment and on down the corridor, past scaffolding and into the vicinity of a good deal of cutting and banging–past doors that would belong to people she’d grown up with, and then downstairs by yet another scissor‑lift.

There was space for shops, besides the security quarters and wing admin–little hole‑in‑the wall shops where she and all the people who had a right to be here, and their staffs, could do something she didn’t ever get to do in the tight security Reseune had now, and just go shopping–well, at least they could order something to be in one of these shops and go down and look at it before they bought it off catalog: that was almostlike shopping.