Engineman - Eric Brown [152]
The crystal stood angled on a plinth at the far end of the long room, a fused rectangular slab coruscating like diamond. Earlier, there had been a queue to experience the work of Santesson's latest find. And, when the guests had actually laid hands on the crystal, they were staggered. The critics were pretty impressed, too - and that pleased me. I wanted to communicate my experience of the supernova to as many people as possible, allow them to live the last flight of the John Marston. Critical acclaim didn't always guarantee popular success, but I was sure that the originality of my art would catch the imagination of the world.
This was the first social gathering I'd attended since the accident, and I was uneasy without Ana.
As the party wore on, I eased my way to the bar and drank a succession of acid shorts. With diminishing clarity I watched the guests circulate, and tried to keep a low profile. This wasn't too difficult. The press-release had been brief and to the point. I was described as the sole survivor of an incredible starship burnout, but Santesson's publicity manager had failed to mention the fact that I had no face. Now there was a clique of artists here from the radioactive sector of the city who had taken over the select towerpiles deserted since the meltdown. These people wore fashion-accessory cancers, externalised and exhibited with the same panache as others might parade pet pythons or parakeets. One woman was nigrescent with total melanoma, another had cultivated multiple tumours of the thyroid like muscatel grapes on the vine. I spotted one artist almost as ugly as myself, his face eaten away by some virulent strain of radioactive herpes. They were known in art circles as the Strontium Nihilists, and tonight I was taken as just another freakish member of their band. The observant guest might have wondered, though, at the steel socket console that followed the contour of my dented cranium, or the remains of the occipital computer that had melted and fused with my collarbone.
From my position at the bar I watched Christianna Santesson as she moved from group to group, playing the perfect host. She was a tall blonde woman in her early sixties with the improved body of a twenty-year-old and a calculating business brain. Her agency had a virtual monopoly of the world's greatest artists, and when I joined her stable Santesson had never lost an opportunity to press me for the secret of the fusion process. She told me that she had people who could produce mega-art on my fused consoles, but I wasn't selling.
I was on my fifth acid short when a white light like the nova I'd survived blinded my one good eye. I raised an arm and called out. Silhouetted in the halogen glare I made out the hulking forms of vid-men toting shoulder cameras. Then I became aware of action beside me. Christianna Santesson was being interviewed. The front-man fired superlatives at the camera, stereotyping Santesson as the Nordic Goddess of the art world and myself as The Man With A Nova In His Head. He moved on to me, and I was blitzed with inane questions to which I gave equally brainless replies. Things like how I wanted the world to understand, and how I did it all for my dead colleagues.
Then the painful glare moved away, leaving the bar in darkness. The vid-men dashed the length of the lounge, the spotlight bouncing like a crazy ball. It appeared that the far entrance was now the focus of attention. The party-goers turned en masse and gawped like expectant kids awaiting the arrival of Santa.
I thumbed the lachrymose tear-duct of my good eye. "What the hell?" I managed. "I could have done without that."