Mirror Space - Marianne de Pierres [16]
He admired the cleanliness of the entire station and stopped at an information booth to watch the advertising film. How surprising to find that rubbish could be so creatively and sanitarily recycled.
‘Your first visit?’ asked the Lamin behind the counter in a high, girlish voice.
Tekton gave a vague nod. He couldn’t bear the creatures: vain and arrogant and fastidious. Not that Tekton didn’t like things to be just so, but not in a Lamin armpit-picking, fingernail-clicking self-impressed way.
‘Well, I suggest you hurry and take a good look. The Fest closes tonight and I can’t say I won’t be relieved. Two months on my feet in these heels...The best work is up on the dais, so they say. A couple of things causing a real stir up there: a living glass sculpture that’s destined to shatter soon in a grand spectacular, and a fluid statue of a humanesque. I’ve heard it’s made of quixite but I haven’t been able to get away from here to have a look.’ It sniffed.
Quixite! logic-mind and free-mind screeched at once.
Tekton scanned the chamber, locating the dais with its colossal giant glass protrusion. Without a word of acknowledgement or thanks to the talkative Lamin, Tekton made a beeline for it.
After a weapon search by a surly balol at the foot of the stairs, he was free to ascend and enjoy the sculptures.
The glass pillar inhabited by an organism was so truly spectacular that Tekton’s free-mind overtook his logic-mind in a swell of creative satisfaction.
So twisted. So strained. Such glorious refraction. And the organism. Tragic. Profound. Death in Freedom.
It babbled for a while as Tekton drifted around the base of the column in a kind of meditative ecstasy. Perhaps he would procure a ticket to the glass explosion. If it was timed, as the spruikers were insisting, to have twin suns shining on it, the experience would be unrepeatable.
And expensive, interjected logic-mind sternly, desperate for a way to be heard. Without enough quixite from Araldis what will happen to our project? Without the project what will happen to our tyro placement on Belle-Monde? Without that - no fat stipend.
Tekton jerked out of his trance and looked around. ‘Where is the quixite statue?’ he demanded of the closest spruiker.
‘Roight behoind yuu moitey,’ it carolled.
Tekton turned and pushed his way into the gathered crowd. The statue stood twice his height; a fine male figure, naked and unmistakably humanesque. The thing that so fascinated the audience though was the statue’s genitals, which every few moments shifted in a carefully fluid but determined motion, from flaccid to erect.
Subtle changes then occurred in the erection, the swelling of the bulb and the enlarging of the testes.
Porn-art, concluded logic-mind.
Yes, agreed free-mind, but the liquid play of the quixite makes it something far more intimate. A triumph of reality.
Pah, said logic-mind. But it does pose the question who the model was and how many times the artist needed to study his arousal.
Who indeed? Tekton wondered. And that thought gave him quite a rush of akula. He would be eager to meet the man.
He glanced up at the face.
Upon recognition, his mouth dropped open in astonishment. Good Sole! It’s me!
But Tekton wasn’t the only one to recognise him. It began with three young female humanesques next to him who nudged and giggled and pointed; and spread through the crowd in a whisper, until more eyes were upon Tekton than the statue.
For the first time that he could ever recall, Tekton was the centre of attention that he had not specifically manufactured. And he could not even think of a way to turn it to his advantage.
He was, in fact, flabbergasted.
In an instant the spruikers roaming the dais picked up the situation and boomed it out to anyone who would listen. ‘Fenr-oi-lia’s model. Fenr-oi-lia’s model. Come and soi-ee the man whose cock grows bigger than a soisage balloon.’
The ignominy of the situation threatened to totally shake Tekton’s composure. Fenralia, the filthy little skieran, had used their acquaintance