The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [69]
“Can’t you get the same effects with glass?” I asked Emily, wondering why the earliest gantzers had not discovered a similar art form when they had first begun to work with biotech-fused sand.
“Similar,” she admitted, “but they’re much harder to manage. Not worth the effort, in my opinion, although artists in the tropic zones have already joined the competition. Most of the light-management work in an ice palace is done by the skin that mediates between the warm spaces and the cold walls. Quite apart from the fact that glass working doesn’t require membranes of that sort, they’re brand-new technology, unique to the new generation of shamirs.”
“But glass houses have been around for a long time,” I observed. “Surely somebody glimpsed these kinds of possibilities.”
“Back in the twenty-second century the main priority was making sure that glass houses were safe, in the sense that they wouldn’t break if you threw stones at them,” she told me. “They were so crude, optically speaking, that it’s no wonder that nobody managed to lay foundation stones for this kind of artwork. In those days, gantzing was just a matter of sticking things together and making sure they stayed stuck. You got a lot of glitter, but there was no practical way to increase the scale and delicacy of the prismatic effects. Ice-palace-like effects couldn’t be foreshadowed in glass even in the twenty-fourth century, when the first true shamirs came in.”
“Well,” I said, looking up into the heady heights of a kaleidoscopically twisted spire, “you’ve certainly made up for lost time. This is the work of a genius.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said, with sincere modesty. “Once you’ve mastered a few simple tricks the effects are easy to contrive. I got a head start because I devised the techniques—now that I’ve shown the way, real architects are beginning to take over the reins.”
“But you’re still learning,” I pointed out. “You could stay ahead of the game if you put your mind to it. Maybe it’s time for you to move on to work in glass.”
“Absolutely not. Ice is my medium. But there’s ice and ice. This is just a beginning. As soon as the twenty-eighth gets under way I’ll be off to where the real action is.”
“The Arctic?” I said, foolishly.
“Hardly,” she said. “There’s no scope here for real hands-on work.”
It finally dawned on me that by “here” she meant Earth, and that what she’d meant when she’d first mentioned the next step on her journey—the one that she knew I wouldn’t be able to take—she’d meant a journey into space.
“This is just the beginning,” she added, while I was still working it out. “When the twenty-eighth century gets under way, I want to be where the real action is.”
“The moon?” I said, foolishly.
“Titan, Dione, and Enceladus,” she replied. “Then on to Nereid and Triton. So far, the colonists of the outer planet satellites have only been digging in, excavating nice warm wombs way down where the heat is. For five hundred years we’ve been imagining the conquest of space as if we were moles. Glass is poor stuff by comparison with ice, but water ice might not be the optimum. All this is just icing on a cake, Morty. It’s not even continental engineering. The next generation of shamirs will lay the groundwork for planetary engineering. Not boring old terraformation—real planetary engineering. Give me four hundred years, Morty, then come visit me in the ice palaces of Neptune’s moons, and I’ll show you a work of art.”
All I could say in response to that, in my feeblest manner, was, “You’re going to the far edge of the Oikumene? That’s as far from home as you can go.”
“For the moment. It won’t seem so far once the kalpas report in—but for now, it’s where the opportunities are.”
“But you’re rich,” I said, redoubling my foolishness. “You have more credit than you’ll need for a millennium and more. You don’t need to leave Earth to seek your fortune.”
“Not that kind of opportunity, Morty,” she said, without a hint of mockery or censure. “The opportunities of the future. Once you’ve caught up with the twenty-seventh century, you know, you’ll have