The Last Days of Krypton - Kevin J. Anderson [6]
Her twelve-year-old brother, Ki-Van, with his faintly freckled nose, inquisitive eyes, and tousled straw-colored hair, had also come to the work site, which he seemed to find more marvelous than any exhibition in Kandor.
Around the main buildings, teams of artists in training clustered around Lara’s mother and father. More than just underlings and assistants, these were true apprentices who learned from Ora and Lor-Van so that one day they could add their own genius to Krypton’s cultural library. They mixed pigments, erected scaffolding, and set up projection lenses for transferring patterns that the master artists had scribed the night before.
If her parents did their jobs well, Kryptonians would no longer focus on Yar-El’s tragic fading and confusion that had marked the poor man’s later life as he succumbed to the Forgetting Disease. Instead, they would remember Yar-El’s visionary greatness. Surely, Jor-El would be grateful to Lara’s parents for that. What more could he ask of them?
With the limberness of youth, Lara sat cross-legged on a lush patch of purple lawn, a strain of grass found in the wild plains that surrounded Kandor. She stared at what she considered to be the most puzzling objects on the grounds: Twelve smooth sheets of tan veinrock stood around the estate’s open areas, each one two meters wide and three meters tall, with irregular edges. The obelisks were like flat upraised hands, blank and unblemished. Eleven of the flat stones were arranged at precise intervals, but the twelfth was startlingly offset from the others. What had old Yar-El meant by that? Had he intended to cover the obelisks with incomprehensible messages? Lara would never know. Though he was still alive, Yar-El was long past explaining the visions locked inside his head.
Lara propped her sketchplate on her knees. She used a charge-tipped stylus to change the colors of the coating of electromagnetic algae, drawing what she had already painted in her imagination. While her mother and father painted epic murals showing the history of Krypton, Lara had made up her mind to use these twelve blank obelisks for a more symbolic purpose. If Jor-El would let her do it. She grew more and more excited as she made plans for each of the flat panels.
Satisfied with her ideas, Lara froze the images on the sketchplate and climbed to her feet, brushing flecks of purple grass from her pearlescent white skirt. Exuberant and determined, she hurried over to the scaffolding where her parents were discussing the best dramatic portrayal of the Seven Army Conference, which had taken place thousands of years ago and changed Kryptonian society forever.
Lara proudly held out her sketchplate. “Mother, Father, look at this. I’d like to have your approval for a new project.” She was full of energy, ready to get to work.
Lor-Van had tied his long auburn hair back in a neat ponytail to keep it out of his way. His expressive brown eyes showed his love for his daughter—as well as long-suffering patience. He tended to indulge Lara whenever she came up to him with one of her new (and often impractical) schemes, but he still seemed to view her as a child rather than an adult in her own right.
Her mother, though, was harder to convince. She had short hair, amber-gold like Lara’s, but streaked with gray; as always, a few smudges of pigment dotted Ora’s cheeks and hands. “What have you done now, Lara?”
“Produced a work of brilliance, no doubt,” her father teased, “but beyond the capability of mere mortals like us to understand.”
“Those twelve obelisks,” Lara said before she could catch her breath, pointing back toward the nearest one. She forced an evenness, a determination, into her voice. “I want to paint them, each one different.”
Without even a glance at the sketches, her mother turned away. “That’s beyond the scope of our project here. Jor-El hasn’t given us permission to touch those.”
Lara pressed the issue. “But has anyone actually asked him about it?”
“He’s inside his laboratory, working. No one should disturb him. I had to send your brother to the perimeter