"Jerry Oltion - The Artist Makes A Splash" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

The Artist Makes a Splash
Jerry Oltion


They wanted to destroy his finest work. That wasn’t the way the Terragen Council presented it when
they came to Talan with their proposal, but that’s what they wanted. He would create the best sculpture
he could possibly build-for what artist could do less with each new project?-and then at the dedication
ceremony for the new atmosphere, they would smash it to flinders for the crowd’s amusement.

Ephemeral art was all the rage back on Earth. Perhaps it came from living in an open environment.
Everything came from the soil and everything eventually returned to it; what matter, then, if you returned
something a bit early? In humanity’s far-flung colonies, however, where people lived sealed in domes and
held a hostile universe at bay mostly through sweat and engineering, anything that might still have a use
was carefully hoarded, repaired, and returned to service.

Of course the dedication of the atmosphere could change all that. For the first time in human history, a
terraformed planet was about to be declared habitable on the surface. It required a generous
interpretation of the term “habitable,” to be sure, but for the last few months a person could step outside
on Nivala without an environment suit and live to tell the tale. Only at the poles, where Altair’s intense
ultraviolet rays came in at a low enough angle to keep from crisping an unprotected body, but there was
still vastly more acreage available outside than in the domes. The icy ground-frozen for millions, maybe
billions, of years-had begun to thaw. In a few more years, farmers could plant crops in the open, and
people could sleep with the sound of rustling leaves coming in through their windows.

And maybe they could relax the intense code of recycling that they had lived under for so long. Lengthen
the chain of processing steps between wastewater and drinking water. Bury bodies instead of rendering
them down for their protein.

Talan considered his commission. An artwork that existed only to be destroyed. It did open new
possibilities.

I want to capture the very essence of ephemerality,” he told his sister as they walked to dinner that
evening. They lived side by side in apartments only a few doors down from their parents, as did most
young singles in the colony.

“Ephemerality? That’s easy: clone up a vat of mayflies.” Her laughter echoed in the corridor.

“Do wehave mayflies?” he asked. “Never mind; of course we must. The gene banks are supposed to
contain everything. But nobody has seen a mayfly in what, six generations? People wouldn’t know what
they were. And besides, DNA isn’t my medium.”

“Well, that kills my next suggestion.”

She grinned and looked at him with eyebrows raised until he said, “What?”

“A steak dinner. Force-grow a cow, butcher it, and let everybody eat it.”

“Yuck!”

“That’s what we’re going to be doing once we move outside. Why not give people a little taste of what’s