Sliding Scales

by Alan Dean Foster

  Peering in the indicated direction, Flinx saw only a closed door. “So the Tier has an artist in residence?” On his shoulder, Pip was gazing mesmerized at the spectacularly vibrant ceiling.

  This time her hissing was all laughter. “An artisst? Flinx, that iss what the Tier iss all about. Have you not noticed the profussion of artwork that decoratess our communal eating area, our living quarterss, the ssandarium, even the walkwayss?”

  “Well, of course I noticed them. I just didn't think anything of it. Remember—until my memory returns, I have nothing to compare to this place.”

  She signaled mild understanding. “Take my word for it: you will not find sso much fine contemporary and forward-thinking artwork anywhere elsse on Jasst—and in few placess on Blasusarr itsself. You ssee, we of the Tier are dedicated to the artss.”

  He nodded attentively. “You and your friends must have received many honors.”

  She stopped so abruptly, it startled him, and Pip had to flutter her wings to hold her perch. “Honorss? Truly, you know or remember little of my kind. We of the Tier are pariahss, Flinx. Why do you think we live like thiss, out here in the middle of nowhere on a nowhere world? While occassional art is appreciated in the Imperial corridorss, thosse who wissh to do nothing elsse for their life-work are regarded as foolss and worsse. We are all of uss here outcasstss within the traditional sstructure of the Empire.” She gestured around them. “We have congregated here sso that we can work in peace, away from the inssultss and whisspered sslurss that would afflict uss elssewhere.”

  Outcasts, he thought silently. While he was of a different species from the members of the Tier, mentally and emotionally they had much in common. No wonder he felt so at ease in this place.

  It struck him then, and with considerable force, that he felt as if he had always been an outcast, though without access to his mislaid memories he could not say exactly why he should feel that was so. But the certainty, and the emotions that came rushing through him at the realization, were undeniable.

  “And you?” He stared into bright yellow eyes.

  “I am a botanical reanimator.” She gestured back the way they had come. “Much of the ornamental foliage and many of the decorative growthss you have admired within the complex were found by me, or brought to me, in a near-lifeless condition. I aessthetically resstore them sso that they regrow in sshapess and formss that are pleassing to the eye.” She resumed walking. “You have sseen exampless of Teemylk'ss work above you. Follow now and I will sshow you more.”

  As was typical with AAnn construction, the underground portion of the artists' complex was far more extensive than any portion viewed from above would lead a casual observer to believe. Some of the workshops were large enough to include works in progress that ranged over several levels. It was all fascinating and new to Flinx, who had never seen anything like it. Or, he was obliged to remind himself, maybe he had, and the remembrances of such wonderful creations were lost in the dark, inaccessible depths of his memory.

  In one studio, an elderly AAnn was crafting an entire community in miniature. Every element of the creation was beautifully designed and executed, from the tiny buildings to the diminutive landscape to the individual plants, animals, and wee AAnn who populated the setting. The two visitors watched in silence, admiring the solitary creator who ignored them as she went about her work of molding, manipulating, and coaxing the miniscule representation of reality into moving, talking, animate life.

  “This is Wiilat'ss work. Sshe iss quite famouss on more than two dozen worldss within the Empire.” Chraluuc leaned over the railing that separated visitors from the artist.

  “What happens to all this?” Flinx's gesture took in the large room that was lit from overhead by several triangular skylights while Pip eyed the small moving figures with interest. “When it's finished, I mean. Does the artist disassemble it and then start a new one?”

  “You are half correct. When Wiilat hass completed the ssimulacrum, sshe will indeed begin a new one. But thiss one”—she gestured with both hand and tail—“will be sold, closed down intact, and sshipped to an off-world cusstomer.”

  “I don't understand.” He watched closely as the elderly nye, utilizing the intricate and difficult-to-master mechanisms of formata construction, wove to life another tiny citizen of the self-contained, artist-imagined community. “If everyone here is an outcast, and your work is looked down upon, then who buys it?”

  Knowing eyes glanced up at him. “There are alwayss collectorss for good work, no matter how notoriouss the origin. While hierarchical AAnn ssociety at large may frown upon the actual methodology of creation, ssociety in private iss ever ready to welcome the new, the exciting, and the fasshionable. How iss it among humankind?”

  “I seem to remember it being similar, though in the society of the Commonwealth I believe that all artists are respected, no matter how controversial their art.”

  “Then you are fortunate in that resspect.” They left the elderly Wiilat hard at work playing God, a role to which AAnn no less than human or thranx artists aspired.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Flinx was subject to sensory overload. There was the young, energetic AAnn who through a combination of art and inorganic chemistry forced flowers of clear and colored quartz to replicate in odorless silicate bouquets that were dazzling to the eye. In a narrow but high studio, one-eyed Kaabu the Wild, as he was known to his fellow members of the Tier, created astonishing three-dimensional constructs of tactile paint. Madly flinging colors into the air and controlling the resultant eruptions with a singsong of musical commands, he induced the heavily magnetized paint to adhere in stunning combinations one could not only view, but walk around, behind, and beneath. His control of the medium was humbling to Flinx, who could not begin to fathom how the artist not only manipulated the media, but did so in a way that resulted in an unmistakable artistic vision instead of simply a multihued blob of hovering color.

  Siivagg was a sand-sculptor. Utilizing special protective command gloves, she whirled color particles about with the ease and touch of a lover caressing their partner. Contained within sculpted blasts of air, the combinations of tinted sand were in constant motion, so that the work of art was never static. In the chamber next to hers a bent-backed AAnn called Cuurajaa liquefied and transformed stone into curious combinations of abstract shapes that spun and writhed in, around, and among one another like live things. Continuing down the corridor, they encountered the drifting contributions of Dooniim the Idler. These whimsical aerogel shapes were imbued with music that could be heard only when the shapes were punctured with a claw, whereupon each emitted its own individual ephemeral opus as it sank to the floor, there to eventually evaporate in a last puff of pianissimo. Dooniim's compositions were as evanescent as they were enchanting. While the tonalities were alien to Flinx's ear, the skill with which they had been compiled could not be denied.

  Eventually, both guide and guest found themselves sated by the surfeit of available stimulation. Despite the splendor he had imbibed, Flinx was almost relieved when they returned to the sere, rambling surface and headed back down a winding path toward the main complex.

  “And you all live out here in the wilderness, by yourselves?”

  Absently lashing out with her tail at a floating, wandering fvuorene and sending it crashing to the rocky ground, Chraluuc considered Flinx's question. Though he felt drawn to these people, he remained aware of the gulf that would always lie between them. Such casual violence as his guide had just demonstrated in killing the inoffensive fvuorene was as alien to him as the scales that covered her body or the vertical pupils that he frequently caught studying him with intense curiosity. Though these outsider AAnn were the only company he had, he could not bring himself to emulate many of their habits.

  “We prefer to live thiss way. It allowss uss to concentrate on our work without the disstractions operating openly in nye ssociety would imposse. We ssell enough to maintain the complex. That iss all any true a
rtisst sshould want.” Those penetrating eyes turned on him once more. “What about you, Flinx? I watched you watching. Have you yoursself any artisstic talentss or leaningss?”

  He was taken aback by the question. Though surrounded by art, he had not thought to draw anything in the way of a personal connection.

  Draw. Experimentally, he moved the fingers of his right hand in a certain way. Was this something he had done? New memories took form in his mind; of the need to pass long hours alone on a ship. Why alone? Didn't everyone travel through space-plus in tandem with others? Or was he, as he was coming more and more to feel, an exception in more ways than one?

  “Can you find me a surface to write on, and instruments to do so?”

  She gestured second-degree accord and bounded forward, forcing him to run to keep up.

  To their mutual delight, they soon discovered that much of what he could not remember in words he could evoke by means of sketches that were not only simultaneously facile and complex, but equally noteworthy for their aesthetic content.

  Interesting, he mused as he drew, wielding with effortless dexterity the tapering electronic stylus designed for the slightly slimmer AAnn hand. I must have had some training in the arts. Was he, in fact, a professional artist? Unlike much of what he swiftly rendered, that notion did not feel right.

  Disregarding for the moment her own work, which she had been compelled to neglect since being assigned to watch over the softskin, Chraluuc looked on in fascination as Flinx sketched one alien image after another. His first likeness was of an old softskin woman, a hideous sort of thing to Chraluuc but one that brought a torrent of childhood memories rushing back to her charge. Subsequent to that emotional flood, he found himself drawing like mad.

  Starships appeared on the single sheet of rewritable material she had provided to him. Each time he prepared to expunge an illustration, she made sure it was first transmitted and saved to an appropriate file for later study. One particular image of a starship of small and unusual shape he kept referring to as his own.

  She was patient with him. “Only the famouss, the important, and the very wealthy have sstarsshipss of their own, and you are neither of thosse thingss.”

  “I know, I know.” He stared transfixed at his own creation. “But I can't escape this overriding feeling of possession and familiarity whenever I look at it.” Holding up the flexible sheet, he manipulated it by hand so that the sketch automatically took on minimal three-dimensional properties. “This just feels like it's mine.”

  “Tssasst,” she teased him roughly in the manner of the AAnn, “if it iss yourss, then where iss it?”

  “I don't know,” he was forced to confess. “Yet.”

  Intermittent hisses of amusement emerged from between sharp teeth. “Better to focuss your attemptss to remember on what iss likely and reassonable. Ample time later for dreaming.”

  She was doubtless right, he knew as he resumed drawing.

  With a dedication that any of the AAnn artists in residence would have appreciated, over the following days Flinx produced dozens of intricate renderings of scenes from many worlds. Every one of them was alien to the captivated Chraluuc. Many did not include depictions of softskins. Either they were less commonly found in many parts of the vast and hostile Commonwealth than the members of the Tier had been led to believe, or else her perpetually bemused charge was more widely traveled than anyone, including himself, had imagined. Or else he was simply conjuring the fantastical visions up out of whole cloth, because while he could produce images of such places, he could not put names to them.

  “Ssurely,” she told him one morning as he was putting the finishing touches on yet another depiction of a planetary surface rife with impossibly lush vegetation, “you cannot have vissited sso many different worldss. If nothing elsse, you are too young. I think what you do have iss a mosst vivid and entertaining imagination.”

  “I know,” he murmured as he deftly manipulated the stylus. “Yet everything feels so real when I draw it.”

  “Comfortable delussionss often are,” she assured him. “But of one thing there can be no doubt: as an illusstrator, you have talent.”

  He shrugged modestly as he drew. “I'm just playing here, using these quick sketches to try to help me remember things.”

  “Truly, I realize thiss, and I ssympathize with your frusstration.” She leaned close to peer over his shoulder at his latest creation. She was able to do so only because the exceedingly defensive flying snake was presently elsewhere, relaxing on a nearby shelf that was brushed with sunlight from the room's single skylight. So used to the human had she become that she no longer had to remember to constrict her nostrils to shut out the powerful mammalian muskiness that emanated from his pliable body. “It musst be exassperating to be able to create picturess of sso many different thingss and not be able to identify them.”

  He nodded, a reflexive cranial gesture she had come to know well through the time she had spent in his company. “It's getting better, though.” He showed her his latest work. It was a sketch of a planet whose encircling rings boasted two extensive gaps. “This is Moth, where I grew up.”

  Curious, she mused as she studied the expert rendering. He did not refer to the unusual world as home: only as the place where he grew up. She had yet to hear him so identify of any of the worlds he had drawn. “A very attractive world,” she ventured politely. “Do you think you could locate it on a star chart?”

  “I hadn't thought of doing that,” he replied with a start. His excitement was palpable. “We'll have to try it.”

  With her left hand she gestured simple fourth-degree concurrence. “An eassy thing to arrange.” She turned thoughtful. “What I have sseen you do during thesse past many six dayss hass ssuggessted to me ssomething elsse that I am afraid will not be sso eassy to arrange.”

  Stylus activated and poised over the receptive sheet, he looked back at her. The proximity to his face of the powerful jaws and sharp teeth of the intelligent carnivore did not unsettle him. By now he was quite used to it. “You have something else in mind for me?”

  “Perhapss.” She was deliberately evasive. “It iss a— ssurprisse.” The pleasure to be found in unexpected revelation was something else human and AAnn shared. “I would not tell you, in any casse, becausse if it doess not come to pass, it will provide no causse for dissappointment.”

  “You'll have to tell me eventually.” He returned to his current drawing of a graceful structure on a world that was bathed in warm sunshine. A beautiful woman had been sketched in standing in front of the human-scaled building. She seemed to be looking directly out at the viewer. “You know how much I enjoy pestering you, Chraluuc.”

  She started to take a slash at him with her tail, only to catch herself in mid-swipe. While he might have misinterpreted the meaning of the leathery slap, that would not have invalidated the sincerity of the gesture.

  “I—I have to leave. My own work wailss for attention.” She turned and backed away from him.

  “Why?” he started to ask her. “What's the rush to …?”

  But she was already gone, out the door as fast as she could gracilely manage, the bewildering emotions swirling within her a disturbing muddle of growing friendship, misplaced affection, maternalistic instinct, and duty. It was fortunate, she reflected as she hurried down the corridor, that the softskin was unable to accurately interpret any of the associated signs, or her circumstances would have been twelve times worse.

  The farther she got from the small apartment that had been allotted to him, the more her inner confusion eased. She knew who she was, and nothing could or would change that. Being an outcast did not render her any less what she was. Truly.

  But despite her strong sense of self-assurance, recollection of the disturbing moment continued to perturb her for the rest of the day.

  To say that the Ssemilionn of the Ssaiinn was astonished by her request was akin to her suggesting that the three Elders abandon their commitments to their respe
ctive disciplines and volunteer their services to the Imperial defense forces. One and all, they regarded her as if she had suddenly turned into one of the foolish, fluttery umorows that was constantly battering itself silly against the skylights of the Tier's buildings in repetitious vain attempts to burrow through and lay its eggs on the other side of the implacably impenetrable material.

  “You are sseriouss in thiss propossal!” Xeerelu's half-prosthetic tail whipped back and forth in agitation.

  Chraluuc stood her ground. “I think it would be a good thing. It would reflect well on the Tier of Ssaiinn.”

  “Truly, it would certainly reflect.” Synthetic eyes whirred imperceptibly as Naalakot clicked his claws together to illustrate his unease. “The quesstion iss, what would that conssequent reflection reveal?”

  “What do we care?” In the presence of the Ssemilionn, Chraluuc was respectful, but not intimidated. Like any AAnn, she could be convinced, or persuaded, or even killed, but rarely intimidated. “We are already looked upon as different from otherss of our kind, and treated as outssiderss.” She eyed each of them in turn. “Ssince it iss already expected that we will do the sstartling and unprecedented, sshould we not do our besst to confirm the ssupicionss of our fellow nye?”

  Viinpou continued to brood, though he was not as visibly unsettled as his two companions. “Not necessarily. We musst sstill rely on the goodwill of the Imperial Authority to maintain our pressence here. Thiss is not an Imperial world, and we could be ordered off it at any time.”

  “Truly!” Chraluuc enthusiastically agreed. “Therefore we are obligated to rely on the goodwill not of the Imperial Authority but of the Vssey themsselvess.”

  “You are being dissingenuouss,” Xeerelu replied accusingly.

  “Iss that not alsso a recognized art form among our kind?” Unable to smile, Chraluuc was reduced to communicating her reaction through gestures. “Sserioussly, venerated Elders, if my ssugesstion iss implemented, asside from the aessthetic asspectss, could it not have potential benefitss none of uss can forssee? And given the inability to forssee, sshould we not try thiss new thing?” Not only was she challenging them individually, she was challenging what they stood for. “Iss that not ultimately what art iss about?”