The Big Aha Page 4

  “I bet,” I said. There was an unspoken suspicion around our house that my father was seducing his tastier patrons. But Mom wasn’t pressing the issue. I had the feeling she was up to something herself. She was a pretty woman, and she’d get all loud and giggly around younger men.

  These were topics I didn’t like to dwell upon. Indeed, I had a phobia that I’d eventually surf into a video of Mom or Dad in action, eyes bright and features engorged. Ugh. Not that, by now, anyone was particularly shocked by scabrous revelations on the web—what with the new gnat cameras around. Everyone cursed, everyone drank, everyone crapped, everyone had sex, and most of it was online 24/7. Privacy was gone, and we’d gotten over it. You couldn’t bust people for the little human foibles anymore.

  Anyway, I took Dad up on his offer and began working in his studio—and I stayed there for three years after high school. Sure, I was eager to leave home and to be an artist on my own. But for now, I could still learn from the old master. And he was getting me gigs. And he had a primo stash of art supplies.

  Dad and I got along pretty well. But our paths diverged when United Mutations started selling nurb-paint. It was a variant of their nurb-gel, which was a generic, highly tweakable slime mold, with a web interface and language parser built into the cell colony like with any other nurb. If you wanted to design a nurb from scratch, you might well start with a big slug of nurb-gel.

  The nurb-paint had colors in its cells, and the stuff understood a vocabulary of a few hundred words—what you might call an art-programming language. Once you’d slathered your nurb-paint onto a wall, the stuff’s brightness and hue was adjustable from spot to spot. You could form stripes, polka dots, nested scrolls, branching filigrees or, if you were into sampling, you could feed it a web copy of some particular image that you liked.

  Given that the nurb-paint layer was several millimeters thick, you also had the option of coaxing it to wrinkle up and form embossed patterns. You could talk to the paint aloud or via the web, and you could push it around with a brush or with a gently tingling electric probe.

  Quickly I mastered the craft of making pictures with nurb-paint. I sensed that this new medium could be richly expressive. In a few days I was painting vibrant imaginary landscapes—bedecked with thorns, elephant trunks, and the puckered faces of little people. I murmured steadily to my paints while I worked. Finally, I had a large finished piece that I really liked. This was in the month of March, three years after I finished high school.

  Dad was dubious about nurb-paint, and when I told him he should switch to it too, he exploded. “I want that creepy-crawly crap out of my studio,” he yelled, his long, fuddydud hair flying from side to side. “It’s slimy bullshit! Use the good old ways I taught you, Zad. Go back to oil paint!”

  “That’ll be a cold day in hell,” I said. In silence I began packing up the easel, brushes and canvases that I’d bummed off Dad—also my stash of nurb-paint.

  Just then one of Dad’s clients happened to meander in—Todd Trask, a social butterfly who owned a Derby-winning thoroughbred. He lived as a bachelor in the exquisitely outfitted mansion on his family farm overlooking the Ohio River. By now Todd’s parents were dead. The mansion was separated from our house by a mile of woods.

  I’d always enjoyed it when my family and I were invited to the extravagant Trask family dos. One of my very first memories from my youth was of a picnic that Todd’s parents had thrown beside a pond with cattails. We’d driven to the pond in our cars across the pastureland. The Trask family retainers had built a bonfire, and I’d roasted a hot dog on a stick.

  Todd Trask was between my parents and me in age. He had an amusingly campy accent—the man was a fop, a dandy, a nob.

  “I’ve got my portrait of your friend Jason all set,” Dad told him.

  “Yes, yeees,” said Todd, ignoring Dad to focus on me and my new painting. “The hale apprentice in Master Lennox’s workshop. Greetings, Zad. This exultant blare of shape and color is from your brush? Hmmm. Nurb-paint? Most excellent.” Todd leaned in close to my large canvas. The man smelled of lavender and country ham. “One might fear a cheap, generic effect, but you’ve made it elegant. Polyrhythms, chaoticity, gnarl. Very of-the-moment. I see a nightmare horse, a crowd in motion and—how sardonic—fat snails on the track. Une belle bizarrie. What do you call your—your monsterpiece, Zad?”

  “Cold Day in Hell,” I said, giving Dad a cocky grin. “That’s the title I’m using for this series. Each painting has a subtitle too.” Knowing Trask’s interests, I came up with a good fit. “Cold Day in Hell: Derby Day Winner’s Circle.”

  “I shall have it!” cried my mark. “Name your price.”

  Dad got in on the conversation then. He knew much more about the business side of art than I did. If I could actually sell my strange new works, Dad would be on my side. As he’d later put it, so what if he didn’t like the taint of my paint. He’d been wrong about art fads before. Come what may, the Plant family painters were a team.

  Todd, Dad and I tossed around some numbers, and then I hit on a different kind of deal. “I’m just about ready to move out on my own,” I told Todd. “I’m getting serious about my work, and I’ll need my own studio. Would—would you have something like a spare tenant’s house I could use rent-free for a couple of years? And a car?”

  “How about a grown home and a roadspider!” exclaimed Todd. “Yes, yes! An outsider nurb artist. Under my wing. I’d fancy being a patron! Very Florentine. Can you promise me first bid on your next few works?”

  “He’ll be selling through Idi Did’s gallery,” put in Dad, smooth as silk. “And she’ll set the prices. Certainly Idi can give you a right of first refusal, Todd. But what’s a roadspider?”

  “An ebony tarantula of the night,” said Todd, waggling his fingers. “An eight-legged steed.” He gave me a conspiratorial look. “We edgy aesthetes must help along the fuddyduds, eh, Zad? I shall hang Cold Day in Hell above the mantel and invite my friends for an epic debauch. My Derby party in May! I hope there’s no danger of that nurb-paint crawling off the canvas? Sinister slugs slither in shadow, they slime into the sleepers’ slits!” He struck a pose, as if seeing a vision.

  “United Mutations claims the stuff is safe,” I said, laughing. “When I’m done with a painting, I lock the tweak interface. If worst comes to worst, you burn it and ask me for a refund. If you feed the painting a crumb of nurb chow once in a while, it loves you. I’ll guarantee it for ten years. Tell me more about that roadspider. Where will you get it? I didn’t know they were on the market yet.”

  “I’ve got an inside track with your schoolmate Whit Heyburn,” drawled Todd. “I know him from the horse auctions. And now his dad got him a starter job at the local branch of United Mutations. In the old Ford plant near the airport? UM is phasing out wheeled vehicles to grow roadspiders and roadhog vans. They’ve been testing various models on our country lanes, lending them out to local artists.”

  “Artists!” I exclaimed. “Why?”

  “Seems there’s a loophole in the Kentucky biotech laws that says a company can deploy an utterly untested nurb—provided the nurb is being developed as a work of art. A gift to the United Mutations bizboys from our accommodating state legislators. That’s how Louisville got a United Mutations campus. Bottom line? Kentucky’s a frontier for nurb innovation, Zad. You’re positioned to be a stellar nurb artiste.”

  In April I moved onto a quarter acre of Todd’s pastureland, atop a little hill near his house. And Todd got me a grown home and a roadspider from United Mutations.

  I thought of my grown home as a she because she talked to me in a womanly voice. And she was, after all, something womby that I lived inside. I called her Bel. She wasn’t overly intellectual—we only talked about simple, practical things. Bel didn’t require much nurb chow—she spread a fan of roots underground to pull in most of the nutrients she needed.

  This was in the very early days of grown homes, and Bel was a little funky, even if she did have thre
e rooms. Her walls were damp, and her air smelled—green. Like a jungle. Nice, in a way. Even if her membranous windows weren’t fully transparent, they let in plenty of light. And, when I wanted, my grown home’s flesh would glow. Some kind of firefly gene in there. As a final touch, one of her inner walls acted as a squidskin, cruising the web in response to my spoken words.

  My roadspider seemed female as well—but in the menacing style of a warrior goddess. Her name was Zix. Zix was gorgeous—sculpted and gleaming like a black, chromed racing motorcycle. She had a comfortable seat grown into her back, and her eight legs arched high, strongly fortified by carbon fibers.

  Perched amid Zix’s living machinery, you’d get a smooth, bouncy ride. Zix could really cover the ground—not as fast as a car, but upwards of forty miles per hour, even without a road.

  It was Whit Heyburn himself who delivered Zix—he rode out to the Trask place on a chrome-shiny roadspider, with Zix trailing along.

  “The great artist,” sneered Whit. He had the same blank, supercilious look as ever. “Are you Trask’s butt-boy now?”

  “Your family gave you a job, huh?” I shot back. “Do you have an office? Go to meetings? Salute the flag?”

  “Don’t tell me your Dad didn’t set you up with a career. I can’t believe Trask is actually trading you a house and a roadspider for a painting. Is it any good?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m a genius. You’ve known that for years.”

  “Show me the painting.”

  “I’d rather not, Whit. You’d just mock it. Give me the roadspider and be on your way.”

  “Fine. By the way, I’m meeting up with Jane tonight. I hear she’s wild. And she’s rich. Like me.” Hatefully he leered at me. How could Jane possibly spend time with this vain, vicious, zero-empathy bully?

  “You should leave her alone,” I snapped, my voice tight. “She deserves better.”

  Whit grinned down at me from his roadspider, enjoying himself. “Better? I’m the best! Anyway, I’m supposed to warn you about Zix. Give her a big feed of nurb chow after every ride. If she ever gets too hungry, she’ll go off to forage on her own. Not a good thing. Can you keep that fact in your flaky art-poser head?”

  “Yes.” There was no point arguing with Whit. He was cold and mean all the way through.

  “Have fun with Todd Trask!” And with that, Whit galloped off.

  Zix had a low-grade intelligence. Her voice was sweet, with a trace of a lisp. She imprinted on me as her owner, and she called me “Master.” A creepy thing about Zix was that the nurbware engineers hadn’t yet straightened out the horrific look of her churning arachnid mandibles. They couldn’t disentangle the mouth parts from the processes that grew the legs. At least Zix’s mouth was on her underside.

  It was wavy riding Zix around town. Everyone would crowd around to look at her and to ask us questions. Sometimes Zix would recite a pitch for the upcoming line of United Mutations Roadspiders.

  Whenever the roadspider and I got home, she’d go to her trough of nurb chow, and then she’d settle down in a messy funnel-web that she’d spun amid the branches of the maple tree beside my bulgy home.

  Wanting to justify the goodies that Todd Trask had given me, I got fairly serious about my art. I did three more pictures with nurb-paint during the month of April. I liked being an artist.

  Reba Ranchtree came over to spend the night as often as she could. And my pal Carlo Solera was dropping by as well. My friends dug the vibe of my studio, with my uncanny nurb-paint works on display. Sometimes we’d get high off an online brainwave channel—we had these buzzy little eel-pad nurbs we’d put on our necks to trickle in the stim. No real data, just itchy rhythms. Like music, but without the sounds. I liked to imagine we were as loofy as the NYC qrudes.

  Sometimes when my friends and I were riding a channel, I’d be gone enough to let them poke into the interfaces of my paintings. No point being tight, I’d say. Welcome the chaos.

  Late in April, Carlo started bringing Jane Roller along. She’d broken up with Whit Heyburn. She’d noticed, thank God, that Whit was possessive and cold.

  I loved hearing Jane’s lively, malleable voice bounce off my grown home’s resonant walls. That voice echoed all the way back to my earliest childhood. Soon I’d admitted to myself that she’d been the one for me all along.

  I told Carlo that I was much more interested in Jane than I was in Reba. He wasn’t against a switcheroo. But we weren’t sure how to swing it. It was like I was too deeply in love with Jane to go ahead and tell her. Put more simply, I was an inarticulate raw youth.

  The turning point came the evening of Todd Trask’s Derby party, early in May. Around dusk that day, I’d given Carlo a ride to my place on the back of my roadspider. Zix didn’t like the extra load, but her stronger-than-metal legs could handle it. When we got to my grown home, Zix was of course very hungry. I mistakenly thought I’d filled her food basket that morning, so without really looking, I went right inside with Carlo.

  We wanted to amp up for the Trask do. I was a little nervous about the event—which would involve, I expected, Todd braying at length about my Cold Day in Hell painting in the party room he called his great hall.

  Jane and Reba showed up at my place in Jane’s electric car, the girls like pastel flowers in their nurb dresses, Reba a lustrous brunette and Jane a reddish-blonde. As the sun went down, we four keyed in on a luxor new brainwave channel that Reba had found. It was crypto, off the grid, on the border of epilepsy. Carlo, Jane, Reba and I flubbed around on my soft floor for an hour or three, not really noticing anything in the outer world.

  “Are you sure you fed the spider?” said Jane all of a sudden. Her voice was clear and sweet, like a tendril from another world.

  I sat up in the gloom, pulling the eel-pad nurb off my neck, and gathering my wits. Down the hill, Todd’s party was going full blast. Time to regroup.

  In the light of the walls’ faint green glow, I saw that we four had gotten naked. Carlo was on top of Reba, softly rocking.

  “Yukker,” said Jane. “I just hope my dress can smooth out.” The sleek, silky cloth crawled onto her lap.

  “Now you’ve got me worried about Zix,” I said. “Did you hear something? Is that why you asked?”

  “A floppy, dragging sound,” said Jane. “A dying neigh. Up high?” Jane’s skin was beautiful, milky, her breasts of a perfect, cuppable size. But now her dress flowed over them. Jane stared into my eyes, her face framed by the dark gold straw of her hair. I was at a loss for words.

  “Bad to channel such loofy brain waves,” said Jane. “Not doing that again, unh-unh. You miss everything.”

  “When I get that high, I always feel like I’m going to find the answer,” I said. “The big aha. But then—”

  “But then—oh well!” said Jane, laughing. “Are you ready to go?”

  “Yeah,” I said, pulling on my pants. “Did you and I—”

  “Don’t think so,” said Jane. “But it’s high time. We’ve been circling each other for so long. And you’ve gotten hot. An artist! In high school, you were just, you know, too luxor for the lecture. Now you’re on a star-quest.”

  Saying this, she made a lo-and-behold gesture towards my latest work, Cold Day in Hell: Two Flights Up. For this one, I’d painstakingly painted three pictures on top of each other, sampling some Bosch and Bruegel along the way. I’d taught my three batches of slime mold to slowly trade places. The result was a multiplex triptych, with the three nurb-paint pictures cycling through Hell, Eden and Heaven. My waviest work yet.

  “The Eve in my Eden is you,” I told Jane.

  “Sweet,” she answered. “And you’re my Adam.” We kissed for first time since those seven minutes in the closet all those years ago.

  “Did you say dying neigh?” I said after a bit, mentally scrolling through our conversation. “Why did you say that?”

  “What I heard maybe,” said Jane. “Up in Zix’s tree?”

  “Shit.”

  We
went outside with a nurb light, and sure enough, Zix’s funnel-nest was torn and trembling. Blood dripping down. The big spider had dragged a colt up there. Zix was feeding on the one-week-old horse. The colt’s thin legs were doing a staccato flutter, as if in frightened protest. But his motions damped down as Zix bit his body again and again.

  “She’s venomous?” said Jane.

  “Nobody told me,” I said weakly.

  Music was sweeping up from the Trask mansion, and people were silhouetted on the big, open porches, their voices rising in self-satisfied honks and quacks. I heard someone yelling my name. Todd Trask. The patron summoning his pet artist.

  I found a long stick on the ground and poked at Zix, wanting to drive her out of her funnel and away from the colt. I had some half-baked notion of burying the horse’s body or at least dragging it off into some underbrush. Maybe Todd would think a fox had killed the colt. This was a very special horse, by the way, sired by a Derby winner that Todd owned, and potentially worth millions of dollars.

  “Leave me, Master,” said Zix, in her sweet, raspy voice. “I am feeding.”

  “Get off that horse, damn you. I’ve got plenty of nurb chow. Just wait and I’ll fill the trough. I’m sorry I forgot.”

  “I like the…horse,” said Zix.

  Recklessly I poked her again with my branch. With a sudden whirling spasm of motion, the spider popped out the other side of her funnel nest, holding the pathetic dying colt tight with her mandibles, dragging him by the neck. As if frightened of me now, Zix scrabbled down the hill towards Trask’s house, her legs arching high, and the colt leaving a trail of blood that glittered dark in the party lights.

  Uncertainly Jane and I tagged along. By now the people could see what had happened. Todd Trask was yelling. No more hothouse accent.