Analog SFF, October 2008 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Dell Magazines
Published: 2010-12-15T07:08:18.882000+00:00

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Short Story: VITA LONGA

by Carl Frederick

Plus ca change....

As she meandered through the Contemporary American Artists Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gale stopped to stare at a wall—where a painting could have been hung, but wasn't. Dreamily, she fantasized stepping out of a stasis booth some hundred years from now and seeing one of her works on that unadorned expanse of wall:

Warm Earth

Gale Edgewater

(United States, mid 21st century)

She took solace in dreaming of the future. She gave a tight-lipped smile. There is no way my work would ever be accepted in today's art world.

Checking her watch, she stalked out of the hall and headed to the Greek and Roman galleries, the venue that Malcolm preferred. She still had a quarter of an hour to kill before meeting him at the exhibit.

The Rubens exhibit. The price of admission was as much as a Broadway play, well outside the means of an impoverished art student. I have got to stop thinking this way. Even though her thin body was the result of that time of hunger, she wasn't a starving art student anymore.

Thanks to Malcolm, her anorexic look had brought her stardom—a far cry from her art student days when she modeled nude for life classes at the league. Will model for food! And now she had real money. Not Malcolm's definition of money, of course; he was of the filthy variety of rich.

They'd met when he was taking a life drawing class and she was modeling for it. Afterward, he'd used his family contacts to inject her into the world of high-fashion modeling, where she'd been remolded into “the Body": the current “big thing.” Gale smiled. Malcolm considered that he personally had done the remolding. He called her “my Galatea,” after the statue brought to life in the Pygmalion myth. She sighed. She owed Malcolm a great deal. It was too bad she didn't love him.

Gale drifted toward the Roman statuary entrance.

“Good evening, my Galatea,” came a cheerful voice from the side.

Gale spun around. “Malcolm. I was just on the way to meet you at the ticket kiosk.”

Malcolm extended an arm expansively to take in the gallery. “Then let's leave this toga-clad era for our little excursion to seventeenth-century Holland.” He withdrew two exhibition admission tickets from his shirt pocket and handed her one. “I've already booked our passage.”

Gale chuckled. “Sorry to pull you away from Rome.”

“Only temporarily, my Galatea.”

Gale nodded. Malcolm was a Classics scholar—because he could afford to be. “This really is your time,” she said.

“I yearn for it as much as you crave your hundred-year leap to the future.” He guided her toward the patron entrance; he had bought the expensive tickets, thus avoiding the line. “But you have it better. In theory, you could go to your future via a stasis booth.” They passed into the exhibit hall and stopped in front of a large canvas. “But my longing for the past can only be fulfilled vicariously.”

“'The Union of Earth and Water,'” Gale read from the plaque aside the painting.

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