Bear, Greg - Eon 03 by Bear Greg

Author:Bear, Greg [Bear, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-30T15:33:26+00:00

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Nimzhian climbed to the porch and addressed us in the narrow courtyard. We were soaked by now, but the rain was subsiding, though thick gray curtains still cloaked the slopes of Mount Jiddermeyer. "I have something to show you," she said. "You can't all come in at once, but you're all welcome."

We took our turns, in groups of six, climbing the steps and shaking hands with her, at which point she introduced us to her true treasures -- cabinets filled with hundreds of watercolor sketches done by herself and her husband. Salap was speechless, and stayed inside with Keyser-Bach as each group came through, staring again and again at the paintings as Nimzhian revealed them, a new group for each party.

She glowed with pride.

"When the silva was healthy," she said, "it covered most of the center of the island, in two similar groupings, two silvas actually, as Jiddermeyer and Baker and Shulago saw ... As we saw when we first arrived. The mountains were more active then. There were even earthquakes a few times a year, and the beach where you landed was rich with fumaroles venting sulfur."

The watercolors glowed with delicate life, revealing as much about their creators as they did about Martha's Island, sketched in with meticulous care using very fine pens cut from the central stalks of arborid leaves, colored by dyes taken from vermids and phlox trees high up in the mountains.

"We recorded all we could on the slate left to us by Shulago," she said. "But it soon stopped taking data. We learned how to make a kind of paper, and taught ourselves how to paint. Martha was very generous. She supplied everything -- pigments, stems for brush handles, even brush hairs.

"We ate her scions, and we painted her as a kind of gift ... Not that it was any true bargain."

A set of paintings showed the vernal efflorescence in the high mountain valleys, when the arborids and phytids shed old growth and produced bright new leaves of vivid reds and oranges, sky blue, and dark purple. The ecos itself seemed to have a painterly plan, the hills covered with zebra stripes of purple against red and sky blue. "The air smelled like the sweetest, finest wine in the spring," Nimzhian said, her fingers caressing the paintings, lifting them from their folders and replacing them with religious care.

Some of the paintings were of specimens of the largest arborids, named yggdrasils: hollow-cored nets of stiff creepers rising in fat cylinders up to a hundred meters high, throwing out tiers of purple-black sun-absorbing leaves. Yeshova had climbed into the hollow trunk of an yggdrasil and depicted it from the inside, like an intricate weavework narrowing to an open circle of sky.

"We used the few pieces of laboratory equipment, over and over again, until all was broken or ruined and we could only look and see and taste ... And sometimes what we tasted made us sick, and we noted the symptoms." She shook her head ruefully.

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