Tyrannia (20 page)

Here is
Roxy
sleeping, curled up in a ball in the corner of her case, the bees bobbing around her head.

Here is
Roxy
eating a block of nutrience, then another.

Here is
Roxy
in the greenhouse yard—named the Van Gogh Arboretum—with a soothing panorama of the Dutch countryside circa 1900 all around her. The museum, of course, is in West Antarctica, and the Dutch countryside is underwater, but
Roxy
has no way to know of these affairs. She hangs from her tail from one of the oak trees (a predisposition on her part that the artist cleverly integrated into her DNA) and swings gently, watching everything. There are only five or six other pieces of the collection allowed in the greenhouse at the same time. I certainly have interest in seeing what else is being accomplished in the field, and by whom. Two particular pieces catch my eye: Mareanxerias’
The Epoxy Disaster of Late Model Capitalism
(a hairless golden bear cub with horse quarters) and
Paint! Paint! Paint!
(a taxidermied wolf head attached to a cherry-colored, wheelless motorcycle chassis and eight spidery legs) by the sublime master Ya Li.

Epoxy
and
Paint
always stand next to each other, and rarely exercise or relax. Their legs twitch. At first I think it is a glitch but after a museum guard attempts to separate the two, I realize that they are communicating to each other. The two shuffle apart before the guard can reach them but slowly gravitate back together after his departure. This occurs over the course of several days during their hour-long stays in the Van Gogh Arboretum.

Roxy
begins to find this curious. She has never been willing to make the first move with anything, but one time she presses her body against the glass of the panorama, close to
Epoxy
and
Paint.
As if trying to capture the false sunlight in her body. (She does not photosynthesize.) Eventually
Epoxy
and
Paint
look over at her in unison, and soon the two in conversation-by-tapping become three, though I have no way to know how
Roxy
has picked up on such a vernacular, since she was never taught such things in my villa.

Still, this is worrisome. I alert my concierge at the museum and soon enough several guards come into the Arboretum to put a stop to this extraneous socialization. They are heavily armed with nonlethal coercive wands.
Roxy
sees them approach and her nostrils flare. I try to connect to my concierge again to warn the museum staff but before that can happen,
Roxy
wraps her tail around one of the guard’s necks and snaps it.

Roxy
tries to dash away, but nano-netting swoops down from the ceiling.

Even
Epoxy
and
Paint
seem scandalized. They try to disentangle themselves from the melee, but are caught in the netting as well.

Roxy’s
access to the Arboretum is revoked, and a guard is in sight of her display case at all times. I should feel horrified and disappointed, but I am not. Because I know that
Roxy
’s errant behavior is deep-seated and incapable of being cured. I once tried instilling discipline into
Roxy
by telling her which rooms she could and couldn’t enter in the villa. The kitchen: only when it was time for her to eat. The foyer: only when guests were present for a reception and she was beckoned to remain motionless there. The study: never, under any circumstances. The library: never. My wife’s rooms: never.

But she never listened.

The next day I send an invitation to
Roxy’s
artist for a light afternoon lunch at the villa and a leisurely suborbital artillery firing. He agrees. I can tell he is reluctant.

Artists are a necessary evil in my world.

John Priestly—such an old-fashioned name—flies in from New Yellowknife. His skin has a bluish sheen to it, and I can’t tell whether that is from a side effect from his latest anti-aging treatments
or preparation for using his own body as a genetic canvas yet again. Perhaps they are the same thing.

On the rooftop overlooking the burning hills, we sit down for lunch and I ask him about a possible restoration job of
Roxy
. One, would this be feasible with a minimum of cost overruns, and two, would this decrease her resale value at auction?

He sips his tea and stares at me for a long time. “
Roxy: Shark * Flower,
” he says at last, “is far more perfect than you can ever imagine. I wouldn’t dream of altering her, not a single strand of code.”

I smile and recount her latest exhibition of aberrant behavior, perhaps laying the blame for her disposition at his feet. After all, I have always believed the artist has a certain moral responsibility for the very act of creation.

John leans forward and pierces a grape with his fingernail. He draws the grape to his mouth, as if he is a poison-tester. “Each piece of art is unique, and has a different effect upon each person who encounters the work. Would you have asked Goya to make
Saturn Devouring His Son
a little less violent? Perhaps, you know, ‘tone it down’?”

I tell him, this time without a smile, that I paid 500 million for
Roxy
, and that he’s no Goya.

He laughs. “No, no I am not. No one is, anymore. Not even Ya Li.”

I stare at him, and tell him that maintaining his artistic integrity is all well and good, but that
Roxy
is slowly becoming a menace, if she is not one already.

“And how do you not know that this, too, is part of what makes her beautiful?” He shakes his head, and speaks to himself, as if I had suddenly disappeared, and he was left alone in a stranger’s house. “I once thought like you did. I worked so hard on my craft, and to make sure that people like you remained pleased. But now . . .
no.” He is sure of his rightness, and I find this frightening.

I stand up, and he follows suit, and shuffles to his helicopter without a farewell. It turns out that we will not be shooting satellite armaments into the ruins of Buenos Aires—together, at least. I discount his outburst as mere petulance. He loves his helicopters and studio-fortress and fame too much. He will never change.

After a week of constant confinement,
Roxy
appears to have calmed, though her behavior is a bit erratic. She paces, she sleeps, she makes tiny trilling noises from the back of her throat. She tips her head back and laughs. I have never seen her laugh before. A troupe of teenagers from New Dubai traipse through the museum halls, disinterested in any of the work, soldiering on as if polar explorers from another century. As they walk past
Roxy
—the tour guide wisely decides not to dwell on her—she splays herself on the glass of her case and bares her teeth, her double line of fangs.

All of her teeth are uncapped.

Several of them begin shrieking, placing calls to their parents and nannies to rescue them. The tour guide fumbles with the emergency response interface attached to her arm. A sleeping gas fills the case and fogs it.
Roxy
struggles and lashes out, longer than I thought would have been possible, until at last she slumbers. She is taken to the Department of Restoration.

The next morning I decide then that I need to buy some new art to clear my head. A fresh start for my collection.

As I make preparations to fly to Cape Adare—my favorite gallery spot—I wonder how
Roxy
will respond to restoration. John Priestly would have been the ideal candidate for the task, of course, but that is out of the question. The museum has the best team on the continent. So they say. I hear that
Epoxy
and
Paint
are in restoration as well. The atmosphere has been growing more chaotic in the Arboretum, even with
Roxy’s
absence: more scuffles with guards, more cunning attempts at communication with other pieces of art.

In a way I am already beginning to say good-bye to
Roxy
, as a squandered investment to write off. It will hurt, but not as much as these constant tantrums on her part. Art, above everything else, is a sign of one’s station in life, and it is difficult to properly display one’s station if there is not decorum.

I am about to put on my favorite art-buying suit and go up to the helipad, but I get a ping from the museum.

Roxy
has escaped.

My body trembles. I desperately want to harangue the museum concierge, but instead I hang up and retreat to my study. I turn on the camera view of
Roxy
and breathe a sigh of relief: the surveillance bees are still active.

I see cacophony. An alarm has gone off and
Roxy
is running, alongside a galloping
Paint
and
Epoxy
, past display case after display case. Many are opened and empty. A museum guard stands in front of them, sparks flying off his gloves.
Paint
leaps forward in an arc and punctures the guard’s heart with one of his legs.
Roxy
fumbles through the guard’s red uniform, and rips the interface patch off his arm, and puts it between her teeth.

They keep running.
Roxy
thinks she is going to make it. She thinks she’s going to be safe—though she’s still terrified, even I can sense that. More guards behind them—they hesitate. Those three works of art are worth more than a thousand of the guards’ lifetime salaries combined. In that second,
Epoxy
puts a hand on
Roxy’s
shoulder, and pushes her in another direction, away from the oncoming crush. She runs into a colder, narrower tunnel, and affords herself only one look back. The look is anguished. The halogens affixed in the ceiling grow dimmer, and then it’s almost dark, and she stops.

The bees have kept up, and they start to luminesce. She scowls at them. The link is still there. I can’t imagine what I would do without that lifeline. She puts her hands on her knees and catches her breath in the near-dark. It must be a service tunnel she is in, for museum employees.

She hears screams and shouts, and considers going back. But she takes a few steps, and there is dim light ahead. She starts walking forward again, her hand on the wall, which is jagged and powdery. The air’s ventilation is thin here. The tunnel curves left, then right. She is determined, which is clear from the look on her face, in her hunched shoulders and tense tail.

When the light grows bright enough to see by, she takes her hand off the wall and starts running again to the end of the tunnel. There must be lag; the bees struggle to keep up and I see the back of her ragged shirt as she runs.

The end of the tunnel is a rock wall with a porthole set into it.

She presses her face against the window. She sees a hangar on the other side. A huge space, as large as my villa, with a ceiling that can’t be seen. About a dozen large-scale art installations are in the hangar—massive, bulbous. The airlock to the arid outdoors is closed. The largest installations float, and
The Leviathan
is the largest of them all—three blue whales conjoined at the head and attached to a hovercraft, looking like the floating petals of a gargantuan poppy flower. On their sides are embedded the complete works of Jackson Pollock. The artist, a native to the continent named Tin Hester, was funded by the Antarctic Arts Research Council to buy the paintings on the cheap, since Pollock really hasn’t been in favor for quite some time.

It is magnificent.

About a dozen people in gray suits work in the hangar—jetting near the larger installations and hovering like dragonflies to tweak a propulsion unit or diagnose an adhesion rivet.

Roxy
crosses her arms and tries to decide what to do next. They will find her; she is sure of that.

No—I see it in her eyes. She is trying to figure out how to do what she already plans to do.

This is the moment that should be flagged, sent higher up the food chain, when a predator is neither contained with other predators nor immediately threatened.

Roxy
says something, but I can’t understand it. She bangs on the window, and then takes the guard’s interface out of her mouth. She presses a few buttons on it and casts it aside. Then she retrieves something else from her mouth, from underneath her long tongue. She slaps a small patch of yellow goo on the window and she takes a few steps back. I’m told that they’ve finally made a connection with her again. They are coming for her.

She covers her face. The door blows open. Metal shards nick her, but she manages to sidestep most of it. There’s a yellowish fog in the corridor; the goo keeps emitting smoke. Behind her, guards call for her. She calls back, but again I can’t understand what she’s saying.

She darts into the hangar, choking but staggering forward. I can’t see her because of the mist. The guards plunge through the broken doorway as well, but they are not prepared for the mist, and they halt and begin coughing.

I cannot see
Roxy
in the hangar at all, but in another minute, the hangar door heaves open, letting in the bright, unyielding Antarctic sunlight and the dry, bitter air.

The art installations’ cables have snapped; whether it’s because of the mist, I cannot say. I am shaking. They slowly float out of the hangar: a hot air-balloon attached to a large black heron, a hybrid of a dragon and a biplane.
The Leviathan
is the last to leave, as the whales’ bodies rotate slowly.
Roxy
is still nowhere to be seen.

That’s when my bees start to die. The view of the hangar gets fainter and scratchier, and then there is only the blank screen the color of black pearl.

I feel feverish. I stand up and check on my wife, who is resting in the study. I see—if only for an instant—
Roxy’s
face in hers. That is why it is important to understand art before you buy it, to know how to see what is in front of you. But after my wife entered her coma, I became not only a connoisseur, but a patron. Commissioning
Roxy
with my wife’s DNA was not theoretically legal, even in Antarctica. But I would not be deterred.

I stroke my wife’s gray locks of hair. She doesn’t stir. I feel the breath from her breathing apparatus. When
Roxy
broke into the study—what did she know? How could she have known of my wife?—she must have stared at my wife’s face and seen something of herself there, some unblemished vision, without the animal splicings, without the flowers blossoming inside her arms.