Beautiful Blood

“The mural? I doubt it. How long do you think it’ll take before they decide to rid themselves of Griaule’s corpse? A week? A month? No more, surely.”

Rosacher murmured in agreement.

“There’s a man in Punta Esperanza who’s had some success with reproducing images from life,” said Cattanay. “Perhaps by the time it’s finished, he’ll have refined the process and the mural will survive in that way. It’s hardly the same thing, though.”

Cattanay had another bite of sandwich and Rosacher, kicking his heels against the side of the platform, said, “May I ask a personal question?”

His mouth full, Cattanay signaled him to go ahead.

“Are you happy?”

Cattanay swallowed, wiped his mouth. “That’s a hell of a question…though I hear it often. Allie asks it of me almost every night.”

“I’m certain the context is very different.”

“Oh, without a doubt.” Cattanay picked at a bit of food trapped between his teeth. “Happy’s not a word I generally apply to myself. You might say I’m content. I’m doing work I love. Things aren’t perfect, but I suppose I’m happy enough. Happier than you by the look of it.”

“You’ll get no argument from me on that account.”

Tipping his head to the side, Cattanay seemed to study him as though he were a troublesome area on a canvas. “Perhaps you lack passion,” he said. “That’s what people need in order to know even a minute’s happiness. Without passion and the focus passion brings, there’s only confusion. That’s how I view it, anyway.”

“I used to be passionate about science, but no more. I was never passionate about the business. The business…it was something to do, something easier than science. I think I’ve used it as an excuse not to do what I really wanted.”

“You’d best find something else you really want, then. That is, if happiness is your goal.”

“I think my goals may be changing.”

“Pah! Mine change a dozen times each morning before lunch. I’ll wish for a better source of a magenta and then the sight of an art student with a nice derriere…well, you know how it goes.”

With a grunt, Cattanay got to his feet. He balled up the paper in which his sandwich had been wrapped and tossed it off the tower. Thin streams of people were passing in the streets below. “I have things to take care of at the vats. Have you been up on the dragon recently?”

“Not for years…and then only to the edge of the mouth.”

Cattanay stepped into the basket of the elevator attached to the side of the tower and prepared to lower himself. “You ought to take a walk up there when you have a chance. It can be inspiring. You never know what you might encounter.”

+

After puttering in his laboratory the rest of the morning and into late afternoon, unable to come to grips with the scientific elements of the issue that confronted him, Rosacher heeded Cattanay’s advice and climbed the scaffolding to the vats and then walked out onto the dragon’s back, following a meandering track through dry-leaved thickets until he came to Hangtown. The settlement had grown from a handful of shacks surrounding a polluted puddle of rainwater half an acre in circumference to a village of perhaps two hundred souls housed in fifty or sixty shanties, the largest of these serving as a tavern and marked by a neatly hand-lettered sign that read:

MARTITA’S HOME IN THE SKY

It was a relatively new structure with windows that were not merely square holes in the walls, but had panes of warped, opaque glass, and its wood was still a roach-brown, not faded to gray like the majority of the shanties; yet it was equally as ramshackle, with a slumping roofed porch and a partial second floor that appeared to be in the process of sliding off. A man—a scalehunter judging by his profusion of green and gold tattoos—sprawled unconscious in a chair on the front porch, an advertisement for the effectiveness of the establishment’s spirits. Having experienced neither exhilaration nor inspiration during his walk, Rosacher entered the spacious common room and its atmosphere of gloom and fried onions, thinking a pint would help fuel his descent to Morningshade. Behind the bar (boards laid across a half-dozen barrels), a robust, round-faced woman of thirty or thereabouts, unprepossessing in aspect, her brown hair in long braids, dressed in cloth breeches (a style favored by Hangtown’s female population—skirts tended to catch on twigs and thorns) and a low-cut blouse, busied herself with polishing mugs. An elderly white-haired man with a scarred face and a man young enough to be his grandson played cards at a bench by the window. They eyed him indifferently and the woman came bustling over to Rosacher, who had taken a seat at the rear.

“We’ve a good blond ale from Port Chantay,” she said. “Otherwise it’s homebrew. Quite nice, it is, and very strong, if that’s your pleasure.”