The City

I slept most of the morning today. In the afternoon I went to the Yellow Brick Road Gallery with Carys and Ava. Rick, Naomi and Darina had decided to go back to the surface and climb the central peak. I remembered Ava’s protective anger last night and wondered if she was anything to do with that decision.

The Yellow Brick Road Gallery is the tallest building in New Copernicus. It’s actually attached to the solid “sky” at the top, though you can’t see it properly in the picture because of the sky lighting (they call it the ‘fake blue’ round here, apparently).

I don’t know why, perhaps it was my quiet room, but I hadn’t expected New Copernicus to be quite so big. The style, with the tall buildings, air conditioning, mass transit systems, and of course vast numbers of embodied people, is that of the 1st Century EE. In fact, the whole thing was built and populated as part of the build up to the Day Billion celebrations, starting only about 400 years ago. It has around 60 million embodied inhabitants, most of them human, and space for another 20 million or so as visitors like us.

It felt like quite a lot of those people were in the Gallery. There was a huge sign in the entrance, ‘A Billion Days of Art’. Carys told me there were over ten thousand exhibits, or one for every few hundred years. ‘It definitely beats the Art Trail,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we came here.’

The first ten floors were dedicated to art relevant to the 1st millennium EE, a century to each floor. There was genetic art, living art, objects made of bone, stone, wood, air, superheated plasma, even little knots of symmetry distortion. Some were recent originals in the ancient artistic styles, some were replicas of art from the time, and one or two were actual 1st millennium artworks, preserved behind careful barriers, their decay prevented at a molecular level. It was fascinating, but exhausting. After a couple of hours, despite two lots of coffee and cake, I’d had enough.

Ava walked back to the hotel with me, leaving Carys to explore the upper levels, or at least some of them.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said as we manoeuvred our way along the crowded street. ‘I didn’t want to drag you away. Perhaps I really am a liability.’

‘No, you’re not,’ she said. ‘Carys is happy looking at all that art he wouldn’t have seen otherwise, Rick and Naomi and Darina are happy climbing and not having to bother about art, and I’m happy just looking after you.’

She stopped in the middle of the road and kissed me lightly on the cheek. I was so confused I collided with someone and had to apologise again.

I wanted to ask Ava why looking after me made her feel happy, but when we got to the hotel I was so tired that I fell asleep again almost immediately. So a bit of a waste of a day, really. But I did get a few pictures in the Gallery, I think these are the best.

Sorry I didn’t get the names of them. I’ll try to find out tomorrow.