Cosmocopia by Paul di Filippo

‘sculpt?’”
    Lazorg jumped up and loosed a wordless howl before recovering himself. “Don’t tell me you don’t know sculpting! I’ve seen sculptures everywhere. You’ve got one right outside your doorway here. The model of the Cosmocopia—”
    “Oh, you mean ideations. Do you not know how ideations are produced?”
    Lazorg sunk back down to the floor. “Not another quirky aspect of this place. Please, I can’t take it. …”
    Palisander had reached around and was rummaging under his bed. He pulled out a long wooden wand with an obvious hand-grip at one end and a set of curious irregular protuberances near the pointed tip.
    “This is a tranche. It’s not a very good one, I’m afraid, because I’m not a very good ideator. Strictly an amateur. Watch.”
    Palisander lofted the tranche and began poking at the empty air. The tranche met no obvious resistance to its prodding—until Palisander hit a certain spot. There, the tranche seemed to catch and hang.
    “An interstitial node. They’re everywhere, really.”
    The tip of the tranche disappeared into some subtle flaw newly opened up in spacetime. Palisander worked the invisible tip about for a time, then withdrew it.
    Attached to the tip of the tranche was a sizable blob of glowing ivory stuff.
    “Cosmocopian nacre. Now, watch!”
    Palisander continued to maneuver the tranche with blob attached in a circuitous path through the air: dipping, weaving, bobbing.
    Lazorg appeared fascinated. The performance, thought Crutchsump, who had not often enjoyed the leisure time to watch ideators publicly create since the days when she was a carefree child, had something of a dance about it, something of a glassblower’s actions, and something of the drunken flight of a swamp bee.
    “This is the stage where skill and artistry are most involved. The physical dexterity of the ideator must be matched and complemented by his mental acuity and emotional sensitivities, projected through the tranche, as he imposes his vision on the nacre.”
    The blob gradually began to take on an altered shape and coloration. The conclusion to the process was signaled by the completed object detaching itself from the now-clean tranche and falling to the floor, where it clunked and bounced but did not break.
    Lazorg shifted his rump to reach and claim the ideation. He held it in his palm, and Crutchsump could discern that it was a crude model of the Cosmocopia, like the grander one out front.
    “You can see that I was not being merely self-effacing when I claimed amateur status. Compared to the genuine Arbogast creation out front, this trinket is a muddy lump. But you may feel free to take it with you, as an expression of my concern for you. Now, if there’s nothing else troubling you …?”
    Lazorg said, “This fellow Arbogast—He lives locally?”
    “Yes. He’s Telerpeton’s most famous ideator. He could certainly afford to make his lodgings in a more exclusive neighborhood, but he retains an affection for the district of his birth. He donated the ideation up front out of the goodness of his heart!”
    “Can you arrange for me to meet him?”
    “Well, I don’t see why not. …”
    Lazorg jumped up, grabbed Crutchsump’s hand, as well as the noetic’s, and pulled both to their feet.
    “Quick! Let’s go!”
    Arbogast lived on the top floor of a sprawling, solid but battered copper-roofed tenement, its stucco walls stained with verdigris streaks, the whole structured around an immense courtyard attained through a tall wide portal in the building’s north side. The courtyard teemed with the quotidian life of its inhabitants: children playing, domestic washing of both clothing and bodies being undertaken at a soapy stone trough fed by a fountain, a cook cart sending up charcoal smoke and the odor of clandestini meat on skewers.
    Crutchsump imagined how splendid it would be to live in such luxury.
    Upon being dragged from his shrine, Palisander had moved very slowly through the