Cosmocopia by Paul di Filippo Page A

streets, reluctant to dispense with a noetic’s traditional decorum, and now Lazorg was fuming with impatience. He hustled Crutchsump and the noetic across the courtyard and up an indicated set of stairs.
    “Slow down,” said Palisander. “There will be just as much interstitial nacre available an hour or a year from now as there will be in the next few seconds. The supply is, for all purposes, infinite.”
    Lazorg paid little heed to the injunction, but took the stairs two at a time, leaving his companions to hasten after him.
    On the top floor a wide corridor faced with numerous humble side doors terminated at a grander entrance to what was plainly a more impressive apartment. Palisander led them to this doorway, and knocked.
    Arbogast himself opened the door before too long.
    The master ideator was a burly fellow with a game leg. His sleeveless leather-and-fur jerkin revealed impressive arm muscles and a barrel torso. Wrestling with the nacre had evidently built his biceps and forearms up. He radiated a certain brusqueness not untempered by curiosity and a childlike vivacity and interest in whatever life presented him. His caul was studded with abstract trinkets.
    “Palisander,” Arbogast said, “what draws you out of your meditative cubbyhole?”
    “I’d like to present this fellow named Lazorg to you. He’s a curious case, a wanderer across the dimensions, and I thought you might find his story lively.”
    Lazorg pushed forward. “Arbogast, I’d like to apprentice myself to you. I want to make ideations.”
    Holding up a hand, Arbogast said, “Hold on one moment! Who says I’m taking any apprentices?”
    “But you must!”
    “Well, let’s discuss this inside.”
    Arbogast’s apartment was a huge unwalled studio featuring broad skylights, with all the domestic furniture pushed into a corner. The rest of the space held shelving, and on these shelves rested a wide assortment of ideations of all types: figures of animals and buildings, as well as sensual sinuosities with no common referents.
    But none of sentients such as Arbogast and Palisander and Crutchsump themselves.
    In the middle of the space was a rack full of tranches of distinct shapes, a cushion for sitting and several other pillows meant to catch finished ideations safely as they fell like fruit from the tranche.
    Arbogast led them to this work zone. He picked up rudimentary tranche of low complexity and handed it to Lazorg.
    “Here, let’s see if you have any natural facility.”
    Lazorg attempted to mimic what Palisander had done. Crutchsump watched with sympathy and hope.
    Probing the air, Lazorg eventually encountered an interstitial node, but was unprepared for resistance. The tranche was almost jerked out of his grip. He managed to maintain his hold, however, and began to reel nacre out of the rift. But when he attempted to disengage, the lump of nacre did not sever, but pulled back like rubber, yanking the tranche out of Lazorg’s hand and snapping the bulbous wand in half against the edges of the rift.
    Lazorg looked at Arbogast with despair in his eyes and stance. Arbogast regarded his broken tool for a moment, then said:
    “It took me three days with my master before I could even sense a node. Perhaps your passage across the dimensions has endowed you with a certain intuition. But whatever the case, you may consider yourself my pupil from this moment forth.”

6. Artists and Models
    CLIMBING THE COOKING-REDOLENT STAIRS to Arbogast’s apartment, Crutchsump vented an unusually self-indulgent expression of her weariness in the form of a deep trembling sigh. Her feet ached from tromping all about Sidetrack City in search of bones. (Today she had been as far as the Zolah stockyards, seeking whatever bones might be cadged from backdoor transactions with shifty employees.) Her hands still smelled faintly but distinctly of carnal muck and rot, although she had indulged in a bath of livewater before venturing here. And she had sprained her