Aurora in Four Voices Read Free Page A

between the human-made pocket of calm around Nightingale and the violent winds that swept Ansatz. Yet despite the long drop to the plateau, the staircase had no protection, not even a rail. Another of Crankenshaft's "quirks." After all, he never used these stairs.
    Jato grimaced. When he came willingly, Crankenshaft always had a flycar waiting to take him home. Today he would have to go back inside and ask for a ride, a prospect he found as appealing as eating rocks.
    So he went down the stairs, stepping with care, always aware of the chasm of air. Around and around the spiral he went, never looking around too much, lest it throw off his balance. He wondered how he would appear to someone down in the city. Perhaps like a mote descending a stone DNA helix on the face of a massive cliff.
    The helix image caught his mind. It would make an intriguing sculpture. He could go to the library and find a text on DNA. It would have to be a holobook, though, rather than anything on the computer.
    Before Jato had come to Ansatz, his computer illiteracy hadn't mattered. As the oldest son of a water-tube farmer on Sandstorm, he hadn't been able to afford web access, let alone a console. Although everyone here in Nightingale had access to the city web, it did him little good. However, he had figured out how to tell a console in the library to print books.
    He doubted he would try the helix sculpture, though. Reading could only give information, not talent. One thing he had to say for Crankenshaft: the man was brilliant. Jato could never imagine him giving away his stratospherically-priced work for a Dream. Besides, what Dream would he find pleasant? Pulling wings off bugs, maybe.
    Jato scowled. A few Dreamers high in Nightingale's city government knew Crankenshaft had set him up. They framed him for a crime so brutal it would have meant execution or personality reconfiguration anywhere else. Imperialate law was harsh: an escaped convict fleeing into a new jurisdiction could be resentenced there for his crime. That often-denounced law was intended to ease the morass of extradition problems that arose as more and more planets came under Imperial rule. But it let Crankenshaft blackmail him; if Jato escaped Nightingale, he was subject to death or a brain wipe.
    Crankenshaft's work was known across a thousand star systems. He was a genius among geniuses, and on Ansatz that translated into power. Whatever he wanted for his art, he was given.
    Including Jato.

2. Dream Debt
    Jato lay in bed, unable to sleep. He had dimmed the lights until only faint images of sand-swept fields softened the walls, holoart he had created himself, memories of his home.
    Even after eight years, he still found this room remarkable. He had grown up in a two-room dustshack his family shared with two other families. Here he had, all to himself, a bed with a quilt, a circular bureau, a mirror, a bathroom, and soft rugs for the floor. The Dreamers charged no rent and gave him a living stipend. His medical care was free, including the light panels and vitamin supplements his sun-starved body craved.
    Tonight the room felt emptier than usual. He gave up trying to sleep and went to the bureau, a round piece of furniture that rotated. He removed his statue from the top drawer. He had come to Ansatz hoping for a miracle, to trade for a fabulous treasure. He had his own dreams then, ones he hoped to achieve by selling such a masterpiece: a farm of his own, a business, a better home for his family, well-deserved retirement for his parents, a wife and children for himself. A life.
    He had never intended to
make
art. Still, living in Nightingale, how could a person deny the pull to create? The statue had taken years to finish and he kept it hidden now, knowing how lacking the Dreamers would find his attempts. He liked it, though.
    To get the stone he wanted, he had climbed down windscoured cliffs below Nightingale, into crevices lost in the night-dark shadows. There he cut a chunk of