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He ran away from the screaming beggar, with her voice echoing foulnesses down
the crystal corridors.
When he returned to the shoppe, one of the Supervisors was waiting for him.
 I ve been looking through your ledger, the Supervisor said. Lhayne had no
idea
which one this was; it might have been Dorell or Keys or even Kathrhn with her
atoms rearranged to form a blank mask without features.  Your last trip
produced some variations in the megaflow that could not be ignored. Why did
you do it? You certainly couldn t have thought you d get away with it?
 I read his mind. He was a filthy little scum.
 Nonetheless!
 Don t yell at me.
 This isn t a game, friend Lhayne. This is survival.
 It s always survival. But not necessarily Art.
 Oh yes. I d forgotten. You re still calling yourself an artist, aren t you?
 That s what I am. It s the correct word.
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The Supervisor snickered. There were no features to the mask, so it was
impossible to tell how much of a sneer accompanied the sound.  Correct?
Perhaps operable is what you mean. An Artist who is himself the Art. Standing
in a public place and letting rain wash over you, and calling it  Rebirth.
Crawling through broken glass till your. body is torn and calling it  The
Eternal Apollonian-Dionysian Conflict. I suppose that s Art.
 I don t tell you how to supervise.
 Art criticism is as old as Art.
 I rearrange the universe. That is the nature of my Art.
 No, friend Lhayne. We all rearrange the universe. What s left of it. The ten
thousand of us, here at the end of time. That is the nature of survival.
 My personal universe, then. I rearrange that.
The Supervisor picked up the ledger.  But you may not rearrange it for the
rest of us.
We are all precariously balanced; we each pay our way; there is no room for
self-indulgence.
 No room for freedom, you mean.
 There is no freedom in oblivion. The Supervisor shoved the ledger toward
Lhayne.
 These gave us our freedom.
The ledger was filled, page after page. Deals. Sales. Time bought with toys.
The ability to mold a bear out of clay, the artistic eye, and the basis of
god-worship... sold to a nameless australopithecene in South Africa. The  way
of seeing that turned a pointed stick used for scratching in the earth into
the first spear... sold to a bright-eyed Neanderthaler in
Pleistocene Prussia. The ultimate weapon, gunpowder, sold to a mandarin
warlord in
Choukoutien village. Godsight, sold to Joan of Arc. The concept of the
assembly-line, sold to
Henry Ford. Page after page, line after filled line, each one signed with a
smeared name or illiterate mark of identification. Signed as if the quill had
been dipped in some watery, vital fluid more binding than blood, some fluid
that might serve as an energy conductor.
Michelangelo, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Pasteur, Méliès, Freud, Jefferson, Roger
Williams, Confucius. Names, thousands of names that meant nothing against the
pull of the Infinite
Dark Mass save as moments of rearranged time that bought survival.
Lhayne stared numbly at the ledger and knew he had been wrong. The madness he
had seen in the beggar of time in the corridor of the vaults had possessed
him, might soon possess them all. And then what point was there to survival?
He wanted to say
I m sorry.
but the artist in him would not let the words emerge. It was stronger than the
frail human being that contained the artistic spirit. It knew there was only
one thing that stood between humanity and the engorgement of the Infinite Dark
Mass.
And it was not merely the frantic need to survive. There was survival... and
there was something finer, greater beyond survival. What was existence without
Art? Empty as the
Infinite Dark Mass that gnawed at the perimeters of Rubble Point.
 Your trips are ended, the Supervisor said.
It was said without feeling, but a tone crept through from behind the mask.
 I ll find another way of buying her freedom. She deserves to live.
 No doubt.
 I ll find another way.
 I think not, friend Lhayne. Your own account will be overdrawn because of
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