Trading Rosemary Read Online Free PDF Page B

said the middle brother. “Go on. Travelling’s hard work. Get a good meal inside before you set off again. You can tell us about the next walk you’re doing. You never know, we might be interested.”
    “I don’t have anything planned,” said Rosemary, “but there’s a lake back home that might be interesting. Not very strenuous—I’d stay at an inn each night, and there’s a boat service that would carry the bags for me.”
    “That sounds civilized,” said the oldest brother.
    “Yes,” said Rosemary. “Just my speed. I think that I’d enjoy it.”

Kaimais
    Regaining the second coin was as enjoyable.
    Rosemary’s mother had collected more furniture than memories. The coins from her generation of stewardship tended towards craftsmanship and construction—the carpenter’s carving of a single sideboard, the potter’s throwing of a single set of crockery. For generations there had been a commune of artists in the Waikato hills who had recorded their experiences and destroyed their creations at the moment of completion. For the most talented of the artists, the coins resulting from their sculptures or paintings or embroidery were worth more than the concrete products themselves. The more accessible experiences could be recorded on multiple disks and would easily find markets among the common people, but the most capable artists, the most brilliant creations, had values that skyrocketed with rarity. A single replication not only of the experience of the artwork, but the experience of its creation, made the picking up a hammer or the lighting a match worthwhile.
    When Rosemary visited, there was a large midden at the gate of the commune, an advertisement of the genius residing within, and a warning to passersby that they needed deep pockets to enter. The midden was a central feature of the commune, the one place all the artists gathered to relax, to drink on an overhanging balcony and cheer their colleagues when they came down the path to the edge of the pit pushing wheelbarrows or carrying baskets of ashes, well-shredded parchment, or canvas. The midden was their agora and café—the workshops themselves were off limits to any but their occupants, lest the experience of a piece be spread and the value of the resulting coin limited.
    Rosemary knew that the people who lived and worked here would not have reacted as Ruth had. Coins were made to be traded. True, it was not entirely the same. Most of the artists who walked the line between destruction and creation had a second copy of their experiences locked within their heads—it kept their skills intact and allowed them to improve on their talents. It meant, of course, that the true value of a coin would not be fully known until after the death of its creator—the mere possibility of replicas kept prices artificially low. This form of double vision was seen as part of the eccentricity of the artist; only very few had access to memory machines that did not erase as they recorded, and these were usually reserved for educational institutions. There was something slightly disreputable about such a practice when performed by a private citizen. It was seen as an overly mawkish form of nostalgia, tinted with greed. The slight whiff of selfishness, of the covetous, hung around those that transgressed this social boundary, including many artists. An unfortunate necessity, thought Rosemary, but then she was secretly sure that artists were never happy unless they felt themselves to be transgressing
something.
    The most talented of the artists, those that came along only once or twice in a generation, disdained the double memory. They possessed but a single copy, and traded it away, relying solely upon the latency of their talent for any future works. These were the most highly valued. Any who pretended to have such talent soon found their ability to create new and desirable works dwindling, and were soon reduced to creating and recreating what they had produced before.