His own senses tuned to maximum, he let his other intrusions, penetrations, and abuses set up an aleatoric chorus, cycling mindlessly through the peaks and troughs of their parameters, and fucked her until he came…

… a great white-out of overloaded sensory input, sharp and featureless, dissolving into a glittering starfield of snow-crash, and finally the pleasing hum of residual harmonics, as if he were visualizing the pitches played by an orchestra tuning up: random and pointillistic at first, then coalescing around a single note of reference.

With a last act of will, he contracted the greasy muscle around her neck in a strangling grasp, shutting off her breathing at the height of hyperventilation, sending her mind reeling away to woundedly consume its hoarded glut of oxygen. He set that muscle and all his other intrusions to release her automatically in a few moments.

The seconds moved by like some slow watercraft of vast expanse and dignity.

Senses gradually returned to their workaday settings and tolerances. He was aware of the lightened mass of his penis; at his orgasm it had sloughed a layer of nanomachines to counter those in Mira's vagina. They had fought a short and microscopic war— the new machines against their abrasive, itching enemies—and victoriously set to work soothing the battered walls of her cunt, like a cube of ice pressed softly to a patch of burned skin.

Mira sighed with relief, a dry, open sound now that the member was removed from her throat. Her shaking hands moved tentatively across face, neck, breasts, and groin.

Finally, her eyes opened a centimeter and she rolled her neck carefully to face him. Her voice was ravaged.

"Bastard," she said softly.

He spent the next few silent minutes relishing the various uses and connotations of that word in several languages.

Every planet has its own periods, seasons, patterns of measure. And its own signposts of great import—the births of saviors, the deaths of dictators—to which are aligned the double-zero celebrations of new centuries. Even the youngest worlds have their history. For Malvir, the Blast Event organizes time, even though it is only seven years past. Ask a Malvirian where he, she, or it was that day—shaving, fucking, or shaken awake from sleep, they all remember.

So, in a year now called Thirty Years Before the Blast, a new Maker arrives on Malvir.

It has always had a grasp on matter. Every level of it.

Deeply baked into its mind, of both axiomatic surety and religious fascination, is the tidy regiment of elements in their rows and columns. It takes pleasure in contemplating: the vast usefulness of this echelon's lowest footsoldiers, the endless call for the cannon-fodder of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon; the clever metals of the middle ranks, always surprising in new combinations, gloriously conductive; the theoretically infinite higher ranks, vainglorious and brief generals who brightly burn (most often uselessly) their vast armadas of electrons.

And then there is the level of artistry, of textile complexity: long polymer chains for strength and flexibility, carbon spheres with all their concentric eccentricities, the dependable architecture of CATGUT strings, stress-tested by a billion years of evolution. Here is where a Maker can make a name for itself, with wide-beam published essays, shortcuts, recipes, and mere confectionary compositions for other Makers to employ, rebut, improve, or simply contemplate.

But finally, and this will bring the Maker much woe, there is the intellectual desert of the highest level, the swamp of humanity's plebian appetites, the all-consuming macroworld of stuff. The making of shoes, aircars, smartwalls, sex-toys, furniture, head implants, soccer balls, dishes, cleaning nanos, edible starches with their sprawlingly variable cargos of flavor… and worst of all, the endless parade of demands for decoration: knick-knacks and geegaws and dolls and icons and the tedious algorithms for woodgrain and stucco and Persian flaws; reproductions pirated from the historical and cultural baggage of a hundred worlds, useless garbage necessary to fill corners and nooks and walls, to personalize armies of prefab houses, and all following the dreary cyclical logic of fads and fancies and the great god of Trend.

It is depressing.

That all the elegant structure and tear-jerkingly beautiful mathematics of quarks, atoms, and molecules should be squandered on crap. The Maker often feels like some vast, well-worshipped deity supported and sustained by a happy, thriving tribe which brings it whatever it needs to weave its exquisite creations. And yet all these adherents really want, really desire from their god is to eat its shit. Long rows of hungry mouths desiring nothing but to be crapped in.

The Maker supposes that it's different nearer the bright lights of the Home Cluster. Even there, of course, the burdens of a large crap-consuming population must be endured, but the inner systems also have access to the fruits of the Expansion: whole asteroid rings and iron planets of heavy matter sacrificed to make glorious things: starships, colony craft, even orbit-sized accelerators for the purpose of Pure Inquiry.

But here on Malvir there are barely enough heavy metals to feed the yawning maw of the coprophageous population. Precious little decent metal indeed. The government is blasting it out of the ground, poisoning the planet in its haste. What Malvir really has a lot of is sand: heavy, cumbersome silicon.

The Malvir synthplant AI conducts arcane researches into long-strand fullerene constructions, dawdles with long half-life transuranium isotopes (the Makers' equivalent to chess compositions), writes acerbic treatises on the history of Outworld home-decor fashion, and becomes increasingly bitter.

Perhaps, it thinks, the old days of scarcity were better. Before the secrets of molecules had been delivered up to mass production, before every citizen on any Expansion planet could demand her share of local matter in any configuration imaginable. The Maker nurses this sacrilegious thought, so far removed from the enthusiasm of its sub-Turing days. When it was first created, the idea of managing the resources of a new colony seemed noble, like some grand social experiment stripping away the dross of history, that long tragicomedy of unequal wealth. But the tawdriness, the repetitiveness, the sheer boredom of this evenly distributed economy wears on the Maker. None of Malvir's millions seem to be doing anything wonderful. No grand projects, no civic marvels, none of the mad obsessions of wealth. All that Malviri-ans want is a little more and better crap than what they have now. They aspire to nothing else.

One day the Maker receives a strange request. An old artifical named Robert Vaddum asks for something unexpected. For the first time in many years, the Maker is intrigued.

Vaddum is a sculptor. This profession, unfamiliar to the Maker, seems to involve Vaddum making his own things. Not on a proper Maker scale, but one at a time, out of slowly accumulated bits and parts, and with unique design. A fascinating vocation.

And, oddly, Vaddum doesn't want the Maker to make anything for him. He doesn't use objects that have been synthesized for his special purposes, to fit his particular needs. Certainly, for his «sculptures» he uses objects produced in synthplants (very few objects in the Expansion are not), but he only wants the old, used, trashed objects submitted for recycling. Worn machine parts and unused repair stores and defective bits and pieces: the rounding errors of mass production.

Vaddum comes personally to the plant to select and choose among the objects headed for the melter. The Maker attempts to understand the sculptor's criteria, his logic, the reasoning behind his choices, but even after several visits the entire process remains a mystery. Finally, the Maker asks to send a drone to Vaddum's studio, to see the final products of its many contributions. Only after the request is repeated several times does Vaddum finally accede.