In Ashes Born (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) (16 page)

I thought he’d placed special emphasis on the words “on the way out,” but I really couldn’t blame him.

Pip nodded. “Yes. I’ll take it. The artist? A local?”

Daryll shrugged. “I suspect so. Most of them are. They’ll be able to tell you at the desk. On the way out.”

Pip stared at Daryll for one long moment. “I’m not going to hurl on your shoes, lad. And I’m on my way out. Relax.”

Daryll actually gulped. He also had the sense to simply nod.

Pip lifted the painting off the hook and peeled the tag off the wall. It left an outline in the surface where it had been hung. “Been here a while, eh. Good,” he said. He turned to Daryll. “So where’s this desk on the way out?”

“Right this way, sir.” He led us back to the maître d’s desk and muttered something in her ear.

“Ah, you’d like to purchase the painting?” she asked.

“I would,” Pip said. “Anything you can tell me about the artist?” He offered the tag.

She took it and pulled a tablet from a cubby under the desk. She flipped through a few screens and smiled. “Yes, Erik James. Local artist. He has several other pieces here if you’d like to see them?”

Pip shook his head. “Just this one. Where can I find Erik James?”

“His contact information should be on the back of the picture,” she said.

Pip looked at the back and grinned. “So it is.” He held out his thumb and she offered the tablet with an image of the painting showing at the top of the screen and the particulars across the bottom. He thumbed it and authorized the transaction. “Thank you very much.” He smiled and nodded toward the door. “Come, Ishmael. We’ve an artist to retain.”

The maître d’ gave him a kindly smile that she probably reserved for the backs of drunken patrons as they left the restaurant—part sympathy and part relief. She offered me one that was all sympathy as I followed him out.

On the sidewalk outside, he peered at the label and then looked around like he was sniffing the air.

“What? You’re going to track him down through your keen sense of smell, now?” I asked.

“No, I’m going to use the signpost over there to figure out where I am so I know how to get to this address. Now are you going to continue being a wise guy or are you coming with me? Pick one.”

“I never knew you were a mean drunk.”

“You still don’t. If I were drunk, I’d have missed this and we’d still be looking for a name.” He held up the painting.

“That’s our name? Firebird?”

“And you call me drunk. Wake up. You’re the one with the classical education.” He strode off down the street, the painting tucked safely under his arm.

I followed him, having to jog a couple of steps to catch up.

As I fell into step with him, he glanced at me. “Were you paying attention to anything I was saying in there about branding?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Who are we?” he asked.

“I have no idea where you’re going with this.”

“You. Yeah, you’re stupidly rich, but the love of your life was snatched away.”

His words hit me in the chest like a blow. When I could catch my breath, I said, “Well, don’t sugarcoat it.”

“The business you built? What happened to it?”

“DST bought it for a nice pile of credits. Which is, I’ll remind you, how I got stupidly rich.”

“Exactly. What do you need now?”

We stomped along for several meters before I shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“Exactly. You have no idea what you need. I’ll tell you what you need. You need something to do. Something other than hanging around campus scaring students and drinking tea with Margaret Newmar.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m still not tracking.”

“And you give me crap about being drunk,” he said, turning to port at the next intersection. “You need a new beginning.”

I frowned at him. The game was beginning to get a little old. “So?”

He slowed down and looked over at me in short glances as he walked along. “So do I. I’m bored spitless by this fast packet trade. It’s too simple. Too small. When I saw the
Chernyakova’s
auction fail twice? I went to the old man and made the case that we need to diversify.”

“So he agreed to letting you go to Breakall and bid.”

“Yeah. And the more I think about it, the more I’m coming to believe he knew I was underfunded.”

“So you’d come home and get back to work?” I asked.

“Probably.”

“What little I know about your old man, that doesn’t sound like him.”

He shrugged. “Maybe I’m wrong. I’d be good with that.”

“I’m still not seeing what this all has to do with the painting.”

“By the all the wrinkly ’nads on Mount Olympus, man. Look!”

He held the painting up in front of me. In the bright light of the late afternoon sun, the ruddy gold flames seemed to dance as the bird rose from the flames. I stared at it for several heartbeats before I twigged.

I looked at Pip. “We need to find Erik James.”

Pip seemed to know his way around that part of town so I followed him as he tracked his way through the warren of streets like Theseus in the Minotaur’s maze following the delicate strand of Ariadne’s thread. In a relatively short period of time, he stopped in front of what looked like a run-down warehouse in a part of town I really didn’t want to be wearing nice clothes in as the sun set.

“This is it.”

I eyed the building and looked around to see who might be eyeing us.

While I wasn’t looking, Pip marched up to a dented metal door and knocked. Loudly.

I followed him up to the building while trying to keep tabs on our surroundings and Pip at the same time.

I heard a couple of bolts clank, and then the door opened a crack. “Yeah?”

“You Erik James?” Pip asked, holding up the painting.

“Maybe.”

“Well, sonny-buck, if you’re not, tell him to get his rosy red cheeks out here. We need to hire him.”

The door opened a little wider, revealing a wraithlike figure wrapped in paint-stained denim. Paint spattered hair hung down to his jawline on either side of his face.

“For what?”

“We need a logo. Based on this firebird.”

The young man’s face wrinkled in obvious confusion. “A logo? For what?”

“Does it matter?” Pip asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Letterhead? Online? Store sign? They all need a different touch.”

“How so?”

“Some things, like letterhead can handle the fine line. Store sign needs to be visible from a distance and detail can get lost.”

Pip looked over his shoulder at me, a wild, maniacal grin on his face.

“Yeah. We need this kid,” he said.

Chapter Sixteen
Port Newmar:
2374, June 8

The outside of the building looked ramshackle. Inside it looked like a paint explosion. I stepped in from the fading evening light and my eyes couldn’t figure out where to look next. Frosted skylights let in light from above. A line of tall windows across the north wall let in even more of the fading daylight, along with a clear view of a brick wall that had been decorated with an eye-searing graffiti mural of arrows and stars that seemed to be moving of their own accord.

The concrete floor, smooth as polished granite under my boots, had paint spatters everywhere. I couldn’t make any sense of the shapes left there. Everywhere I looked I saw paintings and posters and even sculptures. They stood in stacks propped against walls. They hung from the walls and even the rafters some five meters overhead.

“I don’t get many visitors,” the boy said, wiping his hands down the front of his shirt as he backed away from the door.

Pip held out his hand. “We’re not visitors, Mr. James. We’re clients. I’m Philip Carstairs. That’s Ishmael Wang.”

James stepped forward to shake his hand briefly and then stepped back again. His gaze flickered toward me and then back to Pip. “What kind of logo do you want?”

“We want to license the design for this firebird.” He held up the painting again. “This is much too detailed for what we want, but this is the idea.”

“It’s for the side of a freighter,” I said.

He looked at me. “Like an ocean freighter?”

“Like a solar clipper freighter,” I said and pointed upwards.

His eyes and his lips all got very round. “I’ve never seen one. In person anyway.”

“They’re just big boxes out in space. Not very interesting,” Pip said.

He blinked several times. “Not to you, maybe.”

“We see them all the time,” Pip said with a nod. “We’re a little jaded in that regard.” He put the painting down, leaning it against his leg, and pulled out his tablet. He flipped through a few screens and then turned it to face James. “This is my ship. Our logo? Boring C in a circle. See?”

“Well, it has some identity,” James said leaning forward to look at the image. “That’s not a just a circle, is it?”

“My father assures me that it’s a star.”

“Oh, of course. Those are the stellar prominences around the edge. What’s the C stand for?”

“Carstairs.”

James ran fingers through his hair. “Oh, right. You’re Carstairs. And, wait. That’s
your
ship?”

“Technically it belongs to the family company, but yeah. That’s the one I paid for.” Pip lowered his tablet and leaned down to catch the guy’s eye. “Focus, lad. We need your help. Logo? Ship?”

He shook himself. “Right.” He waved a hand at the table. “I can’t tell the scale. How big is that?”

Pip looked at it. “That’s probably three meters across, but it’s not for that ship.” He looked around the warehouse and pointed at the south wall. “We need one at least that big.”

James’s jaw dropped.

“Probably twice as tall, actually,” I said.

Pip looked at me. “Really?”

“Side panel on the forward nacelle is around ten meters tall and twenty wide.”

Pip turned back to James. “It doesn’t need to fill it. It just needs to be visible from a distance.”

The kid’s jaw lost its slackness and his gaze swept the wall of his studio as if he’d never seen it before. “That’s huge,” he said, his voice a bare whisper. He looked at Pip and then at me. “And you want that firebird as the inspiration piece?”

Pip grinned and picked up the painting. “Well, I’d like this painting but it’s way too nuanced to program into an industrial painter.” He stopped in mid-stream and looked at the kid. “Isn’t it?”

James gazed toward the painting, but his focus lay somewhere else. He raked his fingers through his hair again. “Depends.”

“On what?” Pip asked.

“How many colors the painter can spray, how fine a resolution it can spray at.” He shrugged and looked at Pip. “How long you want to wait for it to process.”

Pip turned to me. “Thoughts?”

I shrugged. “We’ll need letterhead, maybe stencils. Shoulder flashes.” I blew out a breath trying to think of all the things we’d done for Icarus. “Color scheme to tie the branding all together.” I shook my head. “I have no idea what those mobile painters can do, but if we’re thinking yardwork in Dree, they’ve got a lot better facilities for that.”

Pip’s head nodded as I checked off the items, his eyes unfocused. “First things first,” he said.

“Feed the crew,” I answered.

He shot me a grin. “Well, I was thinking more like base design. The painting gives us a palette. Reds and golds.”

“You’ll want a ground color,” James said.

“Ground color?”

“Yeah. Red and gold go together but you’ll need something to put the shape on so it stands up. Black and red are common but difficult to work with because their saturation values tend to be too close. Desaturating red makes it pink, and that’s not exactly what you want on the side of your ship.”

“Yeah. We’re not going to go buy red shipsuits,” I said.

Pip looked at me. “No? Crimson suits with gold piping? Sounds nice.”

I sighed. “Sounds like a doorman.”

“I’d go with a light toned gray,” James said. “Neutral color so it won’t clash with anything on top of it. Not dense enough to overpower any design and not so clean that a smudge of dirt would stand out.”

“You design clothes, too?” Pip asked.

He shook his head. “No. Just practical.” He waved his arms around. “White canvas is white. Do you see any white canvases here?”

Pip held up the firebird. “This is white.”

James shook his head. “Gray.”

“Really?”

James nodded.

Pip looked around and pointed to a large canvas hanging on the wall by the door. It had what looked like a line of ideograms running from top to bottom in a progression of colors from black to yellow and back to black.

“Gray,” James said. “Well, more smoke white than gray, but it’s the contrast. If you saw it against white, you’d see.” He crossed to a workbench that lounged against the south wall and pulled a piece of heavy paper from a stack under it. “This is white,” he said. “Or close enough for this.” He crossed to the canvas by the door and held the paper up beside it. The canvas wasn’t white. I couldn’t really tell what it was. It almost looked like it had a bit of blue in it.

Pip walked over and held the firebird up to the paper. It wasn’t white.

“The frame interrupts your perception of the color a little, but it’s not white,” James said.

“What color is it?” Pip asked.