The UNAM arts courtyard smelled like jacaranda, coffee, and fresh varnish.
Lights ran in clean lines between the columns, soft enough that the sky over Mexico City still pressed close. Tables were set, not extravagant, just good linen and real glassware. Faculty moved in small clusters. Donors wore discreet badges. A handful of students were clearly there to be noticed.
Four of the people at the edges had green skin.
Thevir Skelin stood a little apart from his canvas, arms folded. He wore a simple dark jacket that passed for formal in the Trust offices, his rank glyphs tucked out of sight at his collar. On the easel in front of him was a painting he had finished on the ship months ago, the first time he managed to make himself work without a schedule on his desk.
It was not Toluca. It was the approach to Earth from the freighter’s observation ring. A wide curve of cloud and ocean, not quite realistic, layered in translucent colors until it looked like light more than paint. At the bottom edge, a thin line of freighter hull and the suggestion of faces reflected in glass.
“It holds,” Vhselor Drellin said quietly, studying the canvas from an angle. “Your horizon is correct. The stress sits where it should.”
“You see stress everywhere,” Thevir replied, but there was no real bite to it.
Vhselor shrugged. He wore work clothes too, the kind of neat, tough fabric a structural engineer pulled on when he knew he would end up crawling around real machinery after the reception. His piece sat on a waist high pedestal, a sculpted form in two metals, one dark, one pale. The shape spiraled upward, elements crossing near each other but only touching at a few deliberate points.
“Remind me of the title,” T’mari said, stopping beside him.
“Load Bearing,” Vhselor answered, and did not flinch this time.
“It is honest,” she said. “And good work.”
Rhooela Frulen had taken a different corner. Her triptych was small compared to Thevir’s canvas, but it pulled the eye harder. The first panel showed a strip mined V’ren hillside, all cut marks and scoured soil, painted from old survey images. The second was a Missouri test field in late afternoon, rows of trial crops she had helped lay out with AgriSolutions techs the first week she came dirt side. The third was a coastal test plot in a place called the Atacama Desert, from last week months ago, V’ren desalination units
If you knew the work, you could date each one. All older than a week. All a record of work already underway.
“Will you be upset if some bureaucrat’s office wall gets these,” Matt asked her, looking at the set as if he was reading a report.
“I will be upset if they get stored flat in a cupboard,” Rhooela said. “Beyond that I care more that they pay the reserve price.”
“Spoken like a real grown up,” he said, and she snorted softly.
Vaemira Trelen was the only one who seemed relaxed. She had come out of the Trust comms team, paint-stained once upon a time, earth made camera in her hand now like it hd always been there. Her auction piece was a three by three grid of prints from the night before at Toluca, the only work in the courtyard that was less than a day old.
Every frame focused from the knee down. Dancing feet on volcanic stone, on temporary decking, on the pale tiles by the fountain. Pointy boots, beat up sneakers, shiny flats, bare feet with anklets, two pairs of V’ren feet suspended for an instant in a jump. The rhythm of the night without a single face.
The caption read, in V’ren, Spanish, and English, One party, many steps.
“You have started a fight,” T’mari told her in V’ren, amused.
“I did nothing,” Vaemira replied. “Their feet did all the work.”
In front of the prints a Rodriguez cousin was poking at his friends.
“Those are my boots,” he insisted. “Look, that stain is from the oil drum at my uncle’s shop.”
“That is Tía’s sandal, there, I swear,” someone else said.
The mix of voices in T’mari’s translator shifted a little. Less suspicion now, more curiosity.
Closer to the stage, Matt touched her elbow. He had cleaned up for the night in his usual minimal way. Dark jeans, black boots actually buffed, a white shirt open at the throat, and a charcoal jacket that fit his shoulders properly. His bolo tie stayed in a pocket. He had decided Mexico did not need to deal with that much cowboy in one week.
“You still awake,” he asked quietly.
“I am more awake than you,” she said. “You have sung Beatles songs, argued freight math, watched masked men in spandex, and now you are about to talk about your grandmother at a microphone.”
“Great grandmother,” he corrected. “Though I admit, I am starting to lose track of the titles.”
The rector of the arts faculty stepped up to the mic. Her hair was tied back in a neat twist. She wore a UNAM pin and the small bracelet that marked V’ren Trust partnership status.
“Bienvenidos a todos,” she began, and the translators in the room caught up a breath later. “Welcome. Tonight is simple. We are raising money for work that already exists, and for work that has not been made yet.”
She did not plead. She sketched.
“The Freehold and the V’ren Trust have offered our students access to equipment, to residencies, to audiences they would never meet otherwise. We are matching that with time and space here. The auction lots you see, from our own faculty, from V’ren artists, and from the Marmaduke family archive, will fund studio stipends and travel grants for students who choose to step into that work.”
She glanced toward Matt and T’mari.
“We are very aware that partnerships with sovereign entities must be made carefully,” she added. “Tonight is one small step in doing that in public.”
There it was. No poverty pitch. Just terms.
The first lots moved quickly. A set of ceramic workstations for the printmaking studio. A residency slot in Oaxaca, donated by a regional arts center. A house concert by a jazz quartet whose trumpet player had been teaching harmony all week.
“Lote dieciocho,” the auctioneer announced a little later. “Escultura, Load Bearing, Vhselor Drellin, V’ren.”
The sculpture took the central screen. The room went briefly quiet, trying to decide what box to put it in. Then the bids started.
“Ciento cincuenta mil,” an architecture firm’s representative called out, almost immediately.
“Ciento setenta,” someone from a structural engineering company answered, laughter in his voice.
“Doscientos,” a younger voice said near the front. The bid paddle belonged to a group of civil engineering students who had clearly pooled savings and maybe future per diems.
The architecture firm won, at a number that made Vhselor’s ears flick in surprise, but only after they agreed, on mic, that any V’ren art or engineering students could come sit with the piece for free.
“Lote diecinueve,” came next. “Tríptico de recuperación de suelo, Rhooela Frulen, V’ren.”
The three panels went up as a vertical stack on the screen. The burned hillside, the Missouri test plot, the Peruvian Coastal Desert. No one in the room needed a lot of explanation.
A state agricultural institute bid first. Then an NGO focused on climate repair. A secondary teachers’ college slipped in under both of them from the side.
“We have two hundred and fifty thousand from the Instituto Rural,” the auctioneer said, voice smooth. “Do I hear more, knowing this will be on the wall where future agronomists drink bad coffee and rethink your grandparents’ mistakes.”
That line got a laugh and another bid. The teachers’ college won in the end. Rhooela looked satisfied. Teachers would talk about the panels every semester. That was enough.
Thevir’s Earth from orbit piece went to a hotel near the historic center that had a quiet corporate relationship with the Trust. The manager who claimed it said politely that guests ought to be reminded what the sky looked like when someone arrived who did not owe them anything.
Then the auctioneer nodded toward Vaemira’s grid.
“Lote veintiuno, serie fotográfica, Vaemira Trelen, V’ren.”
The nine squares filled the projection. In the courtyard image they had been modest. Up on the screen, the rhythm was clear.
“Oh, that is me, that is me,” a girl near the back said as a snapshot of her bright sandals flashed by.
“You cannot prove that,” her cousin replied. “Your feet were not that coordinated.”
Bids came from a boutique hotel, a media office, and finally from a dance school that wanted it for their entrance. The dance school won when the Rodriguez family pooled cash and pledged to cover the difference.
“Use it to teach my grandchildren,” Teresa’s father called up to the stage. “They need all the help they can get.”
“Noted,” the auctioneer said dryly, as the room laughed.
When Vaemira came back to stand near Matt and T’mari, envelope in hand, she looked more thoughtful than giddy.
“I have never been collected before,” she admitted.
“You are not owned,” T’mari said. “The work is. That is the point.”
Matt nodded. “And now your work will hang somewhere kids walk past on tired feet every day. They will see their own shoes reflected, even if they are never at Toluca. That is value.”
The main screen shifted again.
“Lote veintidós,” the auctioneer said. “Reproducción de Frida Kahlo por Aurora Ros Marmaduke, circa 2220, donada por la familia Marmaduke.”
Frida’s face, in Aurora’s hand, came up on the screen. It was a faithful copy, but not slavish. The eyebrows were a little different. The skin tones had a faint undertone that spoke more of Mindoro and Missouri light than Coyoacán. The label at the bottom carried Aurora’s name and three words in older Spanish, Estudio después de Kahlo.
Matt took the mic without much ceremony.
“The painting is not by Frida Kahlo,” he said. “Let us start there.”
A low chuckle passed through the crowd.
“It is by Aurora Ros, her parents were doctors who had come north to see someplace new. They had Aurora in Missouri the night the solar storm caused the sky went wonky and the Aurora Borealis could be seen as far south as Texas” he went on. “Who later became Aurora Ros Marmaduke when she married Enoch Clarke Boone Marmaduke. They were both born in 2193. They started having children in 2209 and stopped, reluctantly, in 2231. Ten total. One of them was Morgan Kai, who some of you know as the one who turned our family into a philosophical nuisance.”
A few academics smiled at that.
“Aurora was never hungry,” Matt said. “Let us be clear about that too. She did not paint to keep the lights on. She painted because she understood that if all of her time belonged to the farm, the children, and the Freehold charter, there would be nothing left that was actually hers.”
He glanced at the canvas.
“She came to this campus as a married adult,” he said. “Not as a genius plucked from obscurity. She had childcare. She had a husband who could pay the bills. What she did not have was a culture that thought a Freeholder’s wife needed a studio.”
He let that sit for a heartbeat.
“So she enrolled anyway,” he said. “Adult program. Basic composition, color, copying the masters. She sat in a room not far from here and painted this as an exercise. Study after Kahlo. Learn why the lines fall where they do. Learn why your own hand wants to move differently. Then she took it home, hung it on a wall over a stairwell, and spent the next thirty years breaking up fights underneath it.”
This time the laughter had teeth in it. The mothers and abuelas laughed hardest.
“When our archivists pulled it from storage, the back had a note in her handwriting,” Matt said. “Frida Study, 2220, I think, the date is smudged. That is why it belongs here. Not because it can pretend to be a lost Frida. Because it is evidence that when you opened your doors to one stubborn woman with ten children and a Freehold on her back, something stuck.”
He shifted his weight slightly, more relaxed now.
“For the genealogists in the room,” he added, “Aurora’s mother in law was Lykke Lorenzen. Born 2170, died 2260. She was the last fully white person to give birth to a Freeholder. So every time someone calls me gringo, my Mindoro titas, my Māori cousins, and my African aunties get a good laugh out of it.”
The laugh that followed was full and warm. It broke tension instead of smearing sentiment.
“This painting has already done its work for my family,” he finished. “It gave Aurora a few hours a day where no one could tell her to put the brush down. Tonight it can do work for yours. Every FiatDollar you spend on it goes into studio stipends and travel grants for UNAM arts students who are willing to step into the mess of working with the Freehold and the V’ren Trust. They will not be starving. They will be busy. There is a difference.”
He stepped back. The auctioneer did not bother with a long pitch.
“Comenzamos en doscientos mil,” she said. “We start at two hundred thousand.”
A paddle went up immediately near the middle. The woman holding it wore a navy suit and a badge for a valley educators’ union.
“Doscientos,” she said.
“Doscientos cincuenta,” a gallery owner near the front countered.
“Trescientos,” a board member for a local arts foundation added.
The rector watched the union rep carefully. The woman in navy set her jaw and raised her paddle again.
“Cuatrocientos,” she said. “On behalf of the Sindicato de Educadores del Valle.”
The gallery dropped. The foundation hesitated. The auctioneer let the silence breathe.
“¿Cuatrocientos mil, una vez, dos veces…?” she said.
A private collector tried to slide in at the last second. The union rep did not even look over.
“Cuatrocientos cincuenta,” she said.
“SOLD,” the auctioneer declared. “To the Valley Educators’ Union. Equivalent funding for approximately three hundred scholarships, partial or full, depending on program.”
Someone in the back started to clap. The courtyard stood up under it.
Matt did not bow. He just nodded once toward the woman in navy as she moved forward, already in quiet conversation with the rector. T’mari watched his profile.
“Aurora would approve,” she said.
“Aurora would say the frame is crooked and the lighting is wrong,” he answered, but his voice had gone low. “Then she would ask which kids get the money.”
“Then ask,” T’mari said.
He did, later, off mic, directly. The answer pleased him. The first tranche would go to students from outside the capital who agreed to do their studio blocks in shared UNAM Freehold residencies. The second to working teachers who needed a term off the timetable to actually make something.
When the formal auction wrapped, the quartet shifted to softer music. Conversations loosened. A few donors drifted toward the V’ren corner.
An architecture student stopped in front of Vhselor.
“I would like to see your sketches,” she said.
“Then you will need to bring coffee,” he replied.
Rhooela was cornered by a rural development official asking about upland varieties. Thevir found himself explaining orbital viewing angles to a hotel interior designer. Vaemira sat on the low wall with her envelope in her hand, watching a representative from the dance school gesture at her prints and talk about lesson plans.
T’mari and Matt stood at the edge of it, finally with plates in their hands. Someone had set out small tamales and slices of fruit. The jacaranda smell had deepened with the night.
“Less than twenty four hours,” T’mari said, “and already new objects on new walls.”
“Less than three weeks since anybody here knew we existed,” he replied. “And they are about to argue over us in faculty meetings for the next twenty years.”
“You sound pleased,” she said.
“I am,” he admitted. “If people are going to accuse me of empire anyway, I would like the footnotes to include things like studio stipends and decent lighting.”
She considered that.
“Empire is where weight falls,” she said after a moment. “Tonight you moved some of it.”
He looked toward Aurora’s painting, now carefully unhooked from its stand, heading toward a crate with two union stewards walking beside it like honor guard.
“Tonight,” he said, “we let my grandmother do it for us.”
“Third great grandmother,” T’mari corrected.
“Pedantic,” he said.
“Accurate,” she replied.
He reached for her hand under the edge of the tablecloth. She let him have it. For a few minutes the noise of the courtyard was only background. The work, for the moment, was doing itself.
