"Naturally not. Look, Lisa, you and your fellow esthetes have been bottled up in here since—since—when? The year two thousand?"
"John Harchman came here to found his colony in 2059," she said as if repeating a catechism.
"The year doesn't matter. You've been cooped up five hundred years. And what do you have to show for it? Great works of art? No—just drunken parties."
"We've produced wonderful things. Colin's done a glorious visomural, and the sensotapes—"
"You've produced nothing," Kesley said inexorably. "You create for yourselves—each other, at best. But not for the world outside."
"The world outside doesn't want us."
"Wrong. We don't understand you. And it's as much your fault as ours." Kesley turned away. "Leave me alone, Lisa. I should never have come here. I want to leave."
The jagged, violet blades of knifegrass glinted strangely in the morning sun. Kesley waited patiently while his hungry horse grazed. Mutant horse, mutant grass, the cycle held firm. Spindly, six-legged animal nibbling sharp-toothed, man-high grass. The purple blades blended with the blue-green of the Old Kind.
There had been no bombs over Kentucky, but the wind had carried the drifting seeds, brought the zygotes of the strange new grass down here to this unruined land. Now, a tough network of roots dug into the turf, and from them sprang the metal-sharp grass the atoms had made.