The onyx rose was passed from hand to hand, cupped gingerly, as if it might shatter at the slightest jostling. Indeed, both the Hallifaxian who was giving the tour, and the three Serens who followed him, spoke in hushed tones, perhaps imagining the thin-cut petals of onyx might crack at nothing more than a raised voice. In fact, one could probably tap with a hammer against the gemstones that had been fused aeonically around and through the petals of a common yellow rose to make this ebon-hued mystery, without disturbing it. But so wispy were the curving slices of stone that even the guide couldn't help but treat it like a fragment of a robin's egg.

"Many of the Collective consider the Transcendental Aviary to be a bellwether of the Overcity's ideal of Beauty," he explained as he watched the Serens whispering amongst themselves while they studied the flower. They were clearly impressed by the craftsmanship, though he wondered if they could really appreciate the subtlety of the flower, or its garden, or the Aviary as a whole. Their conception of time, for instance, was irritatingly simplistic. They probably fancied the idea that the garden behind him had tiny fae in it who sneakily painted liquid onyx onto the petals when no one was looking, so unable were they to conceive of the idea of so simple a time displacement. Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

"What did he call it?" went one of the whispers, unheard by the guide.

"The Transcendental Aviary."

"What is it transcending?"

The freckled Seren turned to glance up at the sculpted birds and noted the absence of the real thing. "Being an Aviary, apparently."

The third Seren looked a little disparagingly at her two comrades, not wishing their playful jokes to create a diplomatic incident. Tensions between the city in the clouds and the forest were at a high, and she wished to maintain some peace. She cleared her throat. "And to the people of your city, is this more beautiful than the yellow rose we planted?"

The researcher frowned thoughtfully. "An interesting question. I should perhaps organize a study. If we cross-reference assessment surveys through all the combinatoric possible outcomes, and then integrate against--"

"What do you, personally, think?" asked the freckled druid, imperiously, earning an askance glance from the delegation's leader.

"I personally favor shades of blues and indigos," the researcher explained patiently, "so neither stand out for me as a paragon of Beauty, though by comparing the refractive index, this rose contains approximately 78% more blue light in its diffraction than--"

"What my compatriot is asking," the leader said patiently, soothingly as she could, "is about what the Hallifaxian ideal of beauty is."

"Ah, if I might quote from On Perfection," the guide began, earning a few hidden eye-rolls. This wasn't the first time in this brief tour he'd quoted from Llesvelt's book. He had a copy in a pocket of his laboratory coat, but he never needed to consult it. "Beauty: the quality that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is associated with such properties as harmony of form or color, excellence of artistry, truthfulness, and originality. Beauty is of interest to the seeker of perfection due to its ability to create harmony within the mind. A beautiful environ creates a relaxed mind and greatly reduces the impact of minor discordance within the general area."

In whispers, the freckled Seren quipped, "I imagine their best example of beauty is a circle, since their definitions seem always to take that form." The other one sniggered loudly enough for the researcher to raise an eyebrow.

"But," the Seren diplomat began thoughtfully, "surely this implies that a thing has no immanent beauty, since it is defined only by the reaction it evokes in onlookers." She was placing a bunch of freesias into the garden and carefully patting the soil around it, marveling at the gardening technology that could draw the recently-plucked flower's roots into the soil and reinvigorate it so quickly, but still insisting on providing some of her own hand-crafted care.

"Yes?" the researcher asked, as he began to operate the knobs and levers that would aeonically displace the freesias. He didn't seem to see anything questionable in her question.

"Surely the flower has a beauty in itself, even when no one is looking at it?"

"Does it?" he answered. The garden's crystalline aeonic submatrix, hidden beneath vases and flowerpots of ruby and sapphire, began to hum. To the researcher, the hum was harmonic in ways his highly trained senses could not help but react to. Indeed, there was an answering vibration in some of the gemstones that traced complicated, nested orbital paths around his head, describing interlinked two-dimensional regular and irregular polygons to anyone with the eyes to notice the points of conjunction, alignment, and disjunction.

To the Serens, it sounded only like a slightly irritating buzz, and the gems simply careened around him erratically.

"Suppose that we left," the Seren proferred, "and a cluster of Magnagorans came in. No, not Magnagorans. They would probably like the black color." She allowed herself a small grin; the researcher noted it and made a game attempt at offering one in return, but it only looked to the Serens like he'd had a bit too much bran in his breakfast muffin. "Say a group of illithoids from the Undervault. And they found it unaesthetic. Would it then cease to be beautiful, and then become beautiful again later when we returned?"

The researcher allowed himself the tiniest shake of his head. This was the sort of rhetoric that he had tired of when still in the care of the Bureau of Citizen Services Early Childhood Office of Freshmen Formal Inculcation Camp for Education. "Of course not," he began in a patronizing tone one might use with a youth who had been dismissed from B.O.C.S. O.F.F.I.C.E. and sent to the Remediative Intensive Indoctrination Phrontistery instead. "The beauty retains in its ability to inspire the reaction in us even when we are not currently looking at it. Beauty reverberates in time as a causal property of... As a..." His eyes were getting distant. One of the stones whirring around his head was taking an unusual configuration. An alarming one. "Pardon me. I'm afraid we're going to have to cut this tour short. Please make an orderly departure. I will contact you at my earliest convenience to offer a surrogate opportunity."

"Why?" asked the diplomat, glancing back at her companions, wondering if one of them had done something unforgiveable. They were snickering between themselves about some quip concerning 'begging the question' but looked up with an insouciant attempt at innocence.

"I assure you it is a private matter. A personal emergency to which I must attend. Please, you must depart." The researcher looked at the stolidly confused and immobile Serens with rising distress. Primitives, so uncouth. He calculated the relative demerits of revealing the issue (nothing classified about it, he concluded; they might even be attuned to death) versus allowing them to linger unsupervised (not technically a violation of current treaty terms, but certainly distasteful; they would probably leave a mess, if not break something). He sighed as he reached the inevitable conclusion. "My uncle has suffered a misfortune while hunting. I hold his heartstone and must now act to revive him." The vibrating stone's harmonic overtone was reaching the point of no return; he had to hurry this up. "I solemnly pledge I shall provide another tour at a time convenient to you."

The diplomat nodded. She understood; she'd rushed away from things to join moon covens many a time for similar reasons. "Come, let us leave our friend to his business." She stepped to the other two, and soon, a beam of moonlight was whisking them through the sky in an instant. Almost at that same moment, the heartstone's vibration took the researcher flitting through a bend in time -- as it would happen, to a comically unfortunate meeting with the Fates, due to him having waited just too long and not long enough, though the Serens knew nothing of this.

The only sound in the now unpeopled Transcendental Aviary was the whispering susurration of the wind, and the hum of the garden's aeonic submatrix. Though perhaps, as there was no one to hear it, there was no sound at all. A passing bird found its way through a small gap between the gilt cage bars and glass panels, and briefly flitted around looking for seeds to eat. For a few moments, the room was indeed an aviary. The bird pecked at something that seemed like a seed, but it was actually a crystal. The bird instead chirped at one of the statues, which gave no answer. Twice disappointed, it turned and winged its way back the way it had come.

Unseen by anyone, the freesias reemerged from the aeonic field, as the hum ceased. Some resonance between the aeonics submatrix and the unusual vibration of the heartstone, being drawn to the Fates themselves, had caused the freesias to form into a type of crystalline flower that had never been seen before, and indeed, would never be seen again. Nor was it seen this time, either. It lingered, unobserved, for some minutes, before its unstable aeonic lattice broke down and it dispersed into the plexities of time.

No one could say whether it had been beautiful.