The Light That Never Was (13 page)

Also on his desk was a red memo, the form used by Wargen and Demron for confidential reports to each other. This one reported more than one hundred thefts by persons in artist clothing in four adjoining precincts. Demron was becoming desperate.

Disgustedly Wargen turned the memo over and wrote on the back, “I’ll find your thieves if you’ll find me a Zrilund swamp slug.”

Eritha Korak arrived in Zrilund Town with a ferryboat load of tourists and checked in at the Zrilund Town Hostel. “Just call me Ritha,” she said brightly, as Rearm Hylat, the hostel’s tall, gaunt proprietor, squinted uncertainly at her signature. “I’ll pay in advance.”

The granddaughter of Donov’s World Manager possessed a legion of friends, and an encounter with one of them while using an alias could have been embarrassing. She had decided to use her own name but not to flaunt it.

Hylat accepted a week’s rent with alacrity, and Eritha did not comment when he wrote, “Erita Karol,” on her receipt. She took possession of her room, deposited her personal effects and bundle of artist’s equipment, and went to have a leisurely look at Zrilund Town.

A lavishly printed guidebook contained stunning reproductions of Zrilund masterpieces and very little information about the island’s history. The fact was that outsiders didn’t know and natives didn’t care. Fishermen and farmers had inhabited the island for as long us anyone remembered. The fishermen operated smoking and drying sheds on a small bay where there was an excellent harbor and a sloping sandy shore upon which they could beach their ships. They built their homes on the tall cliffs, in a village satisfactorily remote from the offensive sights and smells of fish processing. The village quickly became a small commercial center for the fishermen and for Zrilund’s farmers. Shops lined the oval, and as the fisheries thrived and drainage claimed more land for agriculture, the village grew into a town and the tidy, narrow streets of sturdy stone buildings lengthened.

Then came the deluge of artists, and when this was followed by the deluge of tourists, the fishermen moved away in disgust. They established Fish Town, a new village on the north shore, and they updated their processing to modem methods involving refrigeration and radiation and delivered their catches directly to mainland markets and processors. Their old stone houses were bought by people interested in exploiting the tourist trade, and for a time virtually every building in Zrilund Town had some commercial use, if only in the form of a front room that served as a souvenir shop.

Those were the great days of Zrilund, when enormous throngs of tourists filled the town, sunned themselves on the pier or on the cliffs, climbed down to the beaches to swim, took long walks along the shore, occupied every room in the hostels and all available space in private households, and bought paintings by the hundred, many of which later became museum masterpieces.

Those great days were now mocking memories. Buildings on the side streets were vacant and could be, as the Zrilund saying went, rented for an excuse or bought for an alibi. The town died ten times daily—when the ferries took away their loads of tourists—and overnight guests were a rarity. Hostels in Nor Harbor, on the mainland, were more modem, more convenient, and close to an expanding group of non-art tourist attractions.

As the island’s prosperity diminished, so did its civic harmony and pride. The townspeople bickered among themselves and squabbled with the artists. A proposal to require a license of artists selling paintings directly to the tourists had recently failed only because the artists threatened to move en masse to Nor Harbor.

Eritha had garnered this background before leaving Donov Metro, but she detected no signs of disharmony in her first view of the splendid old town. She covered it from one end to the other and climbed the highest of the gleaming chalk cliffs to watch the departure of the ferry. When she returned to the center of the town, she found the oval deserted.

Easels stood in place, palettes and sprayers were racked ready for use, but at first glance the artists seemed to have vanished along with the tourists. At second glance Eritha accounted for six of them, all relaxing over mugs of adde in the Philpp House. The Chalk Cliffs had another ten and the Swamp Hut, obviously an artists’ hangout, more than she could count. Each eating or drinking place had its scattering of custom, even the dining room of the Zrilund Town Hostel, though its prices and gourmet dishes were aimed at the better class of tourist.

Tired and hot from her long walk, she sat down on the far side of the hostel’s dining room, ordered a mug of adde for herself, and sipped it while eavesdropping on the artists. Suddenly a shout rang out, and the artists drained their mugs and rushed for the door. Eritha stepped to the window and saw artists erupting from doors all around the oval, and when the first ferry passengers arrived they were at work again.

She asked Rearm Hylat, “Why do the artists stop work when the tourists leave?”

“Because they aren’t artists,” he answered sourly. When he saw that she was genuinely interested, he sat down to talk with her. “Many tourists who buy paintings seem to do so because they actually see the artists painting them. So the artists try to get a number of paintings almost finished, and then when they have a prospective customer they can finish one while he watches. I said ‘paintings,’ but I should have said ‘souvenirs.’ No real artist would work that way.”

“I see. But there are some real artists here, aren’t there?”

Hylat shook his head.

“I came here to study art. If there aren’t any artists—”

“There are some very competent painters here,” Hylat said slowly. “There are some excellent craftsmen. They ought to be, they don’t do anything but paint. Being an artist is something else. It’s kind of like a state of mind. The moment an artist stops trying to do his best work in every painting, the moment he takes a shortcut because the painting is only going to be sold to a tourist who doesn’t know any better, he stops being an artist. The moment he tries to please his customers instead of himself, he starts being a fraud. There are a lot of non-artist frauds here. Some of them earn a pretty good living and own property and have bank accounts. Maybe all of them could be competent artists if they wanted to, but they find it easier to paint souvenirs. There is one serious artist here, name of Todd W’iil, but he doesn’t paint anything. Besides, he’s crazy.”

That night Eritha went to the Swamp Hut for dinner, hoping to scrape up a few artist acquaintances. While she ate she listened to the conversation about her.

“… it’s the reds and yellows that attract attention. I sold two today, and they didn’t argue about the price, either.”

“… offered me a contract. The other dealer said there was no way I could guarantee quality, and I told him my reputation as an artist was more a guarantee of quality than his reputation as a dealer was a guarantee of sales, so even though he was paying me two dons more…”

“It’s a mistake to dicker. Set your price, I say, and if one tourist won’t pay it…”

“The tourist who’s just wandering around, he isn’t expecting to buy a painting, and what decides him is first that it attracts his attention, and second that he likes it, and third that it’s cheap. As for me…”

That night Eritha wrote to Wargen. “You wanted to know what the Zrilund artists are talking about. They talk all the time, and it’s always about the same thing: money.”

Todd W’iil had been underage when he came to Donov. He ran away from home, and his parents, resigned to the inevitable, sent him as much money as they could manage, as long as they could manage. Years passed, his father died, his mother despaired of ever seeing him again, and finally the money stopped.

W’iil survived somehow and painted. He was the only artist on Zrilund who practiced at painting, who deliberately attempted to perfect his technique. He worked on a single problem, over and over, tirelessly: exercises in color harmonies and contrasts, in textures, in perspectives, in backgrounds, in sunlights and shadows, in human figures, in animals. When he became satisfied that he had learned as much as he could from one of these rigorous disciplines, he destroyed it. At the age of forty he looked like a shrunken old man, gaunt, ragged, wild in appearance, perpetually undernourished, and he survived only on the bounty of those almost as badly off as himself. He never sold a painting; he never finished one. He painted only to prepare himself for the brilliant execution of the unborn masterpieces that he held within him, and he anticipated their birth with the same attitude of certainty with which a pregnant woman assembled a layette for her unborn child. W’iil’s faith in his artistic pregnancy was a pure, brightly burning flame.

Eritha Korak found him the only artist on Zrilund willing to talk with her about how to paint. He was painfully shy, and her fumbling artistic efforts must have horrified him, but he respected her sincerity and they became friends. When, after a week at the Zrilund Town Hostel, she rented a vacant house that once belonged to an artist and had a well-lighted studio, she invited W’iil to work with her.

He preferred to paint out of doors. Inside light, even the light through the studio’s huge, slanting skylight, seemed artificial to him. He came to see her at the end of every day, and whatever task she had set for herself he demonstrated for her in an unfinished comer of a fabric before destroying it. Sometimes he took her with him to show her how to study a masterpiece: he would position himself in the precise spot from which Zornillo painted the philpp trees or Chord the fountain, and he would paint the same scene with a small copy of the painting before him for reference. He painted only until his failure became evident to him, and then he shrugged cheerfully, filled the blank spaces with whatever interested him, and carried the fabric off to destroy it.

Once he asked Eritha to model for him, and he took her out on the chalk cliffs to a place where Etesff had posed a beautiful young woman in tourist costume. W’iil had found a gaudy tourist’s hat that he wanted to contrast with the white cliff, and he perched it atop Eritha’s turban and told her to lean against the cliff, and stand still. She soon tired of modeling and withdrew from the picture, and he painted on without her while she sat nearby watching him.

She was puzzled. She’d had several queries from Wargen as to whether there’d been any evidence of artists stealing from Zrilunders. She took the problem to Rearm Hylat, who chuckled and said a large number of artists would borrow a man’s toenails right off his feet if they thought of a use for them. They owed everyone in Zrilund, including each other, twice over, but he’d never heard of any of them taking anything without asking.

“Todd,” she called, “did you ever hear of an artist stealing?”

“Every day,” he answered absently. “Taking money for those things they paint is the worst kind of stealing.”

Eritha had been fingering a fragment of chalk. “Isn’t it funny the way things look different from what they really are?” she remarked.

W’iil paused and absently fidgeted with the trigger of his sprayer. He said slowly, “Things look different from—what was that again?”

“Look at the cliffs,” Eritha said. “They look like stone. They even feel like stone, but actually they’re like a soft powder pressed together. If you separated the chalk into what it really is, it’d be soft and clinging. It doesn’t look like what it is.”

“It doesn’t look like what it is,” W’iil echoed, in a puzzled voice that seemed to originate light-years away. After a long silence he asked, “What would it look like if it did look like what it is?”

Eritha did not answer. W’iil sat down and lost himself in thought, as he so frequently did, and after a time Eritha stole away and went down to the Swamp Hut, where a chunky artist named Wes Alof sometimes presided over a clique of hangers-on. He claimed to be a successful painter of portraits and human figures and had a full purse to prove it, and an artist with a full purse invariably attracted satellites who were willing to help him spend his money whenever he was willing to let them.

“Wes,” she said, “have you ever heard of anything being stolen on Zrilund?”

“Sure. Some of those tourists will take anything that isn’t fastened down. What’d you lose?”

“A sprayer. But there weren’t any tourists around. Did you ever hear of an artist stealing anything?”

“Never,” Alof said flatly. “One might have picked it up by mistake, but I’ll guarantee that no artist stole it. Artists beg and borrow, but no matter how broke they are, they don’t steal. Look at this prize collection.” He swept the table with a gesture. “Not one of them has a don to his name, and if I was to walk out and leave my purse on the table, there isn’t a one but would chase me clear across the Big Zrilund Swamp to return it. No, I’ve never heard of an artist stealing anything, anywhere on this crummy world of Donov.”

On her way home Eritha met Todd W’iil, and he looked directly at her without a sign of recognition. She turned and stared after him. “What’ll it be now?” she wondered aloud.

Her casual remark had jolted W’iil like an electric shock. The morning after their conversation his mind was still numb with the wonder of it. He walked about slowly, speaking to no one, and he stopped frequently to ask himself, “What would this look like if it really looked like what it is?” It was a difficult theory to get a grip on, because it seemed to him that a great many things did look like what they were. Finally he took his bundle and went to the cliffs, and he sat for a long time seeing the looming white rock as soft, powdery, and caressing to the touch.

He searched for lights and shadows that would set off the mystical texture that he sought, and he found what he wanted where an enormous hump of chalk thrust out five spurs of contrasting rock that had somehow become embedded there.

He set up his easel and began to paint, and under the skillful touches of his sprayers the hump of rock took on a velvety sheen and a supple, furry texture. W’iil worked with increasing excitement. The five spurs, thrusting up into the hard, chalk-reflected light, formed a brittle, almost translucent contrast. The shadowed chalk in the foreground had softened, purpling overtones. He had filled his fabric with rock textures, leaving only the background blank, before he suddenly realized that he had failed utterly. He stepped aside, sank dejectedly to the ground, and stared at the looming spurs of rock.