The Light That Never Was (18 page)

“There can’t be any harm in giving him an opportunity, I suppose. All the same—” Korak chuckled dryly. “I don’t think I’d care to attend that rev.”

For the tenth time in an hour Lilya Vaan listened to Neal Wargen’s reassurances and remained unassured. The rev was going well in spite of the odd guest list, and the motley crowd of art critics and scholars at least had the good sense not to mingle too familiarly with the other guests; but Lilya had never before offered a speaker as her featured entertainment, and this speaker was a remarkably dubious choice for such a risky experiment. For one thing, Franff’s voice was a croaking whisper. The amplification system would carry his words perfectly to all parts of the room, but Franff’s voice amplified could be nothing more than a loud croaking whisper. Even though her guests might find the notion of a talking beast amusing, this would be unlikely to sustain their interest through the hour lecture that she had paid for.

And then there was this human relic who accompanied Franff and who seemed every bit as peculiar as the animaloid. Wargen claimed that her portraits hung in every worthwhile art collection in the galaxy, and that she had known the greatest artists of the past century and had been the mistress of several, and this weighed not at all with Lilya Vaan. She was not a moralist, she didn’t care how many lovers a woman had as long as none of them ranked lower than baron. A nobleman was, after all, a nobleman, but an artist was only a decorator. What particularly outraged Lilya was that this dubious female had appeared uninvited and could not be summarily evicted because she accompanied the guest speaker.

The two of them remained together at the far end of the room: Anna, clothed in a drab, shapeless wrapper, sat on a low chair with one hand resting caressingly on Franff’s gleaming shoulder, and Franff perched on his haunches with forelegs stiff in front of him, eyes closed, and seemed to sleep. Guests normally gathered about Lilya’s entertainers and familiarly asked questions, but they avoided this pair as though the end of the room were under quarantine.

Finally Lilya sought out Wargen. “I’d rather not,” she said. “I’ve already paid him, so he shouldn’t mind if I just let the rev run until it’s too late for entertainment.”

Wargen smiled. “Lilya, I never thought you would take a coward’s leap. Do you want me to announce him?”

“I don’t want anyone to announce him. I just want him to go away. All right, you do it. Then maybe they’ll blame you for what happens.”

Wargen stepped to the center of the room and said loudly and firmly, “May I have your attention…?”

The guests found chairs; the servants withdrew except for one charged with the manipulation of lighting effects. As Franff waited for the room to become silent, this servant slowly moved a lever, and Franff’s fur changed from gleaming gold to emerald green. Part of the audience—Lilya’s part—burst into applause, but Wargen’s stormy scowl quite spoiled her elation. Regretfully she signaled the servant to desist and thereby abandoned her only opportunity to add something of interest to this alleged entertainment.

Then Franff spoke, and the amplifier did carry his whispered words perfectly to all parts of the room. He said, “We are all guilty.”

Lilya turned blankly to Wargen, but Wargen was gazing just as blankly at Franff, as were the other guests.

“Every life is a monument to all life,” Franff continued slowly. “Every life is a destroyer of life. Each race, each species, must answer to those it has tormented before it accuses its own tormentors. Look about you, see the manifold miraculous forms and guises assumed by that malleable stuff you call humanity. And yet you had, somewhere, a common ancestor. The differences between your species and mine are only in degree more striking than the ways in which you differ from one another. If, as the saying suggests, all men are brothers, are not men and nonors at least cousins? The more so because they hold their one priceless quality in common: Life. Each of their lives is a monument to all lives, and all are guilty because all have destroyed life. How many priceless sparks were extinguished to place before this gathering the servings of meat that I saw you eating? How many priceless sparks destroyed along the way when your relentless vehicles brought you to this place? And afterward, when you leave, will it be possible to step on the grass without crushing the countless lives the night conceals there, will it be possible to discourage the biting night insect without committing murder, without destroying the irreplaceable? For every life, no matter how minute, how humble, how loathsome in appearance or habits, every life is a monument to all life.”

Wargen nudged Lilya. “What’d you ask him to talk about?” he muttered.

“A subject of his own choice.”

“Damnation!”

The guests, all of them, were still stranded in the backwash of the stunned silence that had greeted Franff’s first pronouncement. Franff had paused briefly to ruminate, and before he could speak again, Wargen leaped to his feet.

“Franff,” he called desperately, “why is it that artists achieve more of this cousinhood of life, this brotherhood, than do other people?”

Franff weighed the question and responded with whispered deliberation. “Artists create, and those who devote their lives to creation are slower to destroy.”

Wargen had remained on his feet. “Between the really great artists, was there much of enmity or jealousy?”

“The most generous, selfless men I have ever known have been artists,” Franff said slowly, “but not all of them were great or even good artists. Not all of the great artists I have known were generous and selfless, I was guilty of a dangerous generalization and I apologize. Surely there are generous and selfless men in all professions and occupations, and if those I have known have been artists, that is only because most of the men I have known well have been artists.”

One of the art critics had caught Wargen’s game and was ready with a question of his own. “You were a close friend of Ghord’s. Is it true that he achieved his unique texture with a secret formula for mixing oils with vegetable colors?”

“I saw Ghord paint many pictures,” Franff said. “I never saw him use oil paints in any form.”

Anna spoke up. “He never used anything but vegetable paints. It wasn’t oils that made the texture, it was how much he spit into each color while he was mixing it.”

Lilya had too much presence of mind, was too poised, to reveal her horror, but she was not too horrified to act. Her every instinct as a hostess told her that this had continued long enough. She got to her feet and politely thanked her guest speaker. The audience applauded generously, and Wargen, watching Franff’s courteous acknowledgment, thought it just as well that the old nonor would never realize that the appreciation was not for what he’d said but because it seemed likely that he had stopped.

“It was a peculiar experience,” Wargen told Korak later. “I’ve never had an idea that failed so utterly, in every respect. Even the moralizing effect of Franff’s lecture failed. In spite of his talk about the brotherhood of man and every life being a monument to all life, Lilya was ready to exterminate me with no more compunction than she’d use on those biting insects that Franff mentioned. However, I made a little speech, explaining that the old artist refused to accept charity and their kind and generous hostess had hit upon this ingenious scheme as an excuse to let him earn money for his simple living expenses, and I thanked them for their most kind co-operation and their patient indulgence of a great creative spirit who had suffered more than his share of the evil in the universe. The guests gave Lilya a standing ovation, and eventually she forgave me, or at least she said she did. Are you listening?”

“Oh, I’m listening,” Korak said.

“I came away with the feeling that I’d spent the evening suspended over an exploding catastrophe, but as long as no harm was done to anyone I’ll have to confess that I’m satisfied with the way things turned out. It’s unfortunate that Franff isn’t interested in giving art lectures, he really could make a unique contribution, but at least his first and last speaking engagement was a financial success. Lilya paid him well, and he seemed to have no qualms about keeping the whole fee even though he didn’t speak for anything like the agreed hour. He and Anna will be able to live in good style for a year, or in reasonable comfort for perhaps as long as five years.”

“Would he give an art lecture if he were hired for that specific purpose?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how long nonors live, but he must be extremely old, and his experiences on Sornor took an inevitable toll. Artists who know him say that sometimes he’s perfectly lucid, and other times his memory fails him or he has difficulty in concentrating.”

“We might try him with an audience limited to understanding people interested in art, just to see what happens.”

“We might,” Wargen said, “but I’m satisfied to leave things as they are. He no longer has financial worries, and according to the art critic Hualt, Anna’s casual remark was worth every bit of the money Lilya paid. The paint-mixing habits of artists of Chord’s generation were considered so commonplace that no one thought to describe them for posterity. Then artists’ habits changed, and posterity was left flapping about how Chord and his contemporaries achieved their effects. Now Anna has revealed all, or at least Hualt thinks she has, he’ll know for certain after he does some experimenting. Are you listening?”

“I’m listening,” the World Manager said. “And thinking. You aren’t enthused about the chances of persuading Franff to lecture on art subjects?”

“I’m afraid not. It’d be a risky thing.”

Korak sighed. “He took out a license this morning.”

“
Franff?
”

“A license as a public lecturer. Did Lilya’s money corrupt him, or did he just find out that he likes talking about every life being a monument to all life?”

“He certainly enjoyed delivering his message.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

Three days later Bron Demron came to Wargen with a strange, incoherent report that had reached him from a small rural village sixty miles north of Donov Metro. “I’ve been in this business for forty years,” he said bewilderedly, “and I’ve never encountered anything like this. It makes no sense at all.”

It made too much sense to Wargen. He left immediately and traveled north through a prosperous agricultural region, enjoying the touch of spring that lay on the land until he remembered that the wandering artists should have been on the move and he had seen none. That afternoon he overtook a large, slow-moving cart that was enclosed in the fashion of carts used by artists and drawn by two lumbering wrranels.

Anna rode in the cart; Franff walked leisurely at her side and from time to time moved forward and seemed to commune in some silent language with the ungainly wrranels. They halted wherever they found an audience. Anna’s gentle fingers placed the microphone fabric around Franff’s throat, and he talked. Field workers pausing for a few gulps of adde froze where they stood and listened in astonishment. On the oval of a village, curious shop owners and housewives gathered about the cart.

The message was brief. Franff stated his thesis, expanded it clumsily for a few minutes, and fell silent. Then Anna would remove the microphone fabric, and the wrranels, without any spoken command, would nudge the cart forward. The reaction of the audiences varied from dumbfoundedness to frank puzzlement.

But Wargen could detect no hostility. A Donovian farmer suddenly confronted with an animaloidal apparition informing him that the bugs eating his fromt plants were his cousins reacted with bewilderment but showed no inclination to stone the speaker.

Further, most of these rural Donovians had never seen an animaloid. Obviously Franff was doing no harm and should be permitted to keep his license, and by showing the Donovians what a peaceful harmless creature an animaloid could be, he probably was contributing more than any governmental policy to the prevention of riots on Donov. In the ultimate scheme of things, the old nonor’s message might weigh as a more potent Good Work than the elaborate promotions of Jaward Jorno.

Wargen turned back, and Franff’s whispered, amplified voice drifted after him. “Life is life’s greatest gift. Guard the life of another creature as you would your own, because it is your own. On life’s scale of values, the smallest is no less precious to the creature who owns it than the largest. Every life is a monument.”

Thoughtfully Wargen drove away.

Only those few tourists who took their sight-seeing with fanatical seriousness got up in time for the morning boat to Zrilund. There were rarely any artists on hand to perform for them, and few townspeople about, and they could ponder the famous scenes in uninterrupted solitude until the first ferry arrived and artists and tourists met in the town oval like two converging plagues.

By that time the early tourists had worked up an appetite or at least a thirst. They circled the oval in search of a decent place to cat or drink, and most of them selected the Zrilund Town Hostel.

When the ferry left and the early tourists moved on, the hostel’s dining room was all but deserted. Arnen Brance and Gof Milfro, who had eaten a late breakfast in silence while wincing at the gay patter of the tourists, now ordered adde and settled back in the relaxed manner of old friends who meet rarely and have much to talk about.

“I hadn’t an inkling that you were in town until I looked out the window and saw your ugly face strutting past,” Milfro said. “What is going on here?”

Brance interrupted a leisurely draught of spiced adde to ask with a grin, “How would I know?”

“I came out for a visit with Franff,” Milfro said. “Franff and Anna are gone. One of the artists claims they went to a rev in Donov Metro and never came back. I think he was drunk. I think everyone in Zrilund is drunk. When was the last time the old Zrilund Theater was used?”

“I don’t remember. Years ago.”

“Last night it was packed like a swarm of gulper fish, and there were people outside who wanted to get in but couldn’t. I tried to find out what was happening, but all the artists I know are members of secret committees. They talk in conspiratorial whispers until an old friend happens by, and then they look embarrassed and say nothing at all. I didn’t even hear any gossip about you until I saw you this morning, and then my landlord told me with a perfectly straight face that you’d bought a house in town and were no longer an impoverished, web-footed kruckul farmer. I wouldn’t have believed him, but there was an irrational tone of respect in his voice when he pronounced your name, as though on some occasion within his memory you’d patronized his establishment and paid cash. Why didn’t you let me know? I could have looked you up last night and saved the price of my room.”