Patron of the Arts

by William Rotsler

  “I thought you wanted to put it in the new house on Battle Mountain.”

  “I do, but I thought I might make a special small dome of spraystone. On the point, perhaps. Something extra nice for a Cilento masterpiece.”

  “It sounds like a shrine.” Her face was quiet, her eyes looking into me.

  “Yes,” I answered slowly, “perhaps it is.” Maybe people shouldn’t get to know you so well that they can read your mind when you cannot. I changed the subject and we talked for a few minutes of various friends. Steve on the Venus probe. A fashionable couturier who was showing a line based on the new Martian tablet finds. A new sculptor working in magnaplastics. Blake Mason’s designs for the Gardens of Babylon. A festival in Rio that Jules and Gina had invited us to. The Pope’s desire for Mike to do his tomb. In short, all the gossip, trivia, and things of importance between friends.

  I talked of everything except what I wanted to talk about. When we parted Madelon told me with a sad, proud smile that she had never been so happy. I nodded and punched out, then stared sightlessly at the dark screen. For a long moment I hated Michael Cilento, and he was probably never so near death. But I loved Madelon and she loved Mike, so he must live and be protected. I knew that she loved me, too, but it was and had always been a different kind of love. I went to a science board meeting at Tycho Base and looked at the green-brown-blue white-streaked Earth “overhead” and only paid minimal attention to the speakers. I came down to a petroleum meeting at Hargesisa, in Somalia. I visited a mistress of mine in Samarkand, sold a company, bought an electrosnake for the Louvre, visited Armand in Nardonne, bought a company, commissioned a concerto from a new composer I liked in Ceylon, and donated an early Caruthers to the Prado.

  I came, I went. I thought about Madelon. I thought about Mike. Then I went back to what I did best: making money, making work, getting things done, making time pass.

  I had just come from a policy meeting of the North American Continent Ecology Council when Madelon called to say the cube was finished and would be installed in the Battle Mountain house by the end of the week.

  “How is it?” I asked.

  She smiled. “See for yourself.”

  “Smug bitch,” I grinned.

  “It’s his best one, Brian. The best sensatron in the world.”

  “I’ll see you Saturday.” I punched out and took the rest of the day off and had an early dinner with two Swedish blondes and did a little fleshly purging. It did not really help very much.

  On Saturday I could see the two tiny figures waving at me from the causeway bridging the house with the tip of the spire of rock where the copter pad was. They were holding hands.

  Madelon was tanned, fit, glowing, dressed in white with a necklace of Cartier Tempoimplant tattoos across her shoulders and breasts in glowing facets of liquid fire. She waved at Bowie as she came to me, squinting against the dust the copter blades were still swirling about.

  Mike was there, dressed in black, looking haunted.

  Getting to you, boy? I thought. There was a vicious thrill in thinking it and I shamed myself.

  Madelon hugged me and we walked together back over the high causeway and directly to the new spraystone dome in the garden, at the edge of a two-hundred-foot cliff.

  The cube was magnificent. There hadn’t been anything like it, ever. Not ever.

  It was the largest cube I’d seen. There have been bigger ones since, none has been better. Its impact was stunning.

  Madelon sat like a queen on what has come to be known as the Jewel Throne, a great solid thronelike block that seemed to be part temple, part jewel, part dream. It was immensely complex, set with faceted electronic patterns that gave it the effect of a superbly cut jewel that was somehow also liquid. Michael Cilento would have made his place in art history with that throne alone.

  But on it sat Madelon. Nude. Her waist-long hair fell in a simple cascade. She looked right out at you, sitting erect, almost primly, with an almost triumphant expression.

  It drew me from the doorway. Everyone, everything was forgotten, including the original and the creator with me. There was only the cube. The vibrations were getting to me and my pulse increased. Even knowing that pulse generators were working on my alpha waves and broadcast projectors were doing this and sonics were doing that and my own alpha wave was being synchronized and reprojected did not affect me. Only the cube affected me. All else was forgotten. There was just the cube and me, with Madelon in it, more real than the reality.

  I walked to stand before it. The cube was slightly raised so that she sat well above the floor, as a queen should. Behind her, beyond the dark violet eyes, beyond the incredible presence of the woman, there was a dark, misty background that may or may not have been moving and changing.

  I stood there a long time, just looking, experiencing. “It’s incredible,” I whispered.

  “Walk around it,” Madelon said. I felt the note of pride in her voice. I moved to the right and it was as if Madelon followed me with her eyes without moving them, following me by sensing me, alert, alive, ready for me. Already, the electronic image on the multilayered surfaces was real. Mike’s electronic brushes had transformed the straight basic video images in subtle ways, artful shifts and fragile shadings on many levels revealing and emphasizing delicately.

  The figure of Madelon sat there, proudly naked, breathing normally with that fantastically lifelike movement possible to the skilled molecular constructors. The figure had none of the flamboyance that Caruthers or Stibbard brought to their figures, so delighted in their ability to bring “life” to their work that they saw nothing else. But Mike had restraint. He had power in his work, understatement, demanding that the viewer put something of himself into it.

  I walked around to the back. Madelon was no longer sitting on the throne. It was empty, and beyond it, stretching to the horizon, was an ocean and above the toppling waves, stars. New constellations glowed. A meteor flashed. I stepped back to the side. The throne was unchanged but Madelon was back. She sat there, a queen, waiting.

  I walked around the cube. She was on the other side, waiting, breathing, being. But in back she was gone.

  But to where?

  I looked long into the eyes of the figure in the cube. She stared back at me, into me. I seemed to feel her thoughts. Her face changed, seemed about to smile, grew sad, drew back into queenliness. I drew back into myself. I went to Mike to congratulate him.

  “I’m stunned. There are no words.”

  He seemed relieved at my approval. “It’s yours,” he said. I nodded. There was nothing to say. It was the greatest work of art I knew. It was more than Madelon or the sum of all the Madelons that I knew existed. It was Woman as well as a specific woman. I felt humble in the presence of such great art. It was “mine” only in that I could house it. I could not contain it. It had to belong to the world. I looked at the two of them. There was something else. I sensed what it was and I died some more. A flicker of hate for both of them flashed across my mind and was gone, leaving only emptiness.

  “Madelon is coming with me,” Mike said.

  I looked at her. She made a slight nod, looking at me gravely, with deep concern in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Brian.”

  I nodded, my throat constricted suddenly. It was almost a business deal: the greatest work of art for Madelon, even trade. I turned back to look at the sensatron again and this time the image-Madelon seemed sad, yet compassionate. My eyes were wet and the cube shimmered. I heard them leave and long after the throb of the copter had faded away I stood there, looking into the cube, into Madelon, into myself.

  They went to Athens, I heard, then to Russia for awhile. When they went to India so that Mike might do his Holy Men series I called off the discreet monitors Control still had on them. I saw him on a talk show and he seemed withdrawn, and spoke of the pressures fame placed upon him. Madelon was not on the show, nor did he speak of her. As part of my technology updating I was given an article on Mike, from Science News, that
spoke of his technical achievements rather than his artistic. It seemed the Full Scale Molecular System was a success and much of the credit was his. The rest of the article was on spinoffs of his basic research.

  It all seemed remote from me, but the old habits died hard. My first thought on seeing the new Dolan exhibit was how Madelon would like it. I bought a complete sculptured powerjewel costume from Cartier’s before I remembered, and ended up giving it to my companion of a weekend in Mexico City just to get rid of it.

  I bought companies. I made things. I commissioned art. I sold companies. I went places. I changed mistresses. I made money. I fought stock control fights. Some I lost. I ruined people. I made others happy and rich. I was alone a lot.

  I return often to Battle Mountain. That is where the cube is. The greatness of it never bores me; it is different each time I see it, for I am different each time. But then Madelon never bored me either, unlike all other women, who sooner or later revealed either their shallowness or my inability to find anything deeper.

  I look at the work of Michael Cilento, and I know that he is an artist of his time, yet like many artists, not of his time. He uses the technology of his time, the attitude of an alien, and the same basic subject matter that generations of fascinated artists have used. Michael Cilento is an artist of women. Many have said he is the artist who caught women as they were, as they wanted to be, and as he saw them, all in one work of art.

  When I look at my sensatron cube, and at all the other Cilentos I have acquired, I am proud to have helped cause the creation of such art. But when I look at the Madelon that is in my favorite cube I sometimes wonder if the trade was worth it.

  The cube is more than Madelon or the sum of the sum of all the Madelons who ever existed. But the reality of art is not the reality of reality.

  After the showing of the Cilento retrospective at the Modern the social grapevine told me nothing about them for several months. Reluctantly, I asked Control to check.

  The check revealed their occupancy of a studio in London, but enquiries in the neighborhood showed that they had not emerged in over a month and no one answered a knock. I authorized a discreet illegal entry. Within minutes they were back on the satellite line to me in Tokyo.

  “You probably should see this yourself, sir,” the man said.

  “Are they all right?” I asked, and it hurt to ask.

  “They’re not here, sir. Clothes, papers, effects, but no trace.”

  “You checked with customs? You checked the building?”

  “Yes, sir, first thing. No one knows anything, but . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something here you should see.”

  The studio was large, a combination of junk yard, machine shop, mad scientist’s laboratory and art gallery, much as every other sensatron artist’s studio I had ever been in. Later, I was to see the details—the flowerwine bottles painted with gay faces, the tiny sensatron cubes that made you happy just to hold them and watch them change, the art books with new drawings done over the old reproductions, the crates and charts and diagrams.

  Later, I would wander through the rubble and litter and museum quality art and see a few primitive daubs on canvo that were undoubtedly Madelon’s. I’d find the barbaric jewelry, the laughing triphotos, the tapes, the Persian helmet stuck with dead flowers, the painted rock wrapped in aluminum foil in the refrigerator, the butterfly in permaplastic, the unfinished sandwich.

  But all I saw when I walked in were the cubes.

  I bought the building and had certain structural changes made. I didn’t want to move one of the cubes a millimeter. The one that all the vidtabs and reviewers called “The Lovers” I took. I couldn’t keep it from the world, even though it hurt me to show it.

  The other cube was more of a tool, a piece of equipment, rough-finished but complete, not really a work of art, and I didn’t want it moved.

  Once it was seen people wanted “The Lovers” in a curiously avid way. Museums bid, cajoled, pleaded, compromised, regrouped into phalanxes asking for tours, betrayed each other, regrouped to try again. In a way it’s all I have left of them. I pursued the lines of obvious investigation but I found no trace of them, not on Earth, not on the Moon, not on Mars. I ordered Control to stop looking when it became obvious they did not want to be found. Or could not be. But in a way they are still here. Alive. In the Cube.

  They are standing facing each other. Nude. Looking into each other’s eyes, hand in hand. There is rich new grass under their feet and tiny flowers growing. In Mike’s free hand he is holding out to Madelon something glowing. A starpoint of energy. A small shining universe. He is offering it to her.

  Behind them is the sky. Great beautiful spring clouds move majestically across the blue. Far down, far away are worn ancient rocks, much like Monument Valley in Arizona, or the Crown of Mars, near Burroughs. That’s the first side I saw.

  I walked around to the right, slowly. They did not change. They still stared into each other’s eyes, a slight and knowing smile on their lips. But the background was stars. A wall of stars beyond the grass at their feet. Space. Deep space filled with incredible red dwarfs, monstrous blue giants, ice points of glitter, millions upon millions of suns making a starry mist that wandered across the blackness.

  The third side was another landscape, seen from a hilltop, with a red-violet sea in the distance and two moons.

  The fourth side was darkness. A sort of darkness. Something was back in there beyond them. Vague figures formed, disappeared, reformed slightly differently, changed . . .

  Then I appeared. I think it’s me. I don’t know why I think it is me. I have never told anyone I think one of the dim faces is me, but I believe it is.

  The vibrations were subtle, almost unnoticed until you had looked at the cube a long time. They were peaceful vibrations, yet somehow exciting, as if the brainwave recordings upon which they were based were anticipating something marvelously different. There have been books written about this one cube and each writer has his interpretation.

  But none of them saw the other cube.

  It’s a scenic view and it’s the same as the third face of “The Lovers.” If you walk around it it’s a 360-degree view from a low hillock. In one direction you can see the shore curving around a bay of red-violet water and beyond, dimly seen, are what might be spires or rocks or possibly towers. In the other direction the blue-green waves in the gentle breezes towards the distant mountains. The cycle is long, several times longer than any present sensatron, some thirty hours. But nothing happens. The sun rises and sets and there are two moons, one large and one small. The wind blows, the grass undulates, the tides come and go. A hot G-type sun. Moonlight on the water. Peaceful vibrations. Quiet. Alone in that studio I touched the smooth glassite surface and it was unyielding, yet an alien world seemed within reach. Or was it? Had Mike’s particle research opened some new door for him? I was afraid to have the cube moved for perhaps, in some way, it was aligned. You see, there are footsteps on the ground.

  Two sets, and they start at the cube and go away, toward the distant spires.

  I had my best team look it over. They went away with the diagrams and the notes they found on interdimensional space. They even had a stat of some figures scribbled on a tabletop.

  Sometimes I plug into the monitor and look at the Cube sitting in the empty, locked studio, and I wonder.

  Where are they?

  Where are they?

  5

  For almost two years after Madelon and Mike disappeared I was a sort of robot, going through the motions of being Brian Thorne, being the Brian Thorne, almost by reflex. But I was a changed man, less comfortable in my ways, going from moody hermit holed up in a house or an island, to a party-giving playboy. Madelon’s leaving triggered a flood of lush-bodied young ladies who had been waiting impatiently in the wings, each promising her intimate version of Valhalla, Paradise, or Hell. There were times when I lost myself in beds across the world, burrowing into ma
sses of prime young flesh, rutting mindlessly, shamelessly letting my businesses run themselves with minimum attention from me. Often I would substitute quantity for the quality I really wanted in women and then be disillusioned, and go into meditation about the universe in my belly button.

  But the flesh would tug at me and I would break the shell and emerge, racing to the fleshpots, popping sensoids, pushing my body to the limit, overdosing on sex and high speeds and variety, variety in everything. Once I selected a girl named Millicent Abigail Fletcher as my consort simply because her chocolate skin contrasted so well with a golden body jewelry design I had seen. I changed her name to Juno and never let her wear anything but the totally revealing costume, even when we made love. My guilt over making her a nonperson sent me back into another retreat, this time into the Himalayas.

  I came back from the snows, impatient with the weather-domed Shangri-La, and dropped into the real world again with a large splash. I acquired a pair of identical twins, blonde and tanned and almost grotesquely voluptuous, and made them my constant companions, calling them Left and Right, and dressing them in a mirror image of each other. I stood on a balcony at the New Metropolitan, waiting for Stephanie and Harold, flanked by my shimmering voluptuaries, and I commented that the nude was an art form invented by the Greeks in the fifth century.

  “Before that it was religious sex,” I said.

  “Oh, I am devoutly sexual,” Left said.

  “Me, too,” Right said huskily, the nipple ornament of her left breast denting my jacket, going on automatic with any mention of sex. The next day I had them signed with a good agent and I was in Berlin. I was moody and unhappy and sorry for myself. An idle comment to Von Arrow that a certain artist was lousy because he traced his nudes almost destroyed the man’s career.

  It was while I was in these moods that I studied hardest at mazeru, becoming violent enough to be given a thumping by Shigeta, then a lecture about control and balance and centering. I awoke one morning, looking as if I had just gotten up from inside an egg, and realized there was a nude girl on each side of me, naked beneath the satin, and I couldn’t remember their names, nor was I certain how they had gotten there. I lay quietly, listening to the untroubled dreams of the stereo nudes, immune and indifferent to the bared firm bosoms and ripe curving hips, all within reach. I stared at the big dead panel of the abstraction channel overhead, now silvered and reflecting the wanton trio below. I saw the rippled, distorted images, the black skin, the white, the golden, and I thought my dark thoughts.