Patron of the Arts

by William Rotsler

  We floated up as she thrust herself into the bulky suit, and I buttoned up. Then she grabbed the edge of the hatch, grinned at me, slapped her faceplate shut, and hit the lock control. We went out and down the laser-cut passage, dipping and dodging like dolphins, laughing and grabbing at each other. We seized a line just in time to brake down and we reentered the central core in relative sobriety. Mine was the closer cabin, but there was Pelf, so we went on to Nova’s. She shared it with a nurse who rarely slept there, and it was on Nova’s narrow bunk that we first made love.

  No two sexual encounters are exactly alike. Each couple has its interpersonal relationships spelled out in a different set of positions, a different sequence and rhythm, different “body English” and different words from the last couple and, indeed, from the last coupling of the same couple. Each orgasm rockets through the mind uniquely, caroming off memories and senses and fantasies in a different way each time. From the first Nova and I found that we fit. Not just the plumbing, nor the silent agreement of position or choice of act, but the time and place, the pace, the mood, whether gently and loving or frenetic and demanding. There are times when you make love and there are times when you fuck. We seemed attuned to one another in this and responded wordlessly, for words were not needed, nor would they be adequate.

  One of the things I had learned the hard way, but that Nova seemed to understand instinctively was that each person has only his or her kind of love to give, not your own kind. I felt fortunate that the kinds that we gave each other were so alike.

  I also had learned that you cannot love a person all the way unless the way was open. What is better to do than love, to be in love, or even to anticipate love?

  Love is ego turned inside out, but there must be time spent between loves. I had spent that time wildly and foolishly, and now it was another time. It was time to be the royal escort to the Queen of Mars, by appointment, Lover to the Princess Nova, to be Brian and Nova, perhaps even to be BrianandNova, NovaandBrian.

  I must admit she did a fine job of keeping the various proNova factions from exploding. It had been our conceit that it took the other passengers two weeks to find that we were sleeping together, but perhaps lovers are the last to know that others know. To keep the others from becoming too jealous, she spent much of her time dancing and smiling and dining with other men, from the Captain to the lowest rating. Naturally, that drove me crazy, an emotion I found both foreign and degrading. Brian Thorne would never have gotten jealous. But I was Diego Braddock.

  The month was both short and long. It seemed, in one way, as though we were suddenly there, and yet, in another, it was a long trip because so much happened.

  Plump Miss Blount had affaires de coeur with the ranking Marine, with the ship’s Number Two, and with the wispy little technician she would become engaged to by trip’s end. One of the nurses was the subject of a duel between a crewman and one of the Marines. The Marine won and was court-martialed.

  There was considerable bed-hopping, which was to be expected, and I felt fortunate in having to deck only two men, a torch-watcher who jumped me and damned near killed me, and the biologist, who had named a variant strain of Glycine soja the Nova in hopes of attracting her attention. He went zongo during a quiet party in the lounge and was sedated for the remainder of the journey. It was Nova’s own sweet nature that kept most of the men at bay, and she handled any problems with grace and tact. It is always better to have the woman at least attempt to smooth over ruffled egos. It leaves everyone in a better mood than the aftermath of any violence. I hardly think violence shows an inner strength, but tact and mildness should not be considered weakness, either.

  Other things happened as well, like passing close to a robot ore ship on the long, cheap, slow route to Earth orbit, and having a fine look at a phenomenal solar flare. Nothing spectacular, but they broke the monotony of space travel.

  Nova and I did not involve ourselves much with the ship’s passengers and crew, although there were numerous organized activities that kept the passengers from being idle. At first we were invited to join a handball team, or to go to one of Miss Blount’s gourmet dinners, but soon the invitations dwindled as we politely declined again and again. Most of the time we explored one another. Nova showed an amazing knowledge of Martian archaeology. “I played in the Star Palace as a child, and sat on the throne in the Great Hall, playing Queen of Mars to Georgie’s Grand Vizier and Sabra’s Counterqueen. I was just a baby, practically, when Martian Explorations made all the big finds. Evans used to put me up on his lap and we’d go over the holos together. I used an emerald crystal from the Palace for a paperweight.”

  “Where do you think the Martians went, or what happened to them?” I asked.

  “They ran their cycle, I suppose. They grew up, matured, aged, went senile, and died. Like every other race. Where are the Assyrians, the Maya? Ragged remnants absorbed into other cultures, only on Mars there is no other, absorbent culture. So they died off, like the dinosaurs, the tigers, the musk ox . . .”

  “What about all those legends of supermartians developing into creatures of pure energy?”

  “Legends. Human legends. Human wish-fulfillment, like creating God in their image so they could understand him. Maybe they’re right, maybe the Secret Knowledge Foundation has a lock on the truth. With about thirty galaxies for every human being on Earth there is room enough for almost anything,” she said.

  “And that’s in this universe.”

  “Oh, concepts like that are just unreal! It would take a mind or a computer or something much bigger than mine to comprehend more than one universe. Even the idea of black holes popping out of space-as-we-know-it and popping back in as quasars is something very difficult to understand.”

  “If it’s true,” I said, “then it’s comforting to know there is an outside and an inside. If there’s an ‘outside’ then there might be another universe. If there’s another, there might be universii.”

  “There’s no such word, Diego.”

  “I was just checking your alertness. How about universia?”

  “No, Diego. The idea of black holes popping out and in is scary. What would happen if there were too many holes punched? The whole thing might fall apart!”

  “Quick! This is a job for Captunnnn Laserrr! Planetary catastrophes averted, holocausts under cost, evil beings from OuterWherever vanquished and captured, universes saved. Three FTL

  ships, no waiting, no out-of-town checks, first come, first saved.”

  “Oh, Diego. . .”

  The time I spent with Nova was instructive, delightful, satisfying, joyous, ecstatic, and quite mind-warping.

  I knew I was falling in love, and the great trap to that has always been that you rarely fight it. Once you start, you don’t want to stop. I had a woman who interested me and the time to get know her. I must confess to a little conceit here. As “Brian Thorne” it was very unusual for me not to obtain the woman of my desires. Money, fame, and charm are great aphrodisiacs. But as “Diego Braddock” I felt it was I who earned the love of Nova Sunstrum, and I could not have been more pleased.

  I told her I loved her in the middle of the second week; it was the first time I had used that phrase since Madelon. Saying it comes easy to some men, but it has never come easily to my lips. Some men say it and believe it, at least for the moment, or say it cynically, knowing its falseness, but believing it to be something the other person wants to hear. I have never said it except honestly, an Nova was only the third woman to whom I had said it.

  She was naked in my arms, cuddled in her narrow bunk, when I said it. She pulled back to look up at me, her face serious and concerned. She studied me searchingly, and for a fleeting moment I thought that perhaps I had done the one thing she would not want, that I had somehow ended a “game” whose rules I did not know, doing the one forbidden thing that our days of lovemaking, of learning and laughter, would not permit.

  Then she opened her lips and said the words back to me and the fear
dissolved, and the joy burst over both of us. We made love in a burst of frenetic delight that left us speechless, exhausted, and very happy.

  Sexually, it was as if every thing, every time, was the first time. There was a freshness to her, a vitality, and at times, great insight. She had both innocence and wisdom; she was pixie and earth mother. She seemed instinctively to have the skills and erotic ingenuity of the Great Whore of Babylon, yet there was no coarseness or hardness. For a man like me, jaded by a thousand superb bodies and artfully acquired skills, it was like being reborn. To do the same old things for the first time was a miracle of the mind. I had been spoiled by women, sometimes lovingly, always knowingly, for their own reasons or for the best of reasons, but those who counted most—Suzanne, Gloria, Michele, Louise, Vincene, and, of course, Madelon—had ruined me for the others.

  There were those with finer bodies, greater eyes, bedroom skills of amazing versatility, fast, shrewd minds, and an inner toughness like steel. Sometimes I thought there was a secret factory someplace that bred those sleek creatures like thoroughbreds, with genetic star lines and platoons of stylish teachers, a faculty of clever predators that trained these women and sent them out. They were a familiar type to every man of riches, supple-bodied beauties with brilliant minds. The dumb but beautiful ones were weeded out at the lower levels, with corporation presidents and big algae farmers and entertainment executives. The smart ones, the really smart ones, kept rising. They were the women I met almost daily, sometimes accidentally, sometimes by artfully arranged means, designed to show them off to the best advantage. Some even had managers, and always lawyers.

  It got so you didn’t care. They all wanted out of the mass, and if one was a good example of a type you wanted, you bought her. A simple business deal, no matter how gracefully put. Sometimes the two of you never discussed it, letting it all be handled by lawyers or expeditors. But Nova was different. That each love is different, that it is somehow hand-made each time, is the conceit of all lovers. Or perhaps it was that Diego Braddock was different from Brian Thorne. As Braddock, as Howard Scott Miles, as Waring Brackett, as Andrew Garth, I had pursued and won the attention of certain women. But in the secret room in the back of my mind there was always the thought that somehow they knew I was Brian Thorne.

  Perhaps it was the going to Mars that made me leave that room behind, and the thoughts with it. It didn’t matter. Maybe I just wanted not to carry that burden of a large question mark. There was a fine feeling of freedom to being someone other than Brian Thorne, just as sometimes there was a fine feeling being Brian Thorne. But the simple matter was that I wanted to be in love with someone. I wanted to be in love, not in lust. The time was right, the woman was right, and I was ready.

  What a strange world it is when whim is made of steel, when chance seems like destiny, when mood diverts a life. But it is the way of life. You are a leaf upon a river and come rapids or quiet pool, you go down the river. You, the Lord Leaf, proudly declaim your free will, your freedom of choice, your powerful ambitions, and everything changes when the current shifts.

  We sat in our favorite nook, the observation blister, looking at the stars. “I have always hoped they would invent a time machine,” I said.

  “Which direction would you go?”

  “Back. It’s the only direction I know. I’m going ahead anyway, without a time machine. There are things, I’d like to do.”

  “Save Joan of Arc? Kennedy? Lincoln?”

  “Oh, those are interesting enough, but what I’d really like to do is go back to, oh, 1888, 1889. Probably to a field of sunflowers in Arles. I would go buy a few paintings from a mad and wonderful painter. I wouldn’t tell him how famous he would get, or how valuable his work would be, in effect, and even in money. That might ruin him faster than absinthe and madness, faster than loneliness. But I’d like to talk to him and encourage him in the only way artists need encouragement, by buying his work.

  “All artists have more than enough words given them, what they need is some tangible, pragmatic help. Maybe van Gogh wouldn’t go insane so quickly, or even at all. Think of the paintings we would have!”

  “You might go to Tahiti,” Nova said, “and save the Gauguins that were burned. Or the library at Alexandria.”

  “Yes, true. But van Gogh is . . . my friend. He has touched me across the years as few others have, the poor, mad, son-of-a-bitch.”

  “He is always the example people use to point out how misunderstood their work is,” Nova said. “He sold one painting in his lifetime, and on top of that they thought him mad, he thought himself mad, he went mad. They shut him away in the funny place, too. All that.”

  I smiled and said, “Oh, I know it is very selfish of me, but I don’t care. Imagine spending a few weeks in Arles, seeing Vincent go out at dawn and come back at dusk with a painting, two paintings! My god, what a thrill! Talking art all evening with Gauguin and van Gogh, watching Vincent paint at night, making the stars like those out there, come into swirling life!”

  “Fantasy time,” Nova grinned.

  “Maybe I could take those broke bastards up to Paris and we could see what the others are doing. Poor, broken, drunk Lautrec, who used to walk with his fellow painters, then stop to point out some sight with his cane, and discourse on it, because his stunted, pain-spiked legs needed the rest. Cezanne once cut out a bowl of fruit from a larger painting and traded it for food because that is the only part someone wanted.”

  “Maybe helping them would be the worst thing you could do,”

  Nova said.

  “Yes, I know that. People like Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, that drunk Utrillo, they don’t really need help, not enough to screw around with history. But van Gogh . . . to add a year to his life would have added perhaps a hundred paintings! What a treasure! For that I would meddle. Probably along near the end, where if I did something wrong, the loss in paintings wouldn’t be too much. But, oh, how I would love to do it!”

  “Romantic!”

  “Yea verily and say it thrice!” I sighed. “Sorry, Vincent,” I said to the stars, “I was born a bit too late to help.”

  We were in her bunk, with Nova turned away from me, quietly resting from a rather prolonged period of loving exploration. I put my hand on her hip, feeling the bone beneath the flesh, and the curve of the waist. I moved my hand and took a full-handed feel of her buttock and really felt the great dome of flesh, the texture of skin, the flex and movement of the underlying muscle. It felt different now than it had a few minutes before, as I cupped both hemispheres in the frenzy of orgasm. The skin there was different, different from the skin of her lower leg or her breasts.

  I ran my fingers up the long groove of her spine, feeling the knobs beneath. then down again to lightly touch the dimples that flaked the spine at the top of her rounded buttocks.

  My hand cupped a full breast and she snuggled back against me, murmuring softly, pressing her body to mine. I felt the weight and curving richness within my hand, and I felt the intimacy of it and her nipples, slowly hardening in my palm.

  My hand slid down the flat, taut stomach to caress the warm furrow below and she tilted her head back with a sigh, her eyes closed and her lips parted. She smiled and said, “Strike while the mind is hot.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  The first thing I had noticed about Nova was her beauty. Then I saw her beauty. The carriage, the awareness of self and others, the alertness, the poise, even in one so young, was phenomenal. Granted, beautiful women can more easily come to poise when they see, directly, how insecure most people are.

  But noticing her physical beauty first and her second does not make me a shallow person. It means that was her most obvious asset, and the facet I saw first. Unless we know something of a person in advance, that is always the thing we notice first, the way they look and act. I often meet beautiful women and have discarded perfectly fine ladies that others might die for. It doesn’t mean that I am insensitive o
r strange, it just means they were not the right woman for me, or the right woman at the right time. Searching for and hopefully finding the right person with whom to share your life takes up a great deal of one’s time and attention. Usually we settle for bits and pieces from a lot of different people.

  Bernstein, in a profile in Fortune, said that I tend to judge things aesthetically first, including women, and noted that I seemed to exclude men from this aesthetic judgement. She was correct in that, but in a world that openly admits and even encourages bi-sexuality, I was simply not interested in the physical aspects of men, not as long as there were women around, at least.

  I have seldom cared what other people thought was beautiful. If their tastes agreed with mine, fine. If not, so what? If I thought a woman was beautiful in any way, then she was beautiful, and it didn’t matter what others thought. I had learned early that I had the courage of my convictions, at least about beauty, and that others often simply followed the trends, followed the mass, accepting the standards of others. But physical beauty, or lack of it, is usually the first thing we do notice about anyone, whether we call it by that name or another. If we have advance notice, whether by reputation or pictures or a body of work, or some other thing, we form opinions, then try to adjust those prior opinions to the individual we actually meet. Unfortunately, having clay feet is a very human condition.

  I have noticed that reputations are often undeserved, incomplete, or an image, as seen and “known” by others, to have little bearing on reality, so I try to keep that in mind when encountering the reputations of others.

  Forming an opinion from the work of someone you do not know can also be a dangerous pastime. I know writers of virile, popular, fast-action stories who are physical cowards and dull plods. I know noble appearing politicians who are all front, the mouthpieces of the interests who own them. I know writers of sensitive prose and monumental insight who have petty, cruel, insensitive streaks. I know drunken slob sculptors, atheist ministers, homosexual he-men, frigid glamour queens, and horny priests. I know actors whose Don Juan reputation covers their impotence. I know quiet, shy, schoolteachers who are hell in bed. I know startlingly beautiful women, envied by all, who do not think they are at all pretty, and believe people are lying to them. But as I talked to Nova, first in that observation blister, then everywhere, I was very aware of her womanliness, of her early explorations with the power of that beauty. But she seemed to be finding her way through the mysterious accident of her beauty, discovering the parameters so that she might stabilize herself. She did not seem to be using it for any dictatorial power over others. Her self-confidence in her ability to handle a shipload of men was based on inexperience, not egotism.