Patron of the Arts

by William Rotsler

  We tracked the trail from the machine that had momentarily opened a path through the stars to a certain spot—through the non-space that the Martian artifact focused for us—to the center of the lines of gravitic energy that the crystal computer pinpointed as the ball of dirt where Mike and Madelon had gone.

  I willed us in that direction, almost unconsciously. There was a little push, an electron moving from this orbit to that, a reading from the probability factors.

  We linked . . .

  Linked . . . to Seventh Sphere and the Guide.

  Firstar . . . Snowflake.

  Cornerstone and Mindsword.

  The Teacher . . .

  linked to the ways they had planned, to knowledge . . . to understanding . . .

  it can’t be that easy . . .

  knowing how. . .

  linking to self . . .

  doing . . .

  going . . .

  the focusing . . .

  direction . . . thrust . . .

  wind and motion . . .

  blurred space . . .

  the doing . . .

  a sun . . .

  two moons . . .

  a red-violet sea . . .

  fresh new grass beneath our feet . . .

  the seawind on our naked bodies, cool and brisk . . .

  Brian!

  “Brian! My god, where are we?”

  “A place,” I said. I started down the grassy slope toward the rocks. “Come on, there are some people I’d like you to meet. Then perhaps we can go someplace else.”

  12

  The wind from the sea was fresh, with an invigorating tang. I looked at Nova just as she realized we were naked, but neither of us thought that was important. It was warm, and the sea breezes rippled the vast grassland and bent the tiny surfaces of the small flowers. The gravity was a tenth or so less than Earth’s, and comfortable. Looking into the big bowl of sky we could see pale discs and paler veils, even in the bright sunlight.

  Nova’s first stunned questions died away. “Brian, what have we done? Where are we?” I said I wasn’t sure, exactly, but we would soon find out. I felt a confidence that, upon examination, was based on very little. But I knew it was where I had wanted to go and that the forces within me, and the forces to which we had linked, had brought us here. We rested twice before we got to the rocks, which were much bigger than I had thought. A fringe of leafy green trees surrounded them and ran up into the crevices and small canyons. They were filled with feathered bird-like creatures that had small mouths instead of beaks, and were very beautiful.

  We rested under a large gnarled tree hung with melon-sized blue fruit. I broke one open to find a scented rose-colored interior and a small, polished bead-like seed. We didn’t eat it, but it somehow felt safe.

  “Brian,” Nova said. “The sky is—different. We are nowhere near the Solar System.”

  “Yes, I know. Don’t worry.”

  “Don’t worry? I’m not even sure what we did, Brian. It was so strange, so . . . unique. But we’re here, and naked, and some monster could come over that rock and have us for lunch. All that—sensation—is fading, becoming unfocused, sort of. Can we—get back?”

  “I think so. Come on. We’ll go over the rocks to the sea.”

  We climbed a cleft and startled something in the long thick grasses, which sprang away, running hard. I saw only a golden-tan blur through the blue-green grass, but I knew that there was some kind of life here.

  From the cleft in the rocky spine we could soon see the vast red-violet sea, and the pale pink waves crashing on the rocks below. We went down carefully, and there seemed to be a faint animal trail, which we followed.

  We came again into the jungle belt around the rocks and along through the dappled light until we could see and smell the ocean. We went through a small grove of black-limbed trees with purple fruit and crimson flowers, and walked cautiously toward the water. There was a ring of blackened firestones just back of the treeline, and a collection of curious fish bones were laid out on a rock to dry.

  “Look!” said Nova, and pointed down the beach.

  There were two figures, human and naked, their bodies gleaming wetly, and they were running toward us. The man was bearded and carried a wooden spear with a broad fish-bone point, and the woman was swinging a large popeyed black fish by the gills.

  They were Madelon and Mike.

  “My god, it’s Brian!” Madelon said, dropping the fish to run to me. She hugged me tightly, pressing our bodies together, kissing my face. Her eyes were wet and shining and wholly incredulous. “Brian! My god, how did you get here? Mike, it’s Brian!”

  Michael Cilento stood looking at us, grinning and not seeming surprised. He looked at Nova. “Hi. I’m Mike Cilento.”

  Nova looked from him to Madelon, who was kissing me in a hundred small hungry pecks. “Brian . . . ?”

  I pushed Madelon back and put my arm around her. “Nova, this is Madelon and Mike. Lady and gentleman, this is Nova Sunstrum.”

  “Doctor Livingston, honey, are we glad you are here!” Madelon gave a joyous whoop and ran to hug Mike. “Darling, I can’t believe it!”

  She turned to look at the two of us with shining eyes. “How did you ever—?”

  “We followed the trail that Mike left,” I said. “We just took a different way to get here.”

  “Brian,” Nova said, “will you tell me what is going on?”

  I put my arm around Nova. “These are . . . old friends. Mike is an artist. Michael Cilento, remember?” I saw the astonishment in her eyes.

  “But you’re dead—or something!” she said.

  “Or something,” Mike grinned.

  “Mike found a way to . . .” I hesitated. “How do I say it?”

  “Slip through space?”

  “But what did we do?” asked Nova. “I’ve never experienced anything like that!”

  “Oh, never mind that,” Madelon said. “You did it, we did it, we’re all here.” She started walking and we went along. “Our cave is over there,” she said.

  “What do you call—this place?” Nova asked.

  “We haven’t really decided,” Mike said. “Most of the time we just call it Here. But since man seems compelled to label we’ve considered New Earth, or Terra, which neither of us likes. Starholm, Grassworld, Thor, oh, what else?”

  “Flowerworld,” Madelon said. “Pacifica. But mostly it’s Here.”

  “A world by any other name would be just as sweet,” I said.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  Nude, the four of us walked up the golden beach and around a rock to find the cave house they had created. A border of flowers edged a sand terrace, and an arbor of poles supported a growth of red pear-shaped grapes. The cave was long and twisting and there were beds of moss and, back in the coolness, a carcass of some kind of meat animal.

  “We came through naked,” Mike said. “Not even our tooth fillings made it. Luckily we only had a couple. We came down here and caught fish bare handed and used their bones for tools. I made spears and tracked the jumpers for meat. They’re a bit like deer, but they can jump unbelievably high. There’s a kind of grain that grows south of here, and there is the fruit.”

  His voice petered out and I felt a sudden empathy for him. This Eden-like life was like a vacation, easy and fun, but not a man’s world, certainly not Michael Cilento’s. I noticed the sun-dried clay sculptures, the fire-hardened pots, the unfinished mural he was scratching into a smooth spot on the rock wall. An artist will always create art, but Mike had known better tools, and he was unsatisfied with the primitive ones he had.

  “Do you want to go back?” I asked.

  All three looked at me. “Can we?” asked Madelon.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I think so.” I looked at Nova. “I’m not certain we can do it without . . . them.” Mike and Madelon looked at each other questioningly.

  “It’s the Martians,” Nova said, “or something they left behind. I’m not really certai
n. Brian . . . contacted them, in the Star Palace. We merged with them, somehow. Brian wanted to come here and focused us

  . . . and we just . . . came.” She looked at me confidently. “We can do it.”

  I was not quite so confident. Some of the sureness was dissipating with new doubts. To avoid thinking of it for awhile, I asked about the fruit in a woven basket, then about the planet in general. Mike told me that from what he could determine it appeared to be an ocean world and the land a vast prairie, although he had seen only a small portion of it.

  “Brian, come see the sunset,” Nova said and we all joined her at the entrance to the cave. The western sky was red-orange and the underlit clouds were magnificent far out to sea.

  A whirring insect as large as a canary came at me from the eastern darkness, and I raised a hand to bat at it, but Mike caught my wrist. “They won’t hurt you unless you hurt them,” he laughed. “Believe me, I learned the hard way. There are no tiny annoying buggies here, just three or four species of big ones, sort of all purpose types, to fertilize the trees and flowers. We all—co-exist here.”

  The two women stepped out further, to stand on a weathered snub of rock and listen to the waves breaking as the unnamed sun set. Their naked bodies, lithe and voluptuous, were gilded by the sun. They both seemed very alive, very much aware of each other’s presence, obviously taking pleasure in the other’s beauty. Nova turned toward me to point out the low flight of a fast waterbird and I saw that the apprehension was gone, replaced by a smile. The nipples of her full breasts were hard, and the sunset breeze stirred her long dark hair. Madelon looked over her shoulder to smile at us, too, to share the beauty and her delight at companionship. Her figure was that delicious combination of the voluptuary and the athlete that it had always been, and her barely suppressed excitement was stimulating. Mike put his foot on a rock and stood outlined against the sunset. He was also lean and fit, with long shaggy hair and a full beard. He watched the two women run out to the water’s edge, their breasts bouncing and their long hair swaying. “This is Eden, Brian,” Mike said.

  “Life is easy, it’s beautiful, it’s quiet. Just the sort of thing everyone wants to escape to. Until they do it.” Mike turned his head to look at me, but I could not see his expression against the sunset. “I have my Eve, but there is no Able, not even a Cain. We don’t know why. Our shots wore off well over a year ago. We felt—we knew—that when we died there would be nothing left, only . . .” He waved his hand around. “Only all this space.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “I’m glad you came.’’

  Then he turned and shouted at the two women playing in the dark surf. “Hey, you two! We’re hungry! Let’s make some dinner!”

  Madelon and Nova, supple and voluptuous, trotted up the sands and stepped over the rocks, and went past us, up into the cave. They were talking about sunlight on skin. Madelon went to a cup in the rock and fished out a necklace of carved fruit seeds, as Mike built the fire higher. Madelon gave the necklace to Nova, who slipped it over her head and adjusted it between her firm breasts. She looked at me, smiling, and I said it was as beautiful on her as any custom selection from Tiffany’s. Nova embraced Madelon, their breasts pressing together, and they kissed.

  Mike grinned up at them as he squatted by the fire and spitted a fish. “Yum,” he said, and held the fish over the fire. Madelon and Nova released each other after a long look, their hands clasped together, then Madelon began slicing some beetlike vegetables, and Nova started shredding a mound of fist-sized leafy plants. I sat on the grass bed and began washing some wide leaves to use as dishes.

  The meal was excellent, and our fingers served us well. Afterward, Madelon came around the fire and threw herself on me, bearing me back into the grass bed. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you!” She kissed me long and hard and her skin was smooth and supple against me. I came up grinning and they laughed at my obvious physical reaction. Nova looked cat-eyed, but smiled anyway, and seemed to mean it.

  Some time later Nova came to me and put her arms around my waist as I stood in the cave entrance looking up at the fantasy in the sky. Ragged pale sheets of flaming gas were flung across the sky, netting huge multicolored stars, pale giants that had glowed even in the noonday sun.

  “She was your wife, wasn’t she?”

  I nodded. “Once long ago,” I said. “I loved her then,” I said in answer to her unspoken question. “But now . . . I love her . . . but I’m not in love with her.”

  I took Nova in my arms and the waves splashed thunderously on the rocks. “I love you,” I said into her ear. “You.”

  She hugged me tight and kissed me hard. “I love you, too—but I’m scared, Brian. This place is all right for awhile . . . but they are bored, I know it. I would be bored, too, if there were only ice cream.”

  I looked up at the night sky and said, “I’ll try.”

  Madelon and Mike came out and Mike gestured up at the bright starlight. “Can you figure out where we are? Are we even in Home Galaxy? If we are, is it the Perseus Arm?”

  I shrugged. “Homesick?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Madelon. “To be able to go is fine; but to have to stay is annoying. Do you think your Martian way will help?”

  “I don’t even know how it works,” I said, “except that I seem to

  . . .” There were no words for it. Focus? Merge? Link? Blend? And would that method work so far from where I started? Could the rock fling itself back from the sea?

  “I’m in no hurry to leave,” Nova said, “but I would like to know that we could.”

  I agreed with her and we broke up to go to our moss and grass beds. We made love in the night, and heard one another’s gasping orgasms and I utterly amazed myself by thinking, I’ m glad Madelon is happy. Hearing their unembarrassed intimacies excited Nova and she was perhaps just a little competitive as we made love.

  I fell asleep, with Nova cradled in my arms, more amazed at my own reaction to the lovemaking of my former wife than having crossed the stars in a blink of time. But one was emotional and the other was merely intellectual. Crossing space was possible, one way or another; changing oneself is always the hardest task of all.

  In the morning Nova went with Mike to fish, while I sat on a sunny rock with Madelon and cut open fruit for breakfast. Some deep red ones had a center of a sweet tasty juice in which tiny seeds floated. The purple-striped green ones tasted minty, and some very small yellow ones tasted a little like apples.

  As I cut open some fruit with a fish-bone knife I had time to inspect Madelon, who was fixing a small fire to grill the morning fish. She was deeply and evenly tanned and looked very fit. “This life in Eden seems to agree with you,” I said.

  She shrugged and smiled wanly. “It’s nicely primitive, nicely perfect.”

  “In other words, you’re tired of it,” I said.

  “We have everything here,” she protested. “Privacy, food, beauty, security. For someone raised in archos of three-quarters of a million and up, this is privacy.”

  “Nice to visit, but you don’t want to live here.”

  Madelon looked at me over her tanned shoulder. “You always could read me.” She placed another stick full of food on the fire and stood up, brushing her hands together. She looked around, and sighed deeply, “It’s beautiful, Brian. Alien, and yet—familiar. When Mke found it in the sensatron it seemed perfect. We had to try to go. We didn’t know we couldn’t go back.”

  “How do you know you can’t? Have you tried?”

  “When we came through there was this square of space—black space—behind us, just the size of the sensatron. It just hung there in the air, a hand’s width above the grass. We started down the hill and I looked back. It was higher—about at knee-level. Mike started running toward it, yelling at me to follow, but it slowly drifted up and eastward. By the time we got there we couldn’t reach it. Then it started graying . . . drifting . . . and it was translucent. Then it was gone. Mike said it must have lost focus or we were too far away
to keep a lock on it. Anyway, it was gone and we were here.”

  “I didn’t move the sensatron and I kept it powered. There was still an image, cycling—”

  “Maybe things just got too far out of phase. After all, we don’t know where we are. We could be anyplace.”

  “But we aren’t anyplace. We’re here.” As soon as I had need for it, I realized I had a perfect image of the Martian mural, stored back in my mind, where the outside world never goes. As I needed the contact I felt it reestablish, in nanoseconds, the time delay somehow measuring the distance from my mind to the Star Palace.

  I jumped up. “We can do it!” I said. “We can go back!” I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Let’s find the others!”

  We ran from the rocks out onto the sand and I saw two figures hip-deep in water up the shoreline. They waved, then started wading out as they saw us running, kicking up spurts of golden sand. We ran into each other, breathlessly. “What’s the matter?” Mike said, scanning the rocks behind us.

  “We can do it,” I said, looking at Nova. “I’m linked . . . you’re linked . . . all we have to do is want to! That’s what the computer is for, to help!” They were looking at me, all touching, and I willed the push. There was a shifting . . .

  The full-space-around us thinned.

  We pulsed . . .

  flowed . . .

  Here became there, and then there was here.

  “My god!” Mike gasped.

  The four of us, still naked, hung in a cluster in space, millions of miles above a blazing yellow-orange sun. We were neither hot nor cold, and breathing normally. A safe environment was needed, so it was automatically provided.

  With a kind of clarity beyond the senses we could all see the Solar System around us. The hot blob of rock near the sun, the mist-shrouded second planet, the blue-green-brown ball of Earth, distant Mars, then the great planets, majestic and unique, and further out the frozen balls of methane and rock. The dust, the asteroids, a comet coming into the plane, the primitive ships, debris and radiation, ions and sunwind. It was all there, every atom tagged and logged. And beyond, the most beautiful thing of all, the many-armed spiral of our galaxy, and other galaxies, the pliant fabric of space stretching around, bursting stars, glowing nebulae, life, time and non-time. This is what the Martians have left us, I said in my mind and the others heard. A tool. The tool. We will take it and use it and make it ours. Someday, we will meet them . . . and learn how science can become art, and art become science.