by Brian Aldiss
‘He sounds a detestable man.’
‘It’s possible to detest the man and admire the artist. Anyhow, it was because so many people on Earth found him detestable – or rather because he found so many of them destestable, that he came to Mercury. Since when he has been a thorn in my ample side. But it may be that he has also discovered another dimension; I for one would be delighted if it was an artist rather than one of these goddamned toffee-nosed scientists who did it.’
The signs that Thatch was winding himself up for a burst of controversy were three: a pavement-pulverising emphasis in his tread, a tendency to smoulder about the neckline, and an increased air-intake with high decibel yield. He was about to burst into argument if not flame when they reached the ancient shack which had housed all the Wyndham police in the dear dead days when Thameson was all the Wyndham police.
Unlocking the door, the Inspector led the way in.
The room was large and bare, with a great desk that resembled a medieval stocks in one corner, a clock whose hands – not of the best plastic – had curled into a derisory gesture, and various notices and rude epithets on the walls. Some of the latter, most of them questioning the legitimacy of the Wyndam police, were obscured by a row of canvases turned outwards along one wall so defiantly that Thatch shied towards them like a Turkish charger confronting the giaour.
Mankiloe’s paintings were seven in number. Three were large, three or four feet wide by seven high; one was about four feet square; the others were smaller, going down to a rectangle nine inches wide by some twenty inches high.
‘They’re mere daubs!’ Thatch exclaimed at once.
‘Don’t show your ignorance, man. Take a minute to look at them – they took days to paint.’
The canvases were recognisably on the same theme. The subjects they represented were a disquieting blend of abstract and surrealist, difficult to describe. In one, a recognisable stretch of Mercurian silicate desert merged into a curious distortion of towers where objects like plumes floated or lay. In another, things remotely like tractors, had tractors ever been built of woolly balls, distended themselves into a tranced brown twilight. In the third, the brown twilight was predominant; fluttering objects like falling books could be seen. In the fourth, behind a recognisable boulder, something: like an attenuated bus swathed in grey bunting was surrounded by wavering figures. In the fifth, the brown twilight was back, but punctuated by a curious object resembling the hull of a ship; but distortion and compression rendered its true shape unguessable.
The last two paintings bore an obvious relationship to each other. The smallest, the narrow rectangle, was of an inhuman figure; the other was, or appeared to be, a facial portrait of the figure.
It was difficult to be more explicit than that. The figure was golden, a hard unearthly gold, with three stilt-like legs and a polyhedric head. Either it was swathed in strips of cloth and armless, or it was naked and had several ‘arms’. The distortion, fore-shortening, and blurring effects evident in the other pictures were, equally obtrusive here; they seemed to be less a freak technique than the artist’s deliberate attempt to capture something uncapturable. In the painting of the head, blurring was again present. The polyhedric shape was clear enough; several planes rose into nodes which might have been taken for features.
The execution of all seven canvases was forceful. Here and there the paint protruded almost an inch from the rest, as if the artist had been forced to try to overcome the limitations of his medium.
‘Extraordinary!’ said Thatch.
Fillbrook turned to gaze in astonishment at his superior. In three weeks less a day this solitary breathed word was the only intimation he had had that Thatch could be impressed by the work of his fellow men. Like one quickly slipping a medical boot over an Achilles heel, Thatch added, ‘Extraordinary rubbish, I should say. Now perhaps you’ll tell me what all this has to do with an optician in Hong Kong and the fourth dimension.’
Tearing his gaze from the paintings and facing Thatch with the visible effort of a butler disentangling two flypapers, Inspector Thameson shook his body into a somewhat more spherical shape and said, ‘No time for that. I’m just off to arrest a man.’
‘Inspector, I came to see you expressly for the purpose of eliciting from you an explanation –’
‘You may have heard of the man. His name is Hengist Mankiloe. Profession, artist. Whereabouts, out towards Brittling’s Gap on the edge of the West Salt Desert not a hundred miles from here. Want to come along, boys?’
As he spoke, Thameson had begun towards the door like a one-man stampede, leaving his companions little chance to argue.
‘We’ve no reason to go,’ Fillbrook said feebly. He personally knew of explorers who after returning from the West Salt Desert had spent the rest of their days in a refrigerated asylum clinging to the conviction that they were Tournedos steaks bien cuit.
‘We’ve every reason,’ said Thatch, flinging his legs into gear. Even the Salt Deserts were preferable to self-accusations that he was pampering underlings. Puffing after the nearest upholder of the law, he asked, ‘What made you decide so suddenly to arrest this man, Inspector?’
‘I caught sight of that communication about the bouncing cheque Mankiloe tried to pass for the calico. It was stuck in your fist while you stood gawking at his paintings. It gives me the pretext I need for entering his caravan.’
‘Caravan?’
‘Don’t ask so many questions. Fillbrook, tell your new boss about how there’s no air on Mercury outside these domes, so that itinerants have to live in caravans.’
He bounded along under the polarised dome, a round determined man with a long indeterminate shadow. Behind him two stalwarts of empire strove to keep up and their dignity at the same time. They crossed Sun Avenue at a controlled canter and burst into the vehicle yard of the new Police HQ with some breath still in hand.
A sergeant came forward, listened to Thameson’s instructions, and led him over to a waiting bubbletrack.
‘Excellent,’ Thameson said. ‘Keep a watch for my automatic signal over UVHF, sergeant, but send a search party out for us if we are not back in this yard in twenty-four hours.’
‘Very good, sir.’
At this exchange, both Fillbrook and Thatch quailed. Their eyes met, as far as that was possible across the natural hazard of Thatch’s mustache. Something akin to mutual sympathy flickered there, like a shy fish in a large cold pond.
‘Do you really think we ought to go, sir?’ Fillbrook bleated.
The fish nose-dived into the murky depths.
‘Duty, Fillbrook. I mean to get to the bottom of this,’ snapped Thatch.
‘Then get to the top of this,’ urged Thameson, indicating the rung ladder up the side of the bubbletrack. The three men climbed up and into the vehicle. Last in, Thameson lowered the bubble over them and clamped it down. Settling himself in the high driver’s seat, he gave a chummy wave to the sergeant and let her roll.
They headed down Sun Avenue and out through the West lock.
‘It’s enough to melt the ball-bearings off a brass monkey out here,’ Thameson said cheerfully, and that the refrigerated air-conditioning was not proof against self-suggestion was shown by the beads of sweat which immediately blossomed forth on Fillbrook’s forehead.
All around them stretched the landscape referred to not inappositely by a leading politician as ‘the backside of the universe’. Even under a sun more glorious and unkempt than Thameson’s hair, the land was a sterile grey, beautified only by natural slag-hills, an occasional gay bank of ash, or the alluring black of a sluggish lead stream.
‘Now, with a bit of natural scenery about us, we can relax,’ said Thameson, ‘and I’ll fill you in on the background to the Mankiloe case …’
‘If you are standing on your head again, Joe,’ Hengist Mankiloe said in measured tones, ‘I’ll flay you alive and use your skin for my next canvas.’
He spoke without looking round or ceasing to slash a mixture o
f burnt umber and sienna into one tortured corner of a canvas.
Behind him, Joe came abruptly down, his feet sweeping through a parabola culminating in a loud crash on the floor that rocked the caravan. He dived for shelter as a palette knife skimmed above his head.
Mankiloe sighed. His aim was off when his spectacles were. He turned back to the painting and the view through the vision-port, where a thing like a distorted skyscraper lumbered about the middle distance. All this post-lunch shift he had worked at fever-pitch … which reminded him …
‘Acne, old girl,’ he said conversationally, although nobody was present in the compartment, ‘I suppose you don’t happen to be intending to roast us, do you? Do you mind telling me what the temperature is in here?’
‘At twelve noon the longitude on the meridian approaches twelve point four two litres of prussic acid.’
Wrenching himself away from his easel, Mankiloe turned and kicked at a panel of Acne, the Automated Captain and Nurse (Electronic) which coped, or was supposed to cope, with the many problems of caravan life on the equivalent of a vacuum-packed furnace floor.
‘What’s the matter with you, girl? Can’t get any sense out of you these days.’
‘It’s the cafard,’ Acne explained. ‘You bought this pile of junk sixth hand, I myself was third hand, you’ve never bothered to maintenance me, and now at last the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square root of one is minus one.’
‘Okay, Acne, forget it, but let’s have the place ten degrees cooler, if you can manage it.’
‘A drop in temperature precedes the precipitation of snow on the southern slopes of Aspasia was Pericles’ mistress. Alexander was the horse of Bucephalus the G rat who –’
‘ALL RIGHT, forget it! Babs!’
Babs appeared, lightly clad in a few beads and a suspicion of chiffon. This was her first trip and Mankiloe was going to make sure it was her last. She was a success in some vital respects, but her long sessions watching the Wyndham CV interfered with Mankiloe’s work.
‘What’s the matter, Hen? Want some more beer?’ she asked, with a smile that by exhibiting her teeth left nothing else to be exhibited.
Mankiloe waited patiently until her chiffon settled before replying. This body certainly knew how to dress for a warm climate.
‘Yes please, love. And see that Joe’s okay. Maybe he wants to go out. He has got the fidgets.’
‘So have I, come to that.’
He patted her behind absentmindedly.
‘You’re lovely, Babs.’
‘So are you, Hen.’
‘Get that beer, love, eh?’
‘Okay.’
She disappeared into the other compartment where they cooked, ate and slept. Dimly he heard her chatter to Joe. Sharply he heard her squeal in surprise. She came running back into the studio without the beer.
‘Hen, Hen, there’s something coming – a vehicle!’
‘Head’n’ this way, huh?’ asked Hen, hamming it up with a mid-West accent. ‘Kinda reckon it must be them pesky Injuns agin.’ He put on his spectacles to look at her. ‘You forgot the beer, Babs.’
‘But they’re nearly here, Hen. Who can it be?’
The lock bell rang.
‘The sound of the doorbell ringing is equal to volume times mass of the gas,’ Acne announced.
‘Shut your great automated trap,’ said Hen.
‘It’s not really her fault,’ Babs said in a parenthesis. ‘Joe will post his crusts into her.’
As Mankiloe moved over to the door, Joe skidded forward and got there first. ‘I’ll go, I’ll go,’ he cried.
They opened up. Three men, one nose, one Great Barrier Reef mustache, and one head of hair stood without, smouldering in the tinny confines of the caravan lock.
‘You’re trespassing on private property,’ said Mankiloe mildly. ‘Get out.’
‘I know my Mercurian law as well as you do, Mankiloe,’ Thameson replied, rolling forward as if he had been specially constructed to test the maximum load of caravan floors. ‘We’re police, and I have here a warrant for your arrest on which the ink is hardly dry. Anything you say may be taken either up or down in evidence.’
‘That’s a different kettle of fish; why didn’t you say that in the first place?’ Mankiloe asked defensively as he removed the paint brush from his mouth.
‘He did,’ said Thatch.
‘I’ll handle this,’ said Thameson.
‘Thank goodness,’ said Fillbrook.
Thameson patted Joe’s head.
‘A nice kid you have here. Yours, Mankiloe?’
‘Hell, does he look like mine?’
A friendly atmosphere having thus been established, they settled down to business. Babs appeared after a brief interval clad in something less revealing, chiefly because she had nothing more revealing, and served beer.
‘First time I’ve ever sampled beer at boiling point,’ said Thatch, mainly to keep his end up and his stomach down, for the bumpy ride over the desert had shaken his equilibrium.
‘The sale of beer has been the subject of license ever since 1869, when brewers paid tax on every hundred barrels of Beerbohm, an essayist and stylist who rose to fame in the 1890s …’ said Acne.
‘Pay no attention to her,’ Mankiloe told his guests. ‘Her beer-Beerbohm circuits appear to be shorting; they’re probably adjacent. As for the temperature of the beer, I apologise. Our fridge and oven are also adjacent and there too Acne seems to be in some confusion. What can I do for you gentlemen?’
That Inspector Thameson was pulling himself together was externally evidenced only from a series of undulations of his sacrocostal area, as if in the battle to adjust himself, his ilium had become a second Ilium. The truth was, his preconceptions about artists were strong; he had expected a rebel painter like Mankiloe, this little wisp of a stoat of a man before him, to look slightly more capable of waving a banner at a barricade. However, since he was not one to take refuge in confused silence, he burst into confused speech.
‘I have reason to suppose you have in your possession, Hengist Mankiloe, two hundred and thirty yards of fabric; to specify, coarse second grade calico.’
‘Golly, did the cheque bounce?’ groaned Mankiloe. He caught a wolf-like grin of satisfaction on Thatch’s face and added, ‘You can have it back intact if you like. This trip I decided to paint on hardboard instead.’
‘That’s right,’ Babs said. ‘He’s pulled out all the panelling in the kitchen to paint on. That’s how Joe is able to stuff crusts into Acne.’
Joe stood on his head in confirmation, Fillbrook stared at Babs in envy.
‘If we can return the goods intact,’ Thameson said, ‘no doubt we can get this matter straightened out. I’ll hold that rap over your head, Mankiloe, to ensure I get satisfactory answers to my main line of questions.’
‘Ah ha, I didn’t think you came all this way just for a few yards of canvas. Well?’
Scowling as when a kraken awakes with a hangover, Thatch said, ‘We want to know what your paintings really represent.’
Thameson waved him into silence with his beer mug and assumed a judicial air.
‘Supposing we lay a hypothesis before you, Mankiloe?’
‘As you please.’
‘All right. Supposing we – you and me and these gentlemen and even that half-clad young lady there – were standing all unknowing on the brink of a revolutionary discovery. Supposing you could be the instrument of that discovery. Supposing you knew you could, but because you were a bit antisocial you were holding out on the world and impeding progress.’
‘Supposing your views and mine of what is progress did not coincide,’ said Mankiloe sharply.
‘Joe, you go and play in the other room before there’s an argument,’ Babs urged softly. She knew that progress and Mankiloe were as antithetical as prose style and communist manifestoes.
Inspector Thameson slapped his legs and took a new tack.
‘Let me put a story to you
, Mankiloe. Suppose we have a young artist. He’s pretty good, becomes known to connoisseurs, but critics agree his subjects are pretty plebeian.
‘Suppose this young artist, after a few chastening rubs with authority, decided Earth is over-civilised and heads out for a backwater like Mercury. Let’s go on to suppose he buys an old space-sealed caravan sixth-hand, and in it makes various forays into the Twilight Zone of Mercury. And there he does a lot of paintings.’
They were all listening carefully. Even Fillbrook switched his gaze from Babs to Thameson with the sound of a rubber suction pad tearing off a steel wall.
Becoming somewhat histrionic under such rapt attention, Thameson rose and flung out a hand towards the nearest port.
‘Look at that landscape simmering out there, gentlemen. That was what our hypothetical young artist had to paint. Dust, rock; debris. Fields of lava, no fields of grass. No trees – mountains of ash, but never a mountain ash. Blinding brightness, dense shadow, and a featureless plain that is plainly featureless.
‘And yet – and yet, gentlemen –’
‘Cut out the rhetoric, Thameson,’ Thatch interposed testily.
‘And yet, gentlemen and Mr Thatch, those are not the objects that our imaginary artist paints. Until now, he is an artist who has always depicted what he sees. He is not a surrealist; he is neither the exploiter nor the victim of his subconscious. He paints what he sees. And what does he see? Ha! Indescribable things, weird things – things you might say that could only belong to another dimension!’
He lowered his voice into a whisper and his bulk into a chair, pointed a finger at Mankiloe and proceeded.
‘Now then. Some of these revolutionary paintings sell in London, where they come under the scrutiny of certain gentlemen of the Royal Society. These certain gentlemen, as it happens, are doing research into the findings of the First and Second Mercurian Geogravitic Expeditions which took place recently.
‘The curious thing is that these paintings seem to link up in an odd way with the expeditions’ findings, which were otherwise inexplicable. For one thing, the findings showed several considerable perturbations in magnetic and gravitic flow on the surface of Mercury; these perturbations were not static, but moved apparently at random over the Twilight Zone, just as our imaginary artist friend did.