Todd W’iil had been underage when he came to Donov. He ran away from home, and his parents, resigned to the inevitable, sent him as much money as they could manage, as long as they could manage. Years passed, his father died, his mother despaired of ever seeing him again, and finally the money stopped.
W’iil survived somehow and painted. He was the only artist on Zrilund who practiced at painting, who deliberately attempted to perfect his technique. He worked on a single problem, over and over, tirelessly: exercises in color harmonies and contrasts, in textures, in perspectives, in backgrounds, in sunlights and shadows, in human figures, in animals. When he became satisfied that he had learned as much as he could from one of these rigorous disciplines, he destroyed it. At the age of forty he looked like a shrunken old man, gaunt, ragged, wild in appearance, perpetually undernourished, and he survived only on the bounty of those almost as badly off as himself. He never sold a painting; he never finished one. He painted only to prepare himself for the brilliant execution of the unborn masterpieces that he held within him, and he anticipated their birth with the same attitude of certainty with which a pregnant woman assembled a layette for her unborn child. W’iil’s faith in his artistic pregnancy was a pure, brightly burning flame.
Eritha Korak found him the only artist on Zrilund willing to talk with her about how to paint. He was painfully shy, and her fumbling artistic efforts must have horrified him, but he respected her sincerity and they became friends. When, after a week at the Zrilund Town Hostel, she rented a vacant house that once belonged to an artist and had a well-lighted studio, she invited W’iil to work with her.
He preferred to paint out of doors. Inside light, even the light through the studio’s huge, slanting skylight, seemed artificial to him. He came to see her at the end of every day, and whatever task she had set for herself he demonstrated for her in an unfinished comer of a fabric before destroying it. Sometimes he took her with him to show her how to study a masterpiece: he would position himself in the precise spot from which Zornillo painted the philpp trees or Chord the fountain, and he would paint the same scene with a small copy of the painting before him for reference. He painted only until his failure became evident to him, and then he shrugged cheerfully, filled the blank spaces with whatever interested him, and carried the fabric off to destroy it.
Once he asked Eritha to model for him, and he took her out on the chalk cliffs to a place where Etesff had posed a beautiful young woman in tourist costume. W’iil had found a gaudy tourist’s hat that he wanted to contrast with the white cliff, and he perched it atop Eritha’s turban and told her to lean against the cliff, and stand still. She soon tired of modeling and withdrew from the picture, and he painted on without her while she sat nearby watching him.
She was puzzled. She’d had several queries from Wargen as to whether there’d been any evidence of artists stealing from Zrilunders. She took the problem to Rearm Hylat, who chuckled and said a large number of artists would borrow a man’s toenails right off his feet if they thought of a use for them. They owed everyone in Zrilund, including each other, twice over, but he’d never heard of any of them taking anything without asking.
“Todd,” she called, “did you ever hear of an artist stealing?”
“Every day,” he answered absently. “Taking money for those things they paint is the worst kind of stealing.”
Eritha had been fingering a fragment of chalk. “Isn’t it funny the way things look different from what they really are?” she remarked.
W’iil paused and absently fidgeted with the trigger of his sprayer. He said slowly, “Things look different from—what was that again?”
“Look at the cliffs,” Eritha said. “They look like stone. They even feel like stone, but actually they’re like a soft powder pressed together. If you separated the chalk into what it really is, it’d be soft and clinging. It doesn’t look like what it is.”
“It doesn’t look like what it is,” W’iil echoed, in a puzzled voice that seemed to originate light-years away. After a long silence he asked, “What would it look like if it did look like what it is?”
Eritha did not answer. W’iil sat down and lost himself in thought, as he so frequently did, and after a time Eritha stole away and went down to the Swamp Hut, where a chunky artist named Wes Alof sometimes presided over a clique of hangers-on. He claimed to be a successful painter of portraits and human figures and had a full purse to prove it, and an artist with a full purse invariably attracted satellites who were willing to help him spend his money whenever he was willing to let them.
“Wes,” she said, “have you ever heard of anything being stolen on Zrilund?”
“Sure. Some of those tourists will take anything that isn’t fastened down. What’d you lose?”
“A sprayer. But there weren’t any tourists around. Did you ever hear of an artist stealing anything?”
“Never,” Alof said flatly. “One might have picked it up by mistake, but I’ll guarantee that no artist stole it. Artists beg and borrow, but no matter how broke they are, they don’t steal. Look at this prize collection.” He swept the table with a gesture. “Not one of them has a don to his name, and if I was to walk out and leave my purse on the table, there isn’t a one but would chase me clear across the Big Zrilund Swamp to return it. No, I’ve never heard of an artist stealing anything, anywhere on this crummy world of Donov.”
On her way home Eritha met Todd W’iil, and he looked directly at her without a sign of recognition. She turned and stared after him. “What’ll it be now?” she wondered aloud.
Her casual remark had jolted W’iil like an electric shock. The morning after their conversation his mind was still numb with the wonder of it. He walked about slowly, speaking to no one, and he stopped frequently to ask himself, “What would this look like if it really looked like what it is?” It was a difficult theory to get a grip on, because it seemed to him that a great many things did look like what they were. Finally he took his bundle and went to the cliffs, and he sat for a long time seeing the looming white rock as soft, powdery, and caressing to the touch.
He searched for lights and shadows that would set off the mystical texture that he sought, and he found what he wanted where an enormous hump of chalk thrust out five spurs of contrasting rock that had somehow become embedded there.
He set up his easel and began to paint, and under the skillful touches of his sprayers the hump of rock took on a velvety sheen and a supple, furry texture. W’iil worked with increasing excitement. The five spurs, thrusting up into the hard, chalk-reflected light, formed a brittle, almost translucent contrast. The shadowed chalk in the foreground had softened, purpling overtones. He had filled his fabric with rock textures, leaving only the background blank, before he suddenly realized that he had failed utterly. He stepped aside, sank dejectedly to the ground, and stared at the looming spurs of rock.
Two tourists, a man and a woman, had climbed quietly to the top of the cliff for a view of the sea, and as they turned away they looked at W’iil’s painting. “Now ain’t that something!” the man said.
The woman turned and spoke to W’iil reproachfully. “It isn’t finished.”
“Finished?” W’iil echoed. It had never occurred to him that anyone might care if he left part of a fabric blank. He stepped to the easel and eyed the painting critically, wondering if the application of a background might bring out the elusive quality of texture that he had failed to achieve. Quickly he adjusted a sprayer, found the hues he wanted, and filled in the pale sky and deep blue sea and blended them at a shimmering, watery horizon.
But that, too, was a failure. He shook his head resignedly and began to gather his equipment.
The man and woman stepped forward for another look “Darned if it doesn’t look like an animal’s paw,” the man said. “A furry paw sticking up out of the rock with long claws. Think of imagining a thing like that!”
“But if you look at the cliff just right, that’s sort of what it looks like—a
paw with claws.”
“Darned if it doesn’t.”
“I like it,” the woman said. “It’s unusual.”
“At least it isn’t like those gaudy things in the shops, or the messy things the other artists were painting. It’s restful.”
“Let’s buy it.”
The man nodded and turned to W’iil. “How much? Will you take twenty dons for it?”
W’iil gazed at him blankly.
The woman nudged her husband. “Like you said, it ain’t one of them shop paintings. It’s more like the things we saw in the museum. Or in that big picture gallery in Donov Metro. And he’s a real artist, you can tell by looking at him. He don’t sell no pictures for twenty dons.”
“Those things at Donov Metro were expensive,” the man protested.
“We were going to buy one, only we didn’t find any we liked. Maybe he’d let us have this for a little less, being as he won’t have to pay the gallery to sell it for him.”
The man shrugged. “All right. But the cheapest paintings in the gallery were a thousand dons.” He sighed. “Would you take five hundred for it, fellow?”
Comprehension came slowly to W’iil. “You want to buy—”
“Oh, all right. Six hundred.”
W’iil hadn’t believed the first figure. It was an unheard of sum, no Zrilund painting had brought anything like it since the days of the masters, and this painting was a failure. He was going to say no, to explain that he never sold his paintings, never even finished them, had finished this one only by accident—but the man was counting money into his hand.
The woman said, “We’ll have to handle it carefully. It may not be dry yet.”
“It doesn’t have his name on it,” the man said. “Shouldn’t a painting have the artist’s name on it?”
The woman giggled. “We bought it before he finished it.”
W’iil took a needle spray and wrote, “W’iil,” at the bottom of the fabric. The couple hurried away, the man carrying his prize with exaggerated care.
W’iil stared after them, hypnotically watching his painting until it disappeared from sight. The money he clutched in his perspiring hand felt warm to his touch; inwardly it was searing his soul. He turned toward the sea, meaning to fling it—to fling himself—from the cliff.
He was hungry. He could not remember the last time he had eaten a substantial meal. The girl Ritha kept inviting him to cat with her, but he had learned long before that poverty was tolerable only when one was unaccustomed to anything else.
He had no pocket, so he tucked the money into his sprayer box and again gathered his equipment. As he started down the path he turned to look back at the multiple-spurred rock. He had a feeling of loss, of shame, of betrayal, of having sold something of himself, which he had to admit was silly. If he hadn’t sold the painting he would have burned it. He had betrayed nothing but the fire, and yet—
He was hungry.
The ferry had left; the artists were thronging the more popular hangouts, and W’iil wanted a quiet place in which to think. He went to the Zrilund Town Hostel, and when he got himself settled in the most remote corner and asked the scowling Rearm Hylat for food, Hylat asked to see his money.
W’iil fumbled in his sprayer box and handed over a coin. Hylat blinked at it. “Where’d you get this?”
“Sold a painting.”
Hylat stared at him. “When did you eat last?” he asked finally.
W’iil couldn’t remember.
Hylat brought him a handful of change. “You’ve paid for a meal,” he said, “but you’d better have it in installments, or you’ll kill yourself. I’ll start you off with some soup. Stop in again whenever you feel hungry, and I’ll give you another course.”
The thick soup, with a biscuit, tasted as good as W’iil remembered, but his shrunken stomach’s capacity was reached with a few mouthfuls. He gazed regretfully at the half-filled bowl—the waste horrified him—but he could eat no more.
He hurried to Ritha’s house. She was in her studio, and he panted up the stairs and dropped his bundle. Before he could speak she poured him a mug of adde, nodded at her easel, and asked, “What’d I do wrong?”
W’iil glanced at the painting, took up a sprayer, and neatly incised two lines of perspective to show that they did not meet properly. “The money you loaned to me,” he said. “I’ll pay you back.”
“It wasn’t a loan,” Eritha said. “I paid you for lessons. Remember?”
He did remember, vaguely, but he had made so many excuses for the small handouts that kept him in art supplies that it never occurred to him that anyone might take one of them seriously. “Oh, lessons.” He shrugged. “I’ll give you lessons. But the money—I’ll pay that back.”
“You’ve already given me lessons. You’re giving me a lesson now. You don’t owe any money. I won’t take it back.”
“Oh,” he said. He opened his hand and stared dumbly at the heavy fistful of change that Hylat had given to him.
“Where’d you get all that money?” Eritha exclaimed.
“I—I sold a painting.”
“Really? You actually finished a painting? And sold it? Todd! That’s wonderful!”
He nodded glumly. “For six hundred dons.”
Eritha backed over to a chair and collapsed into it. “Who—I mean, what—” W’iil held the open sprayer box under her nose. “Todd!” she whispered breathlessly. “You’re rich!”
“You see? I’ll pay you back.”
“You don’t owe me anything, Todd.”
“Then what am I going to do with it?” he asked bewilderedly.
“The money you got from me wasn’t a loan, but I know some of the artists have loaned you money, and every artist in Zrilund has given you art supplies when you needed them. You ought to pay back something.”
Todd nodded excitedly. “I’ll do that.”
“Why don’t you buy some new clothes and go to a hostel for a few days? You should give yourself a good rest.”
“I’ll do that!”
It was a different Todd W’iil who climbed the cliffs the next morning. Well rested, bathed, immaculately clothed in the best-styled artist’s garb, he set up his easel in the same place as the day before and painted the same rock formation. He worked just as carefully at capturing the essential texture of the rock as it would look if it looked the way it really was, and just as unsuccessfully, but this time he completed the picture. He seated himself on a nearby rock and waited. A crowd of tourists came by, glanced at the painting, halted, and stared. One of them said, “Darned if it doesn’t look like a furry animal’s paw coming up out of the rock.” Another said, “You know, that rock really looks like that, sort of.”
The first turned to W’iil. “How much?”
“Six hundred dons,” W’iil said.
“Ridiculous! Why, the shops are full of paintings that don’t cost more than twenty!”
W’iil said complacently, “What would you rather do—spend twenty dons for a painting that’s worthless, or spend six hundred for a painting that’s worth a thousand?”
“Six hundred dons is a lot of money,” the tourist said. The crowd moved on; W’iil was unperturbed. He knew what his work was worth. When the ferry left he strolled back to town, leaving his easel in place, and he joined the other artists in the Swamp Hut and shyly bought everyone a mug of adde. Then he went to the com center and sent a message. Suddenly he wanted to know if his mother was still living.
The next ferry arrived, and he sold his painting almost at once, for six hundred dons. He started another. When Eritha came up the cliff lugging her bundle and asked him something about mixing colors, he snapped, “Can’t talk now. Got to get this done before the next tourists get here.”
10
“Rumors can start about anything,” Neal Wargen told the World Manager, “but this one started about nothing. There is no such thing as a swamp slug.”
Korak turned quickly. “Indeed? I thought you said Harnasharn tol
d you—”
“He did. Immediately after that I spent several days looking for a photograph or even a description of a Zrilund swamp slug—the notion of a slug painting pictures of any kind, not to mention good pictures, intrigued me. I wanted to know how it would go about it. I examined every reference book I could find, I queried several professors at the university, and finally I put a referencer at the Quorum Library to work on the problem. I just received the results. If Zrilund has swamp slugs no authority on slugs has ever heard of them. So I went back to Harnasharn and accused him of perpetrating a joke at his government’s expense, and he indignantly informed me that there was so a Zrilund swamp slug, and he not only had seen one, but he’d seen that particular one, and he’d seen it painting.”
“Interesting,” Korak murmured.
“He says it only appears at night, at which time it looks like an enormous dark blob of slime with a million legs or filaments. Which makes me half suspect that someone has perpetrated a joke on Harnasharn.”
“No,” Korak said firmly. “Harnasharn may not know much about slugs, but this world has no greater expert on art. Anyone perpetrating a joke involving a swamp slug artist wouldn’t allow Harnasharn in the same precinct with it. Anyway, the paintings are real enough, and paintings that are possible masterpieces normally don’t get used in jokes.”
“All right. Just put it that a Zrilund swamp slug is a very rare creature. To the tourist, Zrilund is synonymous with art. A picture-painting Zrilund swamp slug is evidently believable while any other kind of picture-painting slug would receive the derision it deserves. Do you want me to track down the rumor?”
“It would be interesting to know where that tourist came from. Mestil resents Jaward Jorno’s refugees. Sornor is resentful about Franff. Other worlds that have had riots resent the fact that Donov hasn’t. Rumors are usually slanted to someone’s disadvantage, and the reverse of the slant will point unerringly at the author. A rumor that’s true, though, is a rumor with a devilishly awkward kink in it. It points everywhere and nowhere. Even if some world is plotting against Donov, the question remains of where it picked up that remarkable item of true information. Has Demron given you the latest report on the thefts?”
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