by Lake, Jay
But the pilot wasn’t going to give up so easily. Banking the aircar and accelerating he dived straight at us.
A kamikaze attack!
He had deliberately switched off his survival circuits. His madness and hatred were highly impressive.
But why had my superior ordered this assault when he knew I was still here? Why had he betrayed me? He was the only one with the authority to launch a strike in this sector, it couldn’t be a mistake. I trembled with disappointment.
My host remained gleeful. “Watch closely now...”
As the aircar came within a few metres of the tallest trees, it began to fade just like the bomb, but the process was much faster because of its velocity. First the wings vanished, then the fuselage, finally the cockpit. The pilot was left in midair like a seated ghost, clasping nonexistent controls.
He clenched his manganese teeth and sealed his eyelids, but these had already grown more insubstantial than the pupils beneath them and for a fraction of an instant he could still witness his peculiar doom. Then he started to vanish too, limbs first, body and head next. His lips and teeth, set in a grin that didn’t represent mirth, were the last items to remain. Despite the fact he had intended to kill me, I felt a pang of sympathy for this dematerialised assassin.
“Reminds me of the Cheshire Cat,” remarked my host, casting a sly glance in my direction. “That’s a literary reference, so I suppose it doesn’t mean a thing to you. Let’s return inside.”
* * * *
When we were back in the drawing room, I inspected the painting over the fireplace. It had changed slightly. This was the confirmation I needed and I was no less grateful for the aerial attack than I was full of bitterness at the treachery it represented.
My host resumed his seat. He nodded at the gun still clasped in my hand. “You were saying?”
“Ah yes!” I replied. “To return to my sentence, as it was before we were so frightfully interrupted...”
He smiled, enjoying my parody of his manner of speaking.
“...I am sure you are familiar,” I continued, “with a forgotten writer named Oscar Wilde and a novel of his entitled The Picture of Dorian Gray? In that book, the main character, a man afraid of growing old, possesses a portrait with strange properties. It is the portrait which ages, while the man himself retains his youthful appearance. A whimsical and fantastic story.”
My host now turned very pale. “Oh yes?”
I stroked my osmium chin with my free tungsten hand. “Well I started to wonder. Supposing this book was not a fiction but a description of an actual process? A process that has never been quite understood or extensively used? And supposing that Wildewood itself owed its continued existence to this process?”
“What exactly are you getting at?”
“Come now, Mr Hallward. By the way, may I call you Basil? That’s so much less informal and we don’t have much time left to get to know each other more intimately. In the novel, the painting of Dorian Gray is one of the productions of an artist called Basil Hallward, same as you. What if he is you, what about that?”
“A bit farfetched,” stammered my host.
“Of course! The best ideas often are. But anyway, it seems to me that you really are the painter who created a portrait that aged instead of the man it represented. The next thing I asked myself was this: what if you had also painted a landscape with those same weird properties, and what if that landscape was Wildewood? After all, the novel specifically remarks that you had painted landscapes and in the company of Dorian Gray too!”
“No, that’s not my secret!” whimpered my host.
He was so unconvincing that I threw back my head and laughed aloud, something which I rarely enjoy.
“Oh no? Well I find it difficult to imagine any sort of scientific defence mechanism protecting this house. Our sensors would have detected it by now. But it is easy to envisage a painting of a blackened, noxious, radioactive landscape hidden away somewhere in Wildewood, growing more twisted and scarred as time goes on, while Wildewood itself continues to exist unchanged, against all reason.”
I pointed at the wall. “And there it is!”
He clutched his head in his hands. “I admit it, you’ve beaten me, I don’t know how you did it.”
I tapped my tantalum nose. “You made one big mistake. You were too arrogant. Literary references do have meaning for me, I’m probably the only machine on the surface of the globe who has been educated in the ‘humanities’ as well as the real academic disciplines. From previous reports of surveillance operations, I knew you were interested in art, so that’s where I concentrated my own studies. I researched the name ‘Wildewood’ and discovered there had been a writer with the surname Wilde. I sought out his books.”
“I’m glad you did that,” he mumbled weakly.
“You thought that because robots were only interested in science and engineering, you were safe forever. Indeed if you had called this sanctuary something else you might have remained impervious, but in your flippancy you gave away a vital clue. Another example of your arrogance is the way you kept the painting in question in full view of every visiting assassin, who you assumed would never guess its significance as the focus of your power.”
He shook his head. “That’s not quite right. I surmised that hanging it on the wall was a smarter option than hiding it away, because over the fireplace it would pass unnoticed among the other art objects. If I’d stored it somewhere obscure, for instance in the cellar, your surveillance operations might have targeted it as something to investigate more closely.”
I conceded the point. “But you forgot that to the eyes of a robot, that painting is the only delightful item in the house. Everything else is phenomenally ugly, but this landscape is perfect, it shows how the land at this location should look, with almost abstract blotches of dark colour, craters and pits of black oil, smashed bare earth sizzling with lovely gamma rays. After the airstrike just now, I noticed how the painting altered to incorporate both the fusion bomb detonation and the kamikaze impact of the plummeting aircar!”
“That passed me by,” he said with a shrug. “A few more craters here and there, a further spreading of toxic molecules. I long ago gave up watching the shifting patterns of chaos, they all seemed the same. I worship only beauty.”
“But why do you keep inviting robots inside your house? Why take the risk of allowing them to approach the painting?”
He sighed. “I get bored and lonely. I enjoy having guests, I’m a social creature. But what will you do now?”
“Destroy this place. But first I have a burning question. How did you manage to remain immortal inside the landscape?”
He regained some of his composure and sat up straight in his chair. Then he told his very last story.
* * * *
“Dorian Gray was my friend,” he began, “and from the moment I met him we spent as much time together as possible. Long before I ever attempted to paint his portrait, he accompanied me on my other painting commissions. I felt inspired by his company to produce superior work.”
“That’s all there in the novel,” I agreed.
“One day I discovered a charming little wood with an elegant but solid house at its centre peeping through the trees. I painted it from a suitable distance and was very pleased with the result. I painted it precisely as I saw it, fired with a frenzy and passion which was the result of the proximity of my friend.”
“He gave you technical advice?” I frowned.
“Never. He knew nothing about art, but there was something magical and forceful about his presence. Anyway, when I got the painting back to my studio and examined it carefully, I noticed that my own reflection had been captured in one of the lower windows of the house, very small and faint but there nonetheless.”
“Ah, you included yourself by a
ccident?”
“Yes. I wasn’t quite such a success back then and like many artists I often reused canvasses or painted on the other side of them. When I came to paint the picture of Dorian Gray, I was better known but old habits die hard and it was the only surface I had near at hand, so his portrait ended up being on the reverse side of this landscape.”
“How did the spell work?” I asked.
He sighed. “I don’t know. Dorian loved the portrait and he stood in front of the completed work and murmured, ‘If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that — for that — I would give everything!’ I was shocked by the intensity of his wish, but how it came true is beyond my powers of reason.”
“And his picture is still there on the reverse side? Please don’t turn it around. Looking at one human face is difficult enough,” I said lightly, but I wasn’t joking.
My host took no offence, probably because he was too lost in his own thoughts to hear me. Then he said slowly:
“When Dorian Gray made his dark wish that his portrait should age instead of his body, whatever power he invoked must have infected the whole canvass, including the reverse side. Thus Wildewood was preserved forever as an unchanging haven and I also become immortal, because I was part of the painted landscape. I lived out the twentieth century in relative comfort and the century after it too, but when the robots began taking over, I retired here. A wise decision because this was the only location in the world which remained safe from the horror of total industrial development.”
I stood and waved my host farewell. “Thank you for that anecdote, but now it’s time for me to depart.”
He watched mutely as I aimed my gun at the picture and pressed the trigger. The weapon squirted unevenly and I adjusted my aim to form a line across the top of the canvass.
“A water pistol???” he gasped.
“Filled with paint stripper,” I explained.
As the liquid trickled down, the painting dissolved. And so did Wildewood, the house collapsing around me.
* * * *
I crouched as the walls sagged and crumpled over my frame, but I felt no weight. After a while I risked opening my eyes. The building had gone and so had the trees. My host had also been confined to oblivion. I walked toward the Aesthete and opened the hatch.
Another aircar descended from a low cloud. It was large and very impressive, almost presidential.
My superior jumped out and creaked over to me.
“Well done, D-350! I knew you were the one for the job. Sorry about that mixup back there, I gave an order not to launch another attack but it was misheard by a minor clerk.”
I noticed that his lips were covered in rust. A spare set of lips was fixed to his collar and those were also rusty. Or were they just the imprint of lips? What did it mean?
There was something inside me struggling to come out, I didn’t know what but it was partly formed from words.
At last I brought it forth:
“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”
“What?” he barked.
“All art is at once surface and symbol... Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril...”
“What are you blabbering on about?”
“It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”
“Sorry D-350, I don’t follow you.”
I shook my head. “Don’t worry, it’s all nonsense anyway. Forget it. I just need to take it easy for a while.”
“Good idea,” he said with a nod. There was sweat on his forehead, large drops of salty water, but that was impossible. Robots don’t perspire. He continued nervously, “The president leant me his own aircar to fly you back. There’s promotion waiting, a medal too.”
I walked past him and climbed into my own vehicle.
I dislike ceremonies. They are useless.
Like art, and progress...
Rust was now eradicated from the earth. Robots who worked at the bottom of the sea no longer needed to lose their looks. I knew that J-J1N9XU would always be beautiful and young. Soon I would visit her, but first I would return to the Isle of Chrome and enjoy a well-earned anaerobic rest.
DISCOVERY TIME, by Frank Belknap Long
Originally published in Crypt of Cthulhu #31 (1985).
Zeig Sandaling sat watching his untiring co-worker returning to the Interstellar Survey projectile with mixed feelings, tilting the viewglass a little to bring the more youthful man into sharper focus.
Dakson was returning across a desert waste that seemed boundless. A paradox, surely, on a tiny world, far out on the rim of a double-star system; it was difficult to think of as a planet.
But then—almost everything about Froma was paradoxical, from the fragile, flowerlike growths deep inside its time-eroded volcanic craters to pools of still, dark water, so miraculously star-mirroring that they appeared to be constantly in motion. Even the desolation had a way, at times, of presenting an exhilarating kind of challenge. If it was less of a challenge to Sandaling than to his young companion it was only because he had been on unexplored worlds more often in the course of the years.
Dakson was stumbling a little now as he drew nearer, under the weight of his heavy equipment and, just possibly, from weariness. But Sandaling doubted that weariness would ever play much of a role in Dakson’s single-track pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Nothing seemed to daunt or the him, or diminish his zest for exploration under the wheeling stars.
Loneliness also seemed alien to his nature. The awful feeling of isolation amidst the vastness of space that swept over Sandaling at times had made Dakson stare at him in total incomprehension.
“But we’re a part of all this, aren’t we?” he could still hear him saying the last time they’d discussed it. “Just to be here, to be alive, is enough for me. How can you feel isolated when you’re contributing to the sum total of human knowledge?”
Sandaling had always taken pride in being honest with himself, and he had to admit that there was just enough truth in what Dakson had said to arouse his envy.
Froma had darkened and grown bright again only four times since Dakson’s departure. But while his young co-worker had been collecting specimens of the soil and bending over precision instruments in the research module on the most mineral-rich side of the planet, something had been taking place in the vicinity of the projectile that would come as a startling surprise to him. Sandaling was sure of that.
It was not in Sandaling’s nature to keep a truly staggering development, of paramount interest to the Survey, a secret from a man whose friendship he valued for long. By the same token, however, he was under no obligation to start talking about it immediately. By keeping it to himself for a short while he would be provided with a thunderbolt that would put him on the winning side of any argument that might arise. The thought gave him pleasure.
He waited until Dakson had passed into the dense shadows at the base of the projectile before he leaned abruptly forward, and activated the entrance panel. There was a slight dimming of the light in the observation section as the panel glided open with an all-too-familiar faint humming sound.
The monotony of just opening and closing the panel—or leaving it open when he went outside—grated on him a little when he was forced to endure it in absolute solitude. But now he straightened in anticipation as he turned from the viewglass and pivoted about in the instrument-attached chair until he was staring at the opened panel at the opposite end of the observation section.
Dakson had an almost ghostly aspect for a moment as he emerged from the darkness of that yawning gap in the section’s bright metallic interior, his pale face and light-textured equipment contrasting not only with the darkness but with the way he had looked through the view-glass on the plain. The sudden glare made the fleeting ee
riness seem even more pronounced, but all it did was fail to amuse Sandaling as it had several times previously. If any one was to be a ghost he felt he had earned the right to preserve that privilege for himself.
For an instant Dakson remained very still, staring at Sandaling with a look in his eyes that could have implied almost anything—shock perhaps, after some great strain, or the kind of stunned, mostly repressed exultation that follows some great triumph or discovery that is still a little difficult to believe in.
Then, without a word, he unsealed and upended the spacious and extremely flexible mineral-collecting sack he had carried slung over his shoulder and let something wet and furry drop out upon the metal floor of the observation section, directly at the base of the instrument board.
It was an animal shape about half the size of Dakson’s muscular torso, but so attenuated it seemed the opposite of muscular. It had a long snout, short legs and a tail that curved back over its hindquarters with the thin, fragile look of a magnetized wire.
The gaping wound in its side had stopped bleeding—if it was blood that filled its veins—but its fur was badly singed in the region of the wound. Its rigidity was so pronounced there could be little doubt that it had stiffened in death.
“A mammal-like beast, beyond any possibility of doubt,” Dakson said, with the repressed triumph in his voice beginning to emerge, despite the tremulousness that accompanied each word. “Think of it. Think what it means.”
For a moment Sandaling felt himself to be incapable of saying anything at all. He could only nod, his hands tightening on the arms of the instrument-connected chair.
“Were you far from here when you encountered it?” he managed, at last.
“Not far,” Dakson said. “And only a short while ago. I stopped for a moment to rest. It emerged from behind a larger boulder than the one I was sitting on and came right at me, so fast I had barely time to bring it down with the ore separator, in a single blast.”