An End tst-2

by Paul Evan Hughes

  Windham approached from the side, at a diagonal. He did not want to sneak up on Reynald, even though he knew that the old man had known he was there even before Windham had made the decision to visit him that morning.

  “Jean?”

  The man turned to him, gentle smile on his lips, eyes engulfed in purest silver. The wind stopped for a moment, and the day was silence.

  “It’s starting, son.”

  “Sir?”

  “The invasion. The war. It’s so close…”

  “Jean, I—”

  “Perpetual autumn. It’s—

  —closing in!”

  Windham spun around in the liquidspace bridge enclosure of the destroyer. His breath was ragged, sucking in the unfamiliar atmosphere of gelatin. He held his hands to his face, confused. Projected control displays followed his hands’ movement, blinking out only as he touched his slick-wet face. Disoriented, lost.

  “Sir?”

  A swarm of fireflies fell from the ceiling, schooling around his head, entering his ears, mouth, nose, eyes. Awareness of his surroundings snapped back into place as emergency machines took control of his body to stop the bleeding and leeching action of the gelatin. The projected displays flickered to life once more.

  The armada was closing in on Windham’s destroyer, the last of his detachment of the Extinction Fleet. Across the bridge of the Teller, Windham’s crew were enclosed in liquidspace bubbles like his own. He could see that three of the ten bubbles had cracked under the last volley of weapons fire from their hunters, the contents of each bubble now smeared in human biologics, simmering physical forms smashed against phased silica.

  Windham reached out with his control wetlink, ejected the corrupt bubbles from the bridge expanse. The vessel automatically reshaped itself to compensate for the loss of mass. The gelatin swiftly filtered out the blood and human flesh fragments from the bridge sea. He saw with some alarm that his own bubble had suffered a crack, and faint rivulets of high-density gelatin from the main bridge expanse were seeping into his likely coffin.

  “Orders, sir?”

  Windham looked at his projected displays, felt the touch of his remaining crew through the wetlink.

  “How many worlds?’

  “Just one.”

  “Inhabited?”

  “Billions.”

  Windham breathed deeply of his gelatin world.

  “Take us in. Focus the weapon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The ship reshaped again, the haunting scream of the liquid civilizations echoing through Windham’s submerged ears. The Teller fast approached the target planet, slingshotting around it to achieve escape velocity. The enemy armada split into a dizzying formation of fireworks.

  “Weapon aligned. Coordinate lock.”

  “Activate EM anchor.”

  “EM lock.”

  “Do we have incoming?”

  Silence…

  “Do we have fire?”

  “Incoming weapons fire on screen.”

  The vessel shuddered as the solar system bent toward the quantum bullets arriving in-system and Light X speed. Windham’s bubble cracked a little more. Almost time.

  The enemy armada scattered at the sight of the horrible white arcs of nothing being thrust at their planet from a rent in space/time. Starlight bent, vessels resonated, pilots liquified. The light emanating from the dark side of the planet blinked out as the first bullet hit. The successive rounds began to knock an equatorial incision into the world’s crust.

  Windham could look no longer. The quantum trebuchet would soon tear the planet apart, and he did not want to be around to see it. He’d killed too many worlds already.

  “Get us—

  —out of here, Lily.”

  The little girl blinked her eyes once, twice, trying to bring Nan into focus. She had been having the most wonderful dream about playing with other little girls just like herself, dancing in a circle, laughing as they held hands and danced and fell to the ground in a heap of unattainable happiness.

  “Nan?”

  The angel’s image was flickering, fuzzy. For an instant, Nan disappeared completely, but came back into focus, overcompensated, stood there in harsh contrast, then returned to fuzzy.

  “No time to explain, dear. We have to get you to safety.”

  She felt it then, the shivery resonance, the undertone that filled the room and made her teeth vibrate when she closed her mouth far enough.

  “Nan?”

  “No time, Lily. They’re in the sky.”

  Lily pushed back the covers, sat up in bed.

  “I have to go see the lady now, don’t I?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Will it hurt?”

  Nan’s heart would have broken if she had indeed possessed a heart.

  “Only for a little while, my little flower.” Nan knew it was a lie.

  Lily reached out, touched Nan’s hand. The phase disruption from the incoming fleet warped and confused the infinite number of silver machines that laced together underneath Lily’s touch; Nan’s skin was cold and felt more like a screen door than human flesh.

  “It’s okay, Nan. I don’t blame you.”

  Nan sobbed and embraced the Catalyst.

  The weapon kept firing.

  “Nav is gone, sir. Buffer cracked, EM drain—”

  “And the enemy fleet?”

  “Regrouping.”

  The vessel rocked as two more command bubbles corrupted and cracked. The bridge sea realigned in an attempt to maintain vessel homeostasis, but with half of the crew gone…Windham reached out and felt the crack in his own bubble. The high-density gelatin that seeped through tickled his fingertips, bounced around his hands. The darker bubbles were increasing in size. Windham’s world was being invaded by near-matter.

  The flashes of quantum fire abruptly ended and he could see through the translucent hull of the liquid vessel that the hole from which the rounds were arriving in-system was collapsing, a great white spiral of space/time confusion in the black of the enemy system. He watched the last of the rounds slam into and through the surface of the enemy’s world, spreading vast chunks of molten continent into space.

  “Orders, sir?”

  Windham struggled to focus, but he could already feel the bridge gelatin dissipating into his atmosphere, clogging his body and mind. Schools of firefly machines swarmed around his face, but they seemed to be just as confused and resigned to death as Windham was.

  “Commander?”

  Windham pressed his hands to the broken phase before him. Dark streams of bridge gelatin were now virtually pouring into his bubble. Each liquid inhalation choked him; each exhalation burned. Through the hull, he saw the hunters regrouping, their scattered firework formation solidifying as they found the Teller on scope.

  “Enemy fleet in pursuit. Orders, Commander?”

  He tried to remain calm, bracing himself for the moment that he had anticipated for years. Cessation. No afterlife, no redemption, nothing. They started then, the images of his wife, his son, his beautiful family that he had left behind. He was beginning to hyperventilate, but the fireflies were now floating dead in the corrupted bubble.

  “Eject my bubble upon collapse and get out of here.”

  “Commander, I—”

  “Just do it. You have to get word to home. They have to know what we found out here.”

  He could hear it, the collapse, when it began: a faint crinkling sound of ice plunged into a tepid drink, the spidery latticework of his end, the disorienting influx of tons of bridge gelatin, displacing the bubble’s atmosphere almost immediately, but not fast enough to displace those final thoughts, that resignation to nothing, that pang of love for his Helen, that broken heart for his people and his time and everything and and crushing suffocating burning torrent rage of sound and fury pressing in and through and white world didn’t fade to black but fell into white and

  more wine?”

  “Mmmmph,” she muttered as she turned ove
r in bed, pushing aside proletariat sheets and exposing pert young breasts that were not yet distorted by the birth and suckling of his bastard son. Her hand moved down her front, fingertips absently tracing between her breasts as she rolled on to her back and looked up at the water-stained ceiling.

  “Jemie?”

  “Hmm?” He was behind the easel, painting something again. The sudden inspiration had nearly interrupted their lovemaking, or perhaps it was just fucking, but regardless, she suspected that the possibility of female orgasm, or even remote satisfaction, had again become secondary to her lover’s obsession with his oils and brushes and canvas.

  “Do you love me?”

  Gently, daintily, he applied white to the canvas. Little dabs of pigment, or lack thereof, smoothed, roughed by the brush’s bristles.

  “Hmm.”

  The room smelled of sex and turpentine and Paris in the summer: sweat and cheap parfum and wine. He poured another glass as he sat back and surveyed his work.

  “Needs more white.”

  “Jemie, answer me!”

  He frowned, turned his attention to his mistress, now sitting up in bed. She is just a child, he thought, but her breasts and the unmistakable vice of her thighs begged otherwise.

  “Don’t call me that, Jo.”

  He turned back to his canvas. Jo harrumped and covered her body with the sheets again. No need to give this artiste a free view of her sex.

  “You son of a bitch, James!”

  Again, he glared at her.

  “Leave my mother out of this, Ms. Hiffernan.”

  Jo wrapped the sheet around her naked form and walked over to his precious canvas. She took his glass, drank his wine.

  “What will it be?”

  James took his time answering, rolled a cigarette, lit it, inhaled and exhaled.

  “It’s you, dear. Don’t you see it?”

  She took his cigarette from him, puffed. “Will it make more sense if I drink more wine?”

  He grinned that acid grin and pulled her close. She sat on his lap on his painting stool and looked at the canvas. Gesso, a hint of gray, and a single white form blocked out in the center.

  “That’s me?”

  “That’s you, my dear white girl.”

  Jo smiled that Irish smile, dimples in full effect, and he felt something for her…Or perhaps it was catarrh.

  “I believe I love you, Mr. Whistler.”

  He hugged her a little closer.

  “And I, dear Ms. Hiffernan, believe I need more wine.”

  Helen sobbed.

  Hunter sat there in the gravel, a child of traumae, his little hands grasping pieces of stone, reaching out, dragging pieces of stone into piles, his gaze never averted from the west, where the phase trebuchet was retracting into the planet. The clouds were wounded, torn apart and thrust aside, now a circular incision cut into their midst. The child sat in the dirt, in the dust, scraping at gravel, looking at sky, hearing mommy weep beside him and behind him. She was rocking in the rocks, on her knees, helpless hands moving from face to hair, one hand reaching out to touch her son’s shoulder, instead pulling back, covering her mouth, sobbing.

  Hunter knew that his father was dead.

  Helen knew that her husband was dead.

  The world shuddered as the phallic tower of the trebuchet receded into its mantle cavity, satisfied in its success. The phased slugs of planet interior would work their way toward target over thousands of years through space/time. Helen knew, she just somehow knew that he was dead, the man she loved, out there somewhere across the divide of eons. The trebuchet had fired at something in the Outer…And Windham was there. Dying, dead, thousands of years away, millions of years dust, just now watching the fire arrive on target, just now gasping in liquid hell, just now ceasing and releasing electricity into void.

  Sirens. City alert. Hunter blinked from reverie and looked back at the apartment complex, leveled. The majority of the buildings he could see were strangely canted on ancient foundations. Bricks sat in the driveway, in the streets. There was rich black smoke coming from somewhere to the east. He could taste that fire. He could taste that danger. One would think that such a little boy would be crying right now. One would think that

  because Jo was Whistler’s mistress, she would have been depicted in a warmer way, but Whistler was not like other artists, or other men, for that matter. I feel that Jo is depicted in a very neutral way that almost makes her become part of the background of the painting. There is no evidence of a love for Jo, or a warmth or fondness for her. She simply stands there, arms at her sides, no facial expression, eyes looking out but not quite at you. Richard Dorment contends that Whistler intended that his model’s face should lack expression, that Jo should assume the facial equivalent of the non-color, white. Whistler did not want to focus attention on her face. Reducing emphasis on the face reduced the tendency to read an emotional reaction into the model’s appearance. Whistler was in essence making Jo an object in the painting, instead of a human being. She becomes just another compositional element upon which to explore the tonal variations of the color white upon white. This objectification of a woman is a characteristic of not only Whistler’s The White Girl, but it could be argued that in his young manhood this is how he viewed women.”

  Page turn.

  “What was it about Whistler’s childhood or young manhood that resulted in a tendency to objectify women? I suspect that, in part, the religious fanaticism of his mother and her insistent meddling with James’ personal affairs and disapproval of his bohemian lifestyle may have created a bitterness or perhaps an uneasiness with women that lasted well into his adult years. If we examine his relationships with his models, Fumette, Finette, and even Jo, we can see that he never truly established a long-term relationship with any of them, and although they may have truly loved him, he never had any intention of reciprocating that love. Whistler used these women as he needed them, to model, to keep his house for him, and as it is rumored in the case of Jo, to bear or care for an illegitimate child of his, but he was always emotionally detached from them. I feel that the early influence of Whistler’s mother created within him a general distrust or indifference toward women that resulted in his objectification of them.”

  Sip of water.

  “The White Girl is not Jo Hiffernan. The White Girl is a study of white on white. I feel that Whistler would agree that an artist does not have to explain his or her intentions or actions when creating a work. An artist creates art for themselves, not for critics or the public. Whistler created The White Girl to study the tonal changes of white on white, and in the process revealed quite a bit about his feelings toward women that perhaps he had not intended to reveal. If this painting displays any narrative at all, I believe it is the sad and bitter tale of an artist who cannot find love, and to whom women or relationships of any meaning at all for that matter are nothing but trivialities, an artist whose showmanship and extraordinary personality are perhaps a defense mechanism against an internal strife brought about by overpowering or meaningless relationships in his youth. I must say that Whistler is not the only artist whose art tells a sad tale.”

  Clear throat.

  “The White Girl is a study of white on white, that is all.”

  They clapped, although he knew they didn’t want to be there, didn’t care about what he had written, didn’t watch the slides as they were projected. Nine artsy souls in a sweltering room meant for storage but converted into a “conference room” by a stingy university, used by upperclassmenandwomen in special topics seminars heralded by big numbers in the four-hundred range on registration slips and add/drop slips and all of the other fun fun bureaucracy of college life.

  Betsy had that grin on her face from behind the dreaded bound green gradebook in which she was keeping notes on each presentation.

  “Paul, that was marvelous! It really felt like you could relate to your research topic. Don’t you think?”

  “Well, I—”

  “I
knew you’d love Whistler. You have so much in common.”

  He blushed, grinned. “Well, that’s what Jo tells me.”

  Betsy’s smile faltered. She leaned forward, almost imperceptibly. “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t you realize, Doctor?”

  “What?”

  “I contain multitudes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Perpetual autumn. It’s coming. A world of gray, silence, nothing. I can hear it.”

  “Jean—”

  “She’s down there right now, planning it all. Planning the extinction. She’ll need both of us for this to work.”

  “Who?”

  “She’ll need me for the arrival, and you for the discovery. The pursuit.”

  “Jean, who?”

  “Notre Mère, mon amie. Elle est prête pour le divinity.”

  “Oui, commandant.”

  Reynald looked up at the young man who was not his son, but who was the closest thing he had ever had to family. He tenderly reached out and took Windham’s left hand, regarding the silver ring.

  “Your Helen?”

  “My Helen.”

  Reynald smiled, patted Windham’s hand and let go.

  “Get out of here. Go home, son.”

  “Jean, I—”

  “Vont, mon fils.”

  “I’ll be back. As soon as I can.”

  Reynald smiled.

  Gray streets. Windham pulled the collar of his overcoat up, protecting his neck from the bitter lick of the wind. His heart was beating in his throat, not from the pace of the walk, but from that distant look in Jean’s eyes…Reynald was looking beyond this world, seeing a time and place that Windham couldn’t begin to comprehend. He was seeing a world through eyes that became more clouded with the silver each time that Windham visited. The old man would be possessed entirely, soon. What then? What information could the creature at the center of the planet reap from his soul upon his total dissolution that she had not yet been able to take already?