The Angels of Our Better Beasts

by Jerome Stueart

  You write a letter to Ajax Connolly, hoping he is still there, asking if you can skip his direction, dom with him for a while, and paint yourself into the pictures of Ajax’s life. When he asks you, as he will, if this is for a project or for more, you can tell him both. That there will be time for both; that you will paint the miners and their lives—the lives that you will spend with them this time, not leaving in a month, but staying, to give the system a true glimpse into life here. You will call this project “Together.” Secretly, though, you don’t know if it will change a single mind, because the only thing you truly want to show to yourself is that you and Ajax can be together.

  “How long will you dom?” Ajax will ask.

  And you will say, “As long as my gravity holds me above the planet, I would like to dom with you.”

  And he will say, “I’ll go buy an extra cabbage then.”

  And that alone will make you happy.

  This is what you believe will happen. You will live a quiet life. You will paint as long as you are able to, till a tremulous hand cannot be disguised as sketchy art. You will have shows only in the nearest floating city, Antigone or Aeschylus, far above Titan and around Saturn—but you will also have shows in Ruckus and Trouble and Skirmish, the bars in each, because they are not as bad as they sound. You quote Susan Sinjay Marshall in your head: “We dive down into the atmosphere to breathe again.” This is what you will say you are doing when you talk to yourself. When you talk to a more and more worried Marie and Francois-Jacques, you say that this is a grand project—a long project—a lifetime project, because life is on such a grand scale is it not? And one cannot do justice to a life in moments, but in a collection of moments.

  “It is dangerous there,” Marie tells you.

  “I’ve been before.”

  “The toxic levels of Jovian radiation, the mining colony, the dangerous rigs and working conditions . . .”

  “All of which I know about and have experienced before.”

  “You are too important to stay there so long.”

  “It’s important that I stay for the project.” You cannot tell her that you are stepping away from the art world, or that you are in retirement. You must couch it this way—that it is a grand project that will take years to complete. Life takes years to complete.

  You argue and you debate, and you pull against the people and the tide that would take you back out into space, until you close your eyes and commit to a show every two years, one that you will not travel with but that they may take on tour, and all but Marie is satisfied with that. Like a daughter, she pleads with you not to disappear, and you promise not to, for her, and you know that she will come eventually by the way she says, “All right.” Quietly, like a whisper.

  >?

  At first, the art world acquiesces to your desires, pliantly allowing you to create a masterpiece of immersion. Becoming Miner they rename it in magazines that you promise to stop reading. The art world has always had a hate relationship with love when love takes away an artist, destroys a band, ferrets away a soul that was perfect in his or her longing, their acute loneliness, their meditative melancholy. Love dulls the edge, they say. But you say Andrew Wyeth, Salvador Dali, the Emperor Shah, Claude Monet, Philip McCoy, Silmarillion: the Martian Brothel—all inspired by love, bettered by love, producing art for love.

  You think to yourself with some excitement, as you travel by Moonline to Ganymede, “I have gotten off the ship,” by which you mean the pre-programmed, autopilot course of your life as you knew it. “But I don’t know where that will take me now.”

  >?

  Ganymede looms ahead of you, a great round eagle’s egg floating in space, splattered and speckled in greys and whites instead of browns. Be home for me, you think to yourself. But that’s so much to ask of Ganymede. It isn’t a friendly place. It isn’t a homey place. It’s difficult for the miners that stay there. We can’t just choose a place to stop and expect it to be everything. That’s why you’ve picked up three bags of honey sesame-covered almonds, a case of black cherry walnut Martian gelato, and five cylinders of Inuvik Delight coffee beans, and you bring a small suitcase of whatnots—things that have the magic to create a home.

  As the Moonline makes its turn, you glide over the deep crevice carved into Ganymede’s surface like an old wound. Ajax and the other miners on Aethon Mining Station call it “the Mouth of Ganymede.” Less than half a kilometre long, about three 300 metres across and ninety-five kilometres straight down, partly man-made partly tectonic, the crevice is the main work site of the crews at Aethon, the Miner’s city floating just above the planet on magnetic lifters, using its own magnetosphere to keep the city aloft. Deep inside the crevice there is an ocean that covers the whole planet just under the icy, rocky crust.

  In this slow descent, you stare at the strata left behind by the cutting and drilling and blasting, the shadow of the Moonline gliding over a billion years of history written on the crevice wall.

  Ahead you see Aethon, and as you approach, you find yourself again asking the same question, this time of Ajax: Can you give me home? But you are certain that you can put roots down here.

  These are the last years of your life, the work of a lifetime, the masterpiece Together.

  Instead of twenty more years of life, you will have eight.

  >?

  The first years of your new life with Ajax are better than all the appreciative, fawning fetes you’ve attended over the last forty years. Ajax holds your hand at tables in the bars of Ruckus as miners talk to you about their hopes and dreams—to take starships into the blanket of space, to take the money they earn and visit Enceladus, because they’ve seen photographs showing the planet looking like sky. Or they tell you about growing up on Mars, or in the Belt; a few of them talk of the green grasses across Nunavut and Russian forests, where they know their uncles and aunts live. Have you been to these places? they ask. And you tell them stories of the worlds of which they dream—and better, you draw them pictures, so many pictures. You will paint a mural inside Skirmish that will become famous—of your memories of Paris in the 2090s, with its tall hanging gardens and the rivers beneath the Eiffel Tower and the Palisades that stream like solar winds from the Arc de Triomphe. Do another, they will ask you months later, and you paint them the windswept plains of the Arctic—their long grasses, their deep steppes, the bison grazing in herds with the mammoth.

  They cannot afford to go home. They cannot afford to leave, so you bring them the rest of the worlds you know: Enceladus, Ariel, Charon on the New Euphrates, anything they ask for—all from memory.

  In exchange for their friendship.

  You know they will not refuse you. Even in awe of your murals, you know they will ask you for a personal painting, of them and their friends, of them and their girlfriends and boyfriends, on these fragile lily pad colonies floating above Ganymede. All miners know the risks of coming here, of the voluntary temporary sterility, of the risk to their health, but the money is good, and they say they are sending it to a sister, or a mother back on Mars, or to their families who have not forgotten them and who believe the deposits to be a form of love. Or they are saving it for their dreams to leave.

  You will paint them all, eventually, but every night here you absorb them—their stories, their smiles—and you absorb the heat from Ajax’s palm. Isn’t this worth leaving the third tier cities, to have someone hold your hand?

  You take your radiation shots more regularly because you will be staying for a long time. You will notice that very few of the men are as old as you are. In the back of your mind, you hear Marie’s voice: “Life is too quick there, Renault. All burned up by forty, most of them, if not mangled by the mining—you belong here with us.”

  Burned up lives, flickering faster but brighter. Oh, that first night you are back, Ajax, the superintendent of Aethon, cannot keep his enthusiasm inside, his joy at seeing you, and h
e carries you over the threshold of his apartment, lays you on the bed and kisses you. His beard is wet with crying, trying to say something about “good things never come back.” You’ve heard that myth before from other miners—that there are no second chances, that nothing good returns. Ajax makes love to you, and even in passion, in this moment, you are an artist tracing every nuance of his body with your mind: his body, his eyes, his arms. His joy ignites the bed.

  >?

  The blue bull from Mexico you put in the kitchen. “I was not always well-received,” you tell Ajax. You left Paris for Mexico when you were twenty-five and you lived in a studio in the Condesa Hipódromo, and you used to walk to the Fuente de los Cántaros in Parque Mexico, that great fountain with the giant woman, just to see her pour water from the jars—such a beautiful sculpture—and you would sit and sketch people. And you were anonymous. No expectations, no crowds, and you might exchange drawings for some flautas or tacos at the mercado. You liked sitting at a set of blue arched doors, and a woman there had this cheap Guido Gambone bull knockoff on her tiled porch, and you knew that she didn’t know it was a cheap copy—it made her happy. She showed it to you when she learned you were an artist, leaned over it, even stroked its smooth ceramic back, talked about its value, how it had been handed down from her grandmother to her mother to her. “That bull was about her family. It wasn’t about Gambone at all,” you say to Ajax as he kisses you on the ear. When you were feeling depressed about your lack of fame—everyone in the Condesas were trying to become famous—you bought this cheap little blue bull to remind you about the value of art in a life, and he travels with you.

  “I think I will have a Condesa Hipódromo life again here,” you tell him, which means drinking and eating and friends and days that you don’t count, you just live.

  >?

  But living in a place means you become curious to explore what it means to live there.

  Eleven times over that first year, against the worries of your patrons who hear that you are becoming reckless, you take trips down to the surface of Ganymede. How can you not? The lives of the miners are not just lived above the planet. The long oval elevators descend on needles of metal tethers, like raindrops travelling the length of grass to the ground. There are hundreds of them. You paint them. You travel in them with Ajax and his crew, several hours of slow descent. When you hear a rumbling, Ajax tells you that they will soon have an upgrade, but until then the tether’s surface behind the elevator is corroding; there are rough patches, but “nothing dangerous.” However, there have been times when they stop working and you have to call in to the Command Centre for assistance.

  It is on the third time you’re there with them that you see a miner crushed between the giant pincers and the drill, his body snapped in three places by the force. His arm and face are enveloped in the metal, his helmet light illuminating his surprise; the drill has broken away from the hoist, and his arm emerges from between strips of metal in the great pincer-suit.

  You paint the memorial service held for an hour in a bar in Ruckus, where he is remembered. The service is recorded for his parents. He was twenty-three. His ashes are placed in a golden, fluttering mechanical bird and dropped into the thin atmosphere of Ganymede, where the metal, after a few weeks, will corrode from radiation and spread his ashes onto the surface. The sun tips the bird’s wings in gold as it flutters from their hands.

  >?

  Only a month later, you paint the miner’s strike. Their union has asked for better equipment, upgrades that were promised years ago (after the last strike ended): upgrades to drinking water safety, better radiation shielding, upgrades to the elevators.

  “I’m just going to watch,” you tell Ajax. You sit atop a table with your easel and paint the negotiations—the growing tensions, the strikers, the frustrations, the human-ness. In an especially explosive moment the moderator looks at you. “Did you get all that, Renault?” he laughs. Ajax is the moderator, and he’s in every sketch and painting. It breaks your heart to paint him so wearied by negotiation. His head lowered, his grief, his fury. His impassioned speeches and his cool head.

  Over your shoulder, though, Ajax nods, kisses the back of your neck. “Oh. I want to help that man,” he says with seriousness.

  “So will others,” you say.

  “I wish I knew him.”

  “If you knew him like I knew him, you would love him.”

  He chuckles behind you. “Did you come here to escape the art world only to paint the miner’s strike?” he asks. “Do not give up the quiet life you came for. Did you come here to escape it all and fall in love, or be a part of all this weary life?”

  “Yes,” you say.

  His face softens; you give him peace.

  “I came here to have a life with you. And this is your life.”

  Someone sends images of the paintings (not without your permission) to those who recite the news. The paintings get incredible coverage—the strike gets amazing, helpful coverage—because of your paintings. You receive frantic messages from Eustachi and Helios that you are not a miner; that you cannot comment on the strike.

  “And what would Picasso say to that?” you write back. “Was Guernica meddling or documenting? Was it a meditation on war?” You call this body of work Meditation on a Strike.

  You sketch the meetings, ink their fiery rhetoric into the canvas. The raw sketches find their way through the ether to Mars and Earth and Saturn. These become your fastest selling compositions, and the more you do, the more you sell. Eustachi becomes rich off the miners’ strike, even though they are accused of taking sides (“we cannot control Renault,” they say in their defense) and the art world becomes activated for the cause, the media now a gallery for your work for weeks.

  Helios, to answer a growing tide of resentment across the system, sends a massive system cruiser and docks it to the colony. You are there, painting quickly, sketching the white arrow of the ship as it stretches over you, and the lawyers they bring—for both sides. The media accompany them, and the negotiations are calm and rational. You paint this as well.

  The union is partially successful in their demands, receiving promises from Helios and immediate upgrades to their equipment via the shipment on the system cruiser.

  You are hailed as a revolutionary by both the miners and the art world. But it is not all positive.

  “Young painters might be asking if there is a place for art in politics, if you are sullying your reputation,” a renowned art magazine says to you in an interview being recorded for later broadcast. “What do you say to them about the nature of true art and its neutral place outside the quagmire of human rivalry?”

  You laugh for such a long time the interviewer has to cut the interview off.

  >?

  Some negotiated improvements never come, now that the strike is over. Helios looks good to have acquiesced and given you new equipment. They tell Ajax via messages that they are working as hard as they can on upgrades to shielding, to pipes, all of which are massive undertakings costing millions.

  Ajax presses his hands on the window in your room. In the reflected light of Ganymede, he appears a faded blue. He’s angry, and when he looks up it seems as if he might fly through the window. You will never paint this scene.

  >?

  Marie comes as you knew she would. You love her because you can’t really tell how appalled she must be by your living conditions—not on her face, not as she greets your friends, smiling, and Ajax, hugging him. She says, “I know we’ve never met, but . . .” and you know she is hugging him because he cares for you. He says, “I know,” finishing her thought.

  You offer her water, and she gives a momentary grimace because she’s told you the water is full of contaminants. Instead she pulls out a bottle of wine from her suitcase.

  Of course, after a jambalaya dinner and wine, she wants to see what you have, for the show that you did
commit to before you came. She doesn’t say it like that. You just know. It’s the little price you pay for freedom.

  You guide her to the bedroom, your work hanging in every available space, some of it stacked against the wall. This is what’s not being broadcast, the work that went beyond the strike. She is amazed by your new work.

  “It’s more visceral,” she says. Several times she gasps. You know you have done well when you hear that sound.

  She holds up a set from the surface of Ganymede, and she notices what she’s never seen before in your work. “That’s you,” she says.

  “I am not separate any longer,” you tell her.

  You immediately see her fear. “You’re not a trained miner.”

  “No, I’m not. But I can’t stay up here and record their lives down there.”

  She knows better than to argue with you. You are stubborn, set in this course. Besides, it gives you a rebellious arc, even further from the patron’s wishes.

  “Is it safe for you?”

  You look across the table at Ajax and think of the three birds you saw fly over the Mouth, their gold surfaces mottled by exposure, carrying the ashes of three different miners set free from Ruckus or Skirmish. “Is it safe for them?”

  She takes forty paintings and drawings with her on the Moonline out, kissing you on the cheek, whispering, “Stay out of your paintings, yes? Be safer.”

  >?

  A short time later, you hear that the corporation will be upgrading the water lines throughout the grid. New air filters are sent, of a higher quality this time, and a team from Helios has brought a great cargo ship with upgrades for the tethers.

  And for Aethon, the promised changes do finally happen, with a raised eyebrow from Ajax. Unfortunate and controversial as that is, they would not have happened if you had not been affected. To Ajax you say, “Let’s see what we can do with this old face.”