Masterpieces

by Orson Scott Card

  The fact that everything would be easily recovered did nothing to soften Hesper’s sense of invasion. She mixed herself a drink, stirring it with the metal straw which poked through the dust-proof lid. “You shouldn’t allow it,” she said at last, and Taki knew from the time that had elapsed that she had tried not to begin this familiar conversation. He appreciated her effort as much as he was annoyed by her failure.

  “It’s part of my job,” he reminded her. “We have to be accessible to them. I study them. They study us. There’s no way to differentiate the two activities and certainly no way to establish communication except simultaneously.”

  “You’re letting them study us, but you’re giving them a false picture. You’re allowing them to believe that humans intrude on each other in this way. Does it occur to you that they may be involved in similar charades? If so, what can either of us learn?”

  Taki took a deep breath. “The need for privacy may not be as intrinsically human as you imagine. I could point to many societies which afforded very little of this. As for any deliberate misrepresentations on their part—well, isn’t that the whole rationale for not sending a study team? Wouldn’t I be farther along if I were working with environmentalists, physiologists, linguists? But the risk of contamination increases exponentially with each additional human. We would be too much of a presence. Of course, I will be very careful. I am far from the stage in my study where I can begin to draw conclusions. When I visit them . . .”

  “Reinforcing the notion that such visits are ordinary human behavior . . .” Hesper was looking at Taki with great coolness.

  “When I visit them I am much more circumspect,” Taki finished. “I conduct my study as unobtrusively as possible.”

  “And what do you imagine you are studying?” Hesper asked. She closed her lips tightly over the straw and drank. Taki regarded her steadily and with exasperation.

  “Is this a trick question?” he asked. “I imagine I am studying the mene. What do you imagine I am studying?”

  “What humans always study,” said Hesper. “Humans.”

  YOU NEVER SAW one of the mene alone. Not ever. One never wandered off to watch the sun set or took its food to a solitary hole to eat without sharing. They did everything in groups and although Taki had been observing them for weeks now and was able to identify individuals and had compiled charts of the groupings he had seen, trying to isolate families or friendships or work-castes, still the results were inconclusive.

  His attempts at communication were similarly discouraging. He had tried verbalizations, but had not expected a response to them; he had no idea how they processed audio information although they could hear. He had tried clapping and gestures, simple hand signals for the names of common objects. He had no sense that these efforts were noticed. They were so unfocused when he dealt with them, fluttering here, fluttering there. Taki’s ESP quotient had never been measurable, yet he tried that route, too. He tried to send a simple command. He would trap a mene hand and hold it against his own cheek, trying to form in his mind the picture which corresponded to the action. When he released the hand, sticky mene fingers might linger for a moment or they might slip away immediately, tangle in his hair instead, or tap his teeth. Mene teeth were tiny and pointed like wires. Taki saw them only when the mene ate. At other times they were hidden inside the folds of skin which almost hid their eyes as well. Taki speculated that the skin flaps protected their mouths and eyes from the dust. Taki found mene faces less expressive than their backs. Head-on they appeared petaled and blind as flowers. When he wanted to differentiate one mene from another, Taki looked at their wings.

  Hesper had warned him there would be no art and he had asked her how she could be so sure. “Because their communication system is perfect,” she said. “Out of one brain and into the next with no loss of meaning, no need for abstraction. Art arises from the inability to communicate. Art is the imperfect symbol. Isn’t it?” But Taki, watching the mene carry water up from their underground deposits, asked himself where the line between tools and art objects should be drawn. For no functional reason that he could see, the water containers curved in the centers like the shapes of the mene’s own abdomens.

  Taki followed the mene below ground, down some shallow, rough-cut stairs into the darkness. The mene themselves were slightly luminescent when there was no other light; at times and seasons some were spectacularly so and Taki’s best guess was that this was sexual. Even with the dimmer members, Taki could see well enough. He moved through a long tunnel with a low ceiling which made him stoop. He could hear water at the other end of it, not the water itself, but a special quality to the silence which told him water was near. The lake was clearly artificial, collected during the rainy season which no human had seen yet. The tunnel narrowed sharply. Taki could have gone forward, but felt suddenly claustrophobic and backed out instead. What did the mene think, he wondered, of the fact that he came here without Hesper. Did they notice this at all? Did it teach them anything about humans that they were capable of understanding?

  “Their lives together are perfect,” Hesper said. “Except for those useless wings. If they are ever able to talk with us at all it will be because of those wings.”

  Of course Hesper was a poet. The world was all language as far as she was concerned.

  When Taki first met Hesper, at a party given by a colleague of his, he had asked her what she did. “I name things,” she had said. “I try to find the right names for things.” In retrospect Taki thought it was bullshit. He couldn’t remember why he had been so impressed with it at the time, a deliberate miscommunication, when a simple answer, “I write poetry,” would have been so clear and easy to understand. He felt the same way about her poetry itself, needlessly obscure, slightly evocative, but it left the reader feeling that he had fallen short somehow, that it had been a test and he had flunked it. It was unkind poetry and Taki had worked so hard to read it then.

  “Am I right?” he would ask her anxiously when he finished. “Is that what you’re saying?” but she would answer that the poem spoke for itself.

  “Once it’s on the page, I’ve lost control over it. Then the reader determines what it says or how it works.” Hesper’s eyes were gray, the irises so large and intense within their dark rings, that they made Taki dizzy. “So you’re always right. By definition. Even if it’s not remotely close to what I intended.”

  What Taki really wanted was to find himself in Hesper’s poems. He would read them anxiously for some symbol which could be construed as him, some clue as to his impact on her life. But he was never there.

  IT WAS AGAINST policy to send anyone into the field alone. There were pros and cons, of course, but ultimately the isolation of a single professional was seen as too cruel. For shorter projects there were advantages in sending a threesome, but during a longer study the group dynamics in a trio often became difficult. Two were considered ideal and Taki knew that Rawji and Heyen had applied for this post, a husband and wife team in which both members were trained for this type of study. He had never stopped being surprised that the post had been offered to him instead. He could not have even been considered if Hesper had not convinced the members of the committee of her willingness to accompany him, but she must have done much more. She must have impressed someone very much for them to decide that one trained xenologist and one poet might be more valuable than two trained xenologists. The committee had made some noises about “contamination” occurring between the two trained professionals, but Taki found this argument specious. “What did you say to them?” he asked her after her interview and she shrugged.

  “You know,” she said. “Words.”

  Taki had hidden things from the committee during his own interview. Things about Hesper. Her moods, her deep attachment to her mother, her unreliable attachment to him. He must have known it would never work out, but he walked about in those days with the stunned expression of a man who has been given everything. Could he be blamed for accepting it? Cou
ld he be blamed for believing in Hesper’s unexpected willingness to accompany him? It made a sort of equation for Taki. If Hesper was willing to give up everything and come with Taki, then Hesper loved Taki. An ordinary marriage commitment was reviewable every five years; this was something much greater. No other explanation made any sense.

  The equation still held a sort of inevitability for Taki. Then Hesper loved Taki, if Hesper were willing to come with him. So somehow, sometime, Taki had done something which lost him Hesper’s love. If he could figure out what, perhaps he could make her love him again. “Do you love me?” he had asked Hesper, only once; he had too much pride for these thinly disguised pleadings. “Love is such a difficult word,” she had answered, but her voice had been filled with a rare softness and had not hurt Taki as much as it might.

  The daystar was appearing again when Taki returned home. Hesper had made a meal which suggested she was coping well today. It included a sort of pudding made of a local fruit they found themselves able to tolerate. Hesper called the pudding “boxty.” It was apparently a private joke. Taki was grateful for the food and the joke, even if he didn’t understand it. He tried to keep the conversation lighthearted, talking to Hesper about the mene water jars. Taki’s position was that when the form of a practical object was less utilitarian than it might be, then it was art. Hesper laughed. She ran through a list of human artifacts and made him classify them.

  “A paper clip,” she said.

  “The shape hasn’t changed in centuries,” he told her. “Not art.”

  “A safety pin.”

  Taki hesitated. How essential was the coil at the bottom of the pin? Very. “Not art,” he decided.

  “A hair brush.”

  “Boar bristle?”

  “Wood handle.”

  “Art. Definitely.”

  She smiled at him. “You’re confusing ornamentation with art. But why not? It’s as good a definition as any,” she told him. “Eat your boxty.”

  They spent the whole afternoon alone, uninterrupted. Taki transcribed the morning’s notes into his files, reviewed his tapes. Hesper recorded a letter whose recipient would never hear it and sang softly to herself.

  That night he reached for her, his hand along the curve at her waist. She stiffened slightly, but responded by putting her hand on his face. He kissed her and her mouth did not move. His movements became less gentle. It might have been passion; it might have been anger. She told him to stop, but he didn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. “Stop,” she said again and he heard she was crying. “They’re here. Please stop. They’re watching us.”

  “Studying us,” Taki said. “Let them,” but he rolled away and released her. They were alone in the room. He would have seen the mene easily in the dark. “Hesper,” he said. “There’s no one here.”

  She lay rigid on her side of their bed. He saw the stitching of her backbone disappearing into her neck and had a sudden feeling that he could see everything about her, how she was made, how she was held together. It made him no less angry.

  “I’m sorry,” Hesper told him, but he didn’t believe her. Even so, he was asleep before she was. He made his own breakfast the next morning without leaving anything out for her. He was gone before she had gotten out of bed.

  The mene were gathering food, dried husks thick enough to protect the liquid fruit during the two-star dry season. They punctured the husks with their needle-thin teeth. Several crowded about him, greeting him with their fingers, checking his pockets, removing his recorder and passing it about until one of them dropped it in the dust. When they returned to work, Taki retrieved it, wiped it as clean as he could. He sat down to watch them, logged everything he observed. He noted in particular how often they touched each other and wondered what each touch meant. Affection? Communication? Some sort of chain of command?

  Later he went underground again, choosing another tunnel, looking for one which wouldn’t narrow so as to exclude him, but finding himself beside the same lake with the same narrow access ahead. He went deeper this time until it gradually became too close for his shoulders. Before him he could see a luminescence; he smelled the dusty odor of the mene and could just make out a sound, too, a sort of movement, a grass-rubbing-together sound. He stooped and strained his eyes to see something in the faint light. It was like looking into the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. The tunnel narrowed and narrowed. Beyond it must be the mene homes and he could never get into them. He contrasted this with the easy access they had to his home. At the end of his vision he thought he could just see something move, but he wasn’t sure. A light touch on the back of his neck and another behind his knee startled him. He twisted around to see a group of the mene crowded into the tunnel behind him. It gave him a feeling of being trapped and he had to force himself to be very gentle as he pushed his way back and let the mene go through. The dark pattern of their wings stood in high relief against the luminescent bodies. The human faces grew smaller and smaller until they disappeared.

  “LEAVE ME ALONE,” Hesper told him. It took Taki completely by surprise. He had done nothing but enter the bedroom; he had not even spoken yet. “Just leave me alone.”

  Taki saw no signs that Hesper had ever gotten up. She lay against the pillow and her cheek was still creased from the wrinkles in the sheets. She had not been crying. There was something worse in her face, something which alarmed Taki.

  “Hesper?” he asked. “Hesper? Did you eat anything? Let me get you something to eat.”

  It took Hesper a moment to answer. When she did, she looked ordinary again. “Thank you,” she said. “I am hungry.” She joined him in the outer room, wrapped in their blanket, her hair tangled around her face. She got a drink for herself, dropping the empty glass once, stooping to retrieve it. Taki had the strange impression that the glass fell slowly. When they had first arrived, the gravitational pull had been light, just perceptibly lighter than Earth’s. Without quite noticing, this had registered on him in a sort of lightheartedness. But Hesper had complained of feelings of dislocation, disconnection. Taki put together a cold breakfast, which Hesper ate slowly, watching her own hands as if they fascinated her. Taki looked away. “Fork,” she said. He looked back. She was smiling at him.

  “What?”

  “Fork.”

  He understood. “Not art.”

  “Four tines?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Roses carved on the handle.”

  “Well then, art. Because of the handle. Not because of the tines.” He was greatly reassured.

  The mene came while he was telling her about the tunnel. They put their dusty fingers in her food, pulled it apart. Hesper set her fork down and pushed the plate away. When they reached for her she pushed them away, too. They came back. Hesper shoved harder.

  “Hesper,” said Taki.

  “I just want to be left alone. They never leave me alone.” Hesper stood up, towering above the mene. The blanket fell to the floor. “We flew here,” Hesper said to the mene. “Did you see the ship? Didn’t you see the pod? Doesn’t that interest you? Flying?” She laughed and flapped her arms until they froze, horizontal at her sides. The mene reached for her again and she brought her arms in to protect her breasts, pushing the mene away repeatedly, harder and harder, until they tired of approaching her and went into the bedroom, reappearing with her poems in their hands. The door sealed behind them.

  “I’ll get them back for you,” Taki promised, but Hesper told him not to bother.

  “I haven’t written in weeks,” she said. “In case you hadn’t noticed. I haven’t finished a poem since I came here. I’ve lost that. Along with everything else.” She brushed at her hair rather frantically with one hand. “It doesn’t matter,” she added. “My poems? Not art.”

  “Are you the best person to judge that?” Taki asked.

  “Don’t patronize me.” Hesper returned to the table, looked again at the plate which held her unfinished breakfast, dusty from handling. “My critical faculties are s
till intact. It’s just the poetry that’s gone.” She took the dish to clean it, scraped the food away. “I was never any good,” she said. “Why do you think I came here? I had no poetry of my own so I thought I’d write the mene’s. I came to a world without words. I hoped it would be clarifying. I knew there was a risk.” Her hands moved very fast. “I want you to know I don’t blame you.”

  “Come and sit down a moment, Hesper,” Taki said, but she shook her head. She looked down at her body and moved her hands over it.

  “They feel sorry for us. Did you know that? They feel sorry about our bodies.”

  “How do you know that?” Taki asked.

  “Logic. We have these completely functional bodies. No useless wings. Not art.” Hesper picked up the blanket and headed for the bedroom. At the cloth curtain she paused a moment. “They love our loneliness, though. They’ve taken all mine. They never leave me alone now.” She thrust her right arm suddenly out into the air. It made the curtain ripple. “Go away,” she said, ducking behind the sheet.

  Taki followed her. He was very frightened. “No one is here but us, Hesper,” he told her. He tried to put his arms around her but she pushed him back and began to dress.

  “Don’t touch me all the time,” she said. He sank onto the bed and watched her. She sat on the floor to fasten her boots.

  “Are you going out, Hesper?” he asked and she laughed.

  “Hesper is out,” she said. “Hesper is out of place, out of time, out of luck, and out of her mind. Hesper has vanished completely. Hesper was broken into and taken.”