Infinity Plus: Quintet

by Neil Williamson

  If that was the right word to describe the condition I was in. I bore little resemblance to the human being who had entered the pod. Although the engine-vault had saved my life, the flux had kicked back and channelled a blast of nova straight into my head. My occipital computer had overloaded and melted, forcing my skull out of shape and removing flesh and muscle from my face. I suffered ninety-five percent burns and only the null-grav effect of the pod had saved me from sticking to the side like a roasting joint...I was lucky to be alive, the medics told me more than once. But in my opinion I was far from lucky; I would have gladly died to be free of the terrible guilt. The one thing for which I was thankful was the fact that I could not recall the accident or the death of Ana and my friends. But I should have known...

  The dreams began a few weeks later.

  My computer had recorded the entire accident, and from time to time what was left of the machine, the still-functioning memory that interfaced with my cortex, bled nightmare visions into my sleeping mind. I saw the star go nova and the ship disintegrate and the crew, my friends for years, die instantly. Ana's brief cry of comprehension as the nova blew would echo in my head forever.

  When I'd finished, Lin Chakra gripped the rail and stared down at the ground effect vehicles passing back and forth like luminescent trilobites. "Your pain doesn't come through on the crystal," she said at last.

  "It isn't supposed to. The Wreck is a statement of fact, a documentary if you like, to show the world what happened. I'm working on other crystals to show the agony caused by the tragic decision... Why? Is that what interests you? The agony?"

  She glanced at me, and gave her head that typically Indian jog from side to side that might have meant either yes or no. I never realized that the gesture of a stranger could be so painful. "Partly," she said. "And partly I'm interested in death."

  I nodded. That was understandable. In a world where death was a rare occurrence, it had become an even more popular subject of artistic enquiry, an even greater source of inspiration.

  "The death of my colleagues was almost instantaneous," I told her. "Mercifully they didn't feel a thing."

  "Oh, I'm not talking about their deaths," she said. "It's yours that interests me..."

  I was glad then that my face could no longer register expression; she would have seen my shock. I was shocked because my decision to die had been a private one, and I had no idea that I'd allowed it to come through on the crystal. Then I recalled the way she had lingered over a particular node on the console.

  "You read it?" I asked her.

  "Very slightly. I almost missed it at first, like everyone else. I don't think you meant to show it, but it's there, buried beneath all the other emotions but just about discernible."

  I remained silent. I had spoken to no-one about my decision, and the fact that Lin Chakra knew made me uneasy. Then her question came. "Why?"

  I had to think for long minutes before I could begin to explain myself. My decision had been a matter of instinct, a feeling that what I planned to do was somehow right. Now, when I came to explain this need, I feared I was cheating a genuine conviction with a devalued currency of words. "I want to die because I survived," I told her. "I had no right to survive when the others died. I can't get over the guilt..."

  "I don't understand." She looked at me, her face serious between the V of her collar. "Maybe you want to end your life because you can't stand to go on as you are?"

  Again my face failed to show the emotion I felt – anger, this time. "I resent that! That would make my decision to die a petty thing, self-pity masquerading as heroics. And anyway, I needn't remain like this. The best medics could fix me a new face, almost as good as new, remove the computer. I could live a normal life despite the fact that Ana's cry would be in my head even when it was no longer there... I'm sorry I've failed to justify my decision to you, but to be honest I don't feel that I have to."

  "There is one way you can do that..."

  "I don't see–" I began. Then I did.

  She took a small box from her tunic and flipped open the lid. Inside, a fresh crystal sparkled in the starlight. "Take it," she said. "Concentrate on why you feel you have to die."

  "I don't see why I should justify my need to you–"

  "Or perhaps you're unable to justify it to yourself."

  So I snatched the crystal and gripped it in my fist, hearing again Ana's scream as she passed into oblivion. And again I experienced the gnawing guilt, the aching desire to share her fate. The crystal soaked up the fact that I had had the casting vote on whether or not we should take the short-cut. I had voted for it, and by doing so had sent Ana and my colleagues to their deaths.

  Ana had voted against the jump.

  When it seemed that I'd wrung moisture from the crystal – my hand dripped with perspiration – I passed it back to Lin Chakra. She held the hexagonal diamond on the flat of her palm, staring at it with large brown eyes.

  Without a word she slipped the crystal into her tunic.

  "The medics give me another six months if I don't agree to a series of operations," I said. "In that time I should be able to finish quite a few crystals. The last one will be an explanation of why I feel I have to die..."

  We talked of other things until Chakra said she had to go.

  "Why not come over to my studio tomorrow evening?" she asked. "The work I'm doing now might interest you."

  With reluctance I accepted the invitation and we left the balcony. She unlocked the door to the party room, and the glare of the spotlight was on her again. I could hear the front-man yammering questions.

  Lin pushed through the crowd. Our first meeting was over.

  ~

  I arrived back at my slum dwelling at dawn, and from across the studio an empty crystal console beckoned me. I began work immediately, spurred by my conversation with Lin Chakra. By telling her of my intentions I had reminded myself of the short time I had left in which to complete the crystals. In six months I would be dead; until our meeting, that had been almost an abstract notion. The fact was definite now, substantial. I had work to do, for myself and for my dead colleagues, and I had no time to waste.

  The first step in the production of a crystal, even before the choice of subject matter, was the preparation of the thousand or so individual gems. I arranged the console on my workbench and set about the fusion process. I had chanced upon the method to do this almost by accident a few months earlier. Like most people, I had kept crystals and toyed with them occasionally. I found that the stronger the emotion infused into a crystal, the longer it remained. Superficial emotions or simple messages were gone in seconds; but love and hate lingered for long minutes... Now, from time to time, the remains of the computer that linked with my cortex gave me nightmares, blinding images of the nova chasing the ship. And the sheer terror that these nightmares produced in me... I was sure that if I could soak a few crystals with this fire-terror, it would last long enough so that people might gain an appreciable insight into what I had gone through.

  So the next time I awoke with the inferno raging inside my head, I was ready. I had jacked the leads into my skull-sockets – the same I had used as an Engineman to achieve the state of flux – wound the wires around my arm and attached the fingerclips. I could have simply held the crystals, but I wanted to gain the maximum effect. When the nightmare began I fumbled for the racked crystals beside my mattress and played a firestorm arpeggio across the faceted surface.

  The result was not what I had expected; instead of impressing my terror on the crystals, I had unknowingly fused them into one big diamond slab. Not only that, but when I experimented with these transformed crystals later in the day I found that the emotions I discharged – my love for Ana, as ever – remained locked indelibly into the structure of the gems.

  I had worked at the technique of bringing about the nightmare at will, and The Wreck Of The John Marston was my first effort. Christianna Santesson had snapped it up and signed me on practically seconds after fi
rst experiencing it. According to her, I was made.

  Now I fused the largest console I'd ever done and began transferring the emotions and images that were in my head. I recreated the atmosphere of the flight before the tragedy, the camaraderie that existed between the crew members. Further on in the crystal I would introduce the accident as a burst of stunning horror. To begin with, I committed to crystal the times I had made weightless love to Ana, relived again the sensation of her sturdy little body entwined with mine in the astro-nacelle. Ana was a Gujarati engineer with a shaven head and bandy legs covered with tropical ulcers the shape of bite marks. We had met when she was assigned to the John Marston, and we had been lovers for two years before that last flight.

  The sun was going down behind distant towerpiles when I realized that I'd gone as far as I could for this session. I was drained and emotionally exhausted. I had worked all day without thought of food and drink; the task had sustained me. I took an acid short from the cooler, dragged myself across to the foamform mattress and collapsed. I was drifting into sleep – and into certain dreams of Ana – when the call came through.

  I crawled to the screen and opened communications. The picture showed a large studio with a figure diminished in the perspective. Lin Chakra stood with her back to the screen and turned when it chimed. "So there you are. You took so long I thought you must be out."

  "I very rarely go out," I told her.

  "No?" She walked towards the screen and peered through at me, her expression as stern and unsmiling as ever. "Well how about tonight? Remember what we arranged yesterday? I'd like to show you some work I'm doing."

  I considered. I had enjoyed the novelty of her company yesterday, and talking to her had proved an inspiration. I nodded. "I'd like that," I said. She gave me directions and I told her I'd be over in thirty minutes.

  I rode the moving boulevard to the end of the line and took a flyer the rest of the way. The pilot dropped me by the plasma barrier that covered the radioactive sector, and I paid him and stepped through the gelatinous membrane.

  The difference between this sector and the rest of the city struck me immediately, and impressed itself on every sense. The air was thick and humid and the quality of light almost magical. The sun was setting through the far side of the dome, transmitting prismatic rainbows across the streets and buildings, many of them in a state of ruin softened by the mutated vegetation that had proliferated here since the meltdown. I walked along the avenue towards the intersection where Lin Chakra lived. The roar of the rest of the city was excluded here, but from within the sector a street band could be heard, their music keeping to the hectic tempo of a Geiger counter. There was an air of peace and timelessness about the deserted streets, and it seemed to me the perfect place for the artist to reside, amid the equal influences of beauty and destruction.

  "Dan...!" The cry came from high above. I craned my neck and saw Lin Chakra waving at me from a balcony halfway up a towering obelisk.

  I counted the windows and took the upchute to her level.

  "In here," she called from one of the many white-walled rooms that comprised the floor she had entirely to herself. I walked through three spacious rooms, each containing holograms like a gallery, before I found her. She was pouring wine by the balcony. She turned as I entered. "I'm glad you could make it," she said.

  I murmured something and stood on the balcony and admired the view, to give me something to do while I tried to surmount the pain I felt at meeting her again.

  She seemed a different person from the woman of last night, and more like Ana. She wore a short yellow smock, and her thin bare legs were pocked with the tight purple splotches of healed tropical ulcers.

  As she invited me to follow her, I realized that she was ill. Her hands shook, and her breath came in ragged, painful spasms.

  We moved from room to room, the contents of each charting Lin's development from small beginnings through her apprentice work to her more recent and accomplished holograms. She had two main phases behind her; the dozen pieces she produced from the age of fifteen to eighteen, and a triptych called Love, which she brought out from the age of eighteen to twenty. These had deservedly earned her world recognition. She had done nothing for more than a year now, and the critics and public alike were eager for the next phase of her work to be released.

  She took me into her workroom overlooking the arching membrane of the outer dome. The contents of the room were scattered; hologram frames and benches in disarray, indicating the artist in the throes of production. Three completed holograms stood against the wall, and others in various stages of completion occupied benches or were piled on the floor.

  "These three are finished and okay. The others–" She indicated those on the floor with a sweep of her hand. "I think I'll scrap them and release these three later this year."

  I stared into the three-dimensional glass sculptures. The imprisoned images were grotesque and disturbing, grim forebodings and prophesies of darkness. I was horrified, without really knowing why. "Dying," I whispered.

  Lin Chakra nodded. "Of course. The ultimate mystery. What better subject for the artist who has done everything else?"

  I moved to the next hologram. This one was more graphic; inside great baubles and bubbles of glass I made out the shrunken image of Lin herself, her small body contorted in angles of pain and suffering. "You...?"

  "I contracted leukaemia six months ago," she said. "The medics give me another three."

  "But why the hell did you come here?"

  "To give myself the opportunity to create art out of death, of course."

  "And when you've finished you'll go for a cure..." I began.

  She averted her gaze, stared at the floor.

  "You can't let it kill you, Lin!" I cried. "You're still young. You have your life ahead of you. All your art–"

  "Listen to me, Dan. I have done everything. I've been everywhere and experienced everything and put it all into holograms and there is nothing else for me to do."

  "Can't you simply..." I shrugged. "Retire? Quit holograms if you've said all you can?"

  She was slowly shaking her head; sadly, it seemed. "Dan... You don't understand. You're no artist, really. Not a true artist. If you were you'd understand that artists live for what they can put into holograms, or on paper or canvas, whatever. When that comes to an end, their lives are finished. How can I go on when I have nothing more to say?" She stared at me. "Death is the final statement. I want to give the world my death..."

  "Does Santesson know about this?" I asked her.

  She nodded. "I told her, of course. She's an artist, Dan. She understands."

  I moved around the studio in a daze. At last I said, "But these holograms aren't your death, Lin. These are your dying."

  Her eyes brimmed with tears, and she nodded. "Don't you think I realize that? Why do you think I've scrapped all these?" She flung out her arm at the half-completed holograms. "They're imperfect, Dan. Impressions of dying, that's all. These three are the closest in dying that I've come to death..."

  I thought of Ana, who had died when she had most wanted to live. Lin's slow suicide was an affront to her memory, and it was this knowledge that burned in me with anger. "You can't do it, Lin."

  "You don't understand!"

  I'd had my fill of pain and could take no more. I left her standing by the entrance and without a word took the downchute. The music had stopped and I walked quickly through the empty streets towards the safe sector of the city.

  For the next couple of days I remained in my studio, drank acid shorts and stared morosely at the crystal I had started but could not finish. My old need to create art from the tragedy of the John Marston was overcome by apathy; it was as if what Lin Chakra was doing had reminded me that nothing, not even art, could ease the agony of my being without Ana.

  Lin called repeatedly, perhaps in a bid to explain herself – to make me understand. But I always cut the connection the second her face appeared on the screen.
/>   I considered killing myself before my time was due.

  A few days after my meeting with Lin I stood before a crystal I'd completed months before. It failed as a work of art, but as a statement of my pain and my love for Ana it was wholly successful. I ran my hand over the crystals, reliving again the experience of being with her; reliving the horror of her absence.

  Next to the crystal I had placed a laser-razor...

  Christianna Santesson saved my life.

  The screen chimed and I ran to it, intending to scream at Lin Chakra that I resented her intrusion. I punched the set into life.

  Santesson smiled out at me. "Daniel... How are you?"

  "What do you want?" I snapped, venting anger on her.

  "Business, Daniel." She chose to ignore my rudeness. "Your crystal is showing very well. I'm delighted with the response of the public. I was wondering... How would you feel about producing a sequel to exhibit beside it?"

  Her commercialism sickened me.

  I told her that that was out of the question – that in fact I'd stopped working.

  She frowned. "That's unfortunate, Daniel," she said; then, with an air of calculation, "I don't suppose you've considered telling me how you produce your crystals, Daniel? After all, you did promise that you would, one day..."

  I nodded. "One day, yes."

  "Then perhaps I could persuade you to sell me one single fused console, instead?" There was a look of animal-like entreaty in her eyes.

  I laughed as something occurred to me. "Very well, I will. But I want a million credits for it." I'd show her that I could play her at her own game.

  To my surprise she smiled. "That sounds reasonable, Daniel. You have yourself a deal. One million credits. I'll pay it into your account as soon as the crystal is delivered."

  In a daze I said, "I'll do it right away."

  She smiled goodbye and cut the connection.

  Later, I wired myself up and arranged a crystal console, induced a nova-nightmare and channelled the firepower into the alien stones. As always it took immense concentration and energy to sustain the power required to fuse an entire console, and I was exhausted by the time I finished. I sealed the slab in a lead wrap and hired a flyer to take it to Santesson. Then I returned to my studio and sprawled across the foamform. All thoughts of pre-emptive suicide had fled; with the million credits I had visions of offering Lin Chakra the stars – literally buying her passage aboard a starship to give her that which she had yet to experience. I slept...