by Ian Whates
“And speaking of native tongues,” he was saying, “it’s about time you learned all of ours, old sport. Here—” He took the carnation from his lapel, and with a very particular flick of his wrist, cast it into the space where no stuff was. All Metal realised he must have included shared language in it.
“WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?” said the nothing, immediately. But now its words didn’t smash into All Metal or John or any of the textures. That must have been something John had included with the shared language.
“What are we,” John said, his voice full of shapes, “if not the sum of our natures? My nature, my central shape, is that of a snake. If you cut me open, you would see it written through me like I was a particularly slippery stick of rock: not to be trusted and especially not to be swallowed. If I am given a side to be on, why, I shall almost immediately find a way to play for the other team. Which explains a lot about my school days.”
All Metal found his gazing inward was hurting. He had gazed inward all this about John, always, but, always, John’s shape made people’s gazing inward spit that out and not swallow it. Did that even apply to Emma? Could she be unaware of this!?
“YOU WANT MY TIME STOP EXPANSION POINT TO ENGULF YOURS?”
“Old man, I positively demand it! For everyone else, anyway. You already know you couldn’t swallow me, and I see how that’s causing you pause. Look around this place. This is what it’s like all over: styles you won’t be able to make head nor tail of; textures that must strike a chord with you, being as you’re able to communicate shared ideas at all; a continuous slide of easy access for you and your kind, assuming, that is, you have a kind? Or is it just you?” He didn’t give the nothing a lovely moment to answer. “We could do, in short, with a change of ownership, a change of scene—Oh, I beg your pardon, were you trying to say something?”
“IT IS JUST ME. THIS LANGUAGE TASTES FUNNY. I CAN’T LIE IN IT.”
“Lie?” John’s voice got more shaped than ever, to the point where All Metal could hear shared vision slipping past it, making hushed shadows ricochet off the corners of the room. “What is this thing you call ‘lie’?”
All Metal couldn’t gaze inward at that. John must be lying, but he just said he couldn’t.
“Why don’t you step right inside and explain it to me at greater length, old chap? You must be catching your death of cold, lurking on the threshold like that.”
The nothing seemed to gaze inward for a sad moment, if it had an inward. Finally, it moved forward, into the room. And now All Metal could gaze at what it had passed through: a number of textures that John must have taken from the walls and placed together at that point.
He realised that he should do something, that he couldn’t go back to Emma and tell her that he’d just watched this sad thing happening. But he should go back to her and tell her about this—
Before he could start to move, John addressed some words to him, and only him, and they landed on his shoulder, as if John had always known he was watching. “All Metal,” the words said, “you got here at exactly the speed you were meant to. Now be a good chap and fetch the others.”
ALL METAL DID. Mmorg didn’t quite fit up the stairs, so shed textures into a fine spray. All Metal breathed in their horror and delight and nausea and kept them gazing inward. The balloon floated up above that. And the bignome just sniffed.
“Ah, just the stuff I was gazing for,” said John when he gazed at the balloon. “You know, sometimes an inward gazing of something’s like the thing itself. Don’t know what chap said that, perhaps I just made it up.” He hooked the string that dangled from the balloon with the handle of his umbrella. “When is a Time Stop Expansion Point not a Time Stop Expansion Point? Possibly never, if everyone involved agrees it is. But what if everyone is just the one?” And with a twirl of his hands that All Metal couldn’t follow, but which filled them all for a lovely moment with points, John flipped the balloon inside out. All Metal lovely suddenly felt the force of whatever had been inside the balloon, sucking at him and everything else. He was pleased to have found out there was something inside after all, even if it was sucking at him. What had been inside the balloon turned out to be like nothing else in everything ever. It was a bit like the nothing, in fact. It flew suddenly from John’s hands, bounced off Mmorg’s locked communications options as something from outside everything ever of course would do, bounced off the bignome’s window as not being able to be gazed at—
—And flew straight at the nothing in the room.
The nothing started to gather its breath, if it had breath, perhaps to try to shout DOOM again—
But then whatever had been in the balloon hit it, and their breaths and words and stuff became one, and that one hit the far wall where those textures had been placed by John, and the whole thing flew back at John—
And he caught it in the balloon. Then he swiftly knotted the end. And that knotting was bliss in scores, and gave everyone such pleasure with the flash of it. And it was done.
“Mood!” said the balloon. And it sounded calm. And then. “I have a mood. I’m a person. Oh. Where am I?”
“In everything ever,” said John. He went over to the wall and nodded to All Metal. “Which now once more lives up to its name. Once you’ve tidied up, that is.”
All Metal quickly kicked the textures off the wall and found—
Just a side beyond them. And that feeling had gone, that had made the textures murmur. The house felt like just a house again.
Emma appeared. “Charming place you have here,” she said. “I love it. I look forward to visiting often.” And with a snap of her fingers All Metal was filled with points and pleasure and knew that he was exactly as slow as he had to be.
John handed her the balloon and she grinned at it.
“Hi,” said the balloon. “I really do have a lot of questions.” It had turned a charming shade of blue.
“And I now once again have all the time in the world for answers,” said Emma, “and will be delighted to give them.”
“What are we going to name it?” said John, indicating the balloon.
“We?” said Emma, one eyebrow raised.
“One day I will manage to trick you into letting me name something. Until then, I try my best.”
“Your best is, as always, very good indeed. In the baddest way. Now”—she looked to All Metal again—“is there any tea?”
And of course, as soon as she said it, there was.
A PALAZZO IN THE STARS
PAUL DI FILIPPO
Paul Di Filippo lives on Rhode Island. He has been writing professionally for some thirty years, and accumulated nearly that number of books under his byline.
A Curious Offer of Selective Employment
CAMPED OUT IN the middle of Saint Mark’s Square with their newfangled Austrian folding-seat walking sticks, the three brash young Americans attracted every native eye as they cut some carefree capers amidst their more serious artistic endeavors. They winked and smiled at all the passing women, young and old, beautiful and homely. They swigged heroic draughts of Chianti straight from straw-buffered bottles. They enjoyed a steady service of foodstuffs delivered to them from the Café Florian by scurrying waiters whom they had cajoled with largesse. They made gestures of over-obsequious deference to the suspicious patrolling carabinieri. They blew airy kisses to nuns and priests. And, of course, they sketched up a positive storm.
The past turbulent decade-and-a-half in Italy, including the country’s proud but bloody Unification, had diminished the number of timid, pleasure-seeking foreign visitors to the newborn Kingdom, and these three travelers were appreciated much as returning birds in spring, their presence regarded as a possible herald of increased patronage by Northerners reinstating Italy to the Grand Tour. An influx of highly useful dollars and pounds and francs and marks looked likely; unless, of course, the recent collapse in this year of 1877 of the corrupt government of Prime Minister Agostino Depretis resulted in further chaos—unfortunately, a
n Italian speciality, and hence one of the more dreaded outcomes.
Under a beneficent June sun as mellow as the expression on the face of Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro in the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (a sight which had just this morning inspired the three men), the trio of visitors continued to sketch, while flocks of rock doves wheeled, landed, then soared aloft again. With narrow, lithe, linen-clad buttocks firmly ensconced on their small canework ovals atop hinged tripods, and well-used scuffed boots planted firmly on the pavement, they employed long, narrow, landscape-favoring sketchbooks featuring covers in mossgreen, oxblood and jonquil, as well as an assortment of pencils and charcoals, to capture some of the vibrant scene about them.
One fellow exhibited a long narrow face with a slightly bent nose, hair in two wings across his brow, radiating from a central parting, and a lush mustache. His technique as he sought to render the famed Doges Palace quite obviously partook of the new vogue of impressionism.
The second sketcher boasted a more oval face, hair already thinning across his crown, but compensated for by enormous bushy eyebrows above piercing optics. His nascent depiction of the Campanile (he had shifted his pad ninety degrees for that assignment) exhibited a sturdier realism.
The last artist possessed a somewhat plump face adorned with a small neat strip of mustache. But his thick untidy thatch of wheat-colored hair needed a trim. An aggressive chin dominated the lower portion of his physiognomy. The intensity of his concentration on the page seemed somehow, even to strangers, self-evidently a habitual part of his demeanor. Few if any smile lines had graven themselves onto his youthful but weary countenance.
This man sketched not any portion of the delightful, soul-stirring architecture of the Piazza San Marco, but rather the passing show of souls. He employed a technique midway between the naturalism of one friend and the impressionism of the other. But, today at least, his style featured a certain soupçon of the fantastic. The characters on his page were not rendered as they had been born, but rather sported in a subtle fashion, emerging from their garments in a manner at first almost imperceivable, tails and wings, horns and claws, fangs and abnormal, disturbing growths.
The trio of artists continued with their antics—the japes of the fantasist rang a bit hollow compared with those of his genuinely enthusiastic pals—and with their drawing, until finally the impressionist had cause to look over and regard the page which the wheat-haired man was fanatically belaboring.
“Good lord, Frank! Those are absolute monsters! One would think you were sitting in Bosch’s Garden rather than here in this lovely Mediterranean clime. What’s gotten into you, chum? Do you feel all right?”
Frank clapped his sketchbook shut and slid it into a scratched leather satchel by his side. He managed to look both rueful and maligned. “Oh, damn it all, John, I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Nothing physical, if that’s what you mean. Just some kind of black dog at my heels. I had imagined this trip would rid me of the beast, but no such luck. And I can’t really plan my future intelligently with that mean mongrel nipping at my britches.”
John, the youngest of the trio by several years, seemed genuinely sympathetic and respectful of Frank’s dilemma, but only up to a point. “Well, I’m sure a path will present itself to someone of your sterling talents. And just consider, you have a rock-solid foundation to build on. After that knockout show in Boston—”
Frank vented his irritation on his friend. “Oh, to hell with that Boston show! It was two years ago, after all, and the load of praise rode in on the years-long coattails of insults and studied obliviousness. What a preening bunch of hypocrites, to admire the work they had slighted for so long. And all because it came from the son of a poor immigrant kraut laborer, an upstart boy who had to learn his trade decorating churches! No academy for me, or rich patrons, meant no respect. I still can’t forgive the bastards.”
The third man, sitting slightly removed from his comrades, now put down his own work and stepped over to see what the fuss was all about.
“Here, here, Frank, come off it. Get down off that high horse! What’s given you the vapors? We’re here to enjoy ourselves, in a land of beauty and delight, with plenty of lira in our pockets, no duties, and the winning charms of three young demiurges! Now, show me what you’ve been drawing that’s caused so much turmoil.”
Frank reluctantly took his pad out of his satchel. “Oh, all right, William, if you must see.”
Holding the book in his lap, Frank flipped through its pages, the weird illustrations of that afternoon’s composition eliciting exclamations and sage or joshing commentary from his appreciative, art-besotted bretheren. Frank began to feel somewhat less downtrodden and downhearted. Surely capturing these phantoms of his imagination in graphite had rendered them harmless to further disturb him.
So intent were the trio on examining Frank’s sketches that they failed to note that a new observer had joined them. Their attention was diverted from the pages only by a sonorous voice proclaiming in charmingly accented English, “Wonder of wonders! You are the very man I have been seeking!”
Frank looked up to confront a patrician figure. A rail-thin elderly gent with facial hair and a poet’s locks, both of the most startling Cremnitz White, as found in the Winsor & Newton palette. The man’s old-fashioned suit, though shabby, bespoke elegant tailoring. He carried a cane whose silver grip mimicked a dragon’s head.
“Whatever can you mean, sir?” asked Frank.
“Let us have introductions all around first, before I explain. I am the Duke of Fossombrone. Here is my card.”
The Duke tendered a neatly engraved card apiece to the artists. In turn, Frank gave their names.
“I’m Frank Duveneck. And these two roarers are John Henry Twachtman and William Merritt Chase.”
“And what brings you all here to the Queen of the Adriatic, my friends? I can’t credit that it was simply to meet my needs.”
“We’ve been studying art in Munich for some time now,” Frank said. “I’ve reached the point where I’m thinking I might even open up my own school there. But after so much hard labor we grew tired of that city, and sought to experience something completely different and relaxing.”
“Well, you have come to the antipodes, so far as that dour German culture is concerned. I’m sure you will all benefit from your stay here. And I know I will.”
“What do you allude to again with this cryptic assertion?”
“Only that I have been looking for an artist who might be able to chronicle an expedition I plan to undertake soon, and I believe you are that man.”
Frank felt compelled to speak up for his pals. “But my friends have as much talent as I. Why not one of them, or perhaps all three of us?”
The Duke said, “Allow me to see your work, gentlemen.”
John and William complied with the request. After examining their portfolios, the Duke said, “Very accomplished and stirring, sirs. But your work lacks that resonance with ineffable mystery that I detect in Signore Duveneck’s. So it is to him alone that I will tender my offer of employment.”
His curiosity piqued, Frank asked, “Exactly what are the terms and nature of this employment?”
Duke Fossombrone smiled, with some small underlying sadness attendant. “It is all too complicated to explain in the middle of the Piazza under a wilting sun. Please do me the honor, all three of you, of sharing dinner with me at my home tonight. Simply ask anyone for directions to the Ca’ d’Oro, and try to arrive by nine. Please bring neither wine nor flowers nor sweets, as I have a cellar, a garden and a baker, all of superlative caliber. I’ll see you then, gentlemen.”
The Duke of Fossombrone walked away with a slight limp, but seemed rather too proud to employ his stick as fully as another man might have done to maximize its benefits.
The Jolie Laide and the Legless Man
THE GONDOLA FERRYING the three American artists to the Ca’ d’Oro rocked precipitously as John and William stood at it
s prow, supporting each other tipsily whilst trying to harmonize with their propulsive steersman at the rear on some native barcarole whose foreign lyrics they had adapted to an indecent English doggerel. The sun had just set, empurpling the gently sloshing Grand Canal and its dreaming houses, and allowing a few eager bright stars to appear above. Civic gas lights vied with oil lanterns to oasis the dark streets of the marshy city.
Slouched comfortably low in the boat on cushions, Frank smiled at the antics of his comrades. At the moment he felt constitutionally incapable of joining them, but he admired their high-spirited roistering nonetheless. To surround oneself with boisterous chums when one was feeling grim was sound medicine, albeit of limited efficacy.
Frank’s thoughts turned to the mysterious proposition tendered by Duke Fossombrone. To take on the mantle of evidentiary artist for some daring expedition into uncharted realms sounded jim-dandy to Frank at the moment, with or without compensation. So far, Italy had not proven sufficiently remote or distracting enough to alleviate his anxieties. If to attain peace of mind he had to emulate Pierre de Brazza, currently engaged in charting the upper reaches of the Ogowe River in Africa with nothing more than a bale of trade fabrics, then so be it!
The gondola began now to arrow toward the shore. The two crooners ceased their caterwauling and substituted whistles and exclamations.
“Is that really where skinny old Saint Nick lives?”
