“Oh. Carlo. It’s all right. They take those things all over the world and put them up and say this is from Venice, the greatest city in the world.”
“They should be here.”
“Here, here, come in and lie down for a few hours. I’ll go see if Giuseppe will go to Torcello with you to bring back those bricks.” She arranged him on their bed. “Let them have what’s under the water, Carlo. Let them have it.” He slept.
He sat up struggling, his arm shaken by his wife.
“Wake up, it’s late. You’ve got to go to Torcello to get those men. Besides, they’ve got your scuba gear.”
Carlo groaned.
“Maria says Giuseppe will go with you. He’ll meet you with his boat on the Fundamente.”
“Damn.”
“Come on, Carlo, we need that money.”
“All right, all right.” The baby was squalling. He collapsed back on the bed. “I’ll do it. Don’t pester me.”
He got up and drank her soup. Stiffly he descended the ladder, ignoring Luisa’s instructions and warnings, and got back in his boat. He untied it, pushed off, let it float out of the courtyard to the wall of San Giacometta. He stared at the wall.
Once, he remembered, he had put on his scuba gear and swum down into the church. He had kneeled behind one of the stone pews in front of the altar, adjusting his weightbelts and tank to do so, and had tried to pray through his mouthpiece and the facemask. The silver bubbles of his breath had floated up through the water toward heaven; whether his prayers had gone with them, he had no idea. After a while, feeling, somewhat foolish—but not entirely——he had swum out the door. Over it he had noticed an inscription and stopped to read it, facemask centimeters from the stone. Around This Temple Let the Merchant’s Law Be Just, His Weight True, and His Covenants Faithful. It was an admonition to the old usurers of the Rialto, but he could make it his, he thought; the true weight could refer to the diving belts, not to overload his clients and sink them to the bottom…
The memory passed and he was on the surface again, with a job to do. He took in a deep breath and let it out, put the oars in the oarlocks and started to row.
Let them have what was under the water. What lived in Venice was still afloat.
—1980
“She rules all of Oz,” said Dorothy, “and so
she rules your city and you, because you are in the
Winkie Country, which is part of the Land of Oz.”
“It may be.” returned the High Coco-Lorum,
“for we do not study geography and have never
inquired whether we live in the Land of Oz or not.
And any Ruler who rules us from a distance, and
unknown to us, is welcome to the job.
—L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz
am not, despite the appearances, fond of crime detection. In the past, it is true, I occasionally accompanied my friend Freya Grindavik as she solved her cases, and admittedly this watsoning gave me some good material for the little tales I have written for the not-very-discriminating markets on Mars and Titan. But after The Case of the Golden Sphere of the Lion of Mercury, in which I ended up hung by the feet from the clear dome of Terminator, two hundred meters above the rooftops of the city, my native lack of enthusiasm rose to the fore. And following the unfortunate Adventure of the Vulcan Accelerator, when Freya’s arch-foe Jan Johannsen tied us to a pile of hay under a large magnifying glass in a survival tent, there to await Mercury’s fierce dawn. I put my foot down: no more detecting. That, so to speak, was the last straw.
So when I agreed to accompany Freya to the Solday party of Heidi Van Seegeren, it was against my better judgement. But Freya assured me there would be no business involved; and despite the obvious excesses, I enjoy a Solday party as much as the next aesthete. So when she came by my villa, I was ready.
“Make haste,” she said. “We’re late, and I must be before Heidi’s Monet when the Great Gates are opened. I adore that painting.”
“Your infatuation is no secret,” I said, panting as I trailed her through the crowded streets of the city. Freya, as those of you who have read my earlier tales know, is two and a half meters tall, and broad-shouldered: she barged through the shoals of Solday celebrants rather like a whale, and I, pilotfishlike, dodged in her wake. She led me through a group of Greys, who with carpetbeaters were busy pounding rugs saturated with yellow dust. As I coughed and brushed off my fine burgundy suit, I said, “My feeling is that you have taken me to view that antique canvas once or twice too often.”
She looked at me sternly. “As you will see, on Solday it transcends even its usual beauty. You look like a bee drowning in pollen, Nathaniel.”
“Whose fault is that?” I demanded, brushing my suit fastidiously.
We came to the gate in the wail surrounding Van Seegeren’s town villa, and Freya banged on it loudly. The gate was opened by a scowling man. He was nearly a meter shorter than Freya, and had a balding head that bulged rather like the dome of the city. In a mincing voice he said. “Invitations?”
“What’s this?” said Freya. “We have permanent invitations from Heidi”
“I’m sorry,” the man said coolly. ‘Ms. Van Seegeren has decided her Solday parties have gotten overcrowded, and this time she sent out invitations and instructed me to let in only those who have them.”
“Then there has been a mistake,” Freya declared. “Get Heidi on the intercom, and she will instruct you to let me in. I am Freya Grindavik, and this is Nathaniel Sebastian.”
“I’m sorry,” the man said, quite unapologetically. “Every person turned away says the same thing, and Ms. Van Seegeren prefers not to be disturbed so frequently.”
“She’ll be more disturbed to hear we’ve been held up.” Freya shifted toward the man. “Who are you, anyway?”
“I am Sandor Musgrave, Ms. Van Seegeren’s private secretary.”
“How come I’ve never met you?”
“Ms. Van Seegeren hired me two months ago,” Musgrave said, and stepped back so he could look Freya in the eye without straining his neck. “That is immaterial, however—”
“I’ve been Heidi’s friend for over forty years,” Freya said slowly, once again shifting forward to lean over the man. “And I would wager she values her friends more than her secretaries…“
Musgrave stepped back indignantly. “I’m sorry!” be snapped. “I have my orders! Good day!”
But alas for him, Freya was now standing well in the gateway, and she seemed uninclined to move; she merely cocked her head at him Musgrave comprehended his problem, and his mouth twitched uncertainly.
The impasse was broken when Van Seegeren’s maid Lucinda arrived from the Street. “Oh, hello Freya, Nathaniel. What are you doing out here?”
“This new Malvolio of yours is barring our entrance,” Freya said.
“Oh, Musgrave,” said Lucinda. “Let these two in, or the boss will be mad.”
Musgrave retreated with a deep scowl. “I’ve studied the ancients, Ms. Grindavik,” he said sullenly. “You need not insult me.”
“Malvolio was a tragic character,” Freya assured him. “Read Charles Lamb’s essay concerning the matter.”
“I certainly will,” Musgrave said stiffly, and hurried to the villa, giving us a last poisonous look.
“Of course Lamb’s father,” Freya said absently, staring after the man, “was a house servant. Lucinda, who is that?”
Lucinda rolled her eyes. “The boss hired him to restore some of her paintings, and get the records in order. I wish she hadn’t.”
The bell in the gate sounded. “I’ve got it. Musgrave,” Lucinda shouted at the villa. She opened the gate, revealing the artist Harvey Washburn.
“So you do,” said Harvey, blinking. He was high again; a bottle of the White Brother hung from his hand. “Freya! Nathaniel! Happy Solday to you—have a drink?”
We refused the offer, and then followed Harvey around the side of the villa, exchanging a glance. I
felt sorry for Harvey. Most of Mercury’s great collectors came to Harvey’s showings, but they dissected his every brushstroke for influences, and told him what he should be painting, and then among themselves they called his work amateurish and unoriginal, and never bought a single canvas. I was never surprised to see him drinking.
We rounded the side of the big villa and stepped onto the white stone patio, which was made of a giant slab of England’s Dover cliffs, cut out and transported to Mercury entire. Malvolio Musgrae had spoken the truth about Heidi reducing the size of her Solday party: where often the patio had been jammed, there were now less than a dozen people. I spotted George Butler, Heidi’s friend and rival art collector, and Arnold Ohman, the art dealer who obtained for many of Mercury’s collectors their ancient masterpieces from Earth. As I greeted them Freya led us all across the patio to the back wall of the villa, which was also fronted with white slabs of the Dover cliffs. There, all alone, hung Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral—Sun Effect. “Look at it, Nathaniel!” Freya commanded me. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
I looked at it Now you must understand that, as owner of the Gallery Orientale, and by deepest personal aesthetic conviction, I am a connoisseur of Chinese art, a style in which a dozen artfully spontaneous brushstrokes can serve to delineate a mountain or two, several trees, a small village and its inhabitants, and perhaps some birds. Given my predilection, you will not be surprised to learn that merely to look at the antique rectangle of color that Freya so admired was to risk damaging my eyes. Thick scumbled layers of grainy paint scarcely revealed the cathedral of the title, which wavered under a blast of light so intense that I doubted Mercury’s midday could compete with it. Small blobs of every color served to represent both the indistinct stone and a pebbly sky; both were composed of combinations principally of white, yellow, and purple, though as I say, every other color made an appearance.
“Stunning,” I said, with a severe squint. “Are you sure this Monet wasn’t a bit nearsighted?”
Freya glared at me, ignoring Butler’s chuckles. “I suppose your comment might have been funny the first time you made it. To children, anyway.”
“But I heard it was actually true,” I said, shielding my eyes with one hand. “Monet was nearsighted, and so like Goya his vision affected his painting—”
“I should hope so,” Harvey said solemnly.
“—so all he could see were those blobs of color, isn’t that sad?”
Freya shook her head. “You won’t get a rise out of me today, Nathaniel. You’ll have to think up your dinner conversation by yourself.”
Momentarily stopped by this riposte, I retired with Arnold Ohman to Heidi’s patio bar. After dialing drinks from the bartender we sat on the blocks of Dover cliffs that made up the patio’s low outer wall. We toasted Solday, and contemplated the clouds of yellow talc that swirled over the orange tile rooftops below us. For those of you who have never visited it, Terminator is an oval city. The forward half of the city is flat, and projects out under the clear dome. The rear half of the oval is terraced, and rises to the tall Dawn Wall, which supports the upper ring of the dome, and shields the city from the perpetually rising sun. The Great Gates of Terminator are near the top of the Dawn Wall, and when they are opened, shafts of Sol ‘s overwhelming light spear through the city’s air, illuminating everything in a yellow brilliance. Heidi Van Seegeren’s villa was about halfway up the terraced slope; we looked upon gray stone walls, orange tile roofs, and the dusty vines and lemon trees of the terrace gardens that dotted the city; outside the dome the twelve big tracks over which the city slid extended off to the horizon, circling the planet like a slender silver wedding band. It was a fine view, and I lifted my glass to the idea that Claude Monet wasn’t there to paint it. For sometimes, if you ask me, reality is enough.
Ohman downed his drink in one swallow. Rumor had it that he was borrowing heavily to finance one of his big terran purchases; it was whispered he was planning to buy the closed portion of the Louvre—or the Renaissance room of the Vatican museum—or Amsterdam’s Van Gogh collection. But rumors like that circulated around Arnold continuously. He was that kind of dealer. It was unlikely any of them were true; still, his silence seemed to reveal a certain tension.
“Look at the way Freya is soaking in that painting you got for Heidi,” I said, to lift his spirits. Freya’s face was within centimeters of the canvas, where she could examine it blob by blob; the people behind her could see nothing but her white-blond hair. Ohman smiled at the sight. He had brought the Monet back from his most recent terran expedition, and apparently it had been a great struggle to obtain it. Both the English family that owned it and the British government had had to be paid enormous sums to secure its release, and only the fact that Mercury was universally considered humanity’s greatest art museum had cleared the matter with the courts. It had been one of Arnold’s finest hours. Now he said, “Maybe we should pull her away a bit, so that others can see.”
“If both of us tug on her it may work,” I said. We stood and went to her side. Harvey Washburn, looking flushed and frazzled, joined us, and we convinced Freya to share the glory. Ohman and Butler conferred over something, and entered the villa through the big French doors that led into the concert room. Inside, Heidi’s orchestra rolled up and down the scales of Mussorgsky’s Hut of Baba Yaga. That meant it was close to the time when the Great Gates would open (Heidi always gets inside information about this). Sure enough, as Mussotgsky’s composition burst from the Hut of Baba Yaga into the Great Gates of Kiev, two splinters of white light split the air under the dome. Shouts and fanfares rose everywhere, nearly drowning the amplified sound of our orchestra. Slowly the Great Gates opened, and as they did the shafts of light grew to thick buttery gold bars of air. By their rich, nearly blinding glare, Heidi Van Seegeren made her first entrance from her villa, timing her steps to the exaggerated Maazel ritard that her conductor Hiu employed every Solday when Pictures at an Exhibition was performed. This ritard shifted the music from the merely grandiose to the utterly bombastical, and it took Heidi over a minute to cross her own narrow patio; but I suppose it was not entirely silly, given the ritual nature of the moment, and the flood of light that was making the air appear a thick, quite tangible gel. What with the light, and the uproar created by the keening Greys and the many orchestras in the neighborhood, each playing their own oveture or fanfare (the Coriolan came from one side of us, the 1812 from the other), it was a complex and I might even say noisy aesthetic moment, and the last thing I needed was to take another look at the Monet monstrosity, but Freya would not have it otherwise
“You’ve never seen it when the Great Gates are opened,” she said. “That was the whole point in bringing you here today.”
“I see.” Actually I barely saw anything; as Freya had guided me by the arm to the painting I had accidentally looked directly at the incandescent yellow bars of sunlight, and brilliant blue afterimages bounced in my sight. I heard rather than saw Harvey Washburn join us. Many blinks later I was able to join the others in devoting my attention to the big canvas.
Well. The Monet positively glowed in the dense, lambent air; it gave off light like a lamp, vibrating with a palpable energy of its own. At the sight of it even I was impressed.
“Yes.” I admitted to Freya and Harvey, “I can see how precisely he placed all those little chunks of color, and I can see how sharp and solid the cathedral is under all that goo, but it’s like Solday, you know, it’s a heightened effect. The result is garish, really, it’s too much.”
“But this is a painting of midday,” Harvey said. “And as you can see, midday can get pretty garish.”
“But this is Terminator! The Greys have put a lot of talc in the air to make it look this way!”
“So what?” Freya demanded impatiently. “Stop thinking so much, Nathaniel. Just look at it. See it. Isn’t it beautiful? Haven’t you felt things look that way sometimes, seeing stone in sunlight?”
“Well…“ And, since
I am a strictly honest person, if I had said anything at all I would have had to admit that it did have a power about it. It drew the eye; it poured light onto us as surely as the beams of sunlight extending from the gates in the Dawn Wall to the curved side of the clear dome.
“Well?” Freya demanded.
“Well yes,” I said, “yes I see that cathedral front—I feel it. But there must have been quite a heat wave in old Rouen. It’s as if Monet had seen Terminator on Solday, the painting fits so well with this light.”
“No,” Freyn said, bit her left eye was squinted, a sign she is thinking.
Harvey said, “We make the conditions of light in Terminator, and so it is an act of the imagination, like this painting. You shouldn’t be surprised if there are similarities. We value this light because the old masters created it on their canvases.”
I shook my head, and indicated the brassy bedlam around us. “No. I believe we made this one up ourselves.”
Freya and Harvey laughed, with the giddiness that Solday inspires.
Suddenly a loud screech came from inside the villa. Freya hurried across the patio into the music room, and I followed her. Both of us, however, had forgotten the arrangements that Heidi made on Soldays to cast the brilliant light throughout her home, and as we ran past the silenced orchestra into a hallway we were blasted by light from a big mirror carefully placed in the villa’s central atrium. Screams still echoed from somewhere inside, but we could only stumble blindly through bright pulsing afterimages, retinal Monets if you will, while unidentified persons bowled into us, and mirrors crashed to the floor. And the atrium was raised, so that occasional steps up in the hallway tripped us. “Murder!” someone cried. “Murder! There he goes!” And with that a whole group of us were off down the halls like hounds—blind hounds—baying after unknown prey. A figure leaped from behind a mirror glaring white, and Freya and I tackled it just inside the atrium.
The Planet on the Table Page 4
