Elanore accepted Gustav's difficulties with what he sometimes found to be chillingly good grace. She was prepared to give him time. He could travel. She could develop new interests, burrow within the net as she'd always promised herself, and live in some entirely different place.
Gustav began to take long walks away from the house, along remote cliff top paths and across empty beaches, where he could be alone. The moon and the sun sometimes cast their silver ladders across the water. Soon, Gustav thought sourly, there'll be nowhere left to escape to. Or perhaps we will all pass on, and the gantries and the ugly virtual buildings that all look like the old Pompidou Centre will cease to be necessary; but for the glimmering of a few electrons, the world will revert to the way it was before people came. We can even extinguish the moon.
He also started to spend more time in the few parts of their rambling house that, largely because much of the stuff they wanted was handbuilt and took some time to order, Elanore hadn't yet had fitted out foreal. He interrogated the house's mainframe to discover the codes that would turn the reality engines off and on at will. In a room filled with tapestries, a long oak table, a vase of hydrangeas, pale curtains lifting slightly in the breeze, all it took was the correct gesture, a mere click of his fingers, and it would shudder and vanish, to be replaced by nothing but walls of mildewed plaster, the faint tingling sensation that came from the receding powerfield. There-then gone. Only the foreal view at the window remained the same. And now, click, and it all came back again. Even the fucking vase. The fucking flowers.
Elanore sought him out that day. Gustav heard her footsteps on the stairs, and knew that she'd pretend to be puzzled as to why he wasn't working in his studio.
"There you are," she said, appearing a little breathless after her climb up the stairs. "I was thinking-"
Finally scratching the itch that he realized had been tickling him for some time, Gustav clicked his fingers. Elanore-and the whole room, the table, the flowers, the tapestries-flickered off.
He waited-several beats, he really didn't know how long. The wind still blew in through the window. The powerfield hummed faintly, waiting for its next command. He clicked his fingers. Elanore and the room took shape again.
"I thought you'd probably override that," he said. "I imagined you'd given yourself a higher priority than the furniture."
"I could if I wished," she said. "I didn't think I'd need to do such a thing."
"No. I mean, you can just go somewhere else, can't you? Some other room in this house. Some other place. Some other continent..
"I keep telling you. It isn't like that."
"I know. Consciousness is fragile."
"And we're really not that different, Gus. I'm made of random droplets held in a force field-but what are you? Think about it. You're made of atoms, which are just quantum flickers in the foam of space, particles that aren't even particles at all .. ."
Gustav stared at her. He was remembering-he couldn't help it-that they'd made love the previous night. Just two different kinds of ghost; entwined, joining-he supposed that that was what she was saying. And what about my cock, Elanore, and all the stuff that gets emptied into you when we're tucking? What the hell do you do with that?
"Look, Gus, this isn't-"
"-And what do you dream at night, Elanore? What is it that you do when you pretend you're sleeping?"
She waved her arms in a furious gesture that Gustav almost recognized from the Elanore of old. "What the hell do you think I do, Gus? I try to be human. You think it's easy, do you, hanging on like this? You think I enjoy watching you flicker in and out?-which is basically what it's like for me every time you step outside these fields? Sometimes I just wish I ..."
Elanore trailed off there, glaring at him with emerald eyes. Go on, Gustav felt himself urging her. Say it, you phantom, shade, wraith, ghost. Say you wish you'd simply died. But instead, she made some internal command of her own, and blanked the room-and vanished.
It was the start of the end of their relationship.
Many guests came to visit their house in the weeks after that, and Elanore and Gustav kept themselves busy in the company of the dead and the living. All the old crowd, all the old jokes. Gustav generally drank too much, and made his presence unwelcome with the female ghosts as he decided that once he'd fucked the nano-droplets in one configuration, he might as well try fucking them in another. what the hell was it, Gus wondered, that made the living so reluctant to give up the dead, and the dead to give up the living?
In the few hours that they did spend together and alone at that time, Elanore and Gustav made detailed plans to travel. The idea was that they (meaning Elanore, with all the credit she was accumulating) would commission a ship, a sailing ship, traditional in every respect apart from the fact that the sails would be huge power receptors driven directly by the moon, and the spars would be the frame of a reality engine. Together, they would get away from all of this, and sail across the foreal oceans, perhaps even as far as Tahiti. Admittedly, Gustav was intrigued by the idea of returning to the painter who by now seemed to be the initial wellspring of his creativity. He was certainly in a suitably grumpy and isolationist mood to head off, as the poverty-stricken and desperate Gauguin had once done, in search of inspiration in the South Seas; and ultimately to his death from the prolonged effects of syphilis. But they never actually discussed what Tahiti would be like. Of course, there would be no tourists there now only eccentrics bothered to travel foreal these days. Gustav liked to think, in fact, that there would be none of the tall ugly buildings and the huge Cocacola signs that he'd once seen in an old photograph of Tahiti's main town of Papeete. There might-who knows?-not be any reality engines, even, squatting like spiders across the beaches and jungle. With the understandable way that the birth rate was now declining, there would be just a few natives left, living as they had once lived before Cook and Bligh and all the rest-even Gauguin with his art and his myths and his syphilis-had ruined it for them. That was how Gustav wanted to leave Tahiti.
Winter came to their cliff top house. The guests departed. The wind raised white crests across the ocean. Gustav developed a habit, which Elanore pretended not to notice, of turning the heating down; as if he needed chill and discomfort to make the place seem real. Tahiti, that ship of theirs, remained an impossibly long way off. There were no final showdowns-just this gradual drifting apart. Gustav gave up trying to make love to Elanore, just as he had given up trying to paint her. But they were friendly and cordial with each other. It seemed that neither of them wished to pollute the memory of something that had once been wonderful. Elanore was, Gustav knew, starting to become concerned about his failure to have his increasing signs of age treated, and his refusal to have a librarian; even his insistence on pursuing a career that seemed only to leave him depleted and damaged. But she never said anything.
They agreed to separate for a while. Elanore would head off to explore pure virtuality. Gustav would go back to foreal Paris and try to rediscover his art. And so, making promises they both knew they would never keep, Gustav and Elanore finally parted.
Gustav slid his unfinished Olympia back down amid the other canvases. He looked out of the window, and saw from the glow coming up through the gaps in the houses that the big reality engines were humming. The evening, or whatever other time and era it was, was in full swing.
A vague idea forming in his head, Gustav pulled on his coat and headed out from his tenement. As he walked down through the misty, smoggy streets, it almost began to feel like inspiration. Such was his absorption that he didn't even bother to avoid the shining bubbles of the reality engines. Paris, at the end of the day, still being Paris, the realities he passed through mostly consisted of one or another sort of cafe, but there were set amid dazzling souks, dank medieval alleys, yellow and seemingly watery places where swam strange creatures that he couldn't think to name. But his attention wasn't on it anyway.
The Musee D'Orsay was still kept in reasonably immaculate condi
tion beside the faintly luminous and milky Seine. Outside and in, it was well lit, and a trembling barrier kept in the air that was necessary to preserve its contents until the time came when they were fashionable again. Inside, it even smelled like an art gallery, and Gustav's footsteps echoed on the polished floors, and the robot janitors greeted him; in every way, and despite all the years since he'd last visited, the place was the same.
Gustav walked briskly past the statues and the bronze casts, past Ingres's big, dead canvases of supposedly voluptuous nudes. Then Moreau, early Degas, Corot, Millet ... Gustav did his best to ignore them all. For the fact was that Gustav hated art galleries-he was still, at least, a painter in that respect. Even in the years when he'd gone deliberately to such places, because he knew that they were good for his own development, he still liked to think of himself as a kind of burglar-get in, grab your ideas, get out again. Everything else, all the ahhs and the oohs, was for mere spectators ... He took the stairs to the upper floor. A cramp had worked its way beneath his diaphragm and his throat felt raw, but behind all of that there was this feeling, a tingling of power and magic and anger-a sense that perhaps ... Now that he was up amid the rooms and corridors of the great Impressionist works, he forced himself to slow down. The big gilt frames, the pompous marble, the names and dates of artists who had often died in anonymity, despair, disease, blindness, exile, near-starvation. Poor old Sisley's Misty Morning. Vincent van Gogh in a self-portrait formed from deep, sensuous, three-dimensional oils. Genuinely great art was, Gustav thought, pretty depressing for would-be great artists. If it hadn't been for the invisible fields that were protecting these paintings, he would have considered ripping the things off the walls, destroying them.
His feet led him back to the Manets, that woman gazing out at him from Deietiner sur l'Herbe, and then again from Olympia. She wasn't beautiful, didn't even look much like Elanore ... But that wasn't the point. He drifted on past the clamoring canvases, wondering if the world had ever been this bright, this new, this wondrously chaotic. Eventually, he found himself face-to-face with the surprisingly few Gauguins that the Musee D'Orsay possessed. Those bright slabs of color, those mournful Tahitian natives, which were often painted on raw sacking because it was all Gauguin could get his hands on in the hot stench of his tropical hut. He became wildly fashionable after his death, of course; the idea of destitution on a faraway isle suddenly stuck everyone as romantic. But it was too late for Gauguin by then. And too late-as his hitherto worthless paintings were snapped up by Russians, Danes, Englishmen, Americans-for these stupid, habitually arrogant Parisians. Gauguin was often poor at dealing with his shapes, but he generally got away with it. And his sense of color was like no one else's. Gustav remembered vaguely now that there was a nude that Gauguin had painted as his own lopsided tribute to Manet's Olympia-had even pinned a photograph of it to the wall of his hut as he worked. But, like most of Gauguin's other really important paintings, it wasn't here at the Musee D'Orsay, this supposed epicenter of Impressionist and Symbolist art. Gustav shrugged and turned away. He hobbled slowly back down through the galley.
Outside, beneath the moonlight, amid the nanosmog and the buzzing of the powerfields, Gustav made his way once again through the realities. An English tea house circa 1930. A Guermantes salon. If they'd been foreal, he'd have sent the cups and the plates flying, bellowed in the self-satisfied faces of the dead and living. Then he stumbled into a scene he recognized from the Mus6c D'Orsay, one, in fact, that had once been as much a cultural icon as Madonna's tits or a Beaties tune. Le Moulin de la Galette. He was surprised and almost encouraged to see Renoir's Parisian figures in their Sunday-best clothing, dancing under the trees in the dappled sunlight, or chatting at the surrounding benches and tables. He stood and watched, nearly smiling. Glancing down, saw that he was dressed appropriately in a rough woolien navy suit. He studied the figures, admiring their animation, the clever and, yes, convincing way that, through some trick of reality, they were composed ... Then he realized that he recognized some of the faces, and that they had also recognized him. Before he could turn back, he was called to and beckoned over.
"Gustav," Marcel's ghost said, sliding an arm around him, smelling of male sweat and Pernod. "Grab a chair. Sit down. Long time no see, eh?"
Gustav shrugged and accepted the brimming tumbler of wine that was offered. If it was foreal-which he doubted-this and a few more of the same might help him sleep tonight. "I thought you were in Venice," he said. "As the Doge."
Marcel shrugged. There were breadcrunibs on his mustache. "That was ages ago. Where have you been, Gustav?"
"Just around the corner, actually."
"Not still painting are you?"
Gustav allowed that question to be lost in the music and the conversation's ebb and flow. He gulped his wine and looked around, expecting to see Elanore at any moment. So many of the others were here-it was almost like old times. There, even, was Francine, dancing with a top-hatted man-so she clearly wasn't across the sky. Gustav decided to ask the girl in the striped dress who was nearest to him if she'd seen Elanore. He realized as he spoke to her that her face was familiar to him, but he somehow couldn't recollect her name-even whether she was living or a ghost. She shook her head, and asked the woman who stood leaning behind her. But she, also, hadn't seen Elanore; not, at least, since the times when Marcel was in Venice and when Francine was across the sky. From there, the question rippled out across the square. But no one, it seemed, knew what had happened to Elanore.
Gustav stood up and made his way between the twirling dancers and the lantern-strung trees. His skin tingled as he stepped out of the reality, and the laughter and the music suddenly faded. Avoiding any other such encounters, he made his way back up the dim streets to his tenement.
There, back at home, the light from the setting moon was bright enough for him to make his way through the dim wreckage of his life without falling-and the terminal that Elanore's ghost had reactivated still gave off a virtual glow. Swaying, breathless, Gustav paged down into his accounts, and saw the huge sum-the kind of figure that he associated with astronomy, with the distance of the moon from the earth, the earth from the sun-that now appeared there. Then he passed back through the terminal's levels, and began to search for Elanore.
But Elanore wasn't there.
Gustav was painting. When he felt like this, he loved and hated the canvas in almost equal measures. The outside world, foreal or in reality, ceased to exist for him.
A woman, naked, languid, and with a dusky skin quite unlike Elanore's, is lying upon a couch, half-turned, her face cupped in her hand that lies upon the primrose pillow, her eyes gazing away from the onlooker at something far off. She seems beautiful but unerotic, vulnerable yet clearly available, and self absorbed. Behind her-amid the twirls of bright yet gloomy decoration-lies a glimpse of stylized rocks under a strange sky, while two oddly disturbing figures are talking, and a dark bird perches on the lip of a balcony; perhaps a raven ... Although he detests plagiarism, and is working solely from memory, Gustav finds it hard to break away from Gauguin's nude on this canvas he is now painting. But he really isn't fighting that hard to do so, anyway. In this above all of Gauguin's great paintings, stripped of the crap and the despair and the self-justifying symbolism, Gauguin was simply right. So Gustav still keeps working, and the paint sometimes almost seems to want to obey him. He doesn't know or care at the moment what the thing will turn out like. If it's good, he might think of it as his tribute to Elanore; and if it isn't ... Well, he knows that, once he's finished this painting, he will start another one. Right now, that's all that matters.
Elanore was right, Gustav decides, when she once said that be was entirely selfish, and would sacrifice everything-himself included-just so that he could continue to paint. She was eternally right and, in her own way, she too was always searching for the next challenge, the next river to cross. Of course, they should have made more of the time that they had together, but as Elanore's ghost admitted at
that van Gogh cafe when she finally came to say good-bye, nothing could ever quite be the same.
Gustav stepped back from his canvas and studied it, eyes half-closed at first just to get the shape, then with a more appraising gaze. Yes, he told himself, and reminded himself to tell himself again later when he began to feel sick and miserable about it, this is a true work. This is worthwhile.
Then, and although there was much that he still had to do, and the oils were still wet, and he knew that he should rest the canvas, he swirled his brush in a blackish puddle of palette-mud and daubed the word NEVERMORE across the top, and stepped back again, wondering what to paint next.
Open Veins
Simon Ings
British writer Simon Ings is the author of four novels, City of the Iron Fish, Hot Head, Hotwired, and, most recently, Headlong. His short fiction has appeared in Interzone, New Worlds, Omni Online, and various anthologies both in and out of the genre, and he reviews regularly for New Scientist. He has recently completed Painkillers, a crime novel about autism set in London, where he lives and works.
In the unsettling story that follows, a government troubleshooter investigating a grisly and mysterious death learns that you can have too much of anything, even intimacy.
They told me she had died inside a sensory deprivation tank; the sort the hotwired use, twisting their sense of shape till they corkscrew into the virtual world. They told me, when they got to her, her lungs were full of brine pinked with her own blood. And they told me to erase it all.
They 'd already bagged her up by the time I got there. I wanted to see her face, but I didn't say anything; just watched as they lifted her into the ambulance. It was pointless; you can't learn anything from a shroud.
They closed the doors and turned the vehicle around. Behind the driver's cab there were no windows, no name of any hospital, no red cross; just army drab, and hazard lights front and rear. It looked like one of those unmarked vehicles you see on highways sometimes, bearing toxins from one nameless compound to another. It was slung so low, pebbles and splinters of driftwood pinged and scraped its belly. It disappeared a moment behind the hangar and turned away, up the long route past the power station. You could watch it go for miles if you wanted to, it was so flat here, and the sky was grey like God had forgot it.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection Page 85
