The Light That Never Was

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  “But it’ll never take the place of the Zrilund fountain,” Eritha heard a cool voice murmur. She turned and found another tourist smiling at her—Mora Seerl, the art critic on sabbatical. “Good evening, Miss Korak. We met at Garffi—ah, you remember me. It’s a pleasure to see you again. On this world one doesn’t often meet an artist in disguise.”

  “Or an art critic,” Eritha said.

  Mora laughed merrily. “But isn’t this as appropriate a costume for a critic as any other?”

  “At least it’s a costume that excuses anything, which is why I wear it. I take it that you’ve been to Zrilund.”

  “Months ago. It was the first colony I visited, and I’ve known its great paintings for so long that it was like going home—to a sadly deteriorated home, to be sure, but none the less home.”

  “How do you like Virrab?”

  “It’s wonderfully scenic, and I suppose there’ll be a Virrab vogue for a time, but to me the place is dead simply because it’ll never come alive.”

  “I rather liked it,” Eritha said.

  “An artist would. It’s new and different, and therefore exciting, and it presents the challenge of capturing all that newness in paint. The critic or tourist doesn’t look at it that way. Virrab has the only untamed nature I’ve ever seen that is utterly sterilized. Keep to the path. No stopping except at official lookouts. No standing between the yellow lines or you’ll spoil the view for the working artists. I miss Zrilund and the other resorts where you can look over the artists’ shoulders. To a critic, just wandering about in those places is a priceless education. You can study a scene and then instantly see it through the eyes of a dozen artists and then look again and think what you might do with it yourself if only you could. On Virrab the artist is behind a bush, and if he’s aware of you at all he’s waiting for you to go away. In time you resent that, or at least I do.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Eritha admitted. “Of course the Virrab artists are among the best on Donov, and the best artists feel very little obligation to entertain tourists. The artists at Zrilund invite interruptions from tourists, which may have something to do with their being the worst on Donov.”

  “I doubt that they are. It’s just that those poor souls have got themselves into a frightful rut, painting and repainting scenes that were exhausted years ago. All they need is a rousing collision with reality, but the only reality on Zrilund is already petrified. In a sense, all Donovian art needs a collision with reality. All of it is dying. Virrab is just a glitteringly artificial attempt to resuscitate something better left to perish in peace.”

  Eritha said indignantly, “You can’t believe that!”

  “Name the great artists working on Donov,” Mora Seerl said. “You can’t. There are lots of first-rate craftsmen—there are even some at Zrilund—but the greatness is gone forever. Donov has nothing left but tradition, and the tradition is one of subject matter only. Even the most casual student of Donovian art notices that at once—the Zrilund fountain treated in a bewildering variety of styles, for example. Once that subject matter is exhausted, and it’s already been exploited to death, those artists had better take their styles elsewhere. Eventually they will.”

  “And—Virrab?”

  “New subject matter, but there are no more great artists on Donov to make a tradition of it. As an art center it won’t last a decade. It may last forever as a charming tourist resort. I’ve no knowledge at all as to the criteria for tourist resorts.”

  Eritha indicated the fountain. “Someone will make a subject of that.”

  “Certainly. It won’t have the appeal of the Zrilund fountain. There can’t be more than one original, and it’s a rather blatant imitation, but it’ll be painted.” She looked about her. “I wish it were being painted now. I miss the artists. When I see them perspiring in the hot sun attempting to give permanence to the most fleeting of visions, I think perhaps I’m catching a glimpse of what human aspiration is all about. I consider it prophetic that Virrab advertises itself as an art resort and yet keeps both art and artists virtually invisible. Donov is well on its way to becoming just another popular vacation world.”

  “I find it hard to accept that.”

  “Oh, people interested in art will always come here, both to see the splendid permanent collections and to see what remains of the things the great artists painted. But they won’t come to see artists painting those things, because there won’t be any artists. There’s a limit to the number of Virrabs that any world can promote, and Virrabs have very short life-spans. They are places without feeling. The only art subject with feeling is people, and Donov’s artists are afraid to paint people.”

  “You aren’t going to the island again?”

  Mora shook her head. “I have three more days here. I haven’t decided what I’ll do—behave like a normal art-hating tourist, I suppose. How about you?”

  “This is my second trip, so I’ve already seen everything. I’m just an escort for two charming middle-aged women.”

  “You poor thing!”

  “So I don’t know what I’m going to do, except that I’ll try to escape whenever I can manage it—which is what I’m doing now.”

  “How’d you like a ride into the country?” Mora asked.

  “What’s there to see?”

  “Absolutely nothing, but we may find some artists. I’ve heard that some of the Zrilund artists came down here when Zrilund was closed to tourists. I’ve been toying with the idea of hiring a transport of some kind and trying to find them. Would you like to come along?”

  “I’d love to,” Eritha said.

  In the morning Eritha persuaded Lilya and the countess to eschew the private tour Jorno had planned for them and join a rollicking crowd of tourists from the main resort. She saw them off for Virrab, and then she climbed into Mora Seed’s rented transport, the driver nodded agreeably, and they followed a winding road through the parklike grounds of Jorno’s meticulously groomed estate. The road looped around Jorno’s new transportation center, and they emerged into the bleak Rinoly countryside.

  Mora looked about her with distaste. “Maybe my friends were having their little joke. They swore that the Zrilund artists came down here. I didn’t think to ask what the artists were supposed to be doing. Surely not painting—I’ve never seen anything so inartistic.”

  After a few minutes of barren, humped hills and decrepit farm buildings, enlivened only occasionally by a plot of the waxy, pink leaves of tarff, Jorno’s fiber plant, they topped a hill and floated down to the small village of Ruil. On Eritha’s previous visit it, too, had looked decrepit and abandoned. Now the old stone buildings were obviously in use, the few shops appeared to be favored with customers, the streets were tidy, and the village oval had entertained a market as recently as that morning.

  Mora spoke to the driver, and the transport settled to a halt. She looked about her and asked perplexedly, “What artists?”

  “I’ll ask someone,” Eritha volunteered.

  Mora got out with her. They walked together to the nearest shop, and at the doorway they halted in tense, staring incredulity. Finally they moved inside and continued to stare.

  The artists were using it as a sepulcher. There were paintings everywhere—on improvised easels, leaned against the room’s rickety furnishings, stacked in haphazard piles—and the walls were filled with them.

  “Incredible!” Mora exclaimed.

  Eritha was gazing awesomely at a large fabric entitled, “Market at Ruil.” The dilapidated, squalid village surrounded dilapidated, squalid people in a scene where the buyers obviously had little money and the sellers just as obviously had little to sell, and those juxtaposed facts gave every transaction a monumental importance.

  Mora suddenly burst into laughter. “Souvenirs!” she gasped. “They’re still painting souvenirs, but now the souvenirs have a message! It’s incredible!”

  Eritha said nothing—one art lesson she had learned well concerned the inutility
of arguments about art—but her entire being wanted to scream, “Beautiful! Beautiful!” She moved breathlessly from painting to painting. Here was the bleak countryside, where a weathered farmer stared disconsolately at a parched field and meditated the nothing of the coming harvest. There a mother, as unfertile as the ground she tilled, ignored the undernourished child beside her who played feebly with the undernourished grain. In a painting of heroic dimensions the cheerless, wasted landscape lay resigned under a stormy sky, awaiting punishment, and in the foreground a threadbare child struggled frantically to lead an enormous wrranel to shelter. It was a stark masterpiece. It was magnificent.

  And it could not be. These were Zrilund artists, the despised souvenir painters who had nothing to say and said it so badly. They had been trapped between the mawkish taste of the tourists and the heavy weight of outmoded tradition and forced to perform anew something that had already been done better ten thousand times.

  Now they were liberated—their talents were liberated. They were free to paint what they saw and felt. More important, they sensed the high drama of a barren struggle for existence, and they were painting what the unfortunate natives of Rinoly felt.

  Mora was moving from painting to painting with renewed peals of laughter and enlarging her comments about souvenirs with a message. “What do you think?” she asked finally.

  “I like them,” Eritha said defiantly.

  Mora regarded her with interest. “How odd! But then, you’re a rather bad artist.”

  “Extremely bad,” Eritha agreed. “At Garffi the artists said I painted almost as ineptly as a critic.”

  She was retracing her steps, looking at the signatures and finding many that she recognized. She gave an exclamation of delight when she saw “W’iil” scrawled on some of the larger paintings. “Dear Todd!” she said. “He finally found subjects that made him forget his theories. And look at the prices! If I were wealthy I’d start a Rinoly Museum of Art.”

  “I can’t imagine myself wealthy enough to do a silly thing like that,” Mora said.

  “If I had any money at all I’d start my own collection, but I’ve been living a whole quarter in advance. Damn!”

  A man had come in quietly, a neighboring shopkeeper. Mora asked, “Where are the artists?”

  “Out painting.”

  “Out where?”

  The shopkeeper gestured at the horizon. “They move around a lot.”

  “Do you sell many of these paintings?” Eritha asked.

  “Ain’t sold none yet.”

  When they returned to the transport, the shopkeeper trailed after them. “If you’re looking for artists you won’t find them in that,” he said. “Them back lanes aren’t big enough for that thing, and farmers hereabouts won’t tolerate people driving over their fields. You’ll have to walk.”

  That day Eritha developed sore feet for the first time in her life and learned to profoundly appreciate the Donovian tourist costume. They tramped narrow lanes, they stopped at time-eroded dwellings to ask questions of elderly, taciturn farmers, they took wrong turnings, they walked in inadvertent circles, they retraced their steps.

  Now and again they came upon small groups of working artists. The first such group was gathered about the comer of a crumbling stone wall where a small boy struggled to milk a wrranel, and there Eritha found Todd W’iil. He yelped his surprise, greeted her with a hug, and proudly led her to his unfinished fabric.

  “It’s wonderful,” Eritha said. “I saw some of your work in town, and it’s all wonderful. But what are you doing here?”

  Todd scratched his head fretfully. “Well, there’s this artist Wes Alof, and he thought we ought to come down here and do something about Jaward Jorno on account of Jorno and his meszs ruined Zrilund.”

  “Do what about Jaward Jorno?”

  “I don’t rightly remember,” W’iil said impatiently.

  Mora was examining the unfinished paintings, and Eritha waited apprehensively for a sneering remark about souvenirs with a message. Instead she began to gush an enthusiasm that Eritha found sickening.

  “Anyway,” W’iil went on, “there was nothing to do in Zrilund, no tourists at all, so I came along. When we got here Alof told us to pretend to work while he got things organized, so we started painting, and—we’re painting!” He beamed at her. “Everyone is painting.”

  “Even Wes Alof?”

  “Sure. He’s not much good except for human figures, but he does them pretty well.”

  “Know an artist named Arnen Brance?”

  “Sure. He’s good. He’s better than me.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Around somewhere. He’s staying in the next village south, but I see him now and then.”

  “And—he’s painting?”

  “Everyone is painting! We’re painting as early as there’s light to see by, and as late, and we’re finding things to paint that we didn’t know existed. Brance has a word for it, he calls it ‘the drama of life.’ Everywhere I look I see that and I want to paint it. Friend of Alof’s—not an artist—comes around every now and then and says the plan’s ready and we can get moving against Jorno, and we tell him what he can do with his plan.”

  “Are you selling any paintings?”

  “There’s no one around here to buy them. They’ll sell when we take them where the tourists are—they’ll even sell in the big galleries. We’ll work here as long as our money lasts, and it don’t cost much to live in Rinoly.”

  Eritha and Mora finally made their way back to the transport. With the driver consulting a map they drove through a series of decrepit little villages, all of them showing signs of the unexpected prosperity wrought by artists spending Wes Alof’s money. Rulong, Reroff, Vuln, Wef—the villages were blurred facsimiles of the first one they visited. In each of them the artists had taken over an abandoned building as a sepulcher, and Eritha wandered through these in bewildered wonderment.

  Between villages Mora led her on exhaustive tramps through the narrow lanes in search of artists, with whom she delightedly exchanged verbal jabs and matched theories of art.

  “Do you still like the paintings?” she asked Eritha abruptly.

  “Yes. It’s an entirely new approach to art—new for Donov—and it’s amazing the way these artists are inspired by it. I even feel as though I’d like to paint something myself!”

  “I don’t, but I enjoy watching the artists.”

  Eritha flexed her aching feet. “The only artists I want to watch now are those I can see from the road.”

  “Just keep telling yourself that somewhere in the wilds of Rinoly is the one artist capable of raising this art above the level of souvenirs, and you may find him. That’s what makes criticism exciting.”

  They drove and walked through a landscape so repetitive that Eritha had the sensation of passing the same bleak, rocky hills and the same moldy, crumbling buildings again and again.

  Suddenly, where the road forked to embrace a village, they came upon a small crowd. It was the first time that day that they had seen more than two people at a time in a village street. Mora signaled the chauffeur to stop, and they dismounted and limped toward it curiously.

  Long before they reached it they heard strange, hoarse, whispered utterances, monstrously amplified and tossed to the fitful Rinoly winds. Then they saw the long, silken neck, the sleek, gleaming, golden fur, and they began to comprehend the whispered phrases: “The smallest quickening of being is no less precious to the creature who possesses it. Life is life’s greatest gift and life’s greatest responsibility. The life that destroys life points the way to its own destruction.”

  “What is that?” Mora demanded.

  “Franff,” Eritha said.

  “The animal aid artist?”

  Eritha nodded.

  “We have two of his paintings at home, in the Qwant Museum. Who’s the old crone?”

  “Anna Lango.”

  Mora stared at her. “That old hag? Excuse me, but I know her face a
s well as I know my own, her young face, she modeled for so many artists. No artist ever used a lovelier prop.”

  “Every life is a monument to all life,” Franff whispered.

  Mora Seerl shook her head bewilderedly. “What a day this has been!”

  That night Eritha placed a call to her grandfather—the World Manager’s communications were equipped with a sensor that screamed a protest when an unauthorized party attempted to monitor—and asked him to connect her with Neal Wargen.

  “First,” she told Wargen, “you can forget your man Brance.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He’s discovered that he’s an artist, and he’s much too busy painting to spy. Second, you were right about someone trying to manipulate the Zrilund artists, and you can forget that, too. It’s a fiasco. All of the artists are painting furiously, and they’re no more interested in sabotaging Jorno than Brance is in spying on them.”

  “What have they found in Rinoly that’s worth painting?”

  “I haven’t the time to explain it. Third, make a note. Mora Seerl. Allegedly an art critic on sabbatical. Find out if her visitor’s or student’s permit is in order. Find out if she has any connection with a transport with registration 5494682, which she says she rented for the day, along with a driver. There’s no place in Rinoly where one can rent vehicles and drivers except through Jorno, and he doesn’t offer transports. His chauffeurs are in uniform, which this driver wasn’t.”

  “Slow down!” Wargen exclaimed. “Mora Seerl, a visiting art critic. What about her?”

  “She’s as phony as that forged Ghord that Harnasharn hangs in his office once a week to remind him of his one mistake. I’ve met her twice. The first time, at Garffi, she was from Kurnu. Today she was from Qwant. She knew my name, which she didn’t get either here or at Garffi. She has a good patter of art talk, but she knows nothing at all about art. She goes on and on about how the only art subject with feeling is people, and when she encounters some really remarkable paintings of people she has no awareness that this is what she’s been talking about.”