The Light That Never Was

The Light That Never Was

Lloyd Biggle Jr.

There were riots on the nearby world of Sornor, and on Mestil the renowned Galactic Zoological Gardens had been closed to protect the animals from an enraged populace. Gerald Gwyll found the news irritating—not because he cared what happened on Sornor or Mestil, hut because he had been vicariously exposed to the same lengthy report and commentary three times that day, on three successive rocket trips, by news-grubbing seat partners who kept the volume on full while Gwyll was trying to read.

But the antipathy of man for beast, with all of its vice versa implications, seemed remote and irrelevant when Gwyll stepped from the underwater ferry into the dazzling clarity of the bright sunlight that flooded the island of Zrilund.

A long, zigzagging stairway led to the top of the cliff, and when Gwyll reached it he turned and looked back. The last of the tourists were huffing their way up the steps, and behind them the white pier lay abandoned, a gleaming finger directing the eye to an empty horizon. Beside it the ferry rested motionless on the flat, crystalline blue of a somnolent sea. The sky was a brilliant, deep azure; the curving chalk cliff a blinding white under the slanted rays of the late afternoon sun.

It was the light that halted him there, where perspiring, complaining tourists bumped him as they struggled past. Magnificent light. The scene fairly screamed, “Paint me!” and nine artists—he took the time to count them—were doing just that. Their easels stood in a row on the rise of ground beyond the wide graveled walk that led to the stairs. Their turbaned heads bobbed comically as they worked.

A hand tugged at Gwyll’s arm. He looked down at a small boy, of earnest, freckled face and pleading voice. “Take you to see the artists, sir?”

“I’ve seen artists,” Gwyll said sourly. “I can see artists now.”

“Lots of artists,” the boy persisted. “And the famous places. The fountain, the mushroom church, the philpp trees—”

“Do you know where Bottom Farm is?”

The boy made a face. “That’d be way over in the swamp.”

“It would be,” Gwyll said in grim agreement. “How do I get there?”

The boy jerked a thumb toward the low pavilion where the tourists were congregating. “Hire a wrranel ’n cart, I guess. It’ll be expensive, ’n you’d best hurry. None of them drivers is gonna wanna take you to Bottom Farm if he can get a load of tourists to haul around town.”

Gwyll eyed the carts skeptically. One at a time they lurched away, passengers clinging precariously to their hard benches. The wrranel was an ungainly, horned beast that seemed to take two jerking steps backward for three forward, and the rattling carts jounced and swayed as they bumped over the rough stone paving.

Gwyll shuddered. “How far is it to Bottom Farm?”

“It’d be six, seven miles, at least.”

“At least,” Gwyll echoed. “I’d like to get there today and with my stomach intact, so I think I won’t hire a cart. Are you game for a seven-mile hike?”

“I dunno. Would you be there long? It’d be dark before we got back.”

“You wouldn’t have to wait for me—just show me the way. Do you know a man named Arnen Brance?”

The boy shook his head.

“His address is ‘Bottom Farm,’ and I have to see him today.” He took a coin from his pocket and flipped it into the air. The boy caught it. “Down payment,” Gwyll said. “Five more like it if you’ll take me to Bottom Farm.”

“I better ask Ma,” the boy said, fingering the coin wistfully.

“Do that. I’ll go with you as far as the fountain and wait for you there.”

They gave the waiting wrranel carts and importuning drivers a wide berth and strolled along a narrow street between old stone buildings, Gwyll recognized it at once. He’d seen it in a hundred good paintings and more that were intolerably bad than he cared to remember. Several of the latter were on display in shopwindows, along with paintings of other Zrilund subjects and a clutter of souvenirs: cheap claptrap for tourists who didn’t know anything about art but knew what they wanted to pay. Gwyll gazed aghast at a particularly lurid rendering of the Zrilund fountain and turned away with a shudder.

“I guess you don’t like art,” the boy chuckled.

The fact was that Gwyll loved art—good art—and because he knew that there would be little good art without the striving of a great many artists to become great, he possessed a benign tolerance for sincere mediocrity. He respected any painting, even a bad painting, that was crafted with integrity. It was only artists that he hated.

The street turned sharply, widened, and separated into two looping branches to embrace the carefully contrived greenery of the town oval. Wrranel carts stood in rows about the perimeter, and tourists milled everywhere, almost, but not quite, outnumbering the artists. For the first time in his life Gwyll grasped the awesome significance of an old Donovian curse:
An epidemic of artists
. Zrilund was said to have originated the expression, but a hundred other towns and villages of the world of Donov claimed it or something like it: an epidemic, a blight, an affliction, a scourge of artists; a pollution of artists; a seizure of artists; a rot of artists.

They worked with frenzied movements, stretching, craning their necks or stepping aside for an unobstructed view and then darting back to their easels with poised sprayers. Most wore the traditional artist’s turban, but a few hardy individualists were bareheaded under the hot sun. One panoramic glance at the paintings in progress revealed to Gwyll every technique he had ever heard of, every type of equipment even including knives and brushes, and every school of painting.

Then he glimpsed a Hash of color and forgot the artists.

Fountain at Zrilund!
Several great artists had painted it, and thousands of bad artists, and paintings, copies of paintings, photographs, prints, and filmstrips were available wherever pictures were sold. Harnasharn Galleries never had less than a dozen inexpensive originals in stock, for not even Harnasharn could afford to ignore the tourist trade.

But the greatest of the paintings, even Ghord’s “Fountain Lights,” paled beside the breath-taking, chromatic turbulence of the original. Scientists had tested and analyzed and experimented and explained but never quite accounted for the fact that the rare combination of mosses and fungi and algae in and about the Zrilund fountain turned its quiet mist into brilliant, swirling color.

The boy’s shout was lost in the din set up by laughing tourists and snarling artists. He darted away; Gwyll stood motionless, stunned by the overwhelming beauty of blending, ever-changing colors. They made him aware as never before of an intrinsic weakness in even the greatest painting: only by implication could it show change and movement.

Suddenly the boy was tugging at his sleeve. “Ma says okay,” he shouted.

Gwyll turned away reluctantly.

A seven-mile walk into a swamp seemed a fitting climax to a day when frustration had relentlessly piled onto frustration. It began with a crudely crated painting that arrived in the galleries’ morning shipment. Gwyll was accustomed to hastily unpacking such unsolicited and unauthorized offerings, taking one brief look, and repacking them. One look at this one had sent him shouting for Lester Harnasharn, and Harnasharn took one look and said, “Get him. Today.”

Gwyll caught the next rocket, and seven thousand miles later he was talking with an artist named Gof Milfro, in the resort and art colony of Verna Plai, in Donov’s southern mountains.

Milfro hadn’t painted the picture. A onetime friend of his named Brance, an artist who’d taken up farming on Zrilund, had sent the painting to him and asked him to get an authoritative opinion on it if he knew anyone capable of rendering one. Old Harnasharn had once done him a favor—Harnasharn had succored thousands of artists in times of dire necessity, even deplorably bad ones. Unlike Gwyll, old Lester liked artists. So Milfro, asked to obtain an opinion on what was obviously a very good painting in a radically imaginative style, had sent it to Harnasharn by way of returning a favor. No, he didn’t think Brance had painted it. He hadn’t any idea who the artist was—didn’t know anyone who painted that well—wasn’t even sure anyone
could
paint that well, the thing had made him drool just to look at it. If Harnasharn was able to make a good thing of it, well, fine, and being as he was behind in his rent and not eating regularly…

Gwyll gave him an advance against a possible commission in the event that Harnasharn made a good thing of it. He returned to Donov Metro for further instructions and found Lester Harnasharn sitting where Gwyll had left him, gazing at the. painting.

“What’d you come back here for?” Harnasharn demanded. “Get over to Zrilund and get that artist under contract. Move!”

Gwyll had moved, but first he took the time to look up Arnen Brance in the Harnasharn files. The galleries maintained a permanent file on every artist who’d ever exhibited on Donov and a great many who hadn’t, and one glance at the strips convinced Gwyll that Brance wasn’t the artist he wanted.

Harnasharn agreed. “Adequate craftsmanship, no imagination. With a different approach he might have gone far, but all he could do was slavishly photograph things in paint.”

“So why go to Zrilund?” Gwyll asked. “The artist could have sent the painting to Brance from halfway across the galaxy. I can place a call—”

“Go!” Harnasharn thundered. Then he added kindly, “Look here, my boy. The galaxy doesn’t produce a dozen really great artists in a generation. This may be one of them. Don’t come back until you can bring a signed contract and every painting he has—even if you have to go halfway across the galaxy to do it.”

Gwyll went. Another four thousand miles by rocket, and he arrived at Nor Harbor shortly after noon and learned to his horror that the only transportation to the island of Zrilund before morning was the underwater tourist ferry. He had an hour wait and then a tedious and sweltering boat ride, with the ferry prowling about the ocean Boor in pursuit of exotic curtains of exquisitely colored sea slime, while perspiring adults and children clambered over Gwyll in the hope of seeing something interesting and the pilot’s voice droned on tirelessly, “On your right, ladies and gentlemen, an unusually large specimen of the
liffu
, a strange aquatic reptile that carries its young in large bubbles attached to its spine. If you’ll look closely—”

And now a seven-mile walk into a swamp, and with no assurance that Brance would know whom the artist was or even that he would be home. The previous frustrations could have been a mere warming up for what was to follow, but at least the awesome beauty of the Zrilund fountain provided a measure of compensation.

They turned their backs on tourists and artists and hurried off, first along the narrow Street of Artisans, now a decrepit row of rooming houses and boarded-up shops, but fifty years earlier a picturesque way made famous by Etesff’s celebrated painting. They passed the mushroom church, which both Garnow and Morvert had immortalized, and walked out the long avenue bordered by misshapen philpp trees that Zornillo had once caught in just the right light and a thousand frustrated imitators hadn’t.

Zrilund was no longer an artists’ colony, though no local resident would have admitted it. It had suffered from prolonged overexposure, and its great days were gone forever. It survived precariously on its past reputation, a shoddy tourist center, a haven for picture hacks, and Gwyll considered the paintings produced there degrading to the cheap souvenirs that were sold beside them. The serious artists had gone elsewhere. It seemed a shame that Zrilund’s perfect light was not being put to better use, but Gwyll was forced to admit that he would find it difficult to get excited over yet another rendition of these familiar Zrilund scenes, however masterful.

The stone road abruptly became dirt and gradually diminished to a cart track between tall hedges. For long stretches it was so narrow that the prudent driver would have walked ahead to make certain that the way was clear before venturing a hill or a turn. The boy skipped along at Gwyll’s side, chattering merrily; Gwyll walked in silence and pondered the gloomy landscape. The road meandered, rose and fell, but the general direction was downward from the steep bluff on which the town lay. They left the hedges behind, and Gwyll looked out across dismally flat, waterlogged land that wore a pale, delicate, bluish fringe of vegetation.

“What do they grow here?” he asked.

“They
try
to grow kruckul,” the boy answered indifferently.

Gwyll had never heard of it and wasn’t interested enough to ask what it was. He searched vainly for a glimmer of the quality he had seen in the painting—the fantastic shimmering of light and color, where the trees, or something like trees, gleamed phosphorescent, where the sky was a turbulent mist, and the grotesque landscape hung suspended over clear, motionless, non-reflecting pools. He saw only bleak, soggy fields. He sighed, wondering where his pilgrimage would take him next.

They walked on. The road became sticky, oozing water filled their footprints just behind them, and they began to slip and slide in the bubbling mud. Scum-covered water filled the ditches. The fields were undivided, even unmarked, but Gwyll could not imagine anyone caring where one farm ended and another began. The dwellings were hovels perched in solitary squalor wherever the ground humped a few feet above the sodden plain.