The Light That Never Was (4 page)

The mural’s fame grew. Tourists began to trudge up the hill for a look at it. They found the walk as healthful and stimulating as the mineral baths, and they came again—and again. The caterer’s business expanded almost beyond his credibility. He did not overlook the source of his prosperity, however; when the enormous main room became so crowded with tourists that there was no place for the artists, he added the annex, reserved it for artists only, and served food and adde at cost—which inspired the artists to continue and expand the mural. At both ends of the room it turned corners, turned again, and met in the center of the opposite wall where a crowd of angry tourists was shown pursuing wrranel-mounted, terrified artists.

A firm dealing in art reproductions heard of the mural and sent a representative, A contract was negotiated, and soon the caterer began receiving royalty warrants. Whenever one arrived, he chalked up the amount in the artists’ annex and served free food and adde until it was exhausted. His competitors did not complain; the number of tourists taking daily walks up to the artists’ colony had enhanced everyone’s profits.

As for the man who started it all, Gof Milfro had his seat of honor and, like the others, free food and adde whenever there was a royalty warrant. Otherwise he borrowed and begged and had an unexpectedly rare windfall when a tourist paid him a pittance for a painting that had required a month’s work. Somehow he survived and continued to work tirelessly—ragged,hungry, uncomfortable, but for all that indomitably cheerful and irrepressibly optimistic. He was an artist.

On this day, despite his pleasure in distributing the Harnasharn largess, he was a worried artist. As he took his seat of honor at the end of the long table, he asked, “Is there any news from Sornor?” He got no answer, so he raised his voice and asked again. Other than a momentary lapse in the conversation, the only response came from a young artist who called, “What’s with Sornor?”

“I’m worried about Franff,” Milfro said.

“Who’s Franff?”

“More of an artist than you’ll ever be.”

“Oh—that animal.”

“Animaloid!” Milfro snapped. “Which by definition is what you probably think you are, an intelligent animal.”

He was prepared to enlarge upon that, but an altercation at the door caught his attention. A woman in tourist costume was attempting to enter, and a waiter firmly blocked her way. “Artists only, ma’am.”

“I only wanted to speak with Mr. Milfro,” she said.

Milfro got to his feet. “Yes? Oh, it’s you.”

The waiter moved aside, and she stepped into the annex, a tall, dark woman of flashing eyes, appealing smile, and indeterminate age. She looked about curiously and exclaimed, “No murals? It’s very generous of you artists to beautify the building for others before you do it for yourselves.”

“Just because we’re artists doesn’t mean we like art,” Milfro growled. “Did you get to see it?”

“Yes. For two uninterrupted hours! I’m on my way back to Donov Metro, and I wanted to thank you before I leave.”

Milfro removed his turban, bowed slightly, and said, “You’re entirely welcome—I don’t remember your name.”

“Mora Seerl.” She spoke to the other artists. “I’m a visiting critic from Adjus. This is my sabbatical year, and I’m studying at the Institute and visiting as many of the art colonies as possible. I wanted to do a detailed study of your mural, but every time I came here the place was so crowded I couldn’t get near it. Finally I told Mr. Milfro about the trouble I was having, and he spoke to the caterer, and the caterer let me come in after closing.”

“Best caterer in the universe,” Milfro murmured. “What’d you think of the mural?”

“It’s charming! I haven’t seen so many portraits in one place since I arrived on Donov. I had the impression that Donovian artists don’t know how to paint portraits. Several of your tourists are priceless, and of course the whole concept is absolutely ingenious. Unfortunately, all of that wall space, and all of that paint, and the tremendous amount of effort and skill involved in applying it, are aimed at showing pictorially the two types that among all the people of Donov are the most utterly lacking in pictorial qualities—artists and tourists.”

She thanked Milfro again, delivered a smile of farewell that embraced everyone in the room, and rushed away. Milfro resumed his chair. “An artist can’t even have a joke,” he announced disgustedly, “without some stupid critic trying to take it seriously.”

Jharge Roln had come in and seated himself at the far end of the table. He called to Milfro, “About Franff—”

“What about him?”

“Know an artist named Om Evar?”

Milfro nodded.

“I hear he has some kind of a connection with one of the riot worlds. don’t know which one, but it might be Sornor.”

“Thanks,” Milfro said. “I’ll go see him now.”

The ramshackle dwelling where Evar lived was the spiritual sibling or every other ramshackle dwelling in the colony. Milfro clumped up three flights of creaking stairs to the attic, where Evar enjoyed the unusual luxury of private quarters and even had a weatherproof skylight improvised out of a hole in the roof.

The door was ajar. Evar sat morosely in front of an easel, tears streaking his face. Milfro stepped into the room and stared at the painting on the easel.

“What’s
that?
”

“A
fvronut
,” Evar blubbered.

“Of course it is. What’s a fvronut?”

“Animaloid on Stovii.”

“Oh.” Milfro regarded the painting with interest. “Really, that’s nicely done. That’s quite the best thing you’ve ever done. You might he very good at portraits. I doubt that there’s a market for this one, though—not many tourists would want a painting of a hideous, earless, long-snouted, toothless, leather-skinned—”

“It’s not hideous!” Evar shouted hotly.

“It’s not? Excuse me, of course it’s not. Beauty in the eye of the beholder, ugliness likewise. It really is the best thing you’re done.”

“It’s the most beautiful creature I’ve ever known,” Evar said, blubbering again. “It’s more than my equal, or yours, and it saved my life. If it’s ugly in the painting that’s my fault. I wasn’t—” He sniffed. “I wasn’t equal to the subject. Now it’s dead. The riots. I just heard.”

“But it isn’t,” Milfro said. “You have the painting, you have your memories—”

“No. It’s dead.”

“Look. I have an animaloid friend on Sornor. Franff. The best friend any young artist ever had and a great artist himself. The situation on Stovii couldn’t be worse than that on Sornor. I’m afraid Franff has been killed, but he’s not dead. He’ll live as long as he’s remembered, and no one who knew him will ever forget him.”

Evar sniffed again. “If you don’t mind—”

“Sure thing,” Milfro said. “Sorry to have bothered you. I’ll close the door.”

He did, and then he opened it. “Say—if that fvronut was better than either of us, and beautiful besides, and saved your life—why do you keep calling it ‘it?’ ”

He closed the door again, very gently, leaving Evar staring after him.

A sheaf of riot reports arrived from M’Don, and Neal Wargen, the World Manager’s First Secretary, had planned on devoting a full day to them. Instead he found himself sourly contemplating a call for help from a precinct police commander. A smuggler was leaving a glittering trail of illegal jewelry across an inland province of the southern continent.

Wargen controlled his temper and asked for a data report on
persons—missing and surplus
. On his way to the port he read the tabulated facts concerning everyone on the world of Donov known to be where he wasn’t expected or known not to be where he was expected, and the sad tale of a tourist missing from a chartered tour group caught his attention. On a world specializing in tourists and vacationers, a lost tourist represented an affront to the national honor, but a smuggler eager to put distance between himself and customs officials might not be aware of that.

Wargen caught the next rocket to Port Ornal, the southern continent’s spaceport, where he picked up the file on the missing tourist. From there he flew to the precinct capital, and a few inquiries in the role of an importer looking for outlets for hand-fashioned trinkets quickly satisfied him that the smuggler was still in the hinterland. He followed his trail posing as a tourist shopping for distinctive presents for his aging mother on the world of Lycol.

Outsiders frequently erred in assuming that fortunes could be reaped in smuggled jewelry on a mineral-poor world where jewelry was inordinately expensive. The frugal Donovians mostly regarded such trinkets as something to be sold to tourists. They rarely purchased any, and those who did, and who wore the jewelry, were talked about. The missing tourist’s trail was as easy to follow as a wrranel stampede.

By midafternoon Wargen had caught up with the culprit, a shabby little peddler who had somehow maneuvered false-bottom luggage through customs. Wargen dispatched an anonymous tip to the local police, waited unobtrusively until he saw the peddler arrested and his satchel confiscated as evidence, and hurried back to Port Ornal. He returned to Donov Metro on the late afternoon rocket, stopped at his office to dictate a report, and finally reached home two hours late.

The Wargen mansion stood at the head of a small valley, and Wargen daily blessed his grandfather for having had the foresight to buy the surrounding steep hills; otherwise, their stark majesty long since would have been smeared with some alien world’s cockeyed architecture. The huge castellated building was one of the worst examples of alien excesses on Donov, but the view from within was superb. The valley mouth opened like a vast window on a breathtaking panorama of Donov Metro.

On this evening his enjoyment of the prospect was brief. His mother greeted him coolly and asked, “How could you! On Ronony’s rev night!”

Wargen groaned. “End of the month reports, you know. I wasn’t paying any attention to the time.”

“I don’t believe it. I don’t believe you can sit all day in that stuffy little office and not pay attention to the time. Go and get dressed.”

Wargen groaned again. “Long trousers and sleeves, I suppose. It’s enough to make a man go asteroid hunting.”

“You know you’ll enjoy it when you get there. And by the way, if that little Korak minx is there—”

“Charming child, isn’t she? What about her?”

“Nothing, Pet. Hurry and get dressed.”

Wargen grumblingly permitted himself to be rushed into rev dress and swept off to Ronony Gynth’s, and he continued to grumble until the moment Ronony’s steward stepped forward to greet them. In actual fact he was more eager to attend than his mother was, but it would not have done at all to have her suspect that.

All of Donov had heard of Ronony Gynth, the mystery woman. Few had ever seen her, and fewer still were aware that she headed the world’s largest and most active group of spies. Wargen was an ardent admirer of her work while at the same time taking great pains to ensure that she knew nothing of his, had no inkling at all that the charming World Manager’s First Secretary was much more than he seemed—was in fact the head of Donov’s Secret Police.

Not even Wargen’s mother knew that.

Lights wreathed the fabulous hilltop mansion, and Ronony Gynth’s guests, brilliantly cloaked, immaculately garmented, glitteringly adorned, filed into the enormous, gold-festooned rev room, where the steward announced them with the mellifluous tones of a trained melodist.

The guest of honor, the newly arrived ambassador from Mestil, His Emissary the Grandee Halu Norrt, sat on Ronony’s private balcony with his wife and staff and studied the clustering and drifting and eddying throng with intense interest. Ronony sat nearby, artfully concealed by shadows. Rumor had it that she was an invalid, that she suffered a disfiguring disease, that she was grotesquely fat and disgustingly lazy. Whatever the cause, none of her guests had ever met her. She never accepted invitations, and she attended her own revs only as a secluded spectator.

She pushed her earpiece aside and touched the ambassador’s arm. “The young man near the entrance—that’s Neal Wargen, the World Manager’s First Secretary.”

“Ah! The Count Wargen! And the lady?”

“The countess, his mother. He’s a full citizen of Donov, as was his father, and the fact that he’s Korak’s First Secretary is vastly more important here than his being a registered and certified count somewhere else. All the best people call him ‘Count,’ though. See the girl who’s watching him? That’s Eritha Korak, the World Manager’s granddaughter. She has a mad crush on him, much to his mother’s disgust. The Koraks have always been commoners, wherever they’ve been, and they have no status at all.”

“But on this world, where there is no official nobility, isn’t the World Manager rather beyond status?”

Ronony snorted. “World managers are merely civil servants with exaggerated responsibilities. On Donov—oh, all right, beyond status, but that doesn’t make the right people want to have anything to do with him socially. Or with her.”

“He serves the people of Donov, not you carpetbagging interlopers and vacationers from other worlds,” the ambassador said lightly. “How many citizens of Donov do you number among those ‘right people?’ ”

Ronony did not answer. A few late-comers swept through the entrance, and her portly steward stepped forward to greet them. She picked up her earpiece and turned a dial on the console at her elbow.

The steward announced the new guests and turned them adrift, and a gathering wave of servants pounced on them to offer food and beverages.

Again Ronony pushed the earpiece aside. “There are complaints because there’s no reception line. People had counted on meeting you.”

“I’m tired of answering questions about those poor animals,” the ambassador growled. “And how would I know what’s causing the riots? I haven’t been home for nine years. Don’t they realize that an assignment to a vacation world is supposed to mean a well-earned vacation?”

Ronony said soberly, “I do hope the rioting is finished. Fortunately the onus is spread somewhat because so many worlds are involved, but even so—couldn’t there have been controls on the news media to stop this daily agitation?”