Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Read online

  “Go ahead.” I’m not sure what I expected. I kept thinking about conditions in M-82, an entire galaxy caught in an eon-long catastrophe. The band on the Titanic. Nearer My God To Thee.

  “Tell me about the place where they live.” She touched a presspad. “What do you know?”

  “I think it would be fair to say that, wherever they are in M-82, the sky is on fire.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Maybe that fits.”

  Lights faded. I listened again to Al Redwood’s music. It was more liquid now, distant, delivered by strings rather than the electronic burble of a Cray. There was a sense of misgiving in the cadences. Or maybe in my own mind: I thought about Al, fleeing down the years with his burden. There must have been moments when he doubted himself, suspected Gelman had been right all along. And then, Chopsticks—.

  Thoughts of North Dakota at night. I was six years old, under a blazing vault of stars, standing out behind the farmhouse while the earth turned beneath my feet. It was a time when the world was full of wonder.

  But the music crowded out all sense of loss.

  Without warning, it roared. Lightning ripped through it, and stars thundered along their courses. White light blazed across iron battlements. Oceans turned to steam, worlds drifted into the dark, suns dissolved.

  The music filled with rage. Death rode the skies, driving the stars on and on, exploding finally in a torrent of sheer irresistible power.

  The mood changed, and I recalled how Honolulu looks at night from the air. And Gus Evans’ 24-Hour Gas Station and Diner, in its warm circle of light halfway up a Colorado mountainside. A coyote bayed outside the McDonald Observatory at Fort Davis. Ginny lived again.

  And I remembered Tom Hicks. At Wesleyan, when he won his Nobel, and we lifted glasses and laughed into the dawn.

  “But that’s you,” I said afterward. “That’s not what was on the CD.”

  She shook her head. “Maybe my imagination got caught up in it a little, Nick. This is not an exact science. But this is close to what they were trying to send.”

  “Then why didn’t they send it?”

  “I don’t know the physics. But it might not have been possible to transmit anything other than the basic melody. They left the rest of it to us. Listen: I can run it through again, change some of the parameters, and things will be different. But not the essentials. They’ve provided the architecture. All we’re adding is marble and sunlight.”

  I stared at her, trying to take it all in.

  “They’ve allowed us to collaborate with them,” she said. No smile. Not this time.

  “I’ve got to find Al. Hell, this is exactly what he was looking for.”

  “Probably.”

  “Something else: these people are winning, Jean. Whatever it is they’re dealing with out there, they’re winning.”

  “Maybe.” She ejected the disk, handed it to me, returned the original, and gave me a second copy. “For Redwood, when you find him.”

  “Why ‘maybe’?”

  She was shutting down the equipment, “Did you catch the sense of wistfulness? It runs through everything, even the most turbulent sections. I think they’re like your friend.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Whistling past the graveyard.”

  IN THE TOWER

  1.

  Uxbridge Bay on Fishbowl in late summer. In a sense, I’d been there many times before: this sweeping sickle of gentle hills and purple flowers and whitegold shrubbery, the bay choppy under a brisk wind from the southeast, the half-dozen sleepy quill drifting across a late afternoon sky. I knew the soil, brown under twin suns, the sandy vineclogged banks, the black polished rocks dribbled through the shallows by a casual hand.

  Only the carefully repaired seam across the vault of sky, through which the same casual hand had plunged a long-handled knife, was wanting.

  This was a place of things lost, of lovers discarded, of thunder below the horizon. It was a place of silent beaches and brilliant far-off breakers, of invisible voices and dying laughter. It was, I suspected, the place that Durell had visited during those increasingly frequent occasions when I found him silhouetted against the bedroom window, or gazing into his wine during long, silent dinners. Something had happened here, something about which I’d learned not to speak. But he’d painted it, and had tried to destroy the painting. In the end, he’d merely denied it a name.

  He’d come back from one of his long walks, less than a week before he rode his skimmer into a precipice, and he’d taken me into his arms without a word. It was so unlike him (he was not unaffectionate, but his love-making always included a mixture of verbal charm and good humor), that it was unsettling.

  “What’s wrong?” I’d asked.

  He’d shuddered, as though cold air had reached him through the sealed windows. His eyes were silver gray, the color of the global sea on Fishbowl, and they were fixed far away. “It’s nothing.”

  So we’d held one another, and I could feel the slow beat of his heart. And after a while he’d broken away. I was desperate: I’d watched him for three years creating melancholy landscapes, utterly unlike his early, pre-Rimway work, and sinking more deeply with each into a despondency I could neither touch nor comprehend. And that night, not for the first time, I tried to imagine life without him. “Durell,” I’d pleaded, “tell me about Fishbowl.”

  He’d just finished the Indemia, which was to be his final work. It’s a rendering of a child playing in a grotto, but the juxtaposition of shadow and rock and, particularly, the dark throat at the back of the cave, may possibly have been Durell’s final statement on the condition of innocence in this world. I’d been upset by it. “There’s nothing to tell,” he said.

  “There is a hell of a lot to tell. What happened there?”

  He’d nodded then, his dark hair unkempt, and, in the manner one uses with a child, he’d begun the old explanation of the peculiar vulnerability of the artist, the hazards consonant with peering into the iron core of reality. I listened to the worn cliches until he himself grew embarrassed. Then I pushed him away. “You don’t want to talk about it? Fine: but I’m not going to sit quietly while you unload all that guilt, or whatever it is, on me. Not if I don’t even know what it’s about.”

  “Tiel,” he said in a whisper so low I could scarcely hear, “you would never understand.” He shook his head, and his eyes filled with tears. “It was the tower room. The goddamn tower room.”

  But that was all I could get from him. In a shaky voice he told me I was right, that it would probably be best if I left. He understood. He was so understanding I felt ill, because what it amounted to was that his secrets meant more to him than I did. So I went into the bedroom and threw as much as I could into one bag, told him I’d send for the rest later, and walked out. “I love you, Tiel,” he’d said as I went through the door. They were his last words to me.

  A few days later they’d handed him to me in a silver urn the color of his eyes. And I: I had come to Uxbridge Bay on Fishbowl, to the few hundred square kilometers that composed the entire land mass of that remote world. I’d developed my own cargo of guilt now: when Durell had most needed me, I’d gone for a walk.

  So I came seeking the meaning of a painting. And a tower.

  The texture of the light was changing rapidly as Gideon sank toward the ocean. It was well toward evening, about two hours later than the scene depicted by Durell. No matter: if Gideon was a little too low in the sky, and the air cool with approaching autumn, this was still a sacred place. How often, over the years, had I stood before the original on Rimway, absorbed by his bleak vision? I knew the reflections of my own losses in that somber water.

  It had come to be known as the Cordelet, a reference to the land of lost innocence mentioned in Belarian mythology:

  …Where echoes yet in cool green glades

  The laughter of departed gods…

  There was, of course, no way to be certain of the exact spot where he’d placed the easel. With
ered deciduals, like the one that dominates the foreground of the painting, are not uncommon in the area. I had a holo version with me, and held it up against the suns, comparing the interweaving of hills along the far edge of the sickle. But the view did not appreciably change from one suspect site to another. I looked for the white-streaked boulder close in to shore. (“The artist’s conviction,” Gilmore had told us at the Academy, “that some things do survive against the flow of eternity.” Gilmore, of course, didn’t know Durell very well.) Anyhow, the tide was at full, and the rock must have been covered.

  It didn’t matter. I wandered among rocks and trees, took off my sandals and strolled through the surf, and gradually became aware that something along the seacoast, or in the bay, was wrong. A shell partially buried in wet sand sprouted long stalked legs and scrabbled into the water. Waves blew across groups of rocks, throwing columns of spume into the air, where the mist lingered somewhat longer than it might have in Rimway’s heavier gravity.

  I looked out across the bay, and gave in to self-pity. Durell was dead. (And where could I hope to find his like again?) I wanted to believe that, in some transcendental manner, his spirit brooded over this place that he’d made famous. That if he lived anywhere, it was here. But passage to Fishbowl had taken my savings; and if I felt anything at that moment other than my own solitude, I have no idea what it was.

  Across the bay was the object that was not in the painting: a projector station on the Point, at the seaward tip of the sickle. A small copper-colored dome with a gaping black hole, it was the only man-made structure anywhere in the wide arc of land and sea appropriated by the artist.

  Odd: this single forlorn symbol of human existence, its bright shell entangled in dense shrubbery, counterpointed the bay, the hills, and the sea quite effectively, heightening the suggestion of mortality which, from the time of the Cordelet, was central to Durell’s work. It was a structure that, had it not already existed, should have been invented. Yet Durell had ruthlessly excluded it. Why?

  I began to wonder if I, and everyone else, was somehow misreading the meaning.

  The Cordelet is, of course, the watershed work of Durell’s career. No one would have predicted greatness from his earlier efforts, although the innocent vitality of the young woman springing across a rainswept field in Downhill, and the spectral snowfall of Night Travels, demonstrate considerable talent. But the Cordelet marks the passage from the exuberance of his early period to the bleak unquiet masterpieces of maturity. The abruptness and totality of that transition is puzzling. Between Night Travels and the Cordelet, there should have been an evolutionary stage, a series of works progressively more introspective, technically more accomplished. But there is no such gradual development. And when the Cordelet appears, in all its somber power, only the idly circling quill, and the brilliant light of the twin suns on the far breakers, remain of the early Durell.

  We would never see them again.

  I was reluctant to leave. The tide was high on the sandy banks. A rising wind pulled at the trees. The rocks were changing color against dying sunlight.

  But I wasn’t dressed for the cool evening, and it was a long walk back to Pellinor. In Durell’s time, before the skimmers were imported in large numbers, there was a road between Pellinor and the southernmost land tip. It would have been his route, so I’d tried to follow it that morning on the way out. It was, after all, the proper way to do things on a pilgrimage. But the road had diminished gradually to a footpath, which ended in heavy foliage. Disappointed, I’d crossed to the ocean’s edge, where the ground was passable.

  So I took a last look, wondering what Durell’s thoughts had been when he closed up his frame on that final day and started back with a canvas so different from anything he’d done before, and descended the far side of the hill, dropping rapidly below sea level.

  It gets cold quickly in the shadow of the sea. Gideon had set, and Heli’s light was blocked by the vertical rise of the ocean. The wall of water to my left soared to more than thirty meters. I hurried along, holding my jacket closed against the falling temperatures. No one else was about, although toward the west, lights were coming on in the occasional manor houses perched out over the ridge that runs down the spine of the island.

  These homes, which were owned mostly by wealthy expatriates from Rimway and Mogambo, were pretentious exercises in hyperbolic architecture: long arcing struts attached them to the underlying rock; but they were actually supported by Gantner light, the same force that restrains the ocean. I’d seen similar constructions on Rimway, although they were usually limited to corporate or public buildings.

  The land along the seawall is flat and uninteresting. Its high saline content has twisted and withered the trees, which have been imported from offworld. Since Fishbowl has no natural dry ground other than the sickle and a few hills on the northern rim of Pellinor, the island’s only city, it has no highly developed non-marine vegetation of its own. A few neglected waterways, from the days when someone hoped to convert all of the recovered land into a garden spot, wandered aimlessly across the landscape.

  The sky had darkened before I was halfway back to town. Dim shapes glided beyond the seawall, silhouetted by filtered moonlight. I switched on my lantern and directed the beam into the water. Small, vaguely luminous plants swayed in the current, and obscure marine shapes darted away The wall itself was hard and unyielding, and quite dry. Like polished marble.

  Projector stations were scattered erratically. The coastline between the sickle and Pellinor was by no means straight, and each change of direction required another site. Several domes were also visible along the central spine. I could not imagine what use they were, well away from the ocean, and learned later that they were a backup system, that Fishbowl is, in effect, compartmentalized, so that a failure at one station would not result in a general disaster.

  I stopped to examine one. It was a wide, graceful shell, about twice my height, lying in the tide like a sleeping tortoise. No sound, and no light, hinted of the enormous power generated within.

  So I walked, shivering, through a landscape not quite real, a place wrenched from the ocean during my lifetime. It is a spectacular place and, by ordinary criteria, a lovely place. But Durell’s sense of transience is quite real: possibly the towering seawalls are responsible for what one feels. Only the natives sleep soundly on Fishbowl. Or maybe there is something more subtle. The island, if indeed one can call it an island, has no past. Time did not exist here until Harry Pellinor and his crew arrived to drive back the sea. If I sensed anything at all in that cramped land, it was that the projectors, the absurd homes, the withered foliage, the town huddling under the seawalls, were only an incursion.

  2.

  I assumed that Durell was Fishbowl’s best-known citizen, so I wandered around town next morning looking for signs of his fame. A statue or two, perhaps. I’d thought that a holo in some prominent place depicting him creating the Cordelet would have been appropriate. Or possibly a prominent walkway named for him. At the very least, I anticipated a Durell Coll Park, with clipped hedges and manicured trees; a gallery prominently featuring his work, and a restored studio. In reality, it was difficult to find anyone who even knew that he’d existed.

  Durell had come to Fishbowl as an adolescent. His father had died on the first mission to Belarius, and his mother had returned with him to Rimway. After her death, from a rare blood disorder, he had returned to paint Pellinor’s spectacular seascapes. But he’d gone quickly through a small inheritance. He used only canvas, disdaining the holos, and thereby assuring permanent poverty. Eventually he moved onto the top floor of a square permearth structure, buried among retailers and storage facilities. It was here that he honed the talents that would, in time, guarantee his fame. And that was somehow the romance of it, I suppose, that the artist whose greatest works would be embodied in broad restless skies and heaving seas should live next to a skimmer repair center.

  The place was still buried. The Tiresian café that
had sheltered the small group of artists on the first floor was gone, replaced by a crockery shop. Heavy utilitarian buildings lined both sides of the ground-level walkway. A loading dock was immediately opposite the crockery shop. One of the recently built mall ramps arched overhead, an aerial strip protruding from a different sort of world. Directly above me, I could see the two pairs of windows through which he’d looked out over the ocean. (In those days, before the elevated malls and walkways, he’d had an unobstructed view to the edge of the world.) The windows were long unwashed.

  The proprietor of the crockery shop was absorbed in a domestic holo. A wedge-headed matron with a fierce appearance, she seemed out of place among the dazzling characters of the romantic drama. I did not immediately rouse her. There was a door at the back of the shop which, I suspected, would provide access to the upper levels. I wandered casually toward it.

  When she looked up, I stopped to examine the crockery, which was handcrafted by local artisans. She stepped out of the holo without dissolving it, and smiled pleasantly. “Good morning,” she said. She looked friendly enough, though I could see she didn’t expect to sell me anything. “Can I help you?”

  “My name’s Tiel Chadwick,” I said. I’d picked up an antique kiln-fired cup. It had a satisfying heft, and carried Survey’s old eagle-and-star logo, over the inscription GS Ranger. Harry Pellinor’s vessel. “A friend of mine used to live here. In the third-floor apartment. I wondered—.”

  Her eyes widened, and she backed up a step. “No,” she said in a voice that had climbed an octave. “I didn’t know him. I’ve only been here a few years.” Her eyes filled with suspicion. “Nobody’s lived there since I came. In fact, I didn’t know it had ever been anything other than a storage area.”