Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

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 bedrooom 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. Withered 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.