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

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.

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.”

“His name was Durell Coll. He was an artist.”

She shook her head. “No. I don’t know anyone like that.”

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

She hesitated. “About four years.” She looked closely to see whether I believed her.

I did a quick calculation, converting to Rimway time. She’d arrived shortly after Durell had left for Rimway. “Is the cup actually from the Ranger ?”

“Of course.”