Andre Norton - The Science Fiction anthology

He knew from books, experience and Labuerre’s conversation in the old days that there was nothing novel about the comedy—that there had even been artists, lots of them, who had counted on endless repetitions of it for their livelihood.

The girl drops in with groceries and the artist is pleasantly surprised; the girl admires this little thing or that after payday and buys it and the artist is pleasantly surprised; the girl brings her friends to take lessons or make little purchases and the artist is pleasantly surprised. The girl may be seduced by the artist or vice versa, which shortens the comedy, or they get married, which lengthens it somewhat.

It had been three years since Halvorsen had last played out the farce with a manic-depressive divorcee from Elmira: three years during which he had crossed the mid-point between thirty and forty; three more years to get beaten down by being unwanted and working too much and eating too little.

Also, he knew, he was in love with this girl.

He took the envelope, counted three hundred and twenty dollars and crammed it into his pocket. “That was your idea,” he said. “Thanks. Now get out, will you? I’ve got work to do.”

She stood there, shocked.

“ I said get out. I have work to do. ”

“Austin was right,” she told him miserably. “You don’t care how people feel. You just want to get things out of them.”

She ran from the studio, and Halvorsen fought with himself not to run after her.

He walked slowly into his workshop and studied his array of tools, though he paid little attention to his finished pieces. It would be nice to spend about half of this money on open-hearth steel rod and bar stock to forge into chisels; he thought he knew where he could get some—but she would be back, or he would break and go to her and be forgiven and the comedy would be played out, after all.

He couldn’t let that happen.

V

Aalesund, on the Atlantic side of the Dourefeld mountains of Norway, was in the lee of the blasted continent. One more archeologist there made no difference, as long as he had the sense to recognize the propellor-like international signposts that said with their three blades, Radiation Hazard , and knew what every schoolboy knew about protective clothing and reading a personal Geiger counter.

The car Halvorsen rented was for a brief trip over the mountains to study contaminated Oslo. Well-muffled, he could make it and back in a dozen hours and no harm done.

But he took the car past Oslo, Wennersborg and Goteborg, along the Kattegat coast to Helsingborg, and abandoned it there, among the three-bladed polyglot signs, crossing to Denmark. Danes were as unlike Prussians as they could be, but their unfortunate little peninsula was a sprout off Prussia which radio-cobalt dust couldn’t tell from the real thing. The three-bladed signs were most specific.

With a long way to walk along the rubble-littered highways, he stripped off the impregnated coveralls and boots. He had long since shed the noisy counter and the uncomfortable gloves and mask.

The silence was eerie as he limped into Copenhagen at noon. He didn’t know whether the radiation was getting to him or whether he was tired and hungry and no more. As though thinking of a stranger, he liked what he was doing.

I’ll be my own audience, he thought. God knows I learned there isn’t any other, not any more. You have to know when to stop. Rodin, the dirty old, wonderful old man, knew that. He taught us not to slick it and polish it and smooth it until it looked like liquid instead of bronze and stone. Van Gogh was crazy as a loon, but he knew when to stop and varnish it, and he didn’t care if the paint looked like paint instead of looking like sunset clouds or moonbeams. Up in Hartford, Browne and Sharpe stop when they’ve got a turret lathe; they don’t put caryatids on it. I’ll stop while my life is a life, before it becomes a thing with distracting embellishments such as a wife who will come to despise me, a succession of gradually less worthwhile pieces that nobody will look at.

Blame nobody , he told himself, lightheadedly.

And then it was in front of him, terminating a vista of weeds and bomb rubble—Milles’ Orpheus Fountain.

It took a man, he thought. Esthetikon circuits couldn’t do it. There was a gross mixture of styles, a calculated flaw that the esthetikon couldn’t be set to make. Orpheus and the souls were classic or later; the three-headed dog was archaic. That was to tell you about the antiquity and invincibility of Hell, and that Cerberus knows Orpheus will never go back into life with his bride.

There was the heroic, tragic central figure that looked mighty enough to battle with the gods, but battle wasn’t any good against the grinning, knowing, hateful three-headed dog it stood on. You don’t battle the pavement where you walk or the floor of the house you’re in; you can’t. So Orpheus, his face a mask of controlled and suffering fury crashes a great chord from his lyre that moved trees and stones. Around him the naked souls in Hell start at the chord, each in its own way: the young lovers down in death; the mother down in death; the musician, deaf and down in death, straining to hear.

Halvorsen, walking uncertainly toward the fountain, felt something break inside him, and a heaviness in his lungs. As he pitched forward among the weeds, he thought he heard the chord from the lyre and didn’t care that the three-headed dog was grinning its knowing, hateful grin down at him.

VI

When Halvorsen awoke, he supposed he was in Hell. There were the young lovers, arms about each other’s waists, solemnly looking down at him, and the mother was placidly smoothing his brow. He stirred and felt his left arm fall heavily.

“Ah,” said the mother, “you mustn’t.” He felt her pick up his limp arm and lay it across his chest. “Your poor finger!” she sighed. “Can you talk? What happened to it?”

He could talk, weakly. “Labuerre and I,” he said. “We were moving a big block of marble with the crane—somehow the finger got under it. I didn’t notice until it was too late to shift my grip without the marble slipping and smashing on the floor.”

The boy said in a solemn, adolescent croak: “You mean you saved the marble and lost your finger?”

“Marble,” he muttered. “It’s so hard to get. Labuerre was so old.”

The young lovers exchanged a glance and he slept again. He was half awake when the musician seized first one of his hands and then the other, jabbing them with stubby fingers and bending his lion’s head close to peer at the horny callouses left by chisel and mallet.

“ Ja, ja ,” the musician kept saying.

Hell goes on forever, so for an eternity he jolted and jarred, and for an eternity he heard bickering voices: “Why he was so foolish, then?” “A idiot he could be.” “Hush, let him rest.” “The children told the story.” “There only one Labuerre was.” “Easy with the tubing.” “Let him rest.”

Daylight dazzled his eyes.

“Why you were so foolish?” demanded a harsh voice. “The sister says I can talk to you now, so that is what I first want to know.”

He looked at the face of—not the musician; that had been delirium. But it was a tough old face.

“ Ja , I am mean-looking; that is settled. What did you think you were doing without coveralls and way over your exposure time?”

“I wanted to die,” said Halvorsen. There were tubes sticking in his arms.

The crag-faced old man let out a contemptuous bellow.

“Sister!” he shouted. “Pull the plasma tubes out before more we waste. He says he wants to die.”

“Hush,” said the nurse. She laid her hand on his brow again.

“Don’t bother with him, Sister,” the old man jeered. “He is a shrinking little flower, too delicate for the great, rough world. He has done nothing, he can do nothing, so he decides to make of himself a nuisance by dying.”