SS Nevermore, page 1
NEVERMORE
Ian R. MacLeod
“Nevermore” appeared in the July 1998 issue of Asimov’s, with an illustration by Mark Evans. British writer Ian MacLeod has been one of the hottest new writers of the nineties to date, and, as the decade progresses, his work continues to grow in power and deepen in maturity.
MacLeod has published a slew of strong stories throughout the nineties in Asimov’s, as well as in markets such as Interzone, Weird Tales, Amazing, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Several of these stories made the cut for one or another of the various “Best of the Year” antholo-gies; in 1990, in fact, he appeared in three different Best of the Year anthologies with three different sto-ries, certainly a rare distinction. His first novel. The Great Wheel, was published in 1997, followed by a major collection of his short work, Voyages by Star-light.
His novella “The Summer Isles,” an Asimov’s story, is on the final Hugo ballot as these words are being typed. MacLeod lives with his wife and young daughter in the West Midlands of England.
Here, in a stylish and compelling look at a deca-dent modern world that ought to be Utopia, he proves once again that Art— like Passion— is in the eye of the beholder.
* * * *
Now that he couldn’t afford to buy enough reality, Gustav had no option but to paint what he saw in his dreams.
With no sketchpad to bring back, no palette or cursor, his head rolling up from the pillow and his mouth dry and his jaw aching from the booze he’d drunk the evening before—which was the cheapest means he’d yet found of getting to sleep—he was left with just that one chance, and a few trailing wisps of something that might once have been beautiful before he had to face the void of the day.
It hadn’t started like this, but he could see by now that this was how it had probably ended. Representational art had had its heyday, and for a while he’d been feted like the bright new talent he’d once been sure he was. And big lumpy actuality that you could smell and taste and get under your fingernails would probably come back into style again—long after it had ceased to matter to him.
So that was it. Load upon load of self-pity falling down upon him this morning from the damp-stained ceiling. What had he been dreaming?
Something—surely some-thing. Otherwise being here and being Gustav wouldn’t come as this big a jolt. He should’ve got more used to it than this by now.... Gustav scratched himself, and dis-covered that he also had an erection, which was another sign—hadn’t he read once, somewhere?—that you’d been dreaming dreams of the old-fashioned kind, unsimulated, unaided. A sign, anyway, of a kind of biological opti-mism. The hope that there might just be a hope.
Arthritic, Cro-Magnon, he wandered out from his bed. Knobbled legs, knobbled veins, knobbled toes. He still missed the habit of fiddling with the controls of his win-dow in the pockmarked far wall, changing the perspec-tives and the light in the dim hope that he might stumble across something better. The sun and the moon were blaz-ing down over Paris from their respective quadrants, pour-ing like mercury through the nanosmog. He pressed his hand to the glass, feeling the watery wheeze of the crack that now snaked across it. Five stories up in these scrawny empty tenements, and a long, long way down. He laid his forehead against its coolness as the sour thought that he might try to paint this scene speeded through him. He’d finished at least twenty paintings of foreal Paris; all reality engines and cabled ruins in grey, black, and white. Prob-ably done, oh, at least several hundred studies in inkwash, pencil, charcoal. No one would ever buy them, and for once they were right. The things were passionless, ugly— he pitied the potentially lovely canvases he’d ruined to make them.
He pulled back from the window and looked down at himself. His erection had faded from sight be-neath his belly.
Gustav shuffled through food wrappers and scrunched-up bits of cartridge paper. Leaning drifts of canvas frames turned their backs from him toward the walls, whispering on breaths of turpentine of things that might once have been. But that was okay, because he didn’t have any paint right now. Maybe later, he’d get the daft feeling that, to-day, something might work out, and he’d sell himself for a few credits in some stupid trick or other—what had it been last time; painting roses red dressed as a playing card?—and the supply ducts would bear him a few pre-cious tubes of oils. And a few hours after that he’d be— but what was that noise?
A thin white droning like a plastic insect. In fact, it had been there all along—had probably woken him at this ridiculous hour—but had seemed so much a part of every-thing else that he hadn’t noticed. Gustav looked around, tilting his head until his better ear located the source. He slid a sticky avalanche of canvas board and cotton paper off an old chair, and burrowed in the cushions until his hand closed on a telephone. He’d only kept the thing because it was so cheap that the phone company hadn’t bothered to disconnect the line when he’d stopped paying.
That was, if the telephone company still existed. The tele-phone was chipped from the time he’d thrown it across the room after his last conversation with his agent. But he touched the activate pad anyway, not expecting anything more than a blip in the system, white machine noise.
“Gustav, you’re still there, are you?”
He stared at the mouthpiece. It was his dead ex-wife Elanore’s voice.
“What do you want?”
“Don’t be like that, Gus. Well, I won’t be anyway. Time’s passed, you know, things have changed.”
“Sure, and you’re going to tell me next that you—”
“—Yes, would like to meet up. We’re arranging this party. I ran into Marcel in Venice—he’s currently Doge there, you know—and we got talking about old times and all the old gang. And so we decided we were due for a reunion. You’ve been one of the hardest ones to find, Gus. And then I remembered that old tenement...”
“Like you say, I’m still here.”
“Still painting?”
“Of course I’m still painting! It’s what I do.”
“That’s great. Well—sorry to give you so little time, but the whole thing’s fixed for this evening. You won’t believe what everyone’s up to now!
But then, I suppose you’ve seen Francine across the sky.”
“Look, I’m not sure that I—”
“—And we’re going for Paris, 1890. Should be right up your street.
I’ve splashed out on all-senses. And the food and the drink’ll be foreal. So you’ll come, won’t you? The past is the past, and I’ve honestly forgotten about much of it since I passed on. Put it into context, anyway. I really don’t bear a grudge. So you will come? Remember how it was, Gus? Just smile for me the way you used to. And remember...”
* * * *
Of course he remembered. But he still didn’t know what the hell to expect that evening as he waited—too early, despite the fact that he’d done his best to be pointedly late—in the virtual glow of a pavement café off the Rue St-Jacques beneath a sky fuzzy with Van Gogh stars.
Searching the daubed figures strolling along the cob-bles, Gustav spotted Elanore coming along before she saw him. He raised a hand, and she came over, sitting down on a wobbly chair at the uneven swirl of the table. Doing his best to maintain a grumpy pose, Gustav called the waiter for wine, and raised his glass to her with trembling fingers. He swallowed it all down. Just as she’d promised, the stuff was foreal.
Elanore smiled at him. And Elanore looked beautiful. Elanore was dressed for the era in a long dress of pure ultramarine. Her red hair was bunched up beneath a narrow-brimmed hat adorned with flowers.
“It’s about now,” she said, “that you tell me I haven’t changed.”
“And you tell me that I have.”
She nodded. “But it’s true. Although you haven’t changed that much, Gus. You’ve aged, but you’re still one of the most... solid people I know.”
Elanore offered him a Disc Bleu. He took it, although he hadn’t smoked in years and she’d always complained that the things were bad for him when she was alive. Elanore’s skin felt cool and dry in the moment that their hands touched, and the taste of the smoke as it shimmered amid the brush strokes was just as it had always been. Music drifted out from the blaze of the bar where dark figures writhed as if in flames. Any moment now, he knew, she’d try to say something vaguely conciliatory, and she’d interrupt as he attempted to do the same.
He gestured around at the daubs and smears of the other empty tables. He said, “I thought I was going to be late....” The underside of the canopy that stretched across the pavement blazed. How poor old Vincent had loved his cadmiums and chromes! And never sold one single fucking painting in his entire life.
“What—what I told you was true,” Elanore said, stum-bling slightly over these little words, sounding almost un-Elanore-like for a moment; nearly uneasy. “I mean, about Marcel in Venice and Francine across the sky. And, yes, we did talk about a reunion. But you know how these things are. Time’s precious, and, at the end of the day it’s been so long that these things really do take a lot of nerve. So it didn’t come off. It was just a few promises that no one really imagined they’d keep. But I thought—well, I thought that it would be nice to see you anyway. At least one more time.”
“So all of this is just for me. Jesus, Elanore, I knew you were rich, but.
..”
“Don’t be like that, Gustav. I’m not trying to impress you or depress you or whatever. It was just the way it came out.”
He poured more of the wine, wondering as he did so exactly wh at trick it was that allowed them to share it.
“So, you’re still painting?”
“Yep.”
“I haven’t seen much of your work about.”
“I do it for private clients,” Gustav said. “Mostly.”
He glared at Elanore, daring her to challenge his state-ment. Of course, if he really was painting and selling, he’d have some credit, And if he had credit, he wouldn’t be living in that dreadful tenement she’d tracked him down to. He’d have paid for all the necessary treatments to stop himself becoming the frail old man he so nearly was. I can help, you know, Gustave could hear Elanore saying, because he’d heard her say it so many times before. I don’t need all this wealth. So let me give you just a little help. Give me that chance.... But what she actually said was even worse.
“Are you recording yourself, Gus?” Elanore asked. “Do you have a librarian?”
Now, he thought, now is the time to walk out. Pull this whole thing down and go back into the street—the foreal street. And forget.
“Did you know,” he said instead, “that the word reality once actually meant foreal—not the projections and the simulations, but proper actuality.
But then along came vir-tual reality, and of course, when the next generation of products was developed, the illusion was so much better that you could walk right into it instead of having to put on goggles and a suit. So they had to think of an improved phrase, a super-word for the purposes of marketing. And someone must have said, Why don’t we just call it real-ity?”
“You don’t have to be hurtful, Gus. There’s no rule written down that says we can’t get on.”
“I thought that that was exactly the problem. It’s in my head, and it was probably there in yours before you died. Now it’s…” He’d have said more.
But he was suddenly, stupidly, near to tears.
“What exactly are you doing these days, Gus?” she asked as he cleared his throat and pretended it was the wine that he’d choked on. “What are you painting at the moment?”
“I’m working on a series,” he was surprised to hear himself saying.
“It’s a sort of a journey-piece. A sequence of paintings which began here in Paris and then ...” He swallowed. “... bright, dark colors ...” A nerve began to leap beside his eye. Something seemed to touch him, but was too faint to be heard or felt or seen.
“Sounds good, Gus,” Elanore said, leaning toward him across the table. And Elanore smelled of Elanore, the way she always did. Her pale skin was freckled from the sun-light of whatever warm and virtual place she was living. Across her cheeks and her upper lip, threaded gold, lay the down that he’d brushed so many times with his the tips of his fingers. “I can tell from that look in your eyes that you’re into a really good phase....”
After that, things went better. They shared a second bottle of vin ordinaire. They made a little mountain of the butts of her Disc Bleu in the ashtray. This ghost—she really was like Elanore. Gustav didn’t even object to her taking his hand across the table. There was a kind of aban-don in all of this—new ideas mixed with old memories. And he understood more clearly now what Van Gogh had meant about this café being a place where you could ruin yourself, or go mad or commit a crime.
The few other diners faded. The virtual waiters, their aprons a single assured gray-white stroke of the palette knife, started to tip the chairs against the tables. The aromas of the Left Bank’s ever-unreliable sewers began to override those of cigarettes and people and horse dung and wine.
At least, Gustav thought, that was still foreal....
“I suppose quite a lot of the others have died by now,” Gustav said.
“All that facile gang you seem to so fondly remember.”
“People still change, you know. Just because we’ve passed on, doesn’t mean we can’t change.”
By now, he was in a mellow enough mood just to nod at that. And how have you changed, Elanore? he won-dered. After so long, what flicker of the electrons made you decide to come to me now?
“You’re obviously doing well.”
“I am ...” She nodded, as if the idea surprised her. “I mean, I didn’t expect—”
“—And you look—”
“—And you, Gus, what I said about you being—”
“—That project of mine—”
“—I know, I—”
They stopped and gazed at each other. Then they both smiled, and the moment seemed to hold, warm and frozen, as if from a scene within a painting. It was almost...
“Well...” Elanore broke the illusion first as she began to fumble in the small sequined purse she had on her lap. Eventually, she produced a handkerchief and blew deli-cately on her nose. Gustav tried not to grind his teeth— although this was exactly the kind of affectation he de-tested about ghosts. He guessed, anyway, from the changed look on her face, that she knew what he was thinking. “I suppose that’s it, then, isn’t it, Gus? We’ve met—we’ve spent the evening together without arguing. Almost like old times.”
“Nothing will ever be like old times.”
“No ...” Her eyes glinted, and he thought for a mo-ment that she was going to become angry—goaded at last into something like the Elanore of old. But she just smiled. “Nothing ever will be like old times. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Nothing ever was, or ever will be ...”
Elanore clipped her purse shut again. Elanore stood up. Gustav saw her hesitate as she considered bending down to kiss him farewell, then decided that he would just re-gard that as another affront, another slap in the face.
Elanore turned and walked away from Gustav, fading into the chiaroscuro swirls of lamplight and gray.
* * * *
Elanore, as if Gustav needed reminding, had been alive when he’d first met her. In fact, he’d never known anyone who was more so. Of course, the age difference between them was always huge—she’d already been past a hundred by then, and he was barely forty—but they’d agreed on that first day that they met, and on many days after, that there was a corner in time around which the old even-tually turned to rejoin the young.
In another age, and although she always laughingly de-nied it, Gustav always suspected that Elanore would have had her sagging breasts implanted with silicone, the wrin-kles stretched back from her face, her heart replaced by a throbbing steel simulacrum. But she was lucky enough to exist at a time when effective antiaging treatments were finally available.
As a post-centarian, wise and rich and moderately, pleasantly, famous, Elanore was probably more fresh and beautiful than she’d been at any other era in her life. Gustav had met her at a party beside a Russian lake—guests wandering amid dunes of snow. Foreal had been a fashionable option then; although for Gustav, the grounds of this pillared ice-crystalled palace that Cathe-rine the Great’s Scottish favorite Charles Cameron had built seemed far too gorgeous to be entirely true. But it was true—foreal, actual, concrete, genuine, unvirtual— and such knowledge was what had driven him then. That, and the huge impossibility of ever really managing to con-vey any of it as a painter. That, and the absolute certainty that he would try.
Elanore had wandered up to him from the forest dusk dressed in seal furs. The shock of her beauty had been like all the rubbish he’d heard other artists talk about and thus so detested. And he’d been a stammering wreck, but somehow that hadn’t mattered. There had been—and here again the words became stupid, meaningless—a dazed physicality between them from that first moment that was so intense it was spiritual.
Elanore told Gustav that she’d seen and admired the series of triptychs he’d just finished working on. They were painted directly onto slabs of wood, and depicted totemistic figures in dense blocks of color.
The critics had generally damned them with faint praise—had talked of Cubism and Mondrian—and were somehow unable to recognize Gustav’s obvious and grateful debt to Gau-guin’s Tahitian paintings. But Elanore had seen and understood those bright muddy colors. And, yes, she’d dabbled a little in painting herself—just enough to know that truly creative acts were probably beyond her ...
Elanore wore her red hair short in those days. And there were freckles, then as always, scattered across the bridge of her nose. She showed the tips of her teeth when she smiled, and he was conscious of her lips and her tongue. He could smell, faint within the clouds of breath that en-twined them, her womanly scent.
