Parallax View (10 page)

Mae stopped listening. Eidetics had been in the news just before she had come to the chateau: a controversial, and risky, treatment for severe psychosis. European parliament had recently sanctioned its use for the psychological “readjustment” of the criminally insane.

Jonathan! What have they done to you?

Ventori continued, “We are aware of the risks involved – as is Jonathan. Now that his work is complete, he is being deprogrammed – Beethoven is being stood down.”

She made herself go and say goodbye. She had watched out for Isabelle Graves’ red MG from a second floor window and when it swung through the gates she rushed downstairs. She was breathless by the time she reached the foyer, afraid she had missed him.

She pushed through the door, then stopped.

Jonathan, his wife at his side, was shaking hands with Ventori. As Mae watched, the pain in her heart like a twisting knife, he turned and walked towards the car. She hurried down the steps, stopped only when Ventori seized her roughly by the arm. She turned on him and something in her manner seemed to communicate with the man, as he released her, raised a hand in a placatory gesture.

“Jonathan,” she said, so softly that he could easily fail to hear.

He turned and looked at her. His brow creased: his puzzled look.
Is it you, I love?
she thought.
Or is it some other you?

Or somewhere in between.

“Goodbye, Jonathan,” she said.

He smiled, nodded, climbed into the low car. “Goodbye,” he said, as if he didn’t know her, or was it just an act?

Mae Chang finished the piece in a daze of emotion, the first time she had played it in public. She stood, rocked by the volume of applause, and for once she did not feel the urge to flee. She bowed, tears blurring her vision of the audience, accepted the bouquet from another identikit girl. Then more flowers started to land all around her, raining down from the massed crowd.

The story of the new Beethoven had become public knowledge in November, just before the release of Mae’s recording. But no one knew the real story behind the headlines.

She hadn’t seen him since that last day at the Chateau d’Arouet. Her only contact with him had been a handwritten note passed to her through Anton:
You played “Appassionata” to me, I believe. I have decided to call this one, simply, “Passion”
.
Yours, Jonathan
.

Mae left the stage. Anton hurried her to the dressing room. She collapsed into a chair before the mirror, Anton smiling at her from the door.

“If you don’t mind, Anton – I want to be alone.”

His smile widened. “I’ve heard from him,” he said.

Mae felt her heart thumping. “From Jonathan?”

“He’s going to do it again in the New Year: he’s going to the chateau for treatment.” Anton waved a piece of paper at her. “I have the contract here, Mae. He wants you to work with him again. He wants you to help him with his tenth symphony...”

She snatched the contract from his fingers, pushed him through the door and sat down heavily. She stared at the print, trying to make sense of it, but it was just so much legalese.

She looked up at her reflection in the mirror. More than anything she wanted to see Jonathan again, renew her affair with the only man she had ever loved.

But how could she return to the chateau? The real Jonathan Graves was a married man, someone she did not know and had never really met. The man she loved was a mere construct, a psychological simulacrum of someone who had lived two hundred years ago – and what kind of love was that?

Mae Chang wondered what to do as she stared into the mirror, her expression blank.

Sugar and Spice

Axel Webber came upon the exhibition quite by chance.

He arrived on the planet of Serenity in the early hours, slept till midday and left the hotel late in the afternoon, as the cries of the muezzins ululated across the city’s packed rooftops. He was quite unprepared for the alienness of Vallore, the narrow streets and the three-storey, sand-coloured buildings. Even the citizens disturbed him, many garbed in white djellabas with only their eyes showing, watching him suspiciously. Others wore the long black frock-coats of Hasidic Jews, or the rainbow cloaks of religious cults new to him. He reminded himself that Serenity was the world where every belief system under the sun had found refuge.

He soon became lost and disoriented. He hurried down lanes and alleys, followed by a crowd of ragged children and beggars drawn to his offworld clothing and the possibility of a few tourist coins. He ignored their outstretched hands, their cries of
baksheesh
. He increased his pace, becoming more agitated by the second. He wondered how he might react if the crowd turned violent. His small handgun would be no protection against so many.

Perhaps a part of his discomfort was not so much the importuning of the hordes as the fact that his ex-lover, Nicole deGryse, had chosen this stinking hell-hole in which to spend the last years of her life. She had chosen to live
here
, rather than with him on Earth?

He had come to Serenity to retrieve her cremated remains. He had thought he’d buried his feelings for her deep in the layers of his past – indeed, he had felt little emotion at the news of her death. He was a self-contained man, a man without ties, emotional or physical. Nothing had a hold over Webber, or so he liked to believe.

And yet... he had felt compelled to come here, to see where Nicole had spent her final years.

He caught sight of the silver domes at the end of the street, their modern architecture speaking of civilisation and sophistication after the squalor of the city. A sign in English, beneath the flowing Urdu script, informed him that this was the Vallore Museum of Modern Art.

He hurried towards the entrance, relieved as he passed into the air-conditioned coolness that the beggars fell away and did not follow him inside.

He moved from dome to dome, giving cursory inspection to a series of emotionless plasma graphics and neograms which formed the bulk of a visiting display. Unfamiliar with the unwritten, elitist rules which differentiated between the acceptable and the passé, and unable to formulate any such rubric of his own, Webber had never developed more than a passing appreciation for art. All he could discern was that the order and formality of these works was in stark contrast with the all-pervasive chaos of the city outside, and thus highlighted their artifice.

He found himself in a courtyard from which he could access any number of globular annexes. He strolled through the nearest entrance, enjoying the cool air and emptiness of the museum.

The display area was easily fifteen metres in diameter, but it was entirely taken up by a single exhibit – the representation of a young girl rendered in exquisite detail. Something within him surged involuntarily at the extraordinary lifelike quality of the sculpture.

He looked around. Vines and creepers obscured the concave inner wall of the dome, filtering and muting the light from outside. He was pleased to see that he was alone, as if reluctant to have others witness his appreciation. He approached the exhibit with a kind of reverent circumspection, as if a sudden movement on his part might startle the statue into flight.

He stopped at the low barrier and stared at the girl, seated on a small, grassy hillock, brown legs folded beneath her. She was wearing a simple green slip and she had a sharp arrowhead of a face, with angled cheekbones, burning emerald eyes and a jet black, feathered fringe. Her head was tilted, as if she was staring up at invisible stars, and an inert tear, a quicksilver dew-drop, hung on the curve of her cheek.

“What are little girls made of?”

He looked round, startled.

“What are little girls made of?”

The words, those of a child, filled the air.

“Sugar and spice

“And all things nice,

“That’s what little girls are made of.”

As the words echoed around the dome, Webber suddenly understood what it was about the exhibit that reached out to him: not so much the innocence alluded to in the rhyme, but the
sense
of innocence, the vulnerability and the inevitability of change.

Something tight in his throat, Webber moved around the perimeter of the display, staring at the lines and planes of throat and cheek, the scintillating highlights of her hair. He stopped before a plaque set into the foot of the knoll. ‘
Sugar
and Spice
’ by Helebron of Xyré, it read. Beneath the title and artist was a note to the effect that the piece was on loan to the Aga of Rhaqalle.

Nicole had been staying in the commune of the Aga, a follower of his Cult of the Prophet. The cult was a strange brew of Islamicist and Paganist beliefs which had been fashionable five years before when Nicole had left Webber, careless of the damage she caused by so easy a disregard of the trust he had given her.

The message asking that Webber remove Nicole’s ashes had come as a surprise that it was to him she had turned when she knew the illness would finish her. He had found bitter satisfaction in the thought that in the years since she had departed she had found no closer relationship than the one she had abandoned.

“What are little girls made of?”

He was not startled by the voice this time, but then, seconds later, he saw that he was no longer alone. A slim woman stood behind him and to one side, staring at the sculpture. She wore black flares, a tight tunic of the same shade, and a velvety purple cape. Her face was bronzed, contrasting sharply with her bleached blonde hair.

Webber returned his attention to the exhibit. He would wait a short time before leaving, so as not to make the woman feel she had driven him away.

“What do you think?” she said in a conversational tone, indicating the statue.

When he glanced in the woman’s direction he saw that she was watching him, waiting. Feeling compelled to reply, he said, “I find it quite... striking.”

She nodded. “Many people find it uplifting,” she said, as if disappointed that he conformed to stereotype.

“You?” he asked, intrigued.

“I find it devastatingly tragic,” she said softly. “A mere creation, so lifelike.”

Now that he looked more closely, Webber saw that the woman wore a stylised tear on her cheek like a jewel, matching the statue’s tear.

He wondered if she was a cultist – the Cult of the Prophet was positively orthodox when compared to some of the odd belief systems that prospered in Serenity’s sandy retreats. Maybe this work had acquired some sort of religious significance for the woman. He had heard about sociopaths whose obsession with a work of art, or another person, could turn from adulation to the compulsive need to possess or destroy. But apart from the affectation of the teardrop, this woman betrayed no sign of mental dysfunction.

She was watching him. “You’re an offworlder?”

He nodded. It was not a difficult deduction.

She moved forward and reached for his hand. He let her raise it, study his palm. “You’re from Earth,” she said. “Eastern Europe, I think.”

He decided to humour her. “Vienna.”

“You’re on a mission here,” she said. “Are you a spy, perhaps?”

He looked away, withdrew his hand. “I have business in Rhaqalle,” he said brusquely.

“It’s a difficult place to get into,” she said. “They don’t welcome visitors unless they’ve been vetted and plan to stay.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ve been invited.”

She glanced at the exhibit. “Helebron is staying in Rhaqalle,” she said. “He is a guest of the Aga.”

Webber started to walk slowly around the exhibit once again. He indicated the plaque set into the foot of the hillock. “There doesn’t seem to be much information available.”

The woman stood where he had left her. She looked at him across the shoulder of the hillock. “What do you wish to know?” she asked.

He shrugged. As the knoll came between him and the woman, he considered. When he could see her again, he said, “How did Helebron create such a realistic representation?”

“From life,” she said simply. “All art comes from life.” He raised his eyebrows, prompting her to add, “The technique itself is Helebron’s alone. Or rather, one he learned from his Xyréan mentors. The small human community on Xyré is very close to the native race – far closer than they are to humankind.”

Suddenly, Webber saw something in the alignment of the girl and the woman. “Who is she?” he asked.

The woman looked down at the floor. “My daughter,” she said. “Jade was my daughter.”

He noted her use of the past tense. He wanted to say something, to equate the woman’s loss with his own, and so share the burden of her grief. But he could not. He was an insular man. He completed his circuit of the dome in silence.

“I came to Serenity after Jade’s death,” she said.

He thought of how cruel chance could be – if chance it was: that an artist from a distant planet had brought his work to where the mother of his deceased model should be staying...

He decided to go, leave the woman alone with her memories. Before he could excuse himself, the woman said, “You probably think it macabre that I come here like this. But there is something of Jade that lingers in this work, an essence. Can’t you feel it?”

He nodded, wary. He could not deny that he had felt something special, a frisson of energy, on encountering this exhibit.

“I thought that it was just me,” he said.

She shook her head vehemently. Then she took his hand again and before he knew what was happening she had stepped over the low barrier. Compliant, if a little alarmed, he followed. They climbed the knoll and paused only when they were level with the figure of the girl.

“There,” the woman said. “Can you feel it now?”

It seemed that the very air about the sculpture was alive with an electric charge that all but hummed with vitality. Somehow – though he later told himself that he had imagined this – he could sense the girl’s personality. He could feel her innocence and youth and yearning for life, and yet at the same time he was aware of a subtle, tragic undercurrent.

“Touch her,” said the woman.

He did as instructed. He moved his fingers towards the girl’s cheek. Instead of touching warm, yielding flesh, as he had almost expected to do, his fingertips encountered a surface as cold and hard as glass. And instantly he no longer perceived the harmony of Jade’s emotions in the air. A feeling like that of death overwhelmed him, an absolute negativity.

He withdrew his fingers quickly, and instantly her vitality was restored. He wondered that something so beautiful could also be so terrifying.

“Sometimes I want to hold her, as you would a child,” said the woman. “Sometimes I think there is a key I can use to reawaken her, the Disney prince’s kiss.”

Webber stared at her, his brain following the tracks she had lain for him. “
This
... this is your daughter?” he said, still disbelieving.

She nodded. “Helebron of Xyré killed Jade,” she said. “He turned her into a work of art in what he termed a ‘process of vitrification’. He has tormented me with her fate ever since.”

Webber followed her down the hillock and over the barrier. She stopped by the exit. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Even after six years the wounds have not yet healed.”

“Of course,” he said. “I–”

“Powers,” she said, interrupting him. She offered her hand for him to shake formally. “Kandy Powers.”

“Axel Webber,” he said.

“I know a good restaurant,” she murmured. “The best on Serenity. Join me?”

He was amazed, in retrospect, at how easily she seduced him.

They dined at an exclusive outdoor restaurant. At first they spoke little, then she asked Webber why he was on Serenity, why he was going to Rhaqalle. He found himself telling Kandy of Nicole, his relationship with her, and his pain at her departure. He had thought that he had adequately dealt with the wounds she had inflicted; he had not realised that they were still there, ready to be reopened.

“The Aga has her ashes,” he said. “He offered to have them spread in the desert, but I declined. I wanted to come to Serenity, to see what it was that she left me for. Then I will take her remains back to Earth.”

They ate their spiced oasis fish and curried yams in silence. Over a mid-meal honeyed wine, he asked her, “Your daughter... how could anyone do such a thing? How is he allowed to get away with it?”

“There are people capable of almost anything,” Kandy said. “You shouldn’t be surprised. He got away with his crime because nobody could prove a thing against him.”

“But the statue!”

“–is a beautiful work of art, composed entirely of an exotic crystal found on the planet of Xyré. Samples have been taken, but there is not the slightest physical trace of my daughter in the sculpture. And of course Helebron has always been careful not to incriminate himself. In his many public statements about the piece, he only ever hints at its true nature. Over the years he has sent me sensories of the piece so that I could all but be there with it. He has sent reviews which praise his genius, interviews where he explains the symbolism of the piece. He has become very fashionable: killing my daughter was a brilliant career move on his part. And, finally, he sends me the work itself.”

Webber studied Kandy’s composed face. Choosing his words carefully, he said, “Are you absolutely certain that Helebron is telling the truth?”

She looked up sharply. “You touched her,” she said. “I always doubted his claims – even the sensories were ambiguous. But since the exhibit came to Serenity, I have
known
. The sculpture is my daughter.”

When they had finished their meal, Kandy reached across the table and put a hand on Webber’s. “Will you take me home?” she said.

She had an apartment in the cosmopolitan part of town overlooking the oasis. The living area of the penthouse suite was large, as if several rooms had been knocked into one. The floors were made of glowing desert wildwood, with low beams of the same, and exotic trailing plants everywhere.