Parallax View (11 page)

While Kandy poured a viscous blue liqueur into two long glasses like test-tubes, Webber strolled through the vine-festooned archways. Strange plants and shrubs in demijohns and terrariums alternated with prints, crystals and neograms, all depicting Jade. They showed the girl from an early age right through to her teens: laughing, posing, riding on the backs of strange animals, cavorting in the surf on a bodyboard.

Webber paused before a free-standing neogram showing a family scene: Jade with her arms around Kandy, standing beside a thick-set man who looked to be in his fifties. The little girl was laughing, the sound activated by Webber’s presence, and looking from her mother to the man. Her child’s voice was recognisable as that which recited the nursery rhyme in Helebron’s exhibit.

Kandy stepped through the arch and handed Webber his drink.

“Jade’s father?”

Her smile was nostalgic as she stared at the ’gram. “My husband, Edourd. That was taken on Bruckner’s World, the year before his death.”

Webber said nothing. She had lost so much.

“He was killed by a terrorist bomb,” she volunteered. “Not by the blast, but by the biological fallout.”

He moved away into the centre of the room. He did not understand how the mood could swing so dramatically when he was with this woman: from light, humorous conversation to shared intimacies about tragedy and loss. Within a short time of meeting Kandy Powers he had come closer to her than to anyone since Nicole.

“You’re an artist?” he asked, trying to manufacture another swing of mood. The neograms distributed around the suite looked like the work of a professional.

“I was,” she said. “Commercial work, mostly – advertising, corporate iconography. I only produced my own work occasionally, when inspiration came.” She hesitated, then continued. “After Edourd died I moved in new directions, and for a short time I was quite successful. But no longer. I stopped all that.” Now, she looked up and Webber saw how intense she had become. “I was driven to create work I did not fully understand. And then I learnt that even the purest work of creation has its consequences. I’ve produced nothing for several years.”

Webber was out of his depth. If he had no understanding of art itself, how could he possibly begin to understand the motivations of those who produced it?

Kandy tipped her glass and a length of blue liquid slipped down her throat.

“What do you do now?” Webber asked. “Without your art?” Or your daughter.

“
Carpe diem
,” she said, and smiled at his frown. “Live for the day.” She gestured at his empty glass. “Another drink? Something stronger this time?” She moved to the bar and poured a green concoction into two bulbous glasses.

He took the drink and held it up to the light. “What is it?”

“A love philtre,” she said, watching him above the rim of her glass as she swallowed the liquid in one.

Her bedroom was a glass-enclosed chamber with a view over the rippling water of the oasis, illumination provided by Serenity’s midnight auroral lights. Webber found himself in new territory, neither casual affair nor the kind of intense love he thought he had shared with Nicole. Kandy had no need of him, he knew. He was a refuge in a storm, a source of comfort in a life that had experienced so much loss.

When he woke the next morning, Kandy was propped up on one elbow, looking down at him. “When are you going to Rhaqalle?” she asked in a whisper.

“Tonight. Perhaps tomorrow morning.”

She waited, letting the silence expand, then said, “Can I come with you?”

The surge of delight he felt was tempered by sudden caution. “Why?” he asked.

“I want to see Helebron. I will beg him to end his torment of me.” Then she lowered her head, kissed Webber on the shoulder, the neck. “And you, Axel,” she murmured, pushing him onto his back. “I don’t want to lose you so soon after having found you...”

In his hotel room later that day he booked two air tickets to Rhaqalle, then started a trawl for information about Helebron of Xyré. He felt that he was betraying Kandy, but at the same time he felt an undeniable need to find out more about her traumatic past. How else might he help her?

After four hours he had found little. Sources on Serenity were limited – exotic art not being a priority here – and access speed for offworld links was infuriatingly slow. He fetched a drink from the bar, then sat back and watched again the three skimpy reviews he had found. Only one of them mentioned the piece entitled ‘Sugar and Spice’, and that only in passing.

Then he noticed a projected icon pulsing to attract his attention. One of his searches had come up with something. “Okay,” he assented, and instantly a projection sprang into 3D life on the wall of his hotel room.

A tall, straw-limbed man with unkempt grey hair and dark, brooding eyes was seated on a wall so low that his knees were thrust up to the level of his chest. The fact of Xyré’s low gravity was clearly demonstrated by Helebron’s gangling limbs. The first words he said were ‘sugar and spice’ – the search had started the interview at the relevant point.

“Sugar and spice and all things nice, that’s what little girls are made of.” Helebron paused, stared into the room with a little smile on his face. “My fellow artists will understand entirely what I mean by this piece.”

Had he said
artist
or
artists
? Instantly, Webber found that he was listening to the interview as if it was directed solely at Kandy.

“The purity... the
innocence
of one so young, on the threshold of a full and adult life. Yet frozen at this point. Not allowed to live beyond it. Trapped in a realm beyond even death.”

Icons pulsed. Webber selected one and the interviewer’s voice asked the artist, “What bearing does your interpretation of this theme, both metaphorical and psychodirective, have on the losses suffered in your non-art-oriented life?”

Helebron barely paused. “I know what it is to have a child taken from me. The loss of my own son naturally has a great impact on what – and how – I create.” Again, he stared out of the wall at Webber. “Perhaps this is my revenge,” he continued. “Perhaps I am driven to trap innocence – to
crystallise
it – just as my own son’s was trapped.” He chuckled amiably, then concluded, “In many ways, I suppose you could say that by freezing Jade Powers’ innocence in my work I have killed her!”

Webber watched the entire interview, at first jumping from question to question, then real-time, but he learnt little more.

She was waiting at her apartment, sitting on the balcony in shorts and sandals. She came to him and wrapped her arms about his neck, but then she seemed to sense something uncertain in his attitude. “What is it?”

He looked into her eyes. “I saw an interview with Helebron. I want to know what happened.”

She tensed, then pulled away. She stood for some time with her back to him, then glanced over her shoulder. “You’ve been investigating me?”

“I want to help you,” he said. “I thought it was the most painless way for me to find out – all I did was watch an interview. And now I’m confused. You lost your daughter, Helebron lost his son...” He crossed to Kandy, touched her shoulder. “What happened, Kandy? I want to help you.”

Her head tipped back as he kneaded her tense neck muscles. “My husband, Edourd,” she said. “It took a month for the viral agents from the fallout of the terrorists’ bomb to kill him. I nursed him to the end, as he was gnawed to death by the cancers... He was an innocent man – a peace protestor petitioning on behalf of a persecuted family. The bomb was democratic, it didn’t discriminate between the innocent and the guilty.

“Afterwards I abandoned my commercial contracts and tried to become a real artist. My work was bitter and cynical.” She smiled. “Art as therapy, if you like. But even therapy can have unforeseen consequences.

“I started to receive some recognition, boosted by the notoriety of some of my works. There was one piece particularly. I called it, ‘What are little boys made of?’ Its centrepiece was a biological replica of the body of a young boy – real flesh, real organs, but it had never lived. I placed the figure on a large dissecting board and peeled back the skin, pinning out the internal organs as if it were a laboratory dissection. All apart from its face, which remained intact, smiling. Every so often, triggered by the presence of a viewer, a voice would recite the nursery rhyme:

“What are little boys made of?

“What are little boys made of?

“Slugs and snails,

“And puppy dogs’ tails,

“That’s what little boys are made of.

“I didn’t find out what had happened to Helebron’s son until some time after he killed Jade in revenge.”

Webber led Kandy across to a sofa, where they sat, her head resting on his shoulder. “What happened?”

She looked up at him, eyes brimming with tears ready to match the false one on her cheek. “A psychopath took my work as the basis for his own perversion. He killed four young boys, pinned them out on the ground. He labelled their organs: slugs, snails, puppy dogs’ tails. One of the boys was Helebron’s son. He held me personally responsible.”

“But... the killer would have killed anyway.”

“But he would not have killed those particular boys in that manner. In the general sense my work might not have been responsible. But in the specific...”

The difference between Kandy and Helebron was clear. Where Kandy had been driven to create work which others had abused, Helebron was driven to abuse directly through his work.

She rubbed at her eyes, then turned to him with a determined expression, which he had come to recognise. “That’s why I must go to Rhaqalle,” she said. “I see now that all powerful works of art have their consequences, whether intended or not. I am ready to plead with Helebron to stop tormenting me.”

Webber nodded. “I’ve made the arrangements,” he said. “The flight leaves this afternoon.”

The rolling desert landscape – so like the classic deserts of Araby – made it somehow apt that an Islamicist-Paganist cult should have its home here. The aircraft took them first over scrubby hills and dry, rubble-strewn wadis, then over endless kilometres of parallel dunes. Occasional escarpments broke the monotony, their leeward sides calved away in curves as precise as the blade of a scimitar. Webber could see no reason why anyone would wish to settle on such a forbidding planet. Perhaps that was why the cults had been able to flourish: leftover people living on the crumbs ignored by the Expansion.

Had Nicole been a leftover person, he mused? Had he really offered her so little that she had opted for a life in such an inhospitable place?

They spent most of the journey in uneasy silence. Kandy sat morosely at Webber’s side, fingernails digging into his leg. “I’m scared,” she confided at one point.

“It’s okay,” he said, inadequately. “It will soon be over.”

They were not the only passengers on the plane. There was a group of a dozen new converts, fresh in from Tartarus, where the Cult had been recruiting heavily. These people put Webber on edge with their evangelical enthusiasm: at first they approached him, mistaking him for one of their own; his scepticism merely marked him down as raw material for them to work on. The more experienced acolytes were discreet, polite but not overbearing, dressed in jeans, long-sleeved shirts, not the affected djellabas and chadors of the converts.

Misled by the desert landscape, he half-expected Rhaqalle to be a cluster of Bedouin tents gathered around a palm-fringed oasis. The place was in fact a small town, with square, white-washed buildings, its blocky skyline broken by the occasional dome and minaret.

A man in jeans, tinted shades and a shirt bearing a crescent moon emblem, approached Webber and Kandy as they emerged from the drab transit office. “Axel Webber?” he asked in a thick accent, glancing at Webber and then staring pointedly at Kandy.

Webber nodded. “A friend,” he said, gesturing to Kandy. “She will be staying with me.”

The man shrugged. “The Aga’s arranged a room for you at the Lodge. When you are ready he will see you. You come with me. I show you.”

They followed the man through crowded streets and across a packed market-place to a large building, the walls of which were daubed with the Aga’s symbol of a crescent moon rising behind a celtic cross.

After checking in at reception, they were shown up to a simple room on the third floor. There was a single bed, a jug of water and a chipped enamel bowl. On the windowsill was what looked like a scorpion; their guide merely flicked it out of the window with the back of his hand. “You settle yourselves,” he said. “Downstairs I will wait. When you are ready we go see the Aga.”

When the man had gone, Webber turned to Kandy, shocked at how exhausted she looked after the journey. “Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll be back later.”

She smiled, nodded, then lowered herself onto the bed.

Out in the street the muezzins were calling the faithful to worship the moon goddess. Each time their piercing wails echoed between the buildings Webber’s guide reached down and touched the ground with his fingertips. Webber wondered if he should do the same, but decided not to; he was more likely to cause offence with feigned affiliation.

They waited outside a mosque until the worshippers began to emerge. Webber stood to one side, studying the faces of the acolytes as they filed past, wondering for the thousandth time what had drawn Nicole to this place. Why had she chosen this one amongst all the countless cults of the Expansion? Why had she needed religion at all?

His guide touched his sleeve, murmured, “Now we can enter. The Aga will see you.”

They removed their shoes and stepped into the mosque, crossed a great, vaulted chamber of marble, its floor polished over the decades by the prayer mats of the faithful.

Seated casually on a stone bench was a small man in a light jacket and flared leggings. The man nodded as Webber and his guide halted before him. His hair was dark, his skin lined and bronzed with exposure to the sun. A small moustache lined his upper lip, as if applied with a pen.

“You must be Axel Webber,” said the man, offering a hand.