Wingrove, David - Chung Kuo 02 (75 page)

She clutched the
painting to her, her deep sense of hurt fueling the anger she felt
toward him.

"Get out!"
she screamed at him. "Go on, get out of here, right now!"

He turned away,
seemingly unaffected by her outburst; then he leaned over the bed,
picking up the folder he had brought with him. She watched him,
expecting him to leave, to go without a further word, but he turned
back, facing her, offering the folder.

"Here,"
he said, meeting her eyes calmly. "This is what I mean. This is
the kind of thing you should be doing, not that crap you mistake for
art."

She gave a laugh
of astonishment. He was unbelievable.

"You
arrogant bastard."

She felt like
slapping his face. Like smashing the canvas over his smug,
self-complacent head.

"Take it,"
he said, suddenly more forceful, his voice assuming an air of
command. Then, strangely, he relented, his voice softening. "Just
look. That's all. And afterward, if you can't see what I mean, I'll
go. It's just that I thought you were different from the rest. I
thought. . ."

He shrugged,
then looked down at the folder again. It was a simple art folder—
the kind that carried holo flats—its jet-black cover unmarked.

She hesitated,
her eyes searching his face, looking for some further insult, but, if
anything, he seemed subdued, disappointed in her. She frowned, then
put the painting down.

"Here,"
she said, taking the folder from him angrily. "You've got nerve,
I'll give you that."

He said nothing.
He was watching her now, expectantly, those dark eyes of his seeming
to catch and hold every last atom of her being, their gaze
disconcerting.

She sat down on
the edge of the bed, the folder in her lap, looking up at him through
half-lidded eyes.

"What is
this?"

"Open it
and see."

For a long time
she was silent, her head down, her fingers tracing the shapes and
forms that stared up at her from the sheaf of papers that had been
inside the folder. Then she looked up at him, wide-eyed, all anger
gone from her.

"Who
painted these?"

He sat down
beside her, taking the folder and flicking through to the first of
the reproductions.

"This is by
Caravaggio. His 'Supper at Emmaus,' painted more than six hundred
years ago. And this . . . this is Vermeer, painted almost sixty years
later; he called it 'The Artist's Studio.' And this is by Rembrandt,
Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer,' painted ten years
earlier. And this is 'Laocoon' by El Greco—"

She put her hand
on his, stopping him from turning the print over, staring at the
stretched white forms that lay there on the page.

"I've—I've
never seen anything like these. They're—"

She shivered,
then looked up at him, suddenly afraid.

"Why have I
never seen them? I mean, they're beautiful. They're
real
somehow."

She stopped,
suddenly embarrassed, realizing now what he had meant. She had
painted him in the traditional way—the only way she knew—but
he had known something better.

"What does
it mean?" she asked, her fingers tracing the pale, elongated
forms. "Who are they?"

He gave a small
laugh, then shook his head. "The old man lying down in the
center, he's Laocoon. He was the priest who warned the Trojans not to
allow the wooden horse into Troy."

She gave a
little shake of her head, then laughed. "Troy? Where was Troy?
And what do you mean by wooden horse?"

He laughed, once
again that openness, that strange naturalness of his surfacing
unexpectedly. "It was an ancient tale. About a war that happened
three thousand years ago between two small nation states. A war that
was fought over a woman."

"A woman?"

"Yes."
He looked away, a faint smile on his lips.

"How
strange. To fight a war over a woman." She turned the page. "And
this?" Ben was silent for a time, simply staring at the
painting; then he looked up at her again. "What do you make of
it?"

She gave a
little shrug. "I don't know. It's different from the others.
They're all so—so dark and intense and brooding. But
this—there's such serenity there, such knowledge in those
eyes."

"Yes."
He laughed softly, surprised by her. "It's beautiful, isn't it?
The painter was a man called Modigliani, and it was painted some
three hundred years after those others. It's called 'Last Love.' The
girl was his lover, a woman called Jeanne Hebuterne. When he died she
threw herself from a fifth-floor window."

She looked up at
him sharply, then looked back down at the painting. "Poor woman.
I..." She hesitated, then turned, facing him. "But why,
Ben? Why haven't I heard of any of these painters? Why don't they
teach them in College?" He looked back at her. "Because
they don't exist. Not officially."

"What do
you mean?"

He paused, then
shook his head. "No. It's dangerous. I shouldn't have shown you.
Even to know about these—"

He started to
close the folder but she stopped him, flicking through the remaining
paintings until she came to one near the end.

"This,"
she said. "Why have I never seen this before?"

Ben hesitated,
staring at the print she was holding out to him. He had no need to
look at it; it was imprinted firmly in his memory. But he looked
anyway, trying to see it fresh—free of its context—as she
was seeing it.

"That's da
Vinci," he said softly. "Leonardo da Vinci. It's called
'The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and John the Baptist' and it
was painted exactly seven hundred and eight years ago."

She was silent a
moment, studying the print, then she looked up at him again, her eyes
pained now, demanding.

"Yes, Ben,
but why? And what do you mean, they don't exist? These paintings
exist, don't they? And the men who painted them—they existed,
didn't they? Or is this all some kind of joke?"

He shook his
head, suddenly weary of it all. Was he to blame that these things had
gone from the world? Was it his fault that the truth was kept from
them? No. And yet he felt a dreadful burden of guilt, just knowing
this. Or was it guilt? Wasn't it something to do with the feeling he
had had ever since he'd come here, into the City? That feeling that
only
he
was real? That awful feeling of distance from
everything and everyone—as if, when he reached out to touch it
all, it would dissolve, leaving him there in the midst of
nothingness, falling back toward the earth.

He heard the old
man's voice echo in his head—Ghosts?
Why, there's
nothing
here
but
ghosts!
—and shivered.

Was that why he
had shown her these? To make some kind of connection? To reassure
himself that he wasn't the only living, breathing creature in this
vast mirage—this house of cards?

Maybe. But now
he realized what he had done. He had committed her. Seduced her with
these glimpses of another world. So what now? Should he back off and
tell her to forget all that she'd seen, or should he take her one
step further?

He looked at her
again, taking her hand, for that one brief moment balanced between
the two courses that lay open to him. Then he smiled and squeezed her
hand.

"Have you
ever read
Wuthering
Heights?"

She hesitated,
then nodded.

"Good. Then
I want you to read it again. But this time in the original version.
As it was first written, three hundred and sixty years ago."

"But
that's—" She laughed then looked down, disturbed by all of
this. "What are you doing, Ben? Why are you showing me these
things?"

"To wake
you up. To make you see all of this as I see it." He looked away
from her, his eyes moving back to the broken painting on the easel.

"I met
someone yesterday. A
Lu Nan Jen.
You know, what they call an
Oven Man. He painted, too. Not like you. He didn't have your skill
with a brush, your eye for classical composition. But he did have
something you haven't—something the whole of Han art hasn't—and
that's vision. He could see clear through the forms of things.
Through to the bone. He understood what made it all tick and he set
it down—clearly, powerfully. For himself. So that he could
understand it all. When you came up to me in the Cafe Burgundy I had
been sitting there thinking about him—thinking about what he'd
done, how he'd spent his life trying to set down that vision, that
dream
of his. And I wondered suddenly what it would be like to
wake that in someone. To make it blossom in the soul of someone who
had the talent to set it down as it really ought to be set down. And
then there you were, and I thought. . ."

She was watching
him closely now, her head pushed forward, her lips parted in
expectation.

"You
thought what?"

He turned back,
looking at her. "What are you doing this afternoon?"

She sat back,
disappointed. "Nothing. Why?"

"Would you
like to come with me somewhere? Somewhere you've never been before?"

She narrowed her
eyes. "Where?"

"Somewhere
no one ever goes. Beneath here. Into the Clay."

* *
*

ben had HlRED a
man to walk ten paces in front of them, his arc lamp held high, its
fierce white light revealing the facades of old graystone buildings,
their stark shapes edged in deepest shadow.

Ben held a
second, smaller lamp, a lightweight affair on a long, slender handle.
Its light was gentler, casting a small, pearled pool of brightness
about the walking couple.

Catherine held
his hand tightly, fascinated and afraid. She hadn't known. She
thought it had all been destroyed. But here it was, preserved,
deserted, left to the darkness; isolated from the savage wilderness
surrounding it.

As they walked,
Ben's voice filled the hollow darkness, speaking from memory, telling
her the history of the place.

"Unlike all
previous architects, the man who designed City Earth made no
accommodation for the old. The new was everything to him. Even that
most simple of concessions—the destruction of the old—was,
as far as possible, bypassed. The tallest buildings were destroyed,
of course, but the rest was simply built over, as if they really had
no further use for the past." He turned, looking back at her.
"What we have now is not so much a new form of architecture as a
new geological age. With City Earth we entered the Technozoic. All
else was left behind us, in the Clay."

He paused,
pointing across at a rounded dome the guide's lamp had revealed.
"Have you ever noticed how there are no domes in our City, even
in the mansions of First Level? No. There are copies of Han
architecture, of course, though even those are quite recent
developments, things of the last fifty years or so. But of the old
West there's nothing. All that elegance of line has been replaced by
harder shapes— hexagons, octagons, an interlacing of complex
crystalline structures, as if the world had frozen over."

"But that.
. ." She pointed up at the curved roof of the dome. "That's
beautiful."

"It is,
isn't it?"

She shook her
head, not understanding. "But why?"

"The desire
for conformity, I guess. Things like that dome induce a sense of
individuality in us. And they didn't want that."

She shrugged. "I
don't follow you."

Ben looked about
him. The circle of light extended only so far. Beyond, it was as if
the great stone buildings faded into uncreated nothingness. As if
they had no existence other than that which the light gave them in
its passage through their realm. Ben smiled at the thought, realizing
that this was a clue to what he himself was doing. For he—as
artist—was the light, creating that tiny circle of mock-reality
about him as he passed.

He turned back,
looking at the girl, answering her.

"When it
all fell apart, shortly before City Earth was built, there was an age
of great excess—of individual expression unmatched in the
history of our species. The architects of City Earth—Tsao
Ch'un, his Ministers, and their servants— identified the
symptom as the cause. They saw the excesses and the extravagance, the
beauty and the expression as cultural viruses and sought to destroy
them. But there was too much to destroy. They would have found it
easier to destroy the species. It was too deeply ingrained. Instead,
they tried to mask it—to bury it beneath new forms. City Earth
was to be a place where no one wanted for anything. Where everything
the physical self could need would be provided for. It was to be
Utopia—the world beyond Peach Blossom River."

She frowned at
him, not recognizing the term, but he seemed almost unaware of her
now. Slowly he led her on through the labyrinth of streets, the
doubled lights, like sun and moon, reflected in the ceiling high
above.

"But the
City was a cage. It catered only to the grounded, physical being. It
did not cater to the higher soul—the winged soul that wants to
fly."

She laughed,
surprised by him. But of course one caged birds. Who had ever heard
of a bird flying free?

The walls closed
about them on either side. They were walking now through a narrow
back alley, the guide only paces in front of them, his lamp filling
the darkness with its strong white light. For a moment it almost
seemed they were walking in the City.

Unless you
looked up. Unless you stopped and listened to the silence; sensing
the darkness all around.

Ben had been
silent, looking away. Now he turned, looking back at her.

"It was to
be a landscape devoid of all meaning. A landscape of unrelated form."

He had paused
and she had been obliged to stop with him. But all she wanted now was
to get out, for all the strange beauty of this place. She felt
uncomfortable here. Afraid, and vulnerable.