Across the Spectrum (67 page)

“Roald!” said Amarga, embarrassed reproach in her eyes. “We
must surely have an original Casey, but let’s have one we can display with
pride to our friends!”

“Come, you mustn’t be narrow-minded,” Roald Ruill rebuked,
but he put aside the offending picture. Casey busied himself with fixative,
struggling against a howl of laughter. Then, halfway between a real desire to
be helpful, and a wicked longing to help the joke along, he hauled out a couple
of pin-up nudes he had done a few months ago, advance sketches for a
prospective calendar. They had been turned down because the client considered
their bikini suits too skimpy even for pin-ups.

“There!” Amarga said with relief.

“Can’t I buy the other too, my dear? Just to show to, er, my
own friends?”

“What would my maternal parent have thought?” nagged Amarga,
and Roald Ruill sighed.

“Well, well, my dear, if you think—will this be sufficient
remuneration, O Great Casey?” With an air of negligent confidence, he stuck one
hand out into empty air, twiddled his long, skinny fingers in a weaving
pattern. Something, a few grains of yellow dust, began to shine in his palm,
then tumbled swiftly upward into a small pile. After a little, it began to
weigh his hand down, and Roald Ruill snapped his fingers, then yawned. “Gold. I
see you haven’t a lead-purse for the standard uranium coinage.”

He dumped the gold on a spare palette. “We will return
tomorrow for a sitting,” he said. “Come along, Amarga.”

They walked casually through an outside wall and were gone,
leaving Casey staring at a little heap of yellow dust—and his half-finished
charcoal sketch of an eight-foot, feather-headed, green-skinned girl.

∞

“It’s gold, all right,” the jeweler said, “and very fine
quality—looks like filings from a goldsmith’s shop. Would you mind telling me
where you got it?”

“I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you mean,” Casey said,
then improvised on the truth; he always went by the idea that if the unadorned
truth wouldn’t do, half a truth was safer than a lie. “A queer old duck wanted
to buy one of my pictures, and he asked if I’d take this for it. It looked like
gold, so I took the chance.”

The jeweler thought for a minute. “All right, I’ll take one
too,” he said. “Fifty-five dollars for what’s here, if you’ll give me the name
of someone who knows you and can vouch for your character.”

“Sure.” Casey gave him the name of Chad Stanton, managing
editor of a chain of pulp magazines to which Casey sometimes sold
illustrations. The jeweler took the gold away, and somewhere in the back of the
shop, Casey heard a number being dialed. In a few minutes, the man came back
and counted out the money.

Freed of worry about next week’s rent, Casey enjoyed a
decent meal, for a change, in a decent restaurant. He was halfway through a
steak when he looked up and saw Chad Stanton coming in the door. The editor
crossed the room to Casey’s side, took a seat across from him.

“Thought I might find you here,” he said. “Did you know
you’re a suspicious character? Whose watch did you hock today? Somebody called
up and asked did I know you, and were you a solid citizen. So you owe me a
drink on that.”

“Sure, I’m loaded,” Casey said, “only weren’t you with a
party?”

Chad Stanton chuckled. “Just the office crowd,” he said,
“and I’m better off over here, where I don’t have to listen. We’re bringing out
a new title, next month—science fiction monthly—and the fellows will do their
planning better when I’m not there to say no. How about that drink?”

Casey ordered it. He had to break a twenty, and Chad
Stanton, used to his friend’s near-empty wallet, whistled rudely. “Not whose
watch did you hock, but whose bank did you rob?”

“None,” Casey said. “But it’s a funny business, just the
same. I’d like to tell you about it. Want to drop up to my room?”

“I can’t make a night of it,” Stanton warned, “not even if
you have a bottle of Haig and Haig. I’ve got a foot-deep slush pile to read for
that science fiction magazine.”

“And I’ve got a. . . a client coming to sit for a portrait,”
Casey said, “but stop in for a few minutes on you way home, will you?”

“Can do,” Stanton said.

∞

At five that afternoon he knocked at the hall door of
Casey’s bedroom. Casey brought him into the studio.

“It was about two-thirty in the morning,” he began, and told
the whole story. Stanton blinked.

“If I read it in the slush pile, I’d laugh my head off,” he
scoffed. “What had you been drinking?”

“A glass of cold milk,” Casey said in annoyance.

“Then you ought to stick to beer.”

“Look, Chad, I’m serious. If not—if I’m crazy—where did the
gold come from?”

Stanton squinted at the few shining grains still adhering to
the palette. His comment was profane and unprintable. “Yes, it looks like gold
all right.”

“And look here,” Casey urged, handing him the sketch of
Amarga.

Stanton whistled, turning the sketch in his hands. “Oh,
brother,” he said, “if that stable of dry-brush pushers we’ve got down there
could see this! This is science fiction art—the real stuff! This is a Bug-Eyed
Monster to end all BEMs! I never knew you could do fantasy art, Casey.”

“I can’t. I tell you, this was a life sketch,” Casey said.
“I don’t even read that crazy science fiction stuff.”

“Maybe you ought to take up writing it, judging by that yarn
you spun,” Stanton snorted. “Look, seriously, Casey—I don’t handle the artwork
over at the shop, but you work up that sketch into a painting, and show it to
Donaldson, over at Vector Pubs. Tell him I said to think about featuring it for
a cover, and we’ll assign somebody to write a story around it.”

“But Chad—” Casey began, then stopped at the sight of the
other man’s face; Stanton’s mouth was open in a long O, his eyes bugged out,
and he was staring fixedly at something just behind Casey. “Now I’m seeing it,”
he yipped. “I must have been reading too much slush—gotta catch my train—gotta
take a rest—” he gabbled, shut his eyes hard, turned and piled pell-mell down
the stairs. Casey turned slowly around, not in a hurry to see what he knew Stanton
had seen: Roald Ruill’s feathery green skull, sticking out of the wallpaper.

“Come right in,” Casey said bitterly. He’d better keep the
man from the future in a good humor; he was going to need whatever fee he got
for Amarga’s portrait. Chances were, he wouldn’t sell anything more to Stanton
after this!

∞

It had taken a week; Amarga had come for three more
sittings, and now the painting was finished. They were to come for it tonight.

Casey liked it, weird as it was. Amarga had a special
beauty; not a human beauty, of course, but you couldn’t have everything.

If only they liked it! Neither of them had looked at the
sketch; Roald Ruill had twittered something kind about not being worthy to
watch the incubation process of the creative mind, and Amarga had told him, in
her shrilling coloratura, that she simply adored surprises.

It was a perfect likeness. Amarga stood, as if living, on
the canvas before him. Casey felt that one minute of pure, perfect
self-satisfaction, the aftermath of all the painful sweats which go into making
anything, whether a picture or a piecrust. Casey looked at his picture and saw
that it was good, the best thing he’d ever painted. He’d have to give it up
soon enough, so right now he meant to sit and admire it for a minute or two.

The materialization process no longer scared him. When
Amarga and Roald Ruill walked out of the wall, he merely greeted them with a
cordial grin.

“This is a great moment in history—in
future
history,” Roald Ruill said pompously. “Amarga, my dear, you must have first
look at the portrait.”

Casey stood back, giving way to Amarga. Roald Ruill edged
behind her.

They looked at the picture for some moments in silence.
Roald Ruill paled to a minty shade of palest green; then suddenly his face
congested to indigo, and Amarga gave a soprano shriek. “Oh!” she cried. “Oh,
it’s
horrible!”

She flung up her long spidery fingers to her eyes and
vanished.

“You don’t like it?” Casey asked numbly, and from nowhere,
her bodiless voice wailed, “Like it!”

Roald Ruill came at him, angrily. “Is it your intention,
Casey, to mock the generations who have revered your name? To insult my
daughter?”

Casey stared, stunned, at the almost-breathing picture of
Amarga. “Insult her?” he faltered. “Nothing could be further from my mind! I
did the best—”

“You have painted her as
inhuman!”
Ruill thundered.

“Well,”
Casey stammered, “Well, she doesn’t look . . . exactly like the . . . human women
I’ve painted, but I painted her as she is, as beautifully as—”

Roald Ruill’s face went through a whole palette of greens
and blues. “Would you flaunt our mutations in our faces?” he demanded. “How
would you paint
any
woman of Earth, as other than human? Why, you
wretched scrawler, if I wanted to see Amarga as she
is,
I would look in
a
mirror!”
He spoke it as one speaks a disgustingly filthy epithet. “As
if anyone ever painted what he
saw!
Have you no artistic sense of
interpretation? You painted only her form—and painted it indecently—and with no
psychological insight whatsoever! Where is her basic humanity? Where are her
thoughts? Where are the beautiful telepathic projections of her innocent soul?
This. . . this obscene scrawl—”

Casey tried to check the flow of rapid words.

“Look here, Roald Ruill, I didn’t think—in our era, it’s
customary to paint a portrait so it looks like the subject—”

“Ridiculous!” Roald Ruill stabbed with an angry long finger
at the pin-up nudes on the wall. “Do you look like
that?”

“Well, no, but then, you see—”

“And that proves it,” Roald Ruill said triumphantly. “I
don’t know why I stand arguing with an ignorant moron of the pre-space era! One
school of criticism has always maintained that pre-space man had no creativity,
and that his so-called
art
is on a level with the scrawls of a child.
Now I have evidence to support this theory! You say, Casey—” he omitted the
“Great” this time “—that you painted Amarga as you saw her? Then where are her
sexual attributes? Why, one would never know whether she was male or female!
You might at least have followed the ordinary conventions of decency! As for
this . . . this—” he went an incoherent purple, touching with
angry, trembling fingers the painted feathery topknot on Amarga’s skull, “even
after what we said about the . . . the lewd indecency of organic
substance on the body, you had the . . . the effrontery to paint
her—” his face ran the whole gamut of colors, green ice to pine-cone, “with
hair,
and wearing . . . wearing
clothing!”

Casey was angry now. “Well, she
was
wearing
clothing,” he flung at Roald Ruill. Damn it, how could he have known about
their dim-witted conventions?

Roald Ruill snorted, “Some concessions to the climate must
be made—but sane and decent people do not mention them in polite society!” He
flung the painting to the floor. “This . . . this daub would be
of interest only to the Council on Abnormal Psychology! Believe me, when I get
back to my own time, I will explode the whole Casey myth! The so-called
Eternity Fragment which calls you the greatest, must be a hoax!”

Roald Ruill was gone, like a whisper of air, and Casey swore
fervently, seeing his fee and a week’s work going glimmering. The room was
empty; Casey wondered if he were sleepwalking, if the whole thing had been a
bizarre nightmare. No, for Amarga’s portrait lay at his feet where Roald Ruill
had thrown it. Casey raised his foot, ready to stamp through the useless,
stupid, cheating face; then he jerked back his foot, so suddenly that he almost
fell. He steadied himself on the easel, stooped, and tenderly picked up the
portrait. He hunted up a piece of brown wrapping paper and a string, and twenty
minutes later, went out into the street. The editorial offices of Vector
Publications didn’t close till six. He could just about make it.

∞

And everybody in the science fiction world knows the
rest—the gorgeous six-color cover on the first issue of
Eternity Science
Fiction Novels
, the story written around the cover by Theodore Sturgeon,
the guest editorial on “The Nonhuman in Science Fiction Art.” The original
painting, auctioned off at the science fiction convention, sold for two hundred
dollars.

No other of Casey’s paintings ever won quite so much fame,
though he sold steadily to the science fiction magazines after that, and twice
won a Hugo as “Artist of the Year.”

He was fairly well satisfied with his modest success, though
his family always wondered why he should waste his talents illustrating
“escapist rubbish.” His nagging maiden aunt (she of the orange polka-dotted
pajamas) once asked him point-blank:

“Why don’t you paint something worthwhile, something to make
a name for yourself? This here-today-and-gone-tomorrow stuff, it’s only good
for waste paper! These crackpot science fiction fans may call you the greatest,
but fifty years from now, none of these cheap magazines will be around—and your
name will be completely forgotten!”

“Hah,” said Casey—but only to himself, for he was almost
always polite to old ladies, “that’s what
you
think!
”

Chaz Brenchley
has been making a living as a writer since
he was eighteen. Chaz is the author of nine thrillers, including
Shelter
, and two major fantasy series:
The Books of Outremer, based on the world of the Crusades, and Selling Water by
the River, set in an alternate Ottoman Istanbul. As Daniel Fox, he has
published
Dragon in Chains
,
Jade Man’s Skin
and
Hidden Cities
, a Chinese-influenced fantasy series. As Ben
Macallan, he has published the urban fantasy
Desdaemona
, and its sequel
Pandaemonium
.
A winner of the British Fantasy Award, he has also published five books for
children and more than 500 short stories in various genres. His time as
Crimewriter-in-Residence on a sculpture project resulted in the collection
Blood Waters. He was Northern Writer of the Year 2000, and now lives in
California with his wife, two squabbling cats and a famous teddy bear.