The Science Fiction anthology - Andre Norton

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to stop and varnish it, and he didn’t care if the paint looked like paint instead of looking like sunset clouds or moonbeams. Up in Hartford, Browne and Sharpe stop when they’ve got a turret lathe; they don’t put caryatids on it. I’ll stop while my life is a life, before it becomes a thing with distracting embellishments such as a wife who will come to despise me, a succession of gradually less worthwhile pieces that nobody will look at.

      Blame nobody, he told himself, lightheadedly.

      And then it was in front of him, terminating a vista of weeds and bomb rubble—Milles’ Orpheus Fountain.

      It took a man, he thought. Esthetikon circuits couldn’t do it. There was a gross mixture of styles, a calculated flaw that the esthetikon couldn’t be set to make. Orpheus and the souls were classic or later; the three-headed dog was archaic. That was to tell you about the antiquity and invincibility of Hell, and that Cerberus knows Orpheus will never go back into life with his bride.

      There was the heroic, tragic central figure that looked mighty enough to battle with the gods, but battle wasn’t any good against the grinning, knowing, hateful three-headed dog it stood on. You don’t battle the pavement where you walk or the floor of the house you’re in; you can’t. So Orpheus, his face a mask of controlled and suffering fury crashes a great chord from his lyre that moved trees and stones. Around him the naked souls in Hell start at the chord, each in its own way: the young lovers down in death; the mother down in death; the musician, deaf and down in death, straining to hear.

      Halvorsen, walking uncertainly toward the fountain, felt something break inside him, and a heaviness in his lungs. As he pitched forward among the weeds, he thought he heard the chord from the lyre and didn’t care that the three-headed dog was grinning its knowing, hateful grin down at him.

      VI

      When Halvorsen awoke, he supposed he was in Hell. There were the young lovers, arms about each other’s waists, solemnly looking down at him, and the mother was placidly smoothing his brow. He stirred and felt his left arm fall heavily.

      “Ah,” said the mother, “you mustn’t.” He felt her pick up his limp arm and lay it across his chest. “Your poor finger!” she sighed. “Can you talk? What happened to it?”

      He could talk, weakly. “Labuerre and I,” he said. “We were moving a big block of marble with the crane—somehow the finger got under it. I didn’t notice until it was too late to shift my grip without the marble slipping and smashing on the floor.”

      The boy said in a solemn, adolescent croak: “You mean you saved the marble and lost your finger?”

      “Marble,” he muttered. “It’s so hard to get. Labuerre was so old.”

      The young lovers exchanged a glance and he slept again. He was half awake when the musician seized first one of his hands and then the other, jabbing them with stubby fingers and bending his lion’s head close to peer at the horny callouses left by chisel and mallet.

      “Ja, ja,” the musician kept saying.

      Hell goes on forever, so for an eternity he jolted and jarred, and for an eternity he heard bickering voices: “Why he was so foolish, then?” “A idiot he could be.” “Hush, let him rest.” “The children told the story.” “There only one Labuerre was.” “Easy with the tubing.” “Let him rest.”

      Daylight dazzled his eyes.

      “Why you were so foolish?” demanded a harsh voice. “The sister says I can talk to you now, so that is what I first want to know.”

      He looked at the face of—not the musician; that had been delirium. But it was a tough old face.

      “Ja, I am mean-looking; that is settled. What did you think you were doing without coveralls and way over your exposure time?”

      “I wanted to die,” said Halvorsen. There were tubes sticking in his arms.

      The crag-faced old man let out a contemptuous bellow.

      “Sister!” he shouted. “Pull the plasma tubes out before more we waste. He says he wants to die.”

      “Hush,” said the nurse. She laid her hand on his brow again.

      “Don’t bother with him, Sister,” the old man jeered. “He is a shrinking little flower, too delicate for the great, rough world. He has done nothing, he can do nothing, so he decides to make of himself a nuisance by dying.”

      “You lie,” said Halvorsen. “I worked. Good God, how I worked! Nobody wanted my work. They wanted me, to wear in their buttonholes like a flower. They were getting to me. Another year and I wouldn’t have been an artist any more.”

      “Ja?” asked the old man. “Tell me about it.”

      Halvorsen told him, sometimes weeping with self-pity and weakness, sometimes cursing the old man for not letting him die, sometimes quietly describing this statuette or that portrait head, or raving wildly against the mad folly of the world.

      At the last he told the old man about Lucy.

      “You cannot have everything, you know,” said his listener.

      “I can have her,” answered the artist harshly. “You wouldn’t let me die, so I won’t die. I’ll go back and I’ll take her away from that fat-head Malone that she ought to marry. I’ll give her a couple of happy years working herself to skin and bones for me before she begins to hate it—before I begin to hate it.”

      “You can’t go back,” said the old man. “I’m Cerberus. You understand that? The girl is nothing. The society you come from is nothing. We have a place here.... Sister, can he sit up?”

      The woman smiled and cranked his bed. Halvorsen saw through a picture window that he was in a mountain-rimmed valley that was very green and dotted with herds and unpainted houses.

      “Such a place there had to be,” said the old man. “In the whole geography of Europe, there had to be a Soltau Valley with winds and terrain just right to deflect the dust.”

      “Nobody knows?” whispered the artist.

      “We prefer it that way. It’s impossible to get some things, but you would be surprised how little difference it makes to the young people. They are great travelers, the young people, in their sweaty coveralls with radiation meters. They think when they see the ruined cities that the people who lived in them must have been mad. It was a little travel party like that which found you. The boy was impressed by something you said, and I saw some interesting things in your hands. There isn’t much rock around here; we have fine deep topsoil. But the boys could get you stone.

      “There should be a statue of the Mayor for one thing, before I die. And from the Rathaus the wooden angels have mostly broken off. Soltau Valley used to be proud of them—could you make good copies? And of course cameras are useless and the best drawings we can do look funny. Could you teach the youngers at least to draw so faces look like faces and not behinds? And like you were saying about you and Labuerre, maybe one younger there will be so crazy that he will want to learn it all, so Soltau will always have an artist and sculptor for the necessary work. And you will find a Lucy or somebody better. I think better.”

      “Hush,” warned the nurse. “You’re exciting the patient.”

      “It’s all right,” said Halvorsen eagerly. “Thanks, but it’s really all right.”

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