Gravity Wells (Short Stories Collection)

toenail. Revealed to the gloom of an overcast day was the naked emaciated corpse of a woman in her nineties, liver-spotted hands folded over her flat-flap breasts. She had coins where most of us have eyes, and a small butterfly tattoo where many of us have small butterfly tattoos.

Suddenly, the woman with the wand proclaimed in a belly-deep voice, 'There are some among us who have compared Life to Stasis. In our trip from birth to death, we are locked into a body that can be frozen with sickness or age or fear. If this is so, death is the moment of liberation, of release, of reaching our long-awaited destination. We wish our sister well in her new world.'

The woman bent over the body and kissed the dead cheeks with that airy Two-Centimeters-From-Contact Kiss that was so much in vogue sixty years ago. The corpse accepted it in the spirit in which it was intended. Then the line began to move, and we all got a chance to scope out the bare-ass carcass and take what liberties we chose. As we filed along, watching others shake the deceased's hand, stroke her flanks, and so on, Leppid murmured to me, 'The dead woman called herself Selene. She specialized in collage…very personal stuff. This whole thing is a surprise to me—I saw her a couple of days ago and she seemed very healthy.'

'She wasted away pretty damned quick then, didn't she?'

'Oh no, she was always very thin. If you'd ever seen her work, you'd know. She often incorporated a photo of herself into pieces.'

'Ahhh.' Self-portraits have a long and noble history…Art will let you pick a self-indulgent subject as long as the self-indulgence stops before you get your brushes gooey. When I drew close and had my turn to pay my unfamiliar respects, I intended to give a quick smooch and walk on; but something caught my eye and held me there much longer than protocol required. Dim and camouflaged by the mottled old skin, stripes of stretch marks chevroned down both sides of her belly.

Esteemed Reader, there are only a few conditions that stretch abdominal skin enough to leave permanent marks. One of them is obesity, from which the scrawny Selene apparently had not suffered. The only other cause I know is pregnancy. And that was an enigma I pondered deeply as Selene's remains were remaindered into the steaming maw of the planet's digestive system.

In the main building, a retrospective of Selene's work had been hastily mounted on one side of the Dear Departed's studio: a collage of collage. A canvas covered with gears and gems and alphabet blocks…a volcano-shaped mound of plaster wrapped in wrinkled tissue paper dabbed with blobs of solder and melted crayons…the great bowl of a radar dish sequined with thousands of tiny dolls' eyes opening and closing in accordance with a cellular automaton schema described in an accompanying booklet…but no, no, no, it is not the Old Scalper's intention to describe too many of the Art objects of Creche. Quick jump to the earliest piece in the collection: by luck or deus ex machination, a life-size double photograph of Selene herself at twenty, front view and back view, in the buff. Titled Birth, Re-Birth, and its Consequences, it was the usual sort of work that early colonial artists seemed compelled to produce when starting off fresh on a new world: an assessment of who she had been and what she was now.

The two full-length photographs were black and white, very clinical, tacked to a corkboard backing. Every scar on the artist's body was carefully circled with red paint; black surgical thread connected each scar on the photos to an accompanying card that explained the circumstances surrounding the scar. (Judging from her knees, Selene had been one of those children who should not have been allowed to play on gravel.) And I know what you all have been wondering, and the answer is no—her taut little tum-tum showed nary a sign of stretch, hurt, or lesion.

'See something you like?' Vavash asked in an amused voice. She was standing by my side, watching me scrutinize the photo of naked young Selene, and I suppose she had attached lascivious motives to same.

'An interesting lead to my article,' I said, wondering if I sounded convincing. 'I arrive and immediately become part of a funeral. Later, I have the chance to see the same woman, sixty years younger. Contrast, irony, all that folderol.'

'Oh.' She seemed dubious.

Vavash was more or less the woman Leppid had described, and more rather than less. She was a head taller than I and a beefy bicep wider, the product of one of those Fringe Worlds that dabbled in Ubermensch breeding programs. For all her eighty years, her eyes were as clear as the cry of a hawk and her spine as straight as a teen-age erection. She was indeed wearing a shapeless tie-dyed dress, not to mention huge round spectacles, leather sandals, and a gold mandala on a chain about her neck. A naive observer might call her an anachronism, a cliched throwback to the Stoned Age; but there was too much intelligence in her for anything so trite.

Vavash had been the woman who led the funeral, and to all appearances she was the First of the First. Frankly, the other First Colonists were a sorry looking lot: over half had already died of old age, and most of the rest were only a step away from Worm Chow. I doubted that more than a handful were actively working any more. A functioning studio is filled with more smells than a Fomalhaut Flatutorium—oils and turpentine and damp clay, hot metal and etching chemicals, tart developing fluid, fresh sawdust, and the crinkle of human sweat—but the studio building around me carried only the ghosts of effluvia past.

'Was this Selene's first work?' I asked.

'Earliest surviving, I would guess,' Vavash answered. 'She was fresh out of art school when she signed up for the Creche colony. I'm sure she had many student pieces, but I wouldn't think they were still around. Not on Creche, anyway. That's not the sort of frippery colonists were allowed to bring with them in the old days.'

'So Selene planned to be an artist all along?'

'Oh, we all did. Creche was always intended to be an artistic commune. We called it a Second Wave colony. The very earliest colonies, the ones we called First Wave, were founded solely on economic grounds—which planets had the most valuable minerals, which were the cheapest to terraform, that sort of thing. The Second Wave colonies were an idealistic backlash—hundreds of special interest groups intent on setting up their own little utopias to show everyone else how it was done, and to hell with the materialistic bullshit. I know that I considered several other Art-oriented colonies before I decided on Creche.'

'What distinguished Creche for you?'

Vavash laughed. 'I had a boyfriend and he liked the name. That's the truth as seen from the objectivity of age. At the time, I would have sworn I made my decision for hard-headed ideological reasons, and my Tomas would have said the same thing. What distinguished Creche after the fact, of course, was that the few of us who landed here had forty years to work without outside interruption, and with so many surplus supplies that we never had to do any kind of non-artistic labor.'

'You had everything you needed?'

'We had all the essentials, but we didn't have everything. We had very little technology beyond the basic terraforming machinery, for example. You can see that in our Art, of course…we work in media that are centuries old. And almost all the medical supplies and medic-bots were on one of the other ships. We were lucky that the standard decontamination measures had succeeded in killing all the dangerous micro-organisms the colonists might have been carrying. Back then, decontamination was seldom that effective.'

'I guess you were lucky that you never had any children either,' I said as off-handedly as I could. 'Pregnancy can get very dicey, medically speaking.'

I knew I was taking a bloody great risk in bringing up such a touchy subject. The First Colonists were the government on Creche, and Vavash was their leader. If she decided to have my head cut off and paraded around the Vac/Port on a pike…well, in place of reading my pellucid prose you'd probably be skipping over some unctuous obit on the late Scalpel, Jonathan The by that self-important Gretchen What's-Her-Name whose incoherent ramblings blight these pages when I'm away on assignment. (By the way, that picture they run above Gretchie's by- line isn't really her—it's just a stand-in. Our Valiant Editor is afraid that if he shows the Gretch as she really is, the Weekly will get popped for Harboring The Product Of A Genetic Experiment Counter To The Public Interest. Hi Gretchikins. Kiss kiss.)

But as you have probably guessed by now, Vavash did not choose to take extreme rancor. She simply stared at me with piercing eyes and said, 'You are rude, Mr. Scalpel. I can't tell if you're being rude because you don't know any better, or because you intentionally want to provoke me. Which is it, Mr. Scalpel? Are you a pugnacious little brat or some scheming Machiavelli?'

'I'm an Art Critic, ma'am,' I replied.

'And does that justify taunting a woman to her face?'

'Politeness is the enemy of both Art and Criticism, ma'am. It tries to color true perception, dilute strong emotion, and replace genuine compassion. To pursue bad manners is childish, to pursue good ones is emasculation.'

'Are you quoting someone?'

'Myself,' I said, wondering why it wasn't self-evident. 'Look, how can you people call yourself artists if you don't read my column? Why would you let a Critic in your front gate if you didn't know that you could respect his judgement? I feel like I've just washed up on one of those islands where the local lizards have never seen a predator.'

She looked me up and down once more with a critical eye. Suddenly, I had the impressions she was assessing me for my proficiency in the Slap-And-Tickle Disciplines. I knew the colonies that Vavash called the Second Wave were rife with the belief that Genital Interlock could solve any problem, from How-Can-I-Show-This-Cocky-Little-Punk-He-Doesn't-Know-Everything to Oh-God-I'm- Bored-And-Everyone-Around-Me-Is-Senile. I was rehearsing my standard speech #24 ('I'm sure it would be delightful, duckie, but I only review people on one Art at a time') when Vavash shook herself and said, 'You are many things I dislike, Mr. Scalpel; but I believe you have integrity. Feel free to wander where you choose.'

She left in a tie-dyed swirl. Leppid, who had a toady's way of hovering in the background whenever Vavash was near, came out from behind an installation piece (a mound of rag-dolls, each with a picture of Selene spiked to the chest with a voodooine hatpin) and mopped his brow, saying, 'Ye Gods, Scalpel, I thought I told you to be deferential.'

'You did. I ignored you.'

We spent many hours touring the studio building, Leppid looming behind my shoulder, pointing out the obvious and the obnoxious, punctuating his every remark with a pudgy finger poking at my chest. For your delectation, a representative Leppidine diatribe, held in front of a trompe d'oeil picture of a shadow-bedecked wooden chair with a teddy bear carelessly sprawled on the seat: 'See this, Scalpel? An oil painting. Colored pigment on canvas. Showing something you can immediately recognize. That sells, Scalpel, that sells on any planet, Fringe World, or colony you want to name. Why? Because Art consumers recognize it as Art. Yesterday you were saying that Art isn't a matter of artifacts, and you are exactly right. Art consumers—my Art consumers—aren't buying artifacts, they're buying into the Human Artistic Tradition. And this Creche stuff, it's classic. Painting, sculpture, tapestry, illustration…that's what Art's been, for a thousand years. People know that. And they want to be part of the greatness. So you tell me why Inter-World is so chintzy with their cargo space that they're only allowing me eight cubic meters on this next flight out. At that rate, it'll take me decades to get a good volume of Creche's work on the market!'

Well, Precious Perusers, whatever there may be off-planet, there is a whacking great volume of work in the Creche studios, and it is quite beyond the capacity of this reviewer to critique a comprehensive catalog. Some of it is quotidian—all the time and freedom in the Bang-Crunch cycle won't wring masterpieces from the determinedly mediocre—but much of it is high quality stuff…if you like being chopped in the chin with childlessness. Wham, we don't have children; whap, we can't have children; powee, we'll never again see children.

How much Crechian work has actually found its way out to the World At Large? A tiny fraction of what is still on-planet. And on any given world, there would be at most twenty pieces, distributed over several collections. No one out there has experienced one iota of the cumulative impact of a sortie through Sterility Studio-land.

For example, empty cradles were an extravagantly popular theme, especially when embellished with some unplayed-with toy trying to look pathetic. Wooden cradles; macram cradles; molded glass cradles with marbles imbedded in them; wicker cradles fondly tucked up with bunny rabbit blankets; cradle sketches in pencil, charcoal, India ink, sepia, silverpoint; cradle paintings in acrylics, watercolors, oils, gouache, tempera, and several homemade concoctions that looked like crushed lava particles suspended in white glue; and this is not to mention all the collages, assemblages, and installations that managed to sneak in cradle-like objects amidst the battered packing crates and out-of-context clippings that traditionally provide the backbone for such works.

There were indeed pieces without obvious reference to barrenness—mirrored cylinders were very big, for example, and it didn't take someone of my keen intellect to make the connection with the stasis chests that carried the colonists to Creche—but there was no escaping the overpowering presence of the underage absence. It was a scab they couldn't help picking, psychological vomit they had to keep revisiting.

With brief stops for lunch and supper at the refectory (bot-staffed and culinarily uninspired), I ploughed on undaunted until we saw twilight through the skylight. In that whole time, I had encountered none of the other colonists; Leppid said they were probably holding some kind of post-funeral vigil for Selene in the hut where she had lived. Considering my usual working conditions, trying to do my job while sandwiched between artists and agents grovelling, picking fights, or both, I was quite chipper to be left on my own.