Patron of the Arts

It took me over an hour to find the spiral down. It was clogged with sand, and I could barely squeeze through into a small chamber of dark and rather pedestrian crystals. I dialed up the light and found the cut in the rock a little further on. I went back and smoothed over the sand by throwing handfuls back over my tracks. Then I went down into the bedrock.

There were rooms, all empty, all fairly equal in size, with nothing so complex as the triclinic openings and the spiraling open spaces of the fanciful structure high above me. There was the dust of ages and the simplicity of primitive building. It looked as though they had shaped existing caves or widened fractures in the rock.

I finally came to what seemed to be the last room and I stopped. I was tired, physically and emotionally. I sat down on a drifting dune of sand that perhaps had taken thousands of years to get this far down the complex. I lay back and closed my eyes.

Slowly I ran through the disciplines of relaxation, but not going quite so far as to close off my hearing. If they were coming, I wanted to know. I did not like the idea of death at all. I certainly did not welcome it as some do; to me, death was extinction, not a transition to a higher plane.

In a sudden, delayed thought it came to me that I had killed a man. Somehow it didn’t seem to me that I had. I hadn’t seen him dead, only injured. A wistful hope that they had lied to me persisted, but I knew they hadn’t.

I had killed. I had killed not by accident, but with skills I had learned determinedly, killing skills, lethal arts. Like a fire department, I had hoped I would never have to use those abilities for anything but exercise. But I had known quite clearly what I was learning to do, just as I honed my abilities in other areas, such as target practice. Friends of mine, rich and comfortable behind bonded guards and alarm systems, had sometimes derided me gently for “dabbling” in these deadly arts. They had asked what gunfighting or knife- fighting abilities had to do with our modern world, where most crime was either a sophisticated computer dodge or a mindless riot. There were crimes of passion, but not many. Much of the crime was corporate, huge, impersonal, done at board level or by the manipulations of the Families. Direct, personal survival skills were seldom needed, or so they thought, disregarding driving hazards, urban riots, defecting guards, faulty alarm systems, and all the other failures of a complex technological civilization.

It seems to me that many, if not all, of those factors that keep an individual alive and functioning in dangerous situations might also be translated into national terms, into a country without tension, because it is confident and secure.

Survival is not just killing. Survival is something as broad as global ecology and as personal as watching both ways, even on a one-way street. It seems to me you should kill to eat, if you wanted meat, or when there is no other way to stay alive, but never just to kill. That is not survival, for all the creatures of the system are part of you, and if I survive I want the variety and pleasures of Earth, and Mars, to survive also. But I would kill the last unicorn on Earth if that were absolutely the only way I could survive, and I would not feel guilty. The most dangerous enemy man has is man himself. If you do not survive, that in which you believe also does not survive, unless your death somehow sustains it. I can see a man or woman dying for something they believe in, but how much better to fight and live to enjoy it?

Now I asked myself what I believed in so strongly that I would find it worth dying for, and I found nothing. That saddened me, for I really thought every man should have something important enough in his life for him to consider its survival worth his death.

It was very depressing to discover that about myself. Both Madelon and Nova came to mind, of course, but Madelon had removed herself, and Nova . . . I said I loved her, I believed I loved her, and I wanted to love her, but in some deep part of me I was actually unsure right now of my ability to open myself up to love.

To divert my mind from bleak depression I opened my eyes and looked up at the ceiling.

At first I just looked up without focusing; then I saw that I was looking at something. Across the entire ceiling of this room, an ancient chamber far below a structure last occupied twenty thousand years before, was a mural. It was brighter and clearer than any of those in the other ruins. I sat up, suddenly excited, flashing my beam here and there, revealing more and more of the mural to my astonished eyes. There was a letdown as I realized the images were still as indistinct and as undecipherable as those found elsewhere, but here, in this oldest of habitations, the mural was the most complete and the brightest in color—and I was the first to discover it.

The images seemed to radiate outward from a center, in long curving arms like that of a spiral galaxy, coming out from a central radiance, gradually forming into more and more distinct shapes as they neared the ends of the spiraling arms. Vaguely amorphic humanoids, which could be winged and could be great insectoids and could be ships and could be decoration.

I lay back on the pile of sand and drank it in, putting my mind in neutral, not probing, just absorbing, drifting toward an assimilation of the whole. When pieces or moments of a work of art stand out it is often because the form is not complete, not unified, not integrated. When a work of art can be experienced all at one time, as in a painting, these factors are clear. When time and motion are involved, as in a dance or a tape or even a sensatron, then there is linear development, hence a variation in reaction, and sometimes this “bright spot, dull spot” theory can work for the artist, providing contrast, rest before activity, part of the selection process.

So I lay there and absorbed and did not judge or concentrate, for that can always be done. I found that I was wondering why man—and the long-dead Martians—created art at all. You didn’t need art to feed your body or to keep you warm or sheltered from the rains. But from the caves onward man had created art with a persistence second only to his desire to feed, to sleep, and to reproduce. To deny food to your body is to die. To deny sex to your body is to deny life. To reject art is to impoverish yourself, rejecting pleasure and growth. We always think of those who have minimal interest in the arts as dull clods, as insensitive beasts. But to accept your sexual self, and to accept art, is to add to yourself.