Patron of the Arts

Art depicts the inner and outer manifestations of sex and living and feeling and dreams and frustrations. It reveals us to ourselves, or should.

Man persistently creates art under the most depressing as well as the most enjoyable circumstances. Some men and women create art as easily as breathing. For them, not to create would be to die. The mysterious process of creation is something that no one had ever stated clearly, at least to me. Some have said it is to go beyond oneself, to be

“other” and “another” and more than the sum of the parts. Goldstone told me it was “to get high,” to become intoxicated with creation. Perhaps artists create to imitate god, to become a god by creating. Art is ego, but the attitude an artist may have about it, before or after, is the purest form of egotism.

Michael Cilento once said that it was to “escape to freedom . . . or to escape from freedom.” Freedom seems to be the constant. Freedom to create, freedom to create new images, new thoughts, new philosophies, new anything.

New worlds, perhaps.

Freedom to create Star Palaces and Grand Halls and perhaps the ultimate freedom from self. Maybe that was where the Martians had gone, simply creating the ultimate, artistic self, the purest ego, a disembodied form of energy to wander the universe, shaping it, or simply experiencing what they had found.

The concept of a race that had evolved beyond the flesh was an old one, but a persistent one, as though it was a sort of genetic goal. I turned off the light and forced sleep upon myself. And the dreams forced themselves upon me.

9

It was hours before I awakened, and when I did I came awake like an animal, instantly alert, not moving, eyes wide in the utter blackness of the deep tomb. When I had determined that I had simply awakened, that nothing had jolted me back, I switched on the light and grinned to myself. I had rarely awakened like that, like a hunted animal. For some reason it was like a proof of skill, oddly pleasing,

I started back up, checking the ceilings of several rooms as I passed; here and there were faint remains of other ceiling murals, very ancient and in a bad state of repair. But my mind was on more immediate things.

Laser in hand, I crept up the curving steps, my light off, with only the faint glow from above to guide me. It was day, and as my head cleared the rock and I was into the lowest level of the crystal palace I was fully alert, with all senses out at the extremes.

I hardly glanced at the rainbow of sunlit glories that I found, from lemon yellow, intimate enclosures to curved- ceiling sanctums of positive and negative green rosettes, from snowy white salons of milky smooth lumps flowing and blending to tiny cells of patterned intersecting circles, each a convoluted, three-dimensional design of pinpoint-faceted crystals. My eyes followed my gunpoint and I went as silent as a shadow, crossing colorless crystal floors, looking down into a forest of stalagmites that seemed random from some points and clearly designed from others. I went swiftly over smoky, delicate bridges that spanned what seemed like liquid crystal pools of many colors, and through grottos of crimson swirls, and past nooks and niches of amber and azure and palest pink. I went as swiftly as possible through the familiar and the unfamiliar, feeling my way, moving fast, then moving slowly to the final portico and the sight of the sands beyond.

After a period of listening and looking I ran as fast as I could

straight out into the sands, threw myself over a dune, rolled, and ran to the right. I moved around the Palace until I found what I hoped was my own track, then followed it, coming in from the desert where, if they were still here, they might least expect me.

I hoped.

I lay on the sand, behind a tiny crystal growth, like a bush in the desert, and surveyed the openings around the base of the big building. Here on this side the prevailing wind had not piled the drifting sand, and there was more open space. And another set of sandcat tracks. They had stopped here, then turned left. But had they dropped off someone with a Magnum Laser equipped with a heatscope and some experience with it?

I backed out into the desert and went to the left. I found their sandcat parked in another compartment a quarter circle on, and saw where they had carelessly backed in and had broken off the edge of the opening, grinding the crystals under the treads. Somehow that made me angrier than their unexplained attempts to murder me. Like the behavior of that mad fool who had used a hammer on Michaelangelo’s Pieta or of the suicidal Arab who had taken a laser to the Wailing Wall, this was a totally senseless act of destruction. I raised my weapon and sliced into the cab with vicious cuts, trusting the resistance of the metal to keep the beam from going through to the back of the chamber.

The pressurized cabin blew outward but as the pressure inside was not that much greater than that outside there was not much noise. I dropped the muzzle and put a series of pulses through the forward drive train, ruining forever this particular sandcat.

If they were going to get me they would have to walk home—and I didn’t think they’d make it.