He debases himself to plead. “Tulia, you’re an artist. The real thing. For centuries to come, people will be collecting and cherishing your work. I am nothing. Please—leave me this. Please.”
She doesn’t even look at him. Her eyes never leave the painting.
“I’m an old man. You can tell them the truth after I’m dead. But please, for now … let me have this. Please.”
After an aeon, she nods, just once, still not looking at him. She leaves the room. Cran knows she will never speak to him again. But she won’t tell.
He turns back to the Vermeer, drinking in the artistry, the emotion, the humanity.
1672
Johannes walked through the Square beside the Hague, toward the water. In a few minutes, he would go inside—they could wait for him a few minutes longer. He studied the reflection of the stone castle, over four hundred years old, in the still waters of the Hofvijer. The soft light of a May morning gives the reflected Hague a shimmer that the actual government building did not have.
He came here to judge twelve paintings. They originally belonged to a great collector, Gerrit Reynst, who’d died fourteen years ago by drowning in the canal in front of his own house. Johannes couldn’t imagine how that had happened, but since then, the collection had known nothing but chaos. Parts of it had been sold, parts gifted to the king of England, parts bequeathed to various relatives. A noted art dealer offered twelve of the paintings to Friedrich Wilhelm, Grand Elector of Brandenburg, who at first accepted them. Then the Grand Elector’s art advisor said the pictures were forgeries and should be sent back. The art dealer refused to accept them. Now they hung in the Hague while thirty-five painters—thirty-five!—gave learned opinions on the pictures’ authenticity. One will be Vermeer.
He was curious to see the paintings. They were all attributed to great masters, including Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Holbein. Vermeer, who had never left the Netherlands, would not have another chance to see such works.
If they were genuine.
Opinions so far had been divided. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish copies from originals. Consider, for instance, his own Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet …
He hadn’t thought about that picture in years. Always, his intensity centered on what he was painting now. That, and on his growing, impossible debts. He was being paid for this opinion, or he could not have afforded the trip to give it.
A skillful forger could fool almost everyone. Johannes, who seldom left Delft and so had seen few Italian paintings, was not even sure that he would be able to tell the difference between a forged Titian and an original, unless the copy was very bad. And a good forgery often gave its owners the same pleasure as an original. Still, he would try. Deceivers should not be able to replace the real thing with imitations. Truth mattered.
But first he lingered by the Hofvijer, studying the shifting light on the water.
Matthew Kressel is a multiple Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award finalist. His first novel, King of Shards, was hailed as, “Majestic, resonant, reality-twisting madness,” from NPR Books. His short fiction has appeared or will soon appear in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Tor.com, Nightmare, Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Electric Velocipede, and the anthologies Mad Hatters and March Hares, Cyber World, Naked City, After, The People of the Book, as well as many other places. His work has been translated into Czech, Polish, French, Russian, Chinese, and Romanian. From 2003 to 2010 he ran Senses Five Press, which published Sybil’s Garage, an acclaimed speculative fiction magazine, and Paper Cities, which went on to win the World Fantasy Award in 2009. His is currently the co-host of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan alongside Ellen Datlow, and he is a long-time member of the Altered Fluid writers group. By trade, he is a full-stack software developer, and he developed the Moksha submission system, which is in use by many of the largest SF markets today. You can find him at online at www.matthewkressel.net, where he blogs about writing, technology, environmentalism, and more. Or you can find him on Twitter @mattkressel.
THE LAST NOVELIST (OR A DEAD LIZARD IN THE YARD)
Matthew Kressel
When I lift up my shoe in the morning there’s a dead baby lizard underneath. It lies on its back, undersides pink and translucent, organs visible. Maybe when I walked home under the strangely scattered stars I stepped on it. Maybe it crawled under my shoe to seek its last breath while I slept. Here is one leaf of a million-branched genetic tree never to unfurl. Here is one small animal on a planet teeming with life.
The wind blows, carrying scents of salt and seaweed. High above, a bird soars in the eastern wind. I scoop up the lizard and bury it under the base of a coconut tree. Soon, I’ll be joining him. I can’t say I’m not scared.
“All tender-belly spacefarers are poets,” goes the proverb, and I’m made uncomfortably aware of its truth every time I cross the stars. I ventured out to Ardabaab by thoughtship, an express from Sol Centraal, and for fifty torturous minutes—or a million swift years; neither is wrong—gargantuan thoughtscapes of long-dead galaxies wracked my mind, while wave after wave of nauseating, hallucinogenic bardos drowned my sense of personhood, of encompassing a unitary being in space and time. Even the pilots, well-traveled mentshen them all, said the journey was one of their roughest. And while I don’t hold much faith in deities, I leaped down and kissed the pungent brown earth when we incorporated, and praised every sacred name I knew, because (a) I might have met these ineffable beings as we crossed the stellar gulfs, and (b) I knew I’d never travel by thoughtship again; I’d come to Ardabaab to die.
I took an aircar to the house, and as we swooped low over bowing fields of sugarcane, her disembodied voice said to me, “With your neural shut
