He was unaware of the darkness and the sharp chiming of metal and rock. He didn’t flinch when a chip of stone struck his face or arms. He wasn’t even aware that one of his arms hammered steadily–sometimes in heavy staccato blows, sometimes in a series of taps–or that his other arm wielded the chisel as tactilely as a paintbrush.
The sculptor felt himself to be a body of water pressing firmly against the stone, against the entire rock wall at once, and that under his calm pressure certain pieces of stone flaked gently away, as if from a harder underlying stone.
Sometimes he knew what he would uncover, other times he was surprised. But always his careful erosion was precise. He had long ago stopped pressing too hard or too quickly.
He exposed a section as large as a man this time. Lifting away that much stone flake by flake had taken a long time. He wasn’t tired, and the time had not seemed long, but he began to feel himself tugged like a cavern pool when the tide outside begins to recede. He was distracted, and his thinking grew murky.He could no longer trust himself to remove the stone properly.
Reluctantly, he drained back into his standing body. Darkness closed around him, and he was leaning with both arms against the cavern wall. He suddenly ached all over, and his ears screamed like sirens.
He set down the hammer and chisel and climbed stiffly from the scaffold. Although he could not see, he knew the cavern well enough to navigate through it at a normal pace. Sometimes he reached out a hand, and a projection of stone would fit into his palm as though he had just that moment conjured it.
He wound through the tunnel until his eyes began to feel stabs of light. He sat on a stone chair until his eyes were ready for light again, then he walked across the hangar-like front cavern and out into daylight.
The departure from deep concentration always left him feeling bereft and out of place, but those feelings quickly faded if he had gotten a lot of work done and if he had not made mistakes. Mistakes in the stone could never be corrected, although they could be concealed if he were willing to make maim other parts of the work to do so. He could not bring himself to do that, so his errors remained, voiceless accusers of his insufficiency. He had learned not to make mistakes, now. So his return to the daylight world was almost always a happy occasion.
He felt good as he walked across the broad shelf of rock outside his cavern, a little lightheaded with the sudden warmth on his nude body. He had done good work.
I feel good enough to die right now,he told himself. It was something he told himself every time he came out of the cavern.
But he didn’t want to die. He wanted to continue working on his mural, to eventually finish it. His feeling about finishing the mural was different that it had been at the start. At the start, he had only wanted to finish the mural for the pleasure of showing it off and of not having to work on it any more. Now he looked forward to finishing it only because that would be a brand new pleasure, the culmination of all the pleasure he had had so far in creating it.
The pleasure of working on his mural had become the reason he kept living. He told himself it no longer mattered that he might die before completing it. What mattered was the way he felt while working on it. He considered the mural to be important only as long as he was alive to enjoy working on it.
It was an enormous mural and had taken more years of life to create than the sculptor could even remember. He had been working on it so long that his earlier life seemed like an anecdote he had pieced together from poorly-remembered conversations.That distant existence did not seem important to him. What he cared about was his work inside the mountain, and the time afterward walking in the sun, chasing lizards, sleeping, knowing he had done good work and that he would be doing more the next day.
The only things that troubled him were the pain he sometimes felt in his ears and the trips he had to make to the plateau atop his mountain.
His ears hurt because of the hammering, noise he rarely heard because it would so quickly send him, as if were an incantation, into the deep lakelike silence of concentration. There was a plant he sometimes found that would help with the pain. He would wring the juice from the plant’s stalk and put the juice in his ears. It would numb the pain, but it would also make him delirious. He couldn’t work if had used the plant juice. On those days he would wander among the boulders throwing stones at lizards, or he would lie in his cavern and have visions of shapes the walls might contain.
He never saw clearly into the mountain’s walls, however, unless he was actually sculpting. That was the only time he knew for certain what shapes were to be found beneath the rough outer stone.
The pain in his ears was bearable most of the time, so he put up with it in order to work. What he couldn’t ignore, however, was the need to go atop the mountain.
After many days–he thought it was usually about 50 days, but he had no way of knowing–he would begin to have dizziness, and that told him it was time to get to the plateau quickly. He hated the plateau. He never thought about going there until he had to actually make the trip.
He thought he had felt a touch of dizziness when he first came into the light that day, but he wanted to be sure. He put the possibility out of his mind because there was no good in thinking about it until it was something he had to do.
He was tired, but not tired enough to fall quickly asleep. He climbed down the boulders from the broad shelf to the desert floor. On the spongy surface of the desert he trotted, sometimes jumping over a fissure or kicking the blossom off one of the short-lived gray flowers that grew there. The trotting took the stiffness out of him. The sun, sitting like a huge bulb in a notch between two distant peaks, cast a long shadow between him and the foot of his mountain. He circled around an outcropping of blue stone. A reflection shot from the stone, causing him to wince. He had not known there was still any metal left there.
I’m come back for it later and bury it with the rest, he told himself. And then, feeling dizzy again, he thought: Oh Valorie!
As he climbed back up to the shelf he felt yet another wave of dizziness. He sighed. He was too tired for the long climb, but he would have to go nevertheless.
He sat in the front cavern and ate three cooked lizards. He rubbed some of the soreness from his neck and skull, then began the journey up the mountain.
The old road was much-weathered, but still a good path for someone on foot. He took turns trotting and walking. Each time he felt dizzy he would stop, letting his head clear before continuing. He kept his speed down and he stayed away from sharp dropoffs, just in case the dizziness came on without warning.
His breathing grew more difficult and his skin grew cool again as he climbed higher. After several hours he had climbed enough to see the full disc of the sun, now floating unattached above the planet’s jagged wall. Out on the plain, in the shadows of the larger outcroppings, he could see violet lightning playing about the fissures.
I’ll miss the storm, he thought. That’s one good thing about the climb this time.
A surge of dizziness forced him to stop and lie down, and when he recovered it was only gradually. He had a half-awake dream about Valorie and the storm on the outcropping where he had seen a piece of metal today. She was sunk to her waist in molten clay, and he was trying frantically to reach her. “I love you, I love you, I love you!” he was screaming. That part was not true. He had not said those words. He had just told her that he would save her, that she should not give up. She must have seen what he was about to do, that he was going to step into the clay himself. She put her hands into the fluid and pushed herself backwards. “Oh, Will,” she choked. Her face suddenly contorted with new pain, and she raised her hands instinctively. They were now blistered and smoking. After a few moments her face took on a sleepy look and for the first time in the eight years he had known her,she smiled at him. Then she sank into the desert.
He never allowed himself to think about her, but when he was dizzy or falling asleep it would sometimes happen anyway.
He shook his head and tried to force clarity back into it.That was too long ago to matter, he told himself. None of that matters anymore. None of that exists anymore. It never even happened, anymore.
He continued, beginning to feel weak at the thought of the plateau. With his body hungry for oxygen, he was losing his self control. He knew that the trembling in his limbs was not just from fatigue and cold.
He came to the tunnel and put on a jump suit he kept there. He looked down on the bright–and now flickering–desert floor, taking it in like a last deep breath. Even the storm looks cozy, he said to himself.Then he entered the tunnel.
In the tunnel he passed out again. This time he dreamed of the time he had been sent outside the spacecraft to straighten a radio fin. He was not trained for anti-gravity work, but he was the only crew member who could manage such a delicate technical repair–at least, that had been his opinion. His high regard for himself was not shared, and so when he was well outside the ship the rest of the crew decided they would try to humble him. They switched off all the ship’s lights. With the ship hovering over him like a bell, and the dark side of the planet looming beneath him, there was absolutely no light to see or to see by. They had even managed to cripple the lights in his vacuum suit. They had fed him way too much tether, so that he seemed attached to nothing.
It roused a phobia he didn’t know he had, and he began screaming. Every second he was more terrified that he was completely and permanently alone. The crew had to reel him in and sedate him, and he hurt one of them by clinging so hard to his neck.
The prank did not change him in the way the crew had expected. He remained confident of his own abilities and disdainful of theirs. But he became grim, shunned their friendship. He told himself he would never again humiliate himself by begging for companionship.
That was an other memory that often came back to him when he fainted. It was a poor thing to think about right before he entered the plateau.
He emerged from the tunnel on his hands and knees. He knew he was out of the tunnel when he saw the stars overhead. Other than the stars, nothing was visible. At that height there was too little atmosphere to diffuse much sunlight, and the plateau was ringed by a tall ridge that blocked any direct light from the low-hanging sun.
The lights on the rejuvenation cell had long since burned out. The only way he could reach it, apart from wandering blindly with his arms outstretched, in a plateau 12 miles across, was to steer straight for a certain pattern of stars.
If he veered aside, he could be lost for hours or days. He could have marked the path some way, but felt he needed to defy his cowardice at least that much. He began the half-mile trip he had made countless times. As he had every time so far, he crawled the whole distance. He always feared that he would black out on the long crawl and lose his bearings. But by taking it very slowly he had always managed to resist fainting on his passage from the tunnel to the bath cell.
With the planet invisible beneath him and, to his chilled knees and hands, barely tangible, he always felt he was in space again. Only now there was not even a severed tether, and no possibility his tormentors would hear his screams and rescue him. His terror the first time had been unjustified, and for that, it seemed, his nightmare had come true .
He was able to forget his exile while walking on the sunlit surface of the planet, or shaping rock inside the planet, but when had to crawl along the edge of outer space he could think of nothing but how solitary he was.
The rejuvenation cell at last opened with a squeak and a hiss. He tumbled into the dark tank and laying panting against the closed door. He flipped the switch of a tiny yellow light and picked up a bracelet lying on the floor near several others. He peered shakily to be sure it said “Valorie Laine.” Then he put it on his wrist, removed the jumpsuit and lowered himself painfully into a deep tub of cold liquid. The temperature, deadly any other time, was necessary for the immersion to pull him back from age.
He touched the bracelet to a lens on the wall and then waited. Gas bubbled briefly into the liquid. His breathing at last grew calmer, and he lay back to sleep.“Rejuvenation cycle number 32 beginning,” said a metallic voice. “You have 8 cycles left, Dr. Laine.”
The sculptor shut his eyes. His quivering stopped and his jaws grew slack. Kept yours for last, the sculptor thought.His thumb and forefinger twitched twice, the bracelet between them.
Now you’re saving me, Dr. Laine. Valorie. What did you mean when you smiled?
He fell asleep dreaming about a world that swallowed its people, and a sky that was cold and starless, and then he imagined himself deep in his dark cavern, pounding on its walls. The little building shook, but by then he was unconscious.
As he always did after a rejuvenation bath, the sculptor felt angry at himself. He was full of strength again, and soon he would be heading back down the mountain, so it was easier now to be brave about the plateau. He chastised himself for being so timid and weak before.
The bath always gave him too much confidence, something he worried about at other times. He clothed himself hurriedly then switched off the yellow bulb and flung open the door. Shutting it behind him, he stepped down into darkness.
Quickly his phobia returned. He feared that his foot would find nothing solid, that he would fall into a sky that lacked even stars. But his foot stopped on solid ground, and he was reassured. He took his bearing on the star pattern above the tunnel and advanced a few strides in that direction. Again he felt panic flowing into him like voltage. He sank to his hands and knees. After that he was fine. He crawled briskly,arriving at the tunnel winded but pleased with himself.
He was eager to work again. With his fresh strength he would be able to work an especially long day. Already he could feel his mind starting into the mines of deep concentration.
Hunched over, he moved rapidly through the tunnel, itching for open ground and daylight so he could run. And then he stumbled. He was more astonished than hurt, because what he had tripped over was a stone–it was as large as his own torso–that had never been there before.
He sat there feeling it, and feeling the place in the ceiling from which it had fallen. He was puzzled, then frightened. Picking himself up he continued through the tunnel, dangerously fast.
He plunged into the sunlight, already gasping in the thin air and his eyes throbbing from the sudden brightness. He followed the footpath to the road and then ran at full pace down the mountain.
In his mind he pictured the ruin an earthquake could cause to his cavern. He had never known one to happen on that planet, but he recalled that the geologist in the crew had said the desert was likely to have one occasionally. The sculptor did not know how he would react if he found his mural damaged. The other carvings he could bear to lose–the statues and ornamentation he had carved outside and all along the descending passageway. That was just his early work, done when he was still learning to use his tools and when his purpose had been entirely different.
Back then he had tried to imitate sculpture he recalled from books, or from brief passages through European cities. Into that sculpting he had poured all his strength, but none of his soul. He had been working without the deep attention that let him simply discover an artwork. His craftsmanship became good, but the works were nothing more than ornamentation. When he finally became an artist, it pained him that he had deformed so much stone with his clumsy zeal.
It was his purpose that kept him blind so long. He was carving things to impress the people he hoped would someday come to live on the planet. It was two decades before he outgrew that. When he quit sculpting for other people’s eyes, he no longer needed his own. He moved into the dark inner cavern and stopped using torches. Sculpting in the dark he began to see what sculpture could be. Sometime later he ceased to even hope his work would ever have an audience.
He could see the desert plain far below, but not the base of his mountain. The desert, shining like a sea, was still smoking and flickering from the fissure lightning. The sun, hanging in its perpetual spot near the horizon, was dim behind the desert steam. It was the usual aftermath of a storm: he could see no sign that there had been an earthquake, but he didn’t know what signs an earthquake in that desert would leave.
He rested only when he ached too much to continue. The sun dropped gradually behind the sawtooth horizon, settling gently into the notch that made it seem like that world’s private lamp. At the same time the air grew warmer, and he removed the suit he had been in too much haste to take off at the tunnel. The sculptor’s dread became stronger as he got nearer his cave. There were rocks on the trail that had never been there before, signs that the great mountain had indeed trembled. In spite of himself he winced as he imagined his mural lying in rubble all around the deep cavern.
Before he traveled the last mile he sat down to catch his breath and bring his mind under control. He felt something creeping up on him like the panic he felt on the plateau. It was the thing he had felt about a month after the rest of the crew, repeating Valorie’s carelessness, had been swallowed by the desert. At first he was just furious at their stupidity. When it finally sank in, however, that there was no one left even to be furious at, that he had at last been truly abandoned, he went berserk. For years he worked maniacally in a frenzy of mourning.
He didn’t want that to happen again. He didn’t want to grieve anything. He had learned not to miss people. If necessary he would have to learn not to miss his sculpture. Grief makes you watch something being destroyed over and over again, he told himself. You have to bury the pieces and forget them.
You may have to close the cavern, he told himself. You may have to bring down the passageway.
I’d rather be dead, he answered. I’ve killed the part that wants people. If I kill the part that cares about sculpture, how
much can be left?
You don’t want to quit living, he told himself.
Yes I do, he answered. I’m 200 years old on a planet no one knows about anymore. I may as well just be dust. There’s no reason to be a person here.
But the mural might be okay, he told himself.
Yes, the mural might be okay. I might not have to become dust yet. As long as I can go into a hole and imagine I’m a lake, there’s reason to continue existing as a human.
He was sick over what he expected to find inside the mountain, and sick at the way he was reacting. He stood, feeling far weaker than he should after a rejuvenation bath. I’m in trouble, he said to himself. He walked the rest of the way down the slope.
When he rounded the last turn in the old road he thought he would see his silly scrollwork and gargoyles lying busted beneath the entrance. What he saw was a vehicle.
It was a large landing shuttle, and it had used the landing pad he and the others had built two and a half centuries ago. The gravel shelf was blackened and glazed beneath the ship.
It was the ship that shook things, he told himself. It was just the force of the rockets. There was no earthquake. It was the rockets.
Then he told himself: It’s a landing shuttle. There’s a shuttle here. A shuttle has landed here.
His mind did not know what to do with that information. It did something it never did that soon after a rejuvenation bath. It shut itself off.
When he woke up, the shuttle was gone. He took in that detail without emotion. Then he went to the cavern to see what else had changed.
Some of his ornamentation had indeed been busted by the concussion of the ship’s landing and departure. He went into the front cavern and saw that there had been damage there, though not by mere concussion from landing rockets. There were deep gouges in the walls and ceiling, concave pits like those they had once made with sonic blasters to enlarge the cavern. Even in the dim light he could tell that large sections of his early work had been destroyed, that in the ghostly piles of rubble there must be pieces smooth and round as paper scrolls, human arms and legs, human heads. He passed into the dark tunnel. His hands found no damage there, but he did not inspect it closely. He walked at a patient pace to his grand cavern, and then he stood there in the dark, wondering where to begin, which part of his vast, doming mural to spread his hands upon first.
All at once he didn’t think he would have the patience to check the whole mural for damage. He had read that whole cathedral-like surface with his hands hundreds of times, but now he wasn’t even sure he could begin. The thought in his head astonished him. It doesn’t matter, his mind was saying.
Moving across the cavern floor he heard an unfamiliar echo. He traced it and found a metal object. At first he didn’t remember what it was, but then his thumb found the switch. He held the instrument a long time before aiming it and pushing the switch. It’s just a bunch of damn rock, he told himself.
He pushed the switch, and the cavern filled with light. For the first time ever he saw his mural with his eyes.
It was more beautiful than he had ever imagined. He had not known what color and shadow would add to those contours, how vision with its sweeping flicker would seem to animate them. He thought he would regret looking at it, but now he was glad. It took away some of the sickness he felt about what he would have to do next. He sat down and looked at his work, finding in it patterns and purposes he had not consciously put there and–even more surprising–finding mistakes. Some of the mistakes stood out like warts. He cried at the beauty of his masterpiece, then he roared with laughter each time he saw another blight. I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it, he said.
The flashlight went out suddenly. He struck it and it came back on for a few minutes. So that’s why you left it behind, he said out loud. I though you just wanted me to see what a jackass I am.
He went back outside. Getting the knife from his table he saw that someone had taken his box of salted lizards. Doesn’t matter now, he told himself. He went outside and lay in the charred circle where the shuttle had sat. He looked into the brown sky, thinking about Valorie and the others and, for the first time in many decades, about the planet he had come from. His memories of that place were very faint. The only thing he remembered vividly was holding a piece of yellow candy that had come to him out of the blue sky as he watched a parade. He remembered unwrapping the candy, and then for a moment he could taste it again.
With new tears in his eyes he decided that putting the knife into his heart would be the best way. A hot breeze passed over him from the desert. He looked into the sky, wishing he could see clouds there, or a yellow sun, or an atmosphere that was blue instead of brown. It doesn’t matter what color it is, he told himself. You’re looking at it for the last time anyway.
In that case, it matters about as much as anything, he thought.
You’re going to have to stop talking to yourself, he told himself. I’m about to, he answered.
He lay there for awhile with his eyes open, giving himself a chance to change his mind. He realized that he was going through with it this time. It was just a small matter of concentration so he would plunge all the way in one thrust, and concentration was something he knew how to do.
His right hand formed a fist and began to rise and fall against the ground.
He was entering the familiar silence of deep attentiveness when he heard the sound, as strange to his ears as the popping shrieks of the cooling desert had once been.
He sat up and saw a man walking towards him. Behind the man, parked near the mouth of the cave, was a small two-man air shuttle. The stranger’s mouth was moving, but his words weren’t clear.
The sculptor cupped a hand behind one ear.
“I told them there was someone here,” said the stranger, smiling broadly. “I told them those lizards didn’t just die. They were smoked.”
The sculptor stood. He spoke, but his words evidently weren’t intelligible
“Are there any others?” asked the stranger, speaking louder.
The sculptor shook his head, tried to speak but could not recall the words he needed.
“Let’s go,” said the young man. “We’ve got to go. This ain’t even a scheduled stop. I told them we’d find something down here. Man, we came that close to leaving you behind.”
As they rose above the atmosphere in the tiny shuttle, the sculptor looked down at his mountain. It stood in the yellow plain like an island. The outcroppings surrounding it looked like a dense ring of boulders that could rip a ship’s hull to pieces.
“I guess you carved all that stuff in the cave,” the young man said, evidently shouting so he would be heard. “That was some great stuff. We blasted some of it before we saw what we were doing. Something like that should be left alone, even if no one’s ever gonna see it.”
“Inside?” asked the sculptor. “In the big cave?”
“The big cavern? Well, that’s not my kind of art, I guess, but I’d like to see it when its finished.”
They both laughed, and the pilot extended his hand. The sculptor blushed and looked out the window. He felt the hand punch him lightly on the shoulder. Looking back he could now see all the distant mountains, too, spread across the yellow globe like a whole continent of islands.