The Pictures of Pavanne Read online

  They were a miracle to behold. A visual mystery, a beatific, hypnotizing ever-changing art form.

  Max Farway, the brilliant Terran artist, was destined to try to capture their majesty on canvas. The wealthy but physically deformed artist was obsessed by the Pictures of Pavanne.

  He traveled to the barren planet, that had only the tourist city of Pavanne cultivated and adapted to human needs. It was a carnival town, trapping tourists by the millions from the entire galaxy. And Harkrider was the master of Pavanne.

  Harkrider controlled the planet, and amassed fortunes through the allure of the bewitching Pictures. Yet somehow, this omnipotent master of Pavanne was afraid—afraid of Max Farway, who unknowingly held the answer to the devastating perplexity of the Pictures of Pavanne....

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  second complete novel

  THE PICTURES OF PAVANNE

  by

  LAN WRIGHT

  ACE BOOKS, INC.

  1120 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10036

  the pictures of pavanne

  Copyright ©, 1968, by Lan Wright

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover by Jack Gaughan.

  the youth monpoly

  Copyright ©, 1968, by Ace Books, Inc.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  I

  Max Farway stood in the sunshine and felt the warmth of it on his bare head. Beneath his feet was white concrete, and beneath the concrete the brown, moist soil of his native Earth.

  I’ve been away too long, he thought, and the beauty of it welled inside him as he looked at the distant range of green hills that were hazed by their own remoteness and by the heat of early afternoon.

  Slowly and painfully he made his way across the few short yards from the Lunar ferry to the ground car that would take him and the other passengers to the control buildings at the edge of the field. He had been deliberate in being the last to leave the ferry since his slow progress from his berth to the entrance would have been an embarrassment to him as well as his fellow travelers—not that he cared very much about their feelings. Now, he realized, he’d made a mistake. He had to board the ground car under the covert gaze of fifty men and women who watched with pity and curiosity as he hoisted his shortened leg painfully up the few steps. He moved crabwise along the central gangway and eased himself into the one vacant seat beside a plump, sweating Terran who shifted irritably.

  Farway felt the resentment bite at him. It was an old and familiar acidity, but one which grew more hateful with the passing; and yet it held him like a drug, to be repeated and repeated with growing addiction.

  Bitterly and deliberately he edged his body more firmly on the seat, and felt a masochistic delight as the other tried to avoid the physical contact that Farway was forcing upon him.

  “I don’t have leprosy,” snapped Farway, his voice loud enough for the rest of the passengers to hear.

  The man reddened and smiled as if Farway had made a joke, but his embarrassment was all too clear. It spread from him in waves so that it affected everyone. The mile long trip to the control center was made in a miasma of silence that had Farway as the center of its being. He sat in the middle of it and hugged his secret delight.

  The formalities at the control center were swift and efficient. Outside, in the wide patio lounge, friends and relatives of the new arrivals waited to welcome them. Men and women kissed and shook hands; said their farewells to shipboard companions of the past few weeks; greeted and were greeted by those who had come to meet them.

  Only Farway seemed alone.

  He threaded his way between the chattering groups, aware that conversation stopped as he passed, to be resumed with an even greater and more frenetic animation after he had gone. He knew that the incongruity of the giant human porter, whom he had hired to carry his luggage at huge and quite unnecessary expense, did much to emphasize his dwarfish ugliness. As always, he fed on the pain and the embarrassment.

  Beyond the cool lounge lay the open courtyard and the sun. Close to the main exit stood the white copter with the Farway symbol gleaming red upon its side. It was a great deal closer, Farway noted, than the regulations allowed, and its positioning was such that he had only a score of meters to walk before he was greeted by the white overalled pilot.

  “Mr. Farway, sir.” The pilot topped him by a good half a foot as he saluted smartly.

  Farway ignored the salute. “Let’s get home.” With no little difficulty he climbed up into the interior of the copter.

  He settled himself in one of the passenger seats, his legs dangling and short of the floor. The pilot followed him and paused hesitantly beside the seat.

  “Well?” asked Farway. “Have you forgotten how to fly this machine?”

  If only the man would answer him back. If only he would show some fire.

  But no! There was a flush to his cheeks, a nervous smile to his lips.

  Beyond that—nothing!

  “Sir!” The smile was replaced by a nervous solemnity. “Sir, I have to tell you before we leave the field. Your father died during the night.”

  Strangely, there was nothing.

  Farway examined his emotions with his usual care and deliberation. He was clinical in all his self-examinations since his emotions were the things which he enjoyed most. He could feed upon them, enjoy them, nurture them; he could hate them, detest them, feel disgust or pleasure or pain. They were never buried or submerged; they were to be savored and prolonged even to the point where, long afterwards, he could recall every nuance that touched each nerve within him.

  His father was dead. Max Farway examined himself. There was nothing.

  The pilot hesitated, shifting from one foot to another, but Farway ignored him. Perhaps there would be some fatuous expression of sympathy; the man might even ask if there was anything he could do. What can be done for the dead? Farway wondered. They die and are buried, and that is an end to it. One day, he would lie on a bed and stare at a ceiling with eyes that would grow blank as the curtains were drawn across them for the last time. The heart would lie quiet at last; the blood would cease to flow; the brain would lose its hold on consciousness. His twisted limbs would relax as they had never relaxed in life. There was sybaritic delight in the thought of no more pain, no more ugliness.

  When I die the world dies with me, thought Farway. The pilot moved away silently, and a few moments later the copter lifted itself into the clear blue sky and headed away from the field toward home.

  Farway dozed a little. The sunshine was hot through the unshaded window but he made no effort to close the blind. He had not felt true sunshine for almost six years; it warmed his body and loosened his muscles. The heat and color of a score of alien stars were embroidered on his mind, but none of them held the comfort that was carried in the golden haze flooding upon his native planet.

  He awoke when the altered beat of the motors told him that they were nearing their destination, and his eyes opened in time to catch the panorama of the Farway home as they swooped upon it.

  Six years and a dozen worlds; and now he was home again.

  There were servants and lackeys; a small car took him from the landing field; there were men to see to his luggage; a man to drive the car; another to take his elbow and assist him up the wide, marble steps that led up to the great porticoed entrance.

  “Get the hell away from me,” snarled Farway, and reveled in the bitter acid of rejection.

  At the top step he half stumbled, and would have fallen but for the steadying hand that seized him. Again he shook it away and passed through the wide doorway into the great house that he knew as home.

  Inside the vast entrance hall he paused for several long seconds to savor th
e moment of return. The sun cast light and shade across the gleaming plastic floor and up the curving sweep of the wide staircase. As always the long windows were devoid of drapes, and there was an air of austerity that was belied by the opulence of statuary and carving around the walls.

  Farway followed one of the servants up the stairs, walking in his usual crabwise and ungainly fashion. At the head of the broad upper corridor the double doors to his father’s room were closed and draped in black. He hesitated before them for a second and then turned resolutely toward his own room that lay in the other direction at the far end of the corridor.

  As the door closed behind him the room enfolded him like a mother; it was the same as it had been on the day he left. There, on the platform below the great arch of the window, stood the shortened easel with the untouched canvas virginal upon it. The same dirty, multicolored rag hung from one of the supporting pegs; the paints and palette lay on the dirty work table; the brushes—carefully cleaned—stood in their appointed places. On the far side, away from the great window, his low bed was carefully made ready for his occupancy, and beside it, set into the wall, the three short shelves that held no more than fifty books—books that he had read and read again through the long, painful years of his youth.

  In one corner stood the metal sticks with the plastic tips at the ends; once these had been his sole means of propulsion. Beside them, unstrung, the shortened metal bow —a relic of the time when he had tried to take his place with other youngsters in the craze of that particular year.

  Remembrance brought pain to tear at him, but he clung to it and savored it, recalling each humiliation, each hurt, each ribald joke. Then he put them all away until another time and another remembrance.

  Farway stood for a long time and allowed the atmosphere of the room to envelop him. He grew back into it like a hermit crab into its shell, and when—finally—he felt at peace he left the room and went back along the corridor toward that other door, closed and black clad, at the head of the stairway.

  It wasn’t locked.

  He turned the ornamental brass handle and went inside. The light was somber from shadowed windows that kept out the afternoon sun; there was a faint, almost intangible antiseptic, an aura of after-death that chilled him.

  “So—you have come at last, Max.” The voice shocked him and his eyes sought the speaker sitting, lonely, beside the bulk of the four-poster bed.

  His stepmother’s voice was strong and untroubled as it had always been.

  Even death, so it seemed, could not bend her with its weight.

  “You have come too late.”

  “I know.” He paused; then, in expiation, “I came as soon as it was humanly possible.”

  “He was four weeks in the dying.” She rose from her seat beside the bed and came toward him, her clothes rustling as she moved. “Four weeks while he waited for you to come, until finally he could wait no longer.”

  Farway shuffled toward the bed so that he could look at the lined, patrician face with its too-long nose and chin. In death the lines that he recalled were gone and the skin was as smooth and untroubled as a young boy’s. The gray eyes were closed and there was a pinkness to the cheeks that held more of life than ever Farway remembered from before.

  “You need never have gone away, Max.”

  “Yes, I did.” He turned away from the corpse. “You know I did. He smothered me with his guilt—”

  “He only did what he thought was right. Max, you could have helped.”

  There was no reproach in her voice. “He loved you perhaps even more than he loved me.”

  “Then why didn’t he kill me at birth?” Farway lashed the words at her with a viciousness that surprised even himself. “He spawned me, protected me, tortured me, forced me into a world that turns its face every time I appear.”

  “He loved you.” The words were a shocked and whispered protest.

  “He loved his guilt. He fed it and nourished it—made it grow into what he called love. Then he watched over me and protected me, and in that way he salved his guilt and his conscience. And I?” Farway lifted his shoulders in a small, helpless gesture. “I was the puppet tied with strings to his efforts at salvation.”

  “You misjudge him badly, Max.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “He misjudged himself. He could never understand what it meant to be the way I am. Do you know, Alicia, he never once asked me?”

  “How do you ask a think like that?”

  “It’s simple. I ask it all the time.” He smiled and the smile blossomed into a chuckle. “I say to myself, what is it like to be a five foot dwarf with a twisted spine and one shortened leg, with overlong arms and a cretin’s head? And then I look at the people around me. I force them to look at me, to notice me, to see me. And then I know what it’s like because I can see it written in their faces.”

  Farway turned from her and looked back at the shadowed bed. In the death room, suddenly, and for the first time in his whole thirty-five years of life, he knew for certain what he was. The pain that welled within him was something fresh and frightening; it blossomed and grew into a brilliant and horrible flame; there was a new beauty to pain and suffering that Farway had never known before. Twin streams of tears made their marks down his smooth, hairless cheeks, and the salt of them tainted his lips.

  “I hated him,” he whispered, “and the more he loved me the more I hated him.”

  Alicia Farway was sobbing softly, and her sobs pulsed to the rhythm of his own tears.

  “I hope to God he rots in hell! I hope to God that I am there to see it!”

  II

  Farway didn’t go to the funeral two days later; instead, he stood in the giant window of his studio room and looked down upon the men and women who had assembled for the occasion.

  From his aerie it seemed like a gathering of saurians upon some reptilian feast. They came in their private copters and walked from the landing field up the long straight road between the acres of lawns and the giant trees. Men and women in the traditional weeds of mourning, they walked slowly and deliberately, the great ones of Earth come to bid farewell to a dead brother. Some Farway recognized: friends and relatives whom he should have greeted, people he hadn’t seen these six or more years gone.

  There was that perversity of his nature that gave him pleasure to know that they would be embarrassed by his absence. His stepmother, Alicia Farway, had done nothing to try and persuade him, and he had felt a grudging admiration that—in her grief—she would not plead or cajole or wheedle. She neither asked nor demanded; neither did she reproach either by word or by implication.

  After the cortege had left Farway turned to his paints and his pictures.

  There were many that he had brought with him, legacies of his wanderings among the man-worlds of the Galaxy. Some were completed, needing only the final glister of preparation; others were half finished, laid aside until his inner eye should see what was needed to make them live and breathe with his own special talent. Soon he would send for Magnus and show him what he had created, and Magnus—with his clumsy hands and artist’s soul—would weep his pathetic tears of envy, would drool like a glutton after six years of starvation. Then he would take them away to his gallery and sell them for fantastic prices.

  Farway wasn’t interested in the money that Magnus garnered in this fashion; he wasn’t interested in the fact that Magnus took a fifty percent commission; but it amused him to see how the art dealer’s boisterously artistic sensitivity could so rapidly turn to a pawnbroker’s quickness for a fast deal. Magnus had spent the six years of Farway’s absence bombarding him with tapes and letters and video-grams, pleading that Farway should send on whatever work he had created. The communications had ranged from the angry to the pleading, from the threatening to the demanding—and Farway had ignored them all.

  He spent all that afternoon and the greater part of the evening working on a multicolored rock scene from the satellite of Melladore. The fantastically rich colors of the
tumbled satellite surface contrasted so vividly with the deep, star scattered depths of space that Farway had spent a long time and a lot of money trying to capture the alien beauty that he’d seen first from the viewport of a privately hired vessel.

  The picture hadn’t been finished, but he knew that he held inside him the means to complete it when the right time came. He had left Melladore and moved on to the Rigel sun and its three human clad planets.

  Now, the time was come; the beauties of Melladore’s small satellite would flow from him to completion over the next hours or days or weeks. There would be a compulsive flood of emotion and talent to be translated into color on the canvas before him; and when it was completed he would be drained and empty, run-down and exhausted mentally and physically.

  Then would come the satisfaction and the delight, the knowledge he had created something which no one else could create, and people would look at it and measure him by what they saw in the painting.

  In his creations Max Farway was a whole man.

  He didn’t know when the funeral party finally broke up. He was too engrossed to pay heed to the whine and drone of the departing copters.

  The night came down over the Farway estate, and suddenly it was too dark for him to see; for the present the spell was broken.

  He covered the canvas and cleaned the brushes carefully; stretched his twisted body and tried to ease the aching muscles which seemed to have taken on their own perverse pains. There was liquor in a cabinet and he poured himself a large glass before relaxing on the half propped pillows of his corner bed. The old, familiar emptiness was there now that the spell was broken, and he knew that he would have to wait until the urge was there again. It wouldn’t be long, probably tomorrow when he was refreshed by a night of rest.