“It’s okay, Nan. I don’t blame you.”
Nan sobbed and embraced the Catalyst.
The weapon kept firing.
“Nav is gone, sir. Buffer cracked, EM drain—”
“And the enemy fleet?”
“Regrouping.”
The vessel rocked as two more command bubbles corrupted and cracked. The bridge sea realigned in an attempt to maintain vessel homeostasis, but with half of the crew gone…Windham reached out and felt the crack in his own bubble. The high-density gelatin that seeped through tickled his fingertips, bounced around his hands. The darker bubbles were increasing in size. Windham’s world was being invaded by near-matter.
The flashes of quantum fire abruptly ended and he could see through the translucent hull of the liquid vessel that the hole from which the rounds were arriving in-system was collapsing, a great white spiral of space/time confusion in the black of the enemy system. He watched the last of the rounds slam into and through the surface of the enemy’s world, spreading vast chunks of molten continent into space.
“Orders, sir?”
Windham struggled to focus, but he could already feel the bridge gelatin dissipating into his atmosphere, clogging his body and mind. Schools of firefly machines swarmed around his face, but they seemed to be just as confused and resigned to death as Windham was.
“Commander?”
Windham pressed his hands to the broken phase before him. Dark streams of bridge gelatin were now virtually pouring into his bubble. Each liquid inhalation choked him; each exhalation burned. Through the hull, he saw the hunters regrouping, their scattered firework formation solidifying as they found the Teller on scope.
“Enemy fleet in pursuit. Orders, Commander?”
He tried to remain calm, bracing himself for the moment that he had anticipated for years. Cessation. No afterlife, no redemption, nothing. They started then, the images of his wife, his son, his beautiful family that he had left behind. He was beginning to hyperventilate, but the fireflies were now floating dead in the corrupted bubble.
“Eject my bubble upon collapse and get out of here.”
“Commander, I—”
“Just do it. You have to get word to home. They have to know what we found out here.”
He could hear it, the collapse, when it began: a faint crinkling sound of ice plunged into a tepid drink, the spidery latticework of his end, the disorienting influx of tons of bridge gelatin, displacing the bubble’s atmosphere almost immediately, but not fast enough to displace those final thoughts, that resignation to nothing, that pang of love for his Helen, that broken heart for his people and his time and everything and and crushing suffocating burning torrent rage of sound and fury pressing in and through and white world didn’t fade to black but fell into white and
more wine?”
“Mmmmph,” she muttered as she turned over in bed, pushing aside proletariat sheets and exposing pert young breasts that were not yet distorted by the birth and suckling of his bastard son. Her hand moved down her front, fingertips absently tracing between her breasts as she rolled on to her back and looked up at the water-stained ceiling.
“Jemie?”
“Hmm?” He was behind the easel, painting something again. The sudden inspiration had nearly interrupted their lovemaking, or perhaps it was just fucking, but regardless, she suspected that the possibility of female orgasm, or even remote satisfaction, had again become secondary to her lover’s obsession with his oils and brushes and canvas.
“Do you love me?”
Gently, daintily, he applied white to the canvas. Little dabs of pigment, or lack thereof, smoothed, roughed by the brush’s bristles.
“Hmm.”
The room smelled of sex and turpentine and Paris in the summer: sweat and cheap parfum and wine. He poured another glass as he sat back and surveyed his work.
“Needs more white.”
“Jemie, answer me!”
He frowned, turned his attention to his mistress, now sitting up in bed. She is just a child, he thought, but her breasts and the unmistakable vice of her thighs begged otherwise.
“Don’t call me that, Jo.”
He turned back to his canvas. Jo harrumped and covered her body with the sheets again. No need to give this artiste a free view of her sex.
“You son of a bitch, James!”
Again, he glared at her.
“Leave my mother out of this, Ms. Hiffernan.”
Jo wrapped the sheet around her naked form and walked over to his precious canvas. She took his glass, drank his wine.
“What will it be?”
James took his time answering, rolled a cigarette, lit it, inhaled and exhaled.
“It’s you, dear. Don’t you see it?”
She took his cigarette from him, puffed. “Will it make more sense if I drink more wine?”
He grinned that acid grin and pulled her close. She sat on his lap on his painting stool and looked at the canvas. Gesso, a hint of gray, and a single white form blocked out in the center.
“That’s me?”
“That’s you, my dear white girl.”
Jo smiled that Irish smile, dimples in full effect, and he felt something for her…Or perhaps it was catarrh.
“I believe I love you, Mr. Whistler.”
He hugged her a little closer.
“And I, dear Ms. Hiffernan, believe I need more wine.”
Helen sobbed.
Hunter sat there in the gravel, a child of traumae, his little hands grasping pieces of stone, reaching out, dragging pieces of stone into piles, his gaze never averted from the west, where the phase trebuchet was retracting into the planet. The clouds were wounded, torn apart and thrust aside, now a circular incision cut into their midst. The child sat in the dirt, in the dust, scraping at gravel, looking at sky, hearing mommy weep beside him and behind him. She was rocking in the rocks, on her knees, helpless hands moving from face to hair, one hand reaching out to touch her son’s shoulder, instead pulling back, covering her mouth, sobbing.
Hunter knew that his father was dead.
Helen knew that her husband was dead.
The world shuddered as the phallic tower of the trebuchet receded into its mantle cavity, satisfied in its success. The phased slugs of planet interior would work their way toward target over thousands of years through space/time. Helen knew, she just somehow knew that he was dead, the man she loved, out there somewhere across the divide of eons. The trebuchet had fired at something in the Outer…And Windham was there. Dying, dead, thousands of years away, millions of years dust, just now watching the fire arrive on target, just now gasping in liquid hell, just now ceasing and releasing electricity into void.
Sirens. City alert. Hunter blinked from reverie and looked back at the apartment complex, leveled. The majority of the buildings he could see were strangely canted on ancient foundations. Bricks sat in the driveway, in the streets. There was rich black smoke coming from somewhere to the east. He could taste that fire. He could taste that danger. One would think that such a little boy would be crying right now. One would think that
because Jo was Whistler’s mistress, she would have been depicted in a warmer way, but Whistler was not like other artists, or other men, for that matter. I feel that Jo is depicted in a very neutral way that almost makes her become part of the background of the painting. There is no evidence of a love for Jo, or a warmth or fondness for her. She simply stands there, arms at her sides, no facial expression, eyes looking out but not quite at you. Richard Dorment contends that Whistler intended that his model’s face should lack expression, that Jo should assume the facial equivalent of the non-color, white. Whistler did not want to focus attention on her face. Reducing emphasis on the face reduced the tendency to read an emotional reaction into the model’s appearance. Whistler was in essence making Jo an object in the painting, instead of a human being. She becomes just another compositional element upon which to explore the tonal variations of the color white upon white. This objectification of a woman is a characteristic of not only Whistler’s The White Girl, but it could be argued that in his young manhood this is how he viewed women.”