“Madelon is coming with me,” Mike said.
I looked at her. She made a slight nod, looking at me gravely, with deep concern in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Brian.”
I nodded, my throat constricted suddenly. It was almost a business deaclass="underline" the greatest work of art for Madelon, even trade. I turned back to look at the sensatron again and this time the image-Madelon seemed sad, yet compassionate. My eyes were wet and the cube shimmered. I heard them leave and long after the throb of the copter had faded away I stood there, looking into the cube, into Madelon, into myself.
They went to Athens, I heard, then to Russia for awhile. When they went to India so that Mike might do his Holy Men series I called off the discreet monitors Control still had on them. I saw him on a talk show and he seemed withdrawn, and spoke of the pressures fame placed upon him. Madelon was not on the show, nor did he speak of her. As part of my technology updating I was given an article on Mike, from Science News, that spoke of his technical achievements rather than his artistic. It seemed the Full Scale Molecular System was a success and much of the credit was his. The rest of the article was on spinoffs of his basic research.
It all seemed remote from me, but the old habits died hard. My first thought on seeing the new Dolan exhibit was how Madelon would like it. I bought a complete sculptured powerjewel costume from Cartier’s before I remembered, and ended up giving it to my companion of a weekend in Mexico City just to get rid of it.
I bought companies. I made things. I commissioned art. I sold companies. I went places. I changed mistresses. I made money. I fought stock control fights. Some I lost. I ruined people. I made others happy and rich. I was alone a lot.
I return often to Battle Mountain. That is where the cube is. The greatness of it never bores me; it is different each time I see it, for I am different each time. But then Madelon never bored me either, unlike all other women, who sooner or later revealed either their shallowness or my inability to find anything deeper.
I look at the work of Michael Cilento, and I know that he is an artist of his time, yet like many artists, not of his time. He uses the technology of his time, the attitude of an alien, and the same basic subject matter that generations of fascinated artists have used. Michael Cilento is an artist of women. Many have said he is the artist who caught women as they were, as they wanted to be, and as he saw them, all in one work of art.
When I look at my sensatron cube, and at all the other Cilentos I have acquired, I am proud to have helped cause the creation of such art. But when I look at the Madelon that is in my favorite cube I sometimes wonder if the trade was worth it.
The cube is more than Madelon or the sum of the sum of all the Madelons who ever existed. But the reality of art is not the reality of reality.
After the showing of the Cilento retrospective at the Modern the social grapevine told me nothing about them for several months. Reluctantly, I asked Control to check.
The check revealed their occupancy of a studio in London, but enquiries in the neighborhood showed that they had not emerged in over a month and no one answered a knock. I authorized a discreet illegal entry. Within minutes they were back on the satellite line to me in Tokyo.
“You probably should see this yourself, sir,” the man said.
“Are they all right?” I asked, and it hurt to ask.
“They’re not here, sir. Clothes, papers, effects, but no trace.”
“You checked with customs? You checked the building?”
“Yes, sir, first thing. No one knows anything, but . . .”
“Yes?”
“There’s something here you should see.”
The studio was large, a combination of junk yard, machine shop, mad scientist’s laboratory and art gallery, much as every other sensatron artist’s studio I had ever been in. Later, I was to see the details—the flowerwine bottles painted with gay faces, the tiny sensatron cubes that made you happy just to hold them and watch them change, the art books with new drawings done over the old reproductions, the crates and charts and diagrams.
Later, I would wander through the rubble and litter and museum quality art and see a few primitive daubs on canvo that were undoubtedly Madelon’s. I’d find the barbaric jewelry, the laughing triphotos, the tapes, the Persian helmet stuck with dead flowers, the painted rock wrapped in aluminum foil in the refrigerator, the butterfly in permaplastic, the unfinished sandwich.
But all I saw when I walked in were the cubes.
I bought the building and had certain structural changes made. I didn’t want to move one of the cubes a millimeter. The one that all the vidtabs and reviewers called “The Lovers” I took. I couldn’t keep it from the world, even though it hurt me to show it.
The other cube was more of a tool, a piece of equipment, rough-finished but complete, not really a work of art, and I didn’t want it moved.
Once it was seen people wanted “The Lovers” in a curiously avid way. Museums bid, cajoled, pleaded, compromised, regrouped into phalanxes asking for tours, betrayed each other, regrouped to try again. In a way it’s all I have left of them. I pursued the lines of obvious investigation but I found no trace of them, not on Earth, not on the Moon, not on Mars. I ordered Control to stop looking when it became obvious they did not want to be found. Or could not be. But in a way they are still here. Alive. In the Cube.
They are standing facing each other. Nude. Looking into each other’s eyes, hand in hand. There is rich new grass under their feet and tiny flowers growing. In Mike’s free hand he is holding out to Madelon something glowing. A starpoint of energy. A small shining universe. He is offering it to her.
Behind them is the sky. Great beautiful spring clouds move majestically across the blue. Far down, far away are worn ancient rocks, much like Monument Valley in Arizona, or the Crown of Mars, near Burroughs. That’s the first side I saw.
I walked around to the right, slowly. They did not change. They still stared into each other’s eyes, a slight and knowing smile on their lips. But the background was stars. A wall of stars beyond the grass at their feet. Space. Deep space filled with incredible red dwarfs, monstrous blue giants, ice points of glitter, millions upon millions of suns making a starry mist that wandered across the blackness.
The third side was another landscape, seen from a hilltop, with a red-violet sea in the distance and two moons.
The fourth side was darkness. A sort of darkness. Something was back in there beyond them. Vague figures formed, disappeared, reformed slightly differently, changed . . .
Then I appeared. I think it’s me. I don’t know why I think it is me. I have never told anyone I think one of the dim faces is me, but I believe it is.
The vibrations were subtle, almost unnoticed until you had looked at the cube a long time. They were peaceful vibrations, yet somehow exciting, as if the brainwave recordings upon which they were based were anticipating something marvelously different. There have been books written about this one cube and each writer has his interpretation.