I had killed. I had killed not by accident, but with skills I had learned determinedly, killing skills, lethal arts. Like a fire department, I had hoped I would never have to use those abilities for anything but exercise. But I had known quite clearly what I was learning to do, just as I honed my abilities in other areas, such as target practice. Friends of mine, rich and comfortable behind bonded guards and alarm systems, had sometimes derided me gently for “dabbling” in these deadly arts. They had asked what gunfighting or knife-fighting abilities had to do with our modern world, where most crime was either a sophisticated computer dodge or a mindless riot. There were crimes of passion, but not many. Much of the crime was corporate, huge, impersonal, done at board level or by the manipulations of the Families. Direct, personal survival skills were seldom needed, or so they thought, disregarding driving hazards, urban riots, defecting guards, faulty alarm systems, and all the other failures of a complex technological civilization.
It seems to me that many, if not all, of those factors that keep an individual alive and functioning in dangerous situations might also be translated into national terms, into a country without tension, because it is confident and secure.
Survival is not just killing. Survival is something as broad as global ecology and as personal as watching both ways, even on a one-way street. It seems to me you should kill to eat, if you wanted meat, or when there is no other way to stay alive, but never just to kill. That is not survival, for all the creatures of the system are part of you, and if I survive I want the variety and pleasures of Earth, and Mars, to survive also. But I would kill the last unicorn on Earth if that were absolutely the only way I could survive, and I would not feel guilty. The most dangerous enemy man has is man himself. If you do not survive, that in which you believe also does not survive, unless your death somehow sustains it. I can see a man or woman dying for something they believe in, but how much better to fight and live to enjoy it?
Now I asked myself what I believed in so strongly that I would find it worth dying for, and I found nothing. That saddened me, for I really thought every man should have something important enough in his life for him to consider its survival worth his death.
It was very depressing to discover that about myself. Both Madelon and Nova came to mind, of course, but Madelon had removed herself, and Nova . . . I said I loved her, I believed I loved her, and I wanted to love her, but in some deep part of me I was actually unsure right now of my ability to open myself up to love.
To divert my mind from bleak depression I opened my eyes and looked up at the ceiling.
At first I just looked up without focusing; then I saw that I was looking at something. Across the entire ceiling of this room, an ancient chamber far below a structure last occupied twenty thousand years before, was a mural. It was brighter and clearer than any of those in the other ruins. I sat up, suddenly excited, flashing my beam here and there, revealing more and more of the mural to my astonished eyes. There was a letdown as I realized the images were still as indistinct and as undecipherable as those found elsewhere, but here, in this oldest of habitations, the mural was the most complete and the brightest in color—and I was the first to discover it.
The images seemed to radiate outward from a center, in long curving arms like that of a spiral galaxy, coming out from a central radiance, gradually forming into more and more distinct shapes as they neared the ends of the spiraling arms. Vaguely amorphic humanoids, which could be winged and could be great insectoids and could be ships and could be decoration.
I lay back on the pile of sand and drank it in, putting my mind in neutral, not probing, just absorbing, drifting toward an assimilation of the whole. When pieces or moments of a work of art stand out it is often because the form is not complete, not unified, not integrated. When a work of art can be experienced all at one time, as in a painting, these factors are clear. When time and motion are involved, as in a dance or a tape or even a sensatron, then there is linear development, hence a variation in reaction, and sometimes this “bright spot, dull spot” theory can work for the artist, providing contrast, rest before activity, part of the selection process.
So I lay there and absorbed and did not judge or concentrate, for that can always be done. I found that I was wondering why man—and the long-dead Martians—created art at all. You didn’t need art to feed your body or to keep you warm or sheltered from the rains. But from the caves onward man had created art with a persistence second only to his desire to feed, to sleep, and to reproduce. To deny food to your body is to die. To deny sex to your body is to deny life. To reject art is to impoverish yourself, rejecting pleasure and growth. We always think of those who have minimal interest in the arts as dull clods, as insensitive beasts. But to accept your sexual self, and to accept art, is to add to yourself.
Art depicts the inner and outer manifestations of sex and living and feeling and dreams and frustrations. It reveals us to ourselves, or should.
Man persistently creates art under the most depressing as well as the most enjoyable circumstances. Some men and women create art as easily as breathing. For them, not to create would be to die. The mysterious process of creation is something that no one had ever stated clearly, at least to me. Some have said it is to go beyond oneself, to be
“other” and “another” and more than the sum of the parts. Goldstone told me it was “to get high,” to become intoxicated with creation. Perhaps artists create to imitate god, to become a god by creating. Art is ego, but the attitude an artist may have about it, before or after, is the purest form of egotism.
Michael Cilento once said that it was to “escape to freedom . . . or to escape from freedom.” Freedom seems to be the constant. Freedom to create, freedom to create new images, new thoughts, new philosophies, new anything.
New worlds, perhaps.
Freedom to create Star Palaces and Grand Halls and perhaps the ultimate freedom from self. Maybe that was where the Martians had gone, simply creating the ultimate, artistic self, the purest ego, a disembodied form of energy to wander the universe, shaping it, or simply experiencing what they had found.
The concept of a race that had evolved beyond the flesh was an old one, but a persistent one, as though it was a sort of genetic goal. I turned off the light and forced sleep upon myself. And the dreams forced themselves upon me.
9
It was hours before I awakened, and when I did I came awake like an animal, instantly alert, not moving, eyes wide in the utter blackness of the deep tomb. When I had determined that I had simply awakened, that nothing had jolted me back, I switched on the light and grinned to myself. I had rarely awakened like that, like a hunted animal. For some reason it was like a proof of skill, oddly pleasing,