Hannah was frowning to herself, and I wondered if she was thinking the same as me: that perhaps, due to his heightened empathetic ability, Dortmund had found the extraterrestrial displays just too much.
“How about a drink?” Hannah suggested, taking the words from my mouth.
We moved to the patio, where the last rays of the sun were playing over the waters of the straights. Dortmund and Matt were at the rail, speaking in lowered tones. The off-worlder was clutching a whisky.
Maddie, Hawk and Kee were seated at a table in the bar area. Maddie waved us over. “Well, what do you think?”
“Amazing,” I said, then laughed at the inadequacy of my response. “I thought Matt’s emotion crystals were great, but these are something else.”
“I’ve never experienced anything like it,” Hannah said.
I ordered a couple of beers from a waiter. “But how does he do it?” I said.
Maddie said, “Well, why don’t you ask the man himself?”
Matt had joined us, clutching a glass of beer and looking thunderous. Now Matt is usually the most pacific of people; I’d rarely seen him angry about anything. I looked beyond him. Dortmund was at the bar, ordering another whisky.
Maddie laid a hand on Matt’s arm. “What is it?”
He gave a tight smile, shaking his head. “I just find Dortmund’s attitude arrogant and… ignorant,” he said. “Let’s forget him, anyway.”
Hannah said, “We enjoyed the exhibition, Matt.”
“It’s exceeded all my expectations. Even when I was setting it up, I never dreamed the experience would be quite so… so powerful.”
“David was wondering how you achieved the effect,” Maddie said, smiling. “Come on, your secret’s safe with us.” As an aside to us, she went on, “I live with him, and he’s not said a word to me!”
Matt relented. “It’s no secret really. The Epiphany Stones are religious relics to the Elan. They contain the essences of their ancestors◦– each stone housing, if you like, the lineage of certain families.”
Hawk, ever the materialist, was frowning. “You mean, they believe the stones contain these essences, or that they really do?”
Matt pursed his lips, tipping his head. “The Elan believe”, he said, “and so do I. Of course, I didn’t before I went to Epiphany. I’d read about the stones. I was intrigued. But what I experienced on the planet…”
“When you were with the elders in the cavern?” Hawk asked.
Matt nodded. I looked at Hannah. She was wide-eyed. Matt said, “The Elan believe that when they die◦– that is, when their bodies die◦– their souls migrate to the stones. Of course, the stones have to be in the vicinity. It’s considered a tragedy if an Elan dies away from a stone. Anyway, when they die, their souls or essences are imprinted within the atomic matrices of the stones◦– and their descendants are able to commune with the stones, with their ancestors.”
“And you experienced this with the elders?” Hannah asked.
“Not as such. They gave me a drug, a sedative, which sent me into a trance. An elder then communed with his family stone, and with the facility of the drug I was able to apprehend a small part of the wonder he was experiencing.” He shrugged. “After that, it was a technical problem I had to solve: how to make something of that experience available to a human audience. That’s what I’ve been working on for the past year, before my second trip to Epiphany to formally request from the Elan the loan of fifty stones.”
Hawk was still frowning. “But do you really think the stones contain the souls of the aliens, or are they merely recording devices which store an impression of their essences?”
Matt pointed a stubby forefinger at the pilot. “Now that, my friend, is the big question. I suppose it depends on your philosophical standpoint.”
“But how were you able to communicate what’s in the stones to us?” Hannah wanted to know.
Matt shook his head. “I don’t think I have. That is, I haven’t been able to communicate the full experience. What I’ve done is suggest, through piezoelectric enhancement, a small part of the content of the stones. You can’t really communicate with the spectral Elan you see when in the vicinity of the stones, merely understand a mood or feeling.”
“Whatever it is”, I said, “it’s damned powerful.”
“But”, said a new voice to the group, “is it art?”
Like a ghost, Dortmund had joined us. He stood beside the table, clutching a tumbler and looking superior. He drew up a seat◦– a barstool was all that was available◦– and sat down side-saddle, looming over us.
He did not look at any one of us, as was his habit, but rather stared down at the centre of the table as he said, “I mean, I don’t wish to demean Sommers’ technical accomplishment in staging this… ‘show’, but I would question whether it is really a valid rendition of what it is to be Elan, or whether it’s merely a meretricious, I might even say sensationalist, pantomime.”
Matt said, reasonably, “I never meant it to be a comprehensive statement on what it is to be Elan◦– that’s impossible. How can the member of one species really apprehend what it’s like to be another? I meant to give some approximation. To communicate this fundamental fact◦– that despite the differences between the Elan and humans, we have a lot in common.”
Dortmund smiled to himself. “I think that answers my question satisfactorily, then. The exhibition is no more than a pantomime.”
“Don’t be so bloody sententious, Dortmund!” This came from Hannah, seated beside me, and I stared at her in surprise. She was sitting back in her chair and staring at the off-worlder.
Dortmund then did something odd◦– odd, that is, considering his previous aversion to eye contact. He stared at Hannah, piercingly. “Sententious?”
I expected his gaze to flick away, to rest on the centre of the table again, but it remained fixed on Hannah.
She said, “Just because your ability enables you to commune with the stones and thereby gain a heightened experience of what they contain, that doesn’t mean you have the right to demean the experience the rest of us have had.” She held his gaze, unflinching.
He remained staring at her. He wore an odd expression, as if trying to read something in her features, but was unable to do so.
He said, “But my dear, I don’t demean the value of your experience, I merely criticise the value of the exhibition as a work of so-called art. After all, if criticism has any validity, then surely the considered opinion of a critic with honed expertise and insight ought to be respected.”
Matt joined in. “But you’re not bringing artistic criteria to the exhibition, Dortmund. You have your own agenda. I present Concordance as a work of art, not of xeno-ethnological fidelity.”
“Which brings me back to my initial question,” Dortmund said. “Is it art?”
Hannah said, “What is art, anyway, but a means of communicating experience? I’d say that Matt’s exhibition pretty much fulfils that criteria.”
Dortmund gave his maddeningly superior, frosty smile. Oddly, his gaze hadn’t left Hannah since she’d first spoken. “It brings a tawdry, diluted vaudeville of second-hand emotion to a jaded, bourgeois audience,” he said.
Maddie said, “Well, we could be arguing this point all night. Who’s for another drink?”
While she collected orders, Dortmund slipped from his stool and moved across to the rail. I noticed, as he did so, that his stare never left Hannah.
I looked at her. She was watching him as he turned and stood with his back to us, gazing out across the waters of the straight.
I murmured, “I don’t think he likes you, Hannah.”
She took my hand and squeezed. “Then the sentiment is reciprocated.”
Maddie ordered drinks and we chatted of other things. At one point, as Hannah was in conversation with Hawk and Kee, Maddie touched my arm and murmured, “You two are getting on rather well, if I might say?”