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Genuine Old Master

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

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Science Fiction

Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust

mzbworks.home.att.net

Copyright ©1977 by Marion Zimmer Bradley

First published in Galileo Magazine #5, 1997

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

Genuine Old Master

Marion Zimmer Bradley

“You may call me Roald Ruill,” said the man from the future.

“And I’m usually called Amarga,” added the (supposedly) female creature beside him.

Dan Casey nodded. He was too dazed and dumbfounded to do anything much, except nod. After all, when a pair of unbelievably tall, spidery, green-skinned, and, let’s face it, gruesome characters wake you up out of a sound sleep, walk back and forth casually through your wall without bruising so much as a single rose on your landlady’s wallpaper, all the time calling you “O, famous master of the Past,” and “O, great Casey,”—all this is, to say the least, disturbing.

It’s disturbing even if you’ve been hitting the bottle hard and heavy; and Dan Casey, who was an unsuccessful illustrator for some unsuccessful magazine, hadn’t drunk anything stronger than restaurant coffee. Not because he’d signed the pledge, but because he was—to put it mildly—broke. Broke, on his uppers, flat. The art editors yawned in his face and indicated where he could find the door on the way out. In fact, Casey had gone to bed that night with his eyes sore from staring at the want ads. He like painting—but he also liked eating, and it was beginning to look as if he couldn’t do both.

Granted, he hadn’t gone to bed in any happy mood. A nightmare would have been fair enough. But waking up to delirium tremens—when he was cold sober—that was adding insult to injury!

So he only stared glumly at the green-skinned characters and mumbled. “So now you have names, yet. Pleased to meet you. Have a chair. Stay awhile. My name’s Casey.”

“Oh, we know,” fluted the one called Amarga. Yes, on second glance she was undeniably female, and she might even have been called pretty—if you like your females eight feet tall, with green skin. Her hair was infinitesimally longer than that of Roald Ruill—if you could call it hair; it looked like feathers. A metallic band was wrapped around her skimpy breasts, and there was a most unusually decorated triangle painted on the front of the brief skin-tight bikini thing that covered her hips. Casey blinked, looked away from it and looked back again, wonder if it was really meant to represent what it looked like, or whether he was merely possessed of a spectacularly filthy mind.

“Oh, we know, we know,” warbled Amarga again, regarding him soulfully. “you mustn’t think us irreverent, Great Casey, if we intrude on your hours of dedicated creative contemplation!”

“Huh … hoo … hah … wha … what?” stammered Casey, “Uh … that’s all right, Miss … er … Amarga, I wasn’t, whatdyacallit, contemplating., I was just asleep.”

Roald Ruill and Amarga exchanged bug eyed glances of awe. “He actually sleeps,” Amarga cooed, and Roald Ruill remarked, “Quite, quite. I had forgotten. The fatigue-center is vestigial in our race, of course, Great Casey.” He glanced about. “May I sit down?”

“Why, ah, sure.” For the first time since they had awakened him, Casey began to feel as if he were really awake and not having a humdinger of a cheese-sandwich nightmare. He began to think of unwrapping the blanket around him and getting up; then he remembered his violently polka-dotted pajamas. Like most men, Casey considered pajamas effeminate and preferred to sleep in his suntan; but it was February, and the landlady was miserly with the coal and the blankets, so it had to be either his color-blind Aunt Jane’s present from last Christmas or freezing to death.

He swung his feet over the edge of the bed, running a hand through dark, pillow-tangled hair.

“Look,” he said, “to tell the sober truth, friend, I’m just now getting wide enough awake to know for sure what you’ve been saying. You told me you came from the future, or maybe I dreamed that. What goes?”

Amarga’s whisper was clearly audible. “Roald, can he be what the records call a madjenius?”

Roald Ruill frowned. “No, no, my dear, you don’t understand the physiological peculiarities of homo neanderthalensis—no, I believe it was almost homo sapiens by your time, was it not, O revered Casey? You must forgive my daughter, Great Casey, this is only her third or fourth journey into Time, and she has never been farther from our own era than the Ninth Time Cycle, so of course she is still a little naïve.”

“Why, I went through the Ninth Martian transit-war,” Amarga protested.

Roald Ruill sat down. More accurately, his elongated legs collapsed like accordions and he squatted on the rug. Amarga perched daintily on the edge of Casey’s bureau. Her legs were so long that it was exactly the right height. The sight fascinated Casey. He blinked again. “Of course. From the future. Time travel. Buck Rogers and Martians and all. Ha ha.” And suddenly he shuddered.

“Oooh, look,” Amarga shrilled, “the inspired writings of creative torment!”

And the green skin of the intruders from the future was positively suffused with robin’s-egg blue.

Casey gulped. Pajamas or no pajamas, he’d face this on his feet. He planted his feet firmly on the worn linoleum, threw off the blanket, and stood up.

“Oooh,” Amarga tweetled, and covered her face with long dainty hands.

Casey, in a shocked glance, saw that the exquisite fingers were at least nine inches long. His artist’s eyes saw an elegant, surrealistic beauty in the elongated girlish form, but he turned to Roald Ruill.

“You say you’re from the future. Okay, I’ll buy that—I mean, I believe you, because you’re surely not like anything I ever saw in the here and now. But would you mind telling me what you’re doing in my bedroom, and why you keep calling me Great Casey?”

“Great Casey—” Roald Ruill began again, then his eyes swiveled, and he said gently “I am accustomed to the lewd customs of the past Great Casey, but will you humor an old man’s whims and make yourself decent? My daughter is young and naive, and your clothedness distresses her.”

Casey gulped. Well, the pajamas were an eyesore, all right. He reached for his robe, and Amarga blinked rapidly, turned blue, and turned around with her back to him.

Roald Ruill’s voice grew stern. “Even the whims of a barbarian genius cannot excuse this deliberate display of indecency before a young female,” he thundered. “Great Casey, I implore you to remove from your limbs enough of that lewd and superfluous organic substance to spare my young daughter’s modesty!”

“You mean, you want to take off—”

“At least enough for decency,” Roald Ruill commanded, and Casey shook his head. Oh well, if this was a dream, it was a lulu, and what did it matter anyway? He shrugged, hauled off his pajama shirt, paused, shrugged again and compromised by rolling his pajama legs to the knees, feeling acutely self-conscious about his long shanks. Amarga peered shyly at him again; even Roald Ruill looked relieved. “Now you appear civilized,” he commented, “not like an animal covered with—” he blushed aquamarine again, “organic substance!”

“Okay, okay,” Casey said wearily. “Now would you mind telling me what you’re doing here in my bedroom?”

“Oh!” Roald Ruill looked startled, “I presumed you had tele-empathized the reason for my presence. Well, we’re on a little time-traveling jaunt to celebrate my daughter’s two-hundred and fortieth Seasonal Festival. Yes, she’s only a little chicken, but she knows what she wants,” he added, with an air of parental indulgence, “and nothing would suit Amarga but that she must have an Old Master to complete her collection. And then we had the great idea!” He positively beamed with benevolence. “Antique paintings are so expensive, and so rare, I decided we would travel into the past, and—” he brought it out with a gurgle, “have the child’s portrait actually painted by the greatest of all the Old Masters! Hence, Great Casey, we are here!”

“Golly,” said Casey. It sounded inadequate.

And then he said, “Who, me?”

And then he said, “Holy smoke! Me, an Old Master?” Slowly Roald Ruill’s words seeped in. He Dan Webster Casey, in some still-inconceivable future, was revered as a great painter—and judging by the way they were bowing and scraping, an Old Master!

But what an idea! To collect art objects in Time! To commission a chair from Duncan Pfyfe’s workshop, to watch Leonardo brushing in the incomparable smile of the Mona Lisa, to watch the chips fall in the studio of Phidias!

He swallowed. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll paint her portrait. But—are you sure you mean me? I’m no great painter! You mean that in your time, I’m—an Old Master?”

“You mean that you are not yet successful?” Roald Ruill asked in amazement. “Amarga, imagine it! We have the incredible fortune of acquiring a portrait by the Casey of the Eternity Fragment! From a time when he was a mere unrecognized genius!” He paused. “Can it be true, Great Casey, that the multitudes do not yet revere your gift!?

“They sure don’t,” Casey muttered, “I don’t know where I’ll get my next week’s rent money!”

Roald Ruill said, “I tele-empathized that you refer to negotiable credits. Would a few pounds of—oh, gold, or uranium, or platinum, help you any?”

“Would they!”

“Well, we will reimburse your generously,” Roald Ruill beamed. “When can you begin Amarga’s portrait?” His accordioned legs zoomed to full height. “We have mastered Time to some extent, Great Casey, but we are still somewhat limited in duration within your continuum. You accept?”

“Why—sure.”

Amarga murmured, “Is that your studio I see through the wall? Oh, how exciting! The studio of Great Casey! Can I see it?”

“Be my guest,” Casey said expansively.

Amarga squealed and grabbed Casey’s hand. “Let’s see it now!”

Roald Ruill faded bodilessly through the wall. Amarga sailed after him, dragging Casey by the hand, headlong. She floated through the wallpaper, and Casey, cracking his head against the molding, picked himself up, half-stunned.

Amarga thrust her head back through the wall; Casey, looking up through spinning stars, shivered at the effect of her long pale-green neck protruding through the wallpaper.

“What’s the matter?” Amarga fretted, “I thought you said we could come in here!”

Casey shook his head, groggily. “I can’t walk through walls,” he said, exasperated, and disregarded Amarga’s tweetles of dismay and curiosity, striding to the connecting door and flinging it open. He surprised Roald Ruill light-heartedly forcing a fine sable brush into the neck of a tube of cadmium yellow. “Don’t do that,” Casey snapped. “How do you do that walking-through-walls trick?” After he said it, he reflected that if they could take short-cuts through a few thousands of years, then walking through a wall was no trick at all.

“You mean you can’t even rearrange your atoms?” Amarga squeaked.

Roald Ruill put down the ruined brush. “Never mind that now. You will paint my daughter?”

“Of course,” Casey said. “But am I—on the level? Am I honestly a famous painter in your era?”

“The Greatest,” intoned Roald Ruill solemnly. “We have a mere half-dozen names from all of pre-space art, and yours is among them. You are, I believe, roughly a contemporary of Michelangelo? Is he a friend of yours? Your pupil, perhaps?”

“Hardly,” Casey said wryly. Maybe four hundred years was merely a flash in the pan to these people. Then he asked, curiously, “Which of my paintings survived—you said, fourteen thousand years?”

“More or less,” Roald Ruill admitted. “As a matter of fact. Great Casey, no single painting has survived. But the mere fact that your name has been handed down across the ages indicates your unique greatness. In our greatest museum, on Mars, is preserved what’s called the Eternity Fragment—generally conceded to be of Earth-origin—containing a brief critical description of your painting.”

Casey was suffused with awe. He would, then, outlast Picasso, Renoir, Gainsborough, Rubens? A hint of humility made him wonder if his name would be preserved, maybe, by mere chance—how do we know how many great Greeks and Romans wrote or painted only to have their works perish in the rubble of the Dark Ages?

But the pride and the humility vanished together when he got out a stick of charcoal and fixed a sheet of rough paper on the easel. “Let me make a rough preliminary sketch now. Yes, that’s fine, Miss—Amarga. Now—” if she was in that position, the obscene thigh-patch didn’t show. He sketched swiftly, drawing with long, easy strokes. It was ridiculously easy to get a likeness; the danger would be that he’d turn it into caricature.

Amarga gurgled, “Oooh, I’m excited—”

Roald Ruill was strolling around the room, examining a few of Casey’s sketches and paintings. “Fantastic, of course,” he remarked, pausing before a few fashion sketches Casey had done for a newspaper assignment that hadn’t quite come off,

“Such incredibly strange people, and their—er—” again the aquamarine blush, “attitude to clothedness. I—hem—like this very much—”

Amarga said. in an embarrassed warble, “Father, you may not indulge your taste for pornography!”

“T-t-t-,” reproved Roald Ruill, “the Universality of Art, my dear—the Universality of Art! And, now, I fear. we must be going. If convenient, Great Casey, may we return tomorrow for a sitting?”

“Sure, sure.” Casey could joke about it by now. “Don’t get mixed up and come yesterday by mistake.”

“Amarga is so fond of having her portrait painted,” Roald Ruill said fondly. “We have twelve contemporary interpretations, each by a different modern artist. In the most recent, by my friend Cloass Clenture, she is portrayed as a winged lamia, with all her erotic fantasies flying around her head. And Tarnby Torris did an impression of her in carved soapstone, with fourteen eyes and two heads to imply that she is twice as beautiful and seven times as foresighted. Arc you a pre-cubist or a neo-surrealist, Great Casey?”

Casey was busy sketching and, in his preoccupation, hardly heard what Roald Ruill said. (He was to wish, later, that he had listened more carefully.) As it was, Casey only snapped out of his concentrated effort when Roald Ruill said, “We must go now.” and added, “I tele-empathize that you are pressed for credit. I love to help struggling young artists, even when—” he squeaked laughter, “they are famous Old Masters. It’s like having a part in the cultural history of the Ages. I should like to buy one of your paintings.” He picked up one of the illustrations, a woman swathed in a luxurious fur coat.

“Roald!” said Amarga, embarrassed reproach in her eyes, “we must surely have an original Casey, but let’s have one we can display with pride to our friends!”

“Come, you mustn’t be narrow-minded,” Roald Ruill rebuked, but he put aside the offending picture. Casey busied himself with fixative, struggling against a howl of laughter. Then, halfway between a real desire to be helpful, and a wicked longing to help the joke along, he hauled out a couple of pin-up nudes he had done a few months ago, advance sketches for a prospective calendar. They had been turned down because the client considered their bikini suits too skimpy even for pin-ups.

“There!” Amarga said with relief.

“Can’t I buy the other too, my dear? Just to show to, er, my own friends?”

“What would my maternal parent have thought?” nagged Amarga, and Roald Ruill sighed. “Well, well, my dear, if you think—will this be sufficient remuneration, O Great Casey?” With an air of negligent confidence, he stuck one hand out into empty air, twiddled his long, skinny fingers in a weaving pattern. Something, a few grains of yellow dust, began to shine in his palm, then tumbled swiftly upward into a small pile. After a little, it began to weigh his hand down, and Roald Ruill snapped his fingers, then yawned. “Gold. I see you haven’t a lead-purse for the standard uranium coinage.”

He dumped the gold on a spare palette. “We will return tomorrow for a sitting,” he said. “Come along, Amarga.”

They walked casually through an outside wall and were gone, leaving Casey staring at a little heap of yellow dust—and his half-finished charcoal sketch of an eight-foot, feather-headed, green-skinned girl.

It’s gold, all right,” the jeweler said, “and very fine quality—looks like filings from a goldsmith’s shop. Would you mind telling me where you got it?”

“I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you mean,” Casey said, then improvised on the truth; he always went by the idea that if the unadorned truth wouldn’t do, half a truth was safer than a lie. “A queer old duck wanted to buy one of my pictures, and he asked if I’d take this for it. It looked like gold, so I took the chance.”

The jeweler thought for a minute. “All right, I’ll take one too,” he said. “Fifty-five dollars for what’s here, if you’ll give me the name of someone who knows you and can vouch for your character.”

“Sure.” Casey gave him the name of Chad Stanton, managing editor of a chain of pulp magazines to which Casey sometimes sold illustrations. The jeweler took the gold away, and somewhere in the back of the shop, Casey heard a number being dialed. In a few minutes, the man came back and counted out the money.

Freed of worry about next week’s rent, Casey enjoyed a decent meal, for a change, in a decent restaurant. He was halfway through a steak when he looked up and saw Chad Stanton coming in the door. The editor crossed the room to Casey’s side, took a seat across from him.

“Thought I might find you here,” he said. “Did you know you’re a suspicious character? Whose watch did you hock today? Somebody called up and asked did I know you, and were you a solid citizen. So you owe me a drink on that.”

“Sure, I’m loaded,” Casey said, “only weren’t you with a party?”

Chad Stanton chuckled. “Just the office crowd,” he said, “and I’m better off over here, where I don’t have to listen. We’re bringing out a new title, next month—science fiction monthly—and the fellows will do their planning better when I’m not there to say no. How about that drink?”

Casey ordered it. He had to break a twenty, and Chad Stanton, used to his friend’s near-empty wallet, whistled rudely. “Not whose watch did you hock, but whose bank did you rob?”

“None,” Casey said. “But it’s a funny business, just the same. I’d like to tell you about it. Want to drop up to my room?”

“I can’t make a night of it,” Stanton warned, “not even if you have a bottle of Haig and Haig. I’ve got a foot-deep slush pile to read for that science fiction magazine.”

“And I’ve got a … a client coming to sit for a portrait,” Casey said, “but stop in for a few minutes on you way home, will you?”

“Can do,” Stanton said. At five that afternoon he knocked at the hall door of Casey’s bedroom. Casey brought him into the studio.

“It was about two-thirty in the morning,” he began, and told the whole story. Stanton blinked.

“If I read it in the slush pile, I’d laugh my head off,” he scoffed. “What had you been drinking?”

“A glass of cold milk,” Casey said in annoyance.

“Then you ought to stick to beer.”

“Look, Chad, I’m serious. If not—if I’m crazy—where did the gold come from?”

Stanton squinted at the few shining grains still adhering to the palette. His comment was profane and unprintable. “Yes, it looks like gold all right.”

“And look here,” Casey urged, handing him the sketch of Amarga. Stanton whistled, turning the sketch in his hands. “Oh, brother,” he said, “if that stable of dry-brush pushers we’ve got down there could see this! This is science fiction art—the real stuff! This is a Bug-Eyed Monster to end all BEMS! I never knew you could do fantasy art, Casey.”

“I can’t. I tell you, this was a life sketch,” Casey said. “I don’t even read that crazy science fiction stuff.”

“Maybe you ought to take up writing it, judging by that yarn you spun,” Stanton snorted. “Look, seriously, Casey—I don’t handle the artwork over at the shop, but you work up that sketch into a painting, and show it to Donaldson, over at Vector Pubs. Tell him I said to think about featuring it for a cover, and we’ll assign somebody to write a story around it.”

“But Chad—” Casey began, then stopped at the sight of the other man’s face; Stanton’s mouth was open in a long O, his eyes bugged out, and he was staring fixedly at something just behind Casey. “Now I’m seeing it,” he yipped. “I must have been reading too much slush—gotta catch my train—gotta take a rest—” he gabbled, shut his eyes hard, turned and piled pell-mell down the stairs. Casey turned slowly around, not in a hurry to see what he knew Stanton had seen: Roald Ruill’s feathery green skull, sticking out of the wallpaper.

“Come right in,” Casey said bitterly. He’d better keep the man from the future in a good humor; he was going to need whatever fee he got for Amarga’s portrait. Chances were, he wouldn’t sell anything more to Stanton after this!

It had taken a week; Amarga had come for three more sittings, and now the painting was finished. They were to come for it tonight.

Casey liked it, weird as it was. Amarga had a special beauty; not a human beauty, of course, but you couldn’t have everything.

If only they liked it! Neither of them had looked at the sketch; Roald Ruill had twittered something kind about not being worthy to watch the incubation process of the creative mind, and Amarga had told him, in her skrilling coloratura, that she simply adored surprises.

It was a perfect likeness. Amarga stood, as if living, on the canvas before him. Casey felt that one minute of pure, perfect self-satisfaction, the aftermath of all the painful sweats which go into making anything, whether a picture or a piecrust. Casey looked at his picture and saw that it was good, the best thing he’d ever painted. He’d have to give it up soon enough, so right now he meant to sit and admire it for a minute or two.

The materialization process no longer scared him. When Amarga and Roald Ruill walked out of the wall, he merely greeted them with a cordial grin.

“This is a great moment in history—in future history,” Roald Ruill said pompously. “Amarga, my dear, you must have first look at the portrait.”

Casey stood back, giving way to Amarga. Roald Ruill edged behind her.

They looked at the picture for some moments in silence. Roald Ruill paled to a minty shade of palest green; then suddenly his face congested to indigo, and Amarga gave a soprano shriek. “Oh!” she cried. “Oh, it’s horrible!”

She flung up her long spidery fingers to her eyes and vanished.

“You don’t like it?” Casey asked numbly, and from nowhere, her bodiless voice wailed, “Like it!”

Roald Ruill came at him, angrily. “Is it your intention, Casey, to mock the generations who have revered your name? To insult my daughter?”

Casey stared, stunned, at the almost-breathing picture of Amarga. “Insult her?” he faltered, “nothing could be further from my mind! I did the best—”

“You have painted her as inhuman!” Ruill thundered.

“Well,” Casey stammered, “Well, she doesn’t look … exactly like the … human women I’ve painted, but I painted her as she is, as beautifully as—”

Roald Ruill’s face went through a whole palette of greens and blues. “Would you flaunt our mutations in our faces?” he demanded. “How would you paint any woman of Earth, as other than human? Why, you wretched scrawler, if I wanted to see Amarga as she is, I would look in a mirror!” He spoke it as one speaks a disgustingly filthy epithet. “As if anyone ever painted what he saw! Have you no artistic sense of interpretation? You painted only her form—and painted it indecently—and with no psychological insight whatsoever! Where is her basic humanity? Where are her thoughts? Where are the beautiful telepathic projections of her innocent soul? This … this obscene scrawl—”

Casey tried to check the flow of rapid words.

“Look here. Roald Ruill, I didn’t think—in our era, it’s customary to paint a portrait so it looks like the subject—”

“Ridiculous!” Roald Ruill stabbed with an angry long finger at the pin-up nudes on the wall. “Do you look like that?”

“Well, no, but then, you see—”

“And that proves it,” Roald Ruill said triumphantly. “I don’t know why I stand arguing with an ignorant moron of the pre-space era! One school of criticism has always maintained that pre-space man had no creativity, and that his so-called art is on a level with the scrawls of a child. Now I have evidence to support this theory! You say, Casey—” he omitted the “Great” this time “—that you painted Amarga as you saw her? Then where are her sexual attributes? Why, one would never know whether she was male or female! You might at least have followed the ordinary conventions of decency! As for this … this—” he went an incoherent purple, touching with angry, trembling fingers the painted feathery topknot on Amarga’s skull, “even after what we said about the … the lewd indecency of organic substance on the body, you had the … the effrontery to paint her—” his face ran the whole gamut of colors, green ice to pine-cone, “with hair, and wearing … wearing clothing!”

Casey was angry now. “Well, she was wearing clothing,” he flung at Roald Ruill. Damn it, how could he have known about their dim-witted conventions?

Roald Ruill snorted, “Some concessions to the climate must be made—but sane and decent people do not mention them in polite society!” He flung the painting to the floor. “This … this daub would be of interest only to the Council on Abnormal Psychology! Believe me, when I get back to my own time, I will explode the whole Casey myth! The so-called Eternity Fragment which calls you the greatest, must be a hoax!”

Roald Ruill was gone, like a whisper of air, and Casey swore fervently, seeing his fee and a week’s work going glimmering. The room was empty; Casey wondered if he were sleepwalking, if the whole thing had been a bizarre nightmare. No, for Amarga’s portrait lay at his feet where Roald Ruill had thrown it. Casey raised his foot, ready to stamp through the useless, stupid, cheating face; then he jerked back his foot, so suddenly that he almost fell. He steadied himself on the easel, stooped, and tenderly picked up the portrait. He hunted up a piece of brown wrapping paper and a string, and twenty minutes later, went out into the street. The editorial offices of Vector Publications didn’t close till six. He could just about make it.

And everybody in the science fiction world knows the rest—the gorgeous six-color cover on the first issue of Eternity Science Fiction Novels, the story written around the cover by Theodore Sturgeon, the guest editorial on “The Nonhuman in Science Fiction Art.” The original painting, auctioned off at the science fiction convention, sold for two hundred dollars.

No other of Casey’s paintings ever won quite so much fame, though he sold steadily to the science fiction magazines after that, and twice won a Hugo as “Artist of the Year.”

He was fairly well-satisfied with his modest success, though his family always wondered why he should waste his talents illustrating “escapist rubbish.” His nagging maiden aunt (she of the orange polka-dotted pajamas) once asked him point-blank:

“Why don’t you paint something worth while, something to make a name for yourself? This here-today-and-gone-tomorrow stuff, it’s only good for waste paper! These crackpot science fiction fans may call you the greatest, but fifty years from now, none of these cheap magazines will be around—and your name will be completely forgotten!”

“Hah,” said Casey—but only to himself, for he was almost always polite to old ladies, “that’s what you think!”

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