The Girl Who Died

For Art and Lived

By Eric Brown

I knew Lin Chakra, the famous hologram artist, for two brief days in spring. Our acquaintance changed my life.

I first met her at the party held by my agent to celebrate the exhibition of my crystal, The Wreck of the John Marston. The venue was Christianna Santesson’s penthouse suite in the safe sector of the city. The event was pure glitter and overkill; big-name critics, artists in other fields, government officials and foreign ambassadors occupied the floor in urbane groups. With The Wreck I had, according to those in the know, initiated a new art form. Certainly I had done something that no-one else had been able to do before.

The crystal stood angled on a plinth at the far end of the long room, a fused rectangular slab coruscating like diamond. Earlier, there had been a queue to experience the work of Santesson’s latest find. And, when the guests had actually laid hands on the crystal, they were staggered. The critics were pretty impressed, too—and that pleased me. I wanted to communicate my experience of the supernova to as many people as possible, allow them to live the last flight of the John Marston. Critical acclaim didn’t always guarantee popular success, but I was sure that the originality of my art would catch the imagination of the world.

This was the first social gathering I’d attended since the accident, and I was uneasy without Ana.

As the party wore on, I eased my way to the bar and drank a succession of acid shorts. With diminishing clarity I watched the guests circulate, and tried to keep a low profile. This wasn’t too difficult. The press-release had been brief and to the point. I was described as the sole survivor of an incredible starship burnout, but Santesson’s publicity manager had failed to mention the fact that I had no face. Now there was a clique of artists here from the radioactive sector of the city who had taken over the select towerpiles deserted since the meltdown. These people wore fashion-accessory cancers, externalised and exhibited with the same panache as others might parade pet pythons or parakeets. One woman was nigrescent with total melanoma, another had cultivated multiple tumours of the thyroid like muscatel grapes on the vine. I spotted one artist almost as ugly as myself, his face eaten away by some virulent strain of radioactive herpes. They were known in art circles as the Strontium Nihilists, and tonight I was taken as just another freakish member of their band. The observant guest might have wondered, though, at the steel socket console that followed the contour of my dented cranium, or the remains of the occipital computer that had melted and fused with my collarbone.

From my position at the bar I watched Christianna Santesson as she moved from group to group, playing the perfect host. She was a tall blonde woman in her early sixties with the improved body of a twenty-year-old and a calculating business brain. Her Agency had a virtual monopoly of the world’s greatest artists, and when I joined her stable Santesson had never lost an opportunity to press me for the secret of the fusion process. She told me that she had people who could produce mega-art on my fused consoles, but I wasn’t selling.

I was on my fifth acid short when a white light like the nova I’d survived blinded my one good eye. I raised an arm and called out. Silhouetted in the halogen glare I made out the hulking forms of vid-men toting shoulder cameras. Then I became aware of action beside me. Christianna Santesson was being interviewed. The front-man fired superlatives at the camera, stereotyping Santesson as the Nordic Goddess of the art world and myself as The Man With A Nova In His Head. He moved on to me, and I was blitzed with inane questions to which I gave equally brainless replies. Things like how I wanted the world to understand, and how I did it all for my dead colleagues.

Then the painful glare moved away, leaving the bar in darkness. The vid-men dashed the length of the lounge, the spotlight bouncing like a crazy ball. It appeared that the far entrance was now the focus of attention. The party-goers turned en masse and gawped like expectant kids awaiting the arrival of Santa.

I thumbed the lachrymose tear-duct of my good eye. “What the hell?” I managed. “I could have done without that.”

“Daniel,” Santesson said, her Scandinavian intonation loading her words with censure. “I had to have them in to record the arrival of Lin Chakra.” And she smiled to herself like a satisfied stage-manager.

Seconds later Lin Chakra entered the spotlight, a diminutive figure surrounded by a posse of grotesques. And I experienced a sudden lurch in the pit of my stomach. Chakra hailed from the same subcontinent as a dead girl called Ana Bhandari, and her resemblance to Ana was unbearable. But then every Indian face sent pangs of grief through me.

Chakra lived in the radioactive sector, though she seemed unaffected by cancer, and compared with the hideousness of her hangers-on she emanated a fragile Asian beauty. She wore black tights, a black jacket, and a tricorne pulled low. Her face between the turned-up collar, and the prow of her tricorne was an angry, inverted arrowhead as she scowled out at the assembled guests.

She walked across to my crystal, the cameras tracking her progress. I found it hard to believe that this was being piped live into half the homes on the continent.

She stood on the lower step of the plinth and played her hands over the crystal spread. Visually, it was not impressive, an abstract swirl of colour in the pattern of a vortex; interesting, but nothing more. It was to the touch that the crystals gave out their store of meaning, transforming the object from a colourful display into a work of art. Now, Lin Chakra would be experiencing what I had gone through in the engineroom of the John Marston.

She took her time, the guests watching her with silent respect, and soaked up the emotions. She lingered over a certain section of the slab, and came back to it again and again to see if the single crystal node still read as true in light of cross-reference with other emotions. She was being diligent in her appreciation of this newcomer’s work.

Then she backed respectfully from the plinth, found Santesson and engaged her in quiet conversation. My agent indicated me with a slight inclination of her head; Lin Chakra’s frequent glances my way were like sudden injections of adrenalin.

Then she joined me at the bar. She hoisted herself onto a high-stool and crossed her legs at the knees. “I like your crystal,” she said in a small voice.

Seen closer to, her resemblance to Ana was less marked. Ana had been beautiful, whereas Lin Chakra was almost ugly. She had risen from the oblivion of a low-caste Calcutta slum, and her origins showed. Her lineage consisted of Harijan lepers, char-wallahs and meningital beggars. Physically she was a patchwork of inherited genetic defects, with a misshapen jaw and pocked cheeks, the concave chest and stoop of a tubercular forebear. But like her compatriots of the radioactive sector, she carried her deformities with pride, the latest recipient in a long line of derelict, hand-me-down DNA. And yet… and yet she wasn’t without a certain undeniable charm, a frail attraction that produced in me a surge of the chivalrous and protective instinct that some people call affection.

When she spoke she looked directly at me, using my misplaced remaining eye as the focus of her attention, and not staring at my shoulder as others were wont to do. My injuries were such that some people found it hard to accept that the slurred, incinerated mass of flesh that sat upon my shoulders had once been a head.

Our conversation came to a close. She slipped a single crystal into my hand and climbed from her stool. She mingled with the crowd, then pushed through the shimmer-stream curtain to the balcony.

In my palm the crystal warmed, communicating. The millions of semi-sentient, empathic organisms gave out their record of Lin Chakra’s stored emotion message. The alien stones were sold on Earth as curiosities, novel gee-gaws for entertainment and communication. No-one before had thought of using the crystals as a means of artistic expression. Once invested in a crystal, an emotion or thought lasted only a matter of minutes, and as artists created for posterity the crystals had been overlooked as a potential medium.

Then, quite by accident, I had come across the method by which to change the nature of the crystals so that they could store emotions or thoughts forever. Hence my sudden popularity.

A guest, fancying his chances, parted the curtain and stepped on to the balcony. He returned immediately. “She’s gone.”

I moved unnoticed from the bar and slipped into the adjacent room. Lin Chakra was waiting for me on the balcony. She had leapt across, and now sat on the rail hugging her shins. I paused by the shimmer-stream curtain. “Hey…”

“I have a fabulous sense of balance,” she reassured me.

“I get vertigo just thinking about the drop,” I admitted.

“An ex-Engineman shouldn’t be afraid of heights,” she mocked, jumping down and leaning against the rail.

Behind me, pressure on the communicating door made it rattle.

She glanced at me.

“I locked it,” I said. “As you instructed. What do you want?”

“I really meant what I said about your crystal. I like it.”

“It’s crude,” I said. “Honest in what it portrays, but incompetently executed. A kid with six months’ practice could do better.”

“You’ll improve as you master the form,” she told me.

I would have smiled, but that was impossible.

“A lot of people would give both arms to know how you fuse those crystals,” she said now. “Do you think you can keep it to yourself forever?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I can,” I said, and tried not to laugh at my sick secret.

Lin Chakra nodded, considering. “In that case, would you contemplate selling a crystal console already fused, so that other artists might create something?”

“So that’s why you’re here tonight. You want a crystal?”

“I came,” she said, “to see your crystal. But-”

“Forget it,” I snapped. “I don’t sell them.”

“Don’t you think that’s rather selfish?”

I laughed, though the sound came out as a strangled splutter. “I like that! I’m the one who discovered the process, after all. Aren’t I entitled to be just a little selfish?”

She frowned to herself, turned and stared into the night sky, at the stars spread above the lighted towerpiles. A long silence came between us. “Which one?” she asked at last.

I stood beside her and found the Pole star, then charted galactic clockwise until I came to the blue-shift glimmer of star Radnor 66. A couple of degrees to the right was Radnor B, where the accident had happened. The star no longer existed, and the light we saw tonight was a lie in time, the ghost of the sun before it went nova. In fifty years it would flare and die, reminding the people of Earth of the time when a smallship from the Canterbury Line was incinerated, with the loss of all aboard but one.

I pointed out the star.

She gazed up in silence, and as I watched her I was reminded again of her frailty. I wanted suddenly to question the wisdom of her living in the radioactive sector. She seemed so fragile that even something as innocuous as influenza might kill her; but that was ridiculous. No-one died nowadays from flu, or cancer. The freaks in the penthouse were merely exhibitionists; as soon as their pet cancers showed the first signs of turning nasty they would be excised, their owners given a clean bill of health. And anyway, Lin Chakra seemed cancer free.

Her request interrupted my thoughts. “Tell me about the accident,” she said.

I stared at her. “Wasn’t the crystal enough?”

“I haven’t experienced everything,” she said shrewdly. “And I want to hear the way you tell it.”

“For any particular reason?”

“Oh… let’s just say that I want to clarify a point.”

So I gave her the full story.

It had been a regular long haul from star Canopus to Sigma Draconis, carrying supplies for the small colony on Sigma D IV. The John Marston had a crew of ten; three Enginemen, two pilots, and five service mechanics, the regular complement for a smallship like ours. After the slowburn out of Canopus we phased into the nada-continuum with one of my colleagues in the flux-tank. We were due for a three-month furlough at the end of the run, and perhaps that was what gave the voyage its air of light-heartedness. We were in good spirits and had no cause for concern—certainly we could not foresee the disaster ahead. When one of the pilots pointed out that we could save five days, and add them to our furlough, if we jumped the flight-path and cut through a sector of space closed to all traffic, we put it to the vote. Five of us voted for the jump, four were against the proposition, and one mechanic abstained.

The prohibited sector was the size of Sol system, with an unstable star at its centre ready to go off like a time-bomb. The star had been like this for centuries though, and I thought that the chances of it going nova just as we were passing through were negligible… if I thought about it at all. So we changed course and I took the place of the Engineman who had pushed us so far—the only reason I survived the accident. I was jacked-up, laid out and fed into the tank. The last thing I remembered was the sight of the variable sun just outside the viewscreen, burning like a furnace.

I didn’t even say goodbye to Ana. But how was I to know?

“When I regained consciousness I found myself in the burns bath of a hospital on Mars. Three months had passed since the supernova.”

Lin frowned. “But if you didn’t actually experience the nova, how were you able to…?”

“Hear me out. I’m getting to that.”

The star had blown just as the John Marston was lighting out of the danger zone; any closer and the boat would have been cindered. As it turned out, the ship was destroyed with the death of all aboard—or so it was thought at the time. The salvage vessel sent into the area reported that only fragments of wreckage remained, and that one of these fragments was the engineroom. It was duly hauled in, and the salvage team was amazed—and horrified—to find that I had survived.

If that was the right word to describe the condition I was in. I bore little resemblance to the human being who had entered the tank. Although the flux-tank had saved my life, the flux had kicked back and channelled a blast of nova straight into my head. My occipital computer had overloaded and melted, forcing my skull out of shape and removing flesh and muscle from my face. I suffered ninety-five percent burns and only the null-grav effect of the tank had saved me from sticking to the side like a roasting joint… I was lucky to be alive, the medics told me more than once. But in my opinion I was far from lucky; I would have gladly died to be free of the terrible guilt. The one thing for which I was thankful was the fact that I could not recall the accident or the death of Ana and my friends. But I should have known…

The dreams began a few weeks later.

My occipital computer had recorded the entire accident, and from time to time what was left of the machine, the still-functioning memory cache that interfaced with my cortex, bled nightmare visions into my sleeping mind. I saw the star go nova and the ship disintegrate and the crew, my friends for years, die instantly. Ana’s brief cry of comprehension as the supernova blew would echo in my head forever.

When I’d finished, Lin Chakra gripped the rail and stared down at the ground effect vehicles passing back and forth like luminescent trilobites. “Your pain doesn’t come through on the crystal,” she said at last.

“It isn’t supposed to. The Wreck is a statement of fact, a documentary if you like, to show the world what happened. I’m working on other crystals to show the agony caused by the tragic decision… Why? Is that what interests you? The agony?”

She glanced at me, and gave her head that typically Indian jog from side to side that might have meant either yes or no. I never realised that the gesture of a stranger could be so painful. “Partly,” she said. “And partly I’m interested in death.”

I nodded. That was understandable. In a world where death was a rare occurrence, it had become an even more popular subject of artistic enquiry, an even greater source of inspiration.

“The death of my colleagues was almost instantaneous,” I told her. “Mercifully they didn’t feel a thing.”“

“Oh, I’m not talking about their deaths,” she said. “It’s yours that interests me…”

I was glad then that my face could no longer register expression; she would have seen my shock. I was shocked because my decision to die had been a private one, and I had no idea that I’d allowed it to come through on the crystal. Then I recalled the way she had lingered over a particular node on the console.

“You read it?” I asked her.

“Very slightly. I almost missed it at first, like everyone else. I don’t think you meant to show it, but it’s there, buried beneath all the other emotions but just about discernible.”

I remained silent. I had spoken to no-one about my decision, and the fact that Lin Chakra knew made me uneasy.

Then her question came. “Why?”

I had to think for long minutes before I could begin to explain myself. My decision had been a matter of instinct, a feeling that what I planned to do was somehow right. Now, when I came to explain this need, I feared I was cheating a genuine conviction with a devalued currency of words.

“I want to die because I survived,” I told her. “I had no right to survive when the others died. I can’t get over the guilt.”

“I don’t understand.” She looked at me, her face serious between the V of her collar. “Maybe you want to end your life because you can’t stand to go on as you are?”

Again my face failed to show the emotion I felt -anger, this time. “I resent that! That would make my decision to die a petty thing, self-pity masquerading as heroics. And anyway, I needn’t remain like this. The best medics could fix me a new face, almost as good as new, remove the computer. I could live a normal life despite the fact that Ana’s cry would be in my head even when it was no longer there… I’m sorry I’ve failed to justify my decision to you, but to be honest I don’t feel that I have to.”

“There is one way you can do that…”

“I don’t see-” I began. Then I did.

She took a small box from her tunic and flipped open the lid. Inside, a fresh crystal sparkled in the starlight. “Take it,” she said. “Concentrate on why you feel you have to die.”

“I don’t see why I should justify my need to you-”

“Or perhaps you’re unable to justify it to yourself.”

So I snatched the crystal and gripped it in my fist, hearing again Ana’s scream as she passed into oblivion. And again I experienced the gnawing guilt, the aching desire to share her fate. The crystal soaked up the fact that I had had the casting vote on whether or not we should take the short-cut. I had voted for it, and by doing so had sent Ana and my colleagues to their deaths.

Ana had voted against the jump.

When it seemed that I’d wrung moisture from the crystal—my hand dripped with perspiration—I passed it back to Lin Chakra. She held the hexagonal diamond on the flat of her palm, staring at it with large brown eyes.

Without a word she slipped the crystal into her tunic.

“The medics give me another six months if I don’t agree to a series of operations,” I said. “In that time I should be able to finish quite a few crystals. The last one will be an explanation of why I feel I have to die.”

We talked of other things until Chakra said she had to go.

“Some Enginemen,” she said, “believe that the nada-continuum promises an afterlife.”

I tried to laugh. “I’m not a Disciple,” I told her. “There is no afterlife, as far as I’m concerned.”

She nodded and said, “Why not come over to my studio tomorrow evening? The work I’m doing now might interest you.”

With reluctance I accepted the invitation, and a little later we left the balcony. She unlocked the door to the party room, and the glare of the spotlight was on her again. I could hear the front-man yammering questions.

Lin pushed through the crowd. Our first meeting was over.

I arrived back at my slum dwelling at dawn, and from across the studio an empty crystal console beckoned me. I began work immediately, spurred by my conversation with Lin Chakra. By telling her of my intentions I had reminded myself of the short time I had left in which to complete the crystals. In six months I would be dead; until our meeting, that had been almost an abstract notion. The fact was definite now, substantial. I had work to do, for myself and for my dead colleagues, and I had no time to waste.

The first step in the production of a crystal, even before the choice of subject matter, was the preparation of the thousand or so individual gems. I arranged the console on my workbench and set about the fusion process. I had chanced upon the method to do this almost by accident a few months earlier. Like most people, I had kept crystals and toyed with them occasionally. I found that the stronger the emotion infused into a crystal, the longer it remained. Superficial emotions or simple messages were gone in seconds; but love and hate lingered for long minutes… Now, from time to time,- the remains of the computer that linked with my cortex gave me nightmares, blinding images of the nova chasing the ship. And the sheer terror that these nightmares produced in me…

I had been sure that if I could soak a few crystals with this fire-terror, it would last long enough so that people might gain an appreciable insight into what I had gone through.

So the next time I’d awoken with the inferno raging inside my head, I was ready. I’d jacked the leads into my skull-sockets—the same I had used as an Engineman to achieve the state of flux—wound the wires around my arm and attached the fingerclips. I could have simply held the crystals, but I wanted to gain the maximum effect. When the nightmare began I fumbled for the racked crystals beside my mattress and played a firestorm arpeggio across the faceted surface.

The result was not what I had expected; instead of impressing my terror on the crystals, I had unknowingly fused them into one big diamond slab. Not only that, but when I experimented with these transformed crystals later in the day I found that the emotions I discharged—my love for Ana, as ever—remained locked indelibly into the structure of the gems.

I had worked at the technique of bringing about the nightmare at will, and The Wreck Of The John Marston was my first effort. Christianna Santesson had snapped it up and signed me on practically seconds after first experiencing it. According to her, I was made.

Now I fused the largest console I’d ever done and began transferring emotions and images. I recreated the atmosphere of the flight before the tragedy, the camaraderie that existed between the crew members. Further on in the crystal I would introduce the accident as a burst of stunning horror. To begin with, I committed to crystal the times I had made weightless love to Ana, relived again the sensation of her sturdy little body entwined with mine in the astro-nacelle. Ana was a Gujarati engineer with a shaven head and bandy legs covered with tropical ulcers the shape of bite marks. We had met when she was assigned to the John Marston, and we had been lovers for two years before that last flight.

The sun was going down behind distant towerpiles when I realised that I’d gone as far as I could for this session. I was drained and emotionally exhausted. I had worked all day without thought of food and drink; the task had sustained me. I took an acid short from the cooler, dragged myself across to the foamform mattress and collapsed. I was drifting into sleep—and into certain dreams of Ana—when the call came through.

I crawled to the screen and opened communications. The picture showed a large studio with a figure diminished in the perspective. Lin Chakra stood with her back to the screen and turned when it chimed. “So there you are. You took so long I thought you must be out.”

“I very rarely go out,” I told her.

“No?” She walked towards the screen and peered through at me, her expression as stern and unsmiling as ever. “Well, how about tonight? Remember what we arranged yesterday? I’d like to show you some work I’m doing.”

I considered. I had enjoyed the novelty of her company yesterday, and talking to her had proved an inspiration. “I’d like that,” I said. She gave me directions and I told her I’d be over in thirty minutes.

I rode the moving boulevard to the end of the line and took a flyer the rest of the way. The pilot dropped me by the plasma barrier that covered the radioactive sector, and I paid him and stepped through the gelatinous membrane.

The difference between this sector and the rest of the city struck me immediately, and impressed itself on every sense. The air was thick and humid and the quality of light almost magical. The sun was setting through the far side of the dome, transmitting prismatic rainbows across the streets and buildings, many of them in a state of ruin softened by the mutated vegetation that had proliferated here since the meltdown. I walked along the avenue towards the intersection where Lin Chakra lived. The roar of the rest of the city was excluded here, but from within the sector a street band could be heard, their music keeping to the hectic tempo of a Geiger counter. There was an air of peace and timelessness about the deserted streets, and it seemed to me the perfect place for the artist to reside, amid the equal influences of beauty and destruction.

“Dan…!” The cry came from high above. I craned my neck and saw Lin Chakra waving at me from a balcony halfway up a towering obelisk.

I counted the windows and took the upchute to her level.

“In here,” she called from one of the many white-walled rooms that comprised the floor she had entirely to herself. I walked through three spacious rooms, each containing holograms like a gallery, before I found her. She was pouring wine by the balcony. She turned as I entered. “I’m glad you could make it,” she said.

I murmured something and stood on the balcony and admired the view, to give me something to do while I tried to surmount the pain I felt at meeting her again.

She seemed a different person from the woman of last night, and more like Ana. She wore a short yellow smock, and her thin bare legs were pocked with the tight purple splotches of healed tropical ulcers.

As she invited me to follow her, I realised that she wasn’t well. Her hands shook, and her breath came in ragged, painful spasms.

We moved from room to room, the contents of each charting Lin’s development from small beginnings through her apprentice work to her more recent and accomplished holograms. She had two main phases behind her: the dozen pieces she produced from the age of fifteen to eighteen, and a triptych called Love, which she brought out from the age of eighteen to twenty. These had deservedly earned her world recognition. She had done nothing for more than a year now, and the critics and public alike were eager for the next phase of her work to be released.

She took me into her workroom overlooking the arching membrane of the outer dome. The contents of the room were scattered; hologram frames and benches in disarray, indicating the artist in the throes of production. Three completed holograms stood against the wall, and others in various stages of completion occupied benches or were piled on the floor.

“These three are finished and okay. The others-” She indicated those on the floor with a sweep of her hand. “I think I’ll scrap them and release these three later this year.”

I stared into the three-dimensional glass sculptures. The imprisoned images were grotesque and disturbing, grim forebodings and prophesies of darkness. I was horrified, without really knowing why. “Dying,” I whispered.

Lin Chakra nodded. “Of course. The ultimate mystery. What better subject for the artist who has done everything else?”

I moved to the next hologram. This one was more graphic; inside great baubles and bubbles of glass I made out the shrunken image of Lin herself, her small body contorted in angles of pain and suffering. “You?”

“I contracted leukaemia six months ago,” she said. “The medics give me another three.”

“And when you’ve finished you’ll go for a cure…” I began.

She averted her gaze, stared at the floor.

“You can’t let it kill you, Lin!” I cried. “You’re still young. You have all your life ahead of you. All your art-”

“Listen to me, Dan. I have done everything. I’ve been everywhere and experienced everything and put it all into holograms and there is nothing else for me to do.”

“Can’t you simply…” I shrugged. “Retire? Quit holograms if you’ve said all you can?”

She was slowly shaking her head; sadly, it seemed. “Dan… You don’t understand. You’re no artist, really. Not a true artist. If you were you’d understand that artists live for what they can put into holograms, or on paper or canvas, whatever. When that comes to an end, their lives are finished. How can I go on when I have nothing more to say?” She stared at me. “Death is the final statement. I want to give the world my death.”

“Does Santesson know about this?” I asked.

“I told her, of course. She’s an artist, Dan. She understands.”

I moved around the studio in a daze. At last I said, “But these holograms aren’t your death, Lin. These are your dying.”

Her eyes brimmed with tears, and she nodded. “Don’t you think I realise that? Why do you think I’ve scrapped all these?” She flung out her arm at the half-completed holograms scattered about the room. “They’re imperfect, Dan. Impressions of dying, that’s all. These three are the closest in dying that I’ve come to death.”

I thought of Ana, who had died when she had most wanted to live. Lin’s slow suicide was an affront to her memory, and it was this knowledge that burned in me with anger. “You can’t do it, Lin.”

“You don’t understand!”

I’d had my fill of pain and could take no more. I left her standing by the entrance and without a word took the downchute. The music had stopped and I walked quickly through the empty streets towards the safe sector of the city.

For the next couple of days I remained in my studio, drank acid shorts and stared morosely at the crystal I had started but could not finish. My old need to create art from the tragedy of the John Marston was overcome by apathy; it was as if what Lin Chakra was doing had reminded me that nothing, not even art, could ease the agony of my being without Ana.

Lin called repeatedly, perhaps in a bid to explain herself, to make me understand. But I always cut the connection the second her face appeared on the screen.

I considered killing myself before my time was due.

A few days after my meeting with Lin I stood before a crystal I’d completed months before. It failed as a work of art, but as a statement of my pain and my love for Ana it was wholly successful. I ran my hand over the crystals, reliving again the experience of being with her; reliving the horror of her absence.

Next to the crystal I had placed a laser-razor…

Christianna Santesson saved my life.

The screen chimed and I ran to it, intending to scream at Lin Chakra that I resented her intrusion. I punched the set into life.

Santesson smiled out at me. “Daniel… How are you?”

“What do you want?” I snapped, venting anger on her.

“Business, Daniel.” She chose to ignore my rudeness. “Your crystal is showing very well. I’m delighted with the response of the public. I was wondering… How would you feel about producing a sequel to exhibit beside it?”

Her commercialism sickened me.

I told her that that was out of the question, that in fact I’d stopped working.

She frowned. “That’s unfortunate, Daniel,” she said; then, with an air of calculation, “I don’t suppose you’ve considered telling me how you produce your crystals, Daniel? After all, you did promise that you would, one day.”

I nodded. “One day, yes.”

“Then perhaps I could persuade you to sell me one single fused console, instead?” There was a look of animal-like entreaty in her eyes.

I laughed as an idea occurred to me. “Very well, I will. But I want a million credits for it.”

To my surprise she smiled. “That sounds reasonable, Daniel. You have yourself a deal. One million credits. I’ll pay it into your account as soon as the crystal is delivered.”

In a daze I said, “I’ll do it right away.”

She smiled goodbye and cut the connection.

Later, I wired myself up and arranged a crystal console, induced a nova-nightmare and channelled the firepower into the alien stones. As always it took immense concentration and energy to sustain the power required to fuse an entire console without leaching my emotions into it, and I was exhausted by the time I finished. I sealed the slab in a lead-lined wrap and hired a flyer to take it to Santesson. Then I returned to my studio and sprawled across the foamform. All thoughts of pre-emptive suicide had fled. With the million credits I would offer Lin Chakra the stars, buy her passage aboard a starship to give her that which she had yet to experience. I slept.

I dreamed of Ana. We were making love in the astro-nacelle, our bodies joined at the pelvis and spinning as the stars streaked around the dome. Ana moaned in Hindi as orgasm took her, eyes turned up to show only an ellipse of pearly white. Our occipital computers were tuned to each others’ frequency, and our heads resonated with ever-increasing ecstasy. Around our spinning bodies cast-off sweat hung weightless like miniature suns, each droplet catching the light of the genuine suns outside. Then, with a surreal rearrangement of fact common to dreams, the nova blew while I was still with Ana, and burned in my arms, though I remained strangely uninjured. Her flesh shrivelled and her bones exploded, and through our computer link she screamed her hate at me.

The horror pushed me to a shallower level of sleep, though I didn’t awake. I tossed and turned fitfully, and then began to dream a second time. Again I was in the astro-nacelle, and again I was making love—but this time not to Ana. I held Lin Chakra to me, distantly aware of this anomalous transposition, and she stared in wonder at the starlight wrapped like streamers around the dome.

It was dark when I awoke. I had slept for almost twenty-four hours. Through the slanting glass roof of the studio, star Radnor, B winked at me. I got up feebly and staggered across to the vid-screen. I called Lin Chakra, but she was either out or not answering; the screen remained blank. I paced around for an hour, going through the contents of my dreams. Then I tried to reach her again, and again there was no response. I decided to go to her place with my offer of the stars, dressed and left the studio.

I walked through the deserted streets of the radioactive sector and rode the upchute to her suite. I called her name as I passed through the large white rooms, but there was no reply. The words I had rehearsed were a jumble in my head as the time approached for me to use them. I think I realised that she would refuse my offer, point out quite simply that she could have bought the experience of starflight herself, if she had thought it might afford her new insights. In the event I had no need to make the offer. I entered her room. .

I found Lin on the floor.

Her naked body lay in a pool of her own blood. Choking, I dropped to my knees beside her. She had taken a laser and lacerated her left wrist almost to the point of amputation. She appeared far more beautiful in death than ever she had in life, and I knew that this was because of the expression on her face. I realised then that during all the time I had known her I had never seen her smile.

I cried something incomprehensible, lifted her body into my arms and began to rock, repeating the name, “Ana…” over and over.

*

A few weeks later I met Christianna Santesson at a party.

I had completed a dozen crystals since the first, and they were showing quite well. My last crystal had been an admission of the guilt I felt at consigning my colleagues to death, an expiation that stood in place of my own death. I hoped that soon I would be able to leave the psychologically crippling subject of the John Marston and move on to other things. Perhaps in fifty years I would be able to watch the nova of star Radnor B without the pain of guilt.

I had hired the services of a top medic and he had removed the computer and rebuilt my face. I was still no beauty, but at least people could look at me now without flinching. The scars still showed, physical counterparts of the mental scars that would take much longer to heal.

Christianna Santesson did not recognise me.

As I stood beside her in a group of artists and critics, I could not decide if she was evil or supremely good. My attitude towards her was ambivalent; I passed through phases of wanting to kill her and wanting to thank her for saving my life a second time.

Someone mentioned Lin Chakra.

“Her death was such a tragic loss,” Santesson said. “But she will live on in her work. Her final trilogy, Dying, will be out this summer. I had arranged for her to make a definitive statement on the subject, but the piece was stolen soon after her death. As I was saying…”

I left the party early and returned to my studio.

The crystal lay in the centre of the room, sparkling in the starlight and still covered in blood. Lin had even titled it before she killed herself: The Death of Lin Chakra. I knelt before the console and passed a hand across the faceted surface. Agony and pain saturated each crystal, and they communicated the awful realisation that everything she had ever known was drawing to a close with the inevitable approach of death. Lin had achieved her final artistic goal; she had successfully transferred to crystal her ultimate experience. Soon, as she would have wished, I would give her masterpiece to the world, so that everyone might learn from Lin Chakra’s bloody death how fortunate they were to be alive.

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