PS Creativity > Fan Fiction > Alex In A Brush With Art

Alex stepped off the shuttle onto his new world. His routine at Xnuwellsoft had been simple, dull and about all he felt he could cope with. Despite some unpleasantness, he felt he had made friends there. Of especial kindness was Chief Cataloguer Maupin, a tall man with a thin face who followed Alex out of the shuttle. Alex breathed deeply to calm himself. He was dressed in his comfortable white hooded pullover and loose fitting white trousers, which made him feel safe. It was going to be good at the Collection.

When the enormous Killoran came over to welcome them he almost screamed.

‘Take your bags over to the main reception,’ the Killoran growled.

‘Ah, excellent,’ said Maupin. ‘Myself I have little luggage. Young Alex has all his worldly belongings with him, but as you can imagine from looking at the poor crouching wretch, that amounts to very little.’

‘I’m not your bloody porter! Get out of my landing port!’ The Killoran stomped away.

Alex put his hands to his own bald head. That beast was covered in hair; it must have been swamped with lice, ticks and germs. He felt nauseous. Remembering what his old friend Hell had taught him about conquering his fear, he calmed down and went running after Maupin.

‘You have your security pass?’ asked Maupin. ‘It’s a copy of mine, so you will have all the access you need. I have arranged everything else for you, so when directed you can install the upgrades to their cataloguing software. Congratulations, my boy! You are officially a temporary member of the Braxiatel Collection. Now wait here while I talk to Ms.Jones.’

Delighted to be rid of Alex, Maupin walked straight through the reception, out through another door and back to the shuttle, which was preparing to leave.

A robot porter had already taken Alex’s bags to the Hamlet. Presuming Maupin would return he had stood waiting for two hours. His legs had grown stiff, so he went for a walk. The idea of having access to the Braxiatel Collection excited him.

‘It would be great to have a look round,’ he thought. ‘I could do a little cataloguing of my own.’

He found his way into a lavish, maze-like gallery. The paintings were organised in a jumble of styles, subjects and artists, which irritated him. As he went, he took notes. Years ago he would have kept it all in his head, but Maupin had told him to write things down when he was working, so other people could understand what he’d done. For clarity, he jotted down each painting’s size, what it depicted and its approximate height from the ground.

‘Two by six, hung at one point five, three horses.’

‘One meter square, on the floor, woman’s head.’

‘One by three, hung at one point two, three squares.’

It grew dark outside, but Alex didn’t notice. There were hardly any people about. Usually there would have been at least some students about, but there were some particularly good parties arranged for that evening. The few people left in the gallery were too anti-social to say hello.

After wandering around for three hours, Alex found a darkened room stuffed with boxes instead of paintings. Mysterious scientific equipment lined the walls.

In the middle of the room was a spherical object, about the size of a man’s head. It glowed slightly and was decorated in beautiful bright colours, with swirls and rings under its shiny gold surface. Something about it made Alex itch insatiably. It seemed incomplete, almost broken. He held it up to the dim light.

The red and yellow swirls were all connected in a line, but with gaps. At each gap, there were small green and blue circlets in an indistinct pattern. Given the size of the sphere and the position of the swirls, Alex could see that the circlets were in the wrong positions, in a deliberately incorrect pattern. It was a stupid object. Alex felt tempted to smash it, but the memory of his friend Hell came back to him. Hell had taught him to control his anger during the bleak years he had spent in the Harlequin freak show. The badge of the Harlequin was still burned onto his wrist.

Then he worked it out. Instead of smashing the sphere, he tried tapping the orb in the places the ringlets should have been located. The swirling lines shifted and the orb’s glow increased. Suddenly Alex saw that it was beautiful.

There was laughter from the gallery. Alex followed the sound into the wide, bright hall. The laughter was louder here, but he was the only person in the room. All the paintings in the hall seemed vibrant, as thought they were lit up from inside. Conversely, his notepad on the positions of the paintings had become dull grey and unreadable.

As he neared one of the paintings the laughter got louder. Earlier, he had described the painting as ‘Five dogs, arranged in formation’.

‘Now, let’s have a look at these photos… we’ve got an Alsatian here, he’s kind of open-mouthed.’

Alex was sure that he had thought these words, but it wasn’t his own voice.

‘Sketch in the Jack Russell first, Arthur. Put the Collie in the background, then the Bulldog, Basset Hound and Alsatian. They’re great looking dogs. Damned cute faces, almost like people. I’d rather be drawing women, but hey, the dollars are good for this stuff.

‘Now that Alsatian is positively gagging with excitement, looks sorta’ shocked, so I’ll stick him over to the left…

‘We got the Bulldog, he’s pompous an’ cross like an old man, he can go in the middle. Let’s have him rollin’ his eyes, disappointed.

‘There’s the Collie, don’t know if his expression’s quite right for this. He’s snickering at what’s going on. If he were speaking, he’d say, “Now son, you ain’t done that right!”

‘Let’s get the Basset Hound with his floppy ears perched on the edge there, half hiding out of view. That’s dandy.

‘Now for the man himself, Jack the Ripper, heh. What’s his expression? Gotta be shocked, hasn’t it. Get a nice picture of him with his tongue out, should do nicely.

‘Damn fine! Do the detailing on the pool table, get that rip looking nice and there we are!’

Alex laughed at the dogs playing pool. The Jack Russell putting his cue through the felt of the pool table, the cigar falling out of the Alsatian’s mouth, the dogs’ daft facial expressions. It was so funny. He stood in the middle of the great gallery, and hooted with laughter. ‘When have I ever felt like this?’ he wondered. In his short, dark life he had seldom had occasion to laugh.

As Alex stepped back from the painting, the effects faded. Within minutes, he had regained his composure. He had seen into the mind of a classic artist, possibly a grandmaster. He looked around for another painting to see if it would work again.

An abstract piece cried out to him. It was a small canvas, hung low on the wall between two large, colourful paintings. It depicted a number of grey squares overlaid on each other, with red bands grouped tightly together in a circle at the bottom left. The squares and red lines were thickly textured, like layers and layers of dried gruel. The painting was dominated by thick black lines, which were flicked across the canvas.

After the first cry, the painting was silent. Alex put his ear close to it and heard thin, fractured ghosts of speech. Among the quiet turbulence, a droning voice was muttering ‘Another life, another life, another life…’ As he listened, Alex felt a flood of unfamiliar memories.

A bag was thrust over his head a cord round his throat, while his arms were swiftly locked into wooden cuffs. Mechanical pincers gripped him and hoisted him into the air. He struggled and screamed, but the pincers cut deep into his flesh. For a moment he was aloft, then he was lowered onto a soft, warm object and the pincers let him go. He rubbed his sore arms on the shape beneath him. That shape was another person, one of hundreds chucked into this wagon by the Brothers of Flesh.

The best years of his life were then spent in a labour camp on the moon of his homeworld, picking crystals out of the lunar regolith. It ruined his hands and eyes. Every day he saw people slaughtered.

After the liberation, his world was drowned with displaced people. He found work in a kitchen, killing and splitting open scavenging mammals for the chef to fillet. It was work that nobody else had the stomach for and with the money he was able to rent a private room. The first time he saw it, he cried. It was smaller than his cell on the moon.

In all his life, he completed one painting. Making his own paint from the discarded kitchen chemicals, he was able to create a few dull colours. His ruined eyes couldn’t tell how bright they were. It was a simple interpretation of the war, the occupation and the concepts of idealism. For the rest of his life, he reinforced the squares and the red circle with thicker and thicker paint.

When the kitchen cook unexpectedly died in his arms and the police assumed his guilt, he hid in his hovel. Everyone he had seen die in the war, on the moon, since the liberation; they all came back to him. With the remains of his paint, he painted one line for each person. The police found him, surrounded the flat and opened fire before he could surrender. By that time he had streaked his art with over two thousand thin black lines, continually muttering ‘Another life, another life, another life…’

Alex was terrified now. ‘All those lives, all those deaths, they’re all here.’ His heart beat hard and he found a bench to rest on. There was something hot in his hand. He tried to put it down but the tendons of his arm were taut. His fingers were stretched like ragged meat over the orb that he had been clutching since leaving the laboratory. Bright glowing patterns danced over it.

Behind Alex, there was an enormous painting of a tundra flanked by mountains, with wild animals amongst the tussocks. The bottom right corner was blank.

Alex felt a roaring wind and looked behind him. There was something awesome about this incomplete painting.

‘All my adult life I had hoped to return to Russia.’

He felt himself transported into the landscape. A man was standing behind him. Was it his husband? No, he could remember his death. It was his nurse.

‘I don’t want to be out here too long. This area still has some radiation pockets. I’ll set your wheelchair up by the canvas for your sketching.’

Knowing the risks to her faltering health, she came out here daily to sketch and to breathe the Russian air. For fifty years, the country had been uninhabitable. Now, at last, the radiation was starting to recede. While she had travelled the galaxy, painting the most unusual landscapes, her homeland had been healing.

Back in the studio, she set up an enormous canvas. This would be her masterpiece.

Alex felt an almighty weight descend on his chest.

‘I will show the galaxy that I have surpassed the skills of my forebears. I shall wring my talent out on this canvas until it is soaked through.

‘The animals will show the way. To the guilty, their eyes will pierce into their sins. To the decadent, they will remind them that they must be strong to survive. And to the innocent…’

The pain in Alex’s chest increased while pins and needles shot through his limbs. He knew he mustn’t look at the incomplete corner, even as it reeled him in.

‘Look at it, child!’

This was the swansong. The blank corner spread across the tundra, swallowing the mountains, filling his mind. Alex’s heart exploded.

A woman who had been studying a painting at the far end of the gallery heard Alex fall off the bench.

He opened his eyes to see a white ceiling. He was in a bed in the Hamlet.

‘You are awake,’ a robotic voice nearby said. ‘I will need to inform Miss Tarrant. Remain here. Please take the water and tablets by the bedside, as these will restore your strength.’

Alex struggled up as the floating drone opened the door and zipped off. After a moment of anger, he did as he was told and took the tablet.

As Alex recovered, a slim, brown haired woman about her came into the room. She introduced herself as Bev Tarrant. She had a slightly battle-weary air about her.

‘OK, let’s get this straight. I’m impressed and annoyed that you managed to get past security. I’m surprised you had the arrogance to get into a dangerous artefact store and feel you could wander round. I’m stunned at your ability to decipher the messages on the Retro-engineer artefact and to get it working. I’m furious that you had a heart attack in our art gallery. You’re lucky to be alive, but most of all I’m asking myself why I should care when you’re staring out of the window while I shout at you!’

Alex dragged his attention away from the Martian that was lumbering past outside. ‘I don’t even know what happened to me.’

Bev softened. ‘That orb belonged to an extinct civilisation of Retro-engineers. Their world was built on the ruins of an enormously advanced culture. They devoted their lives to finding out how the technologies all around them worked. The orb was apparently their greatest invention, but we couldn’t tell what it did. We had speculated that it let you see how an object was put together. So if I used it on your bedside table, it would tell me about machine planed wood and the metal in the nails.’

‘It does more than that. Its beautiful.’ Alex smiled.

‘Alex, I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re so detached. You didn’t speak to anyone on arriving here. I contacted Xnuwellsoft and they’re denying all knowledge of you. I suspect they want you to stay here permanently, which means they think you’re a problem. Are you a problem, Alex?’

A few days later, Alex returned to the gallery. That morning, he had found an unexpected ally in the Collection, who had noticed his ability with numbers and codes. As the Collection catalogue was an indecipherable hymn to chaos, there might be work for him here.

Sitting on a bench he gazed at Mavra Sidorova’s Homecoming, the vast and unfinished canvas. He had discovered that Mavra had indeed suffered a fatal heart attack before finishing the painting. Alex thought that he would like to spend a lot of time in the gallery. There were many paintings to enjoy.

click here to return to Fan Fiction