Starship Summer (Starship Seasons, #1)(8)

FOUR



The Matt Sommers private viewing was held in the low-slung dome of the community centre on the southern headland of the bay. The mounted works of art, the knots of well-dressed connoisseurs drifting from piece to piece amid a hum of polite conversation, brought back memories of the times I had attended similar events with my wife.

As happens on these occasions, my memories seemed to refer to another, long gone life, and I half doubted that they were real. Why is it that recollections of past happiness are so evanescent, while remembrance of tragedy is so stark and real?

The exhibition consisted of two separate sets of Matt Sommers’ work: the emotion crystals for which he was famous, and his more recent paintings. These latter were no mere graphic representations of visual subjects, but abstract pieces created from memory plastic, so that the picture within the frame changed constantly, consecutive scenes linked thematically to the last.

An increased buzz of chatter heralded the arrival of the artist. He stepped into the dome flanked by two officious-looking individuals: a suited silver-haired man in his sixties who was the mayor of Magenta, and a tall woman who carried her glamour with a distant, disdainful hauteur.

Between them, Sommers appeared reassuringly ordinary: he was an artist, and had nothing to prove by power-dressing or putting on a pose. He wore baggy trousers spattered with flecks of memory plastic, and an old shirt open at the chest to reveal a mat of unkempt grey hair.

Sommers was in his early seventies, a big, strong man with an open face and curly hair gone grey. He looked around the group and nodded to friends as the woman struck her champagne glass with a stylus.

When silence descended, she said, “Magenta has been privileged for many years now to be the home of the Expansion’s finest artist, who needs no introduction from me. The Arts Bureau of Chalcedony is proud to be staging this exhibition, Matt’s first in two years, the highlight of which is the series of graphics entitled Towards Infinity. I hope you will enjoy…”

Conversation resumed; people milled around the exhibits; Sommers was surrounded by admiring guests.

The crystals were arrayed on two long tables in the centre of the dome, while the graphics were displayed on free-standing dividers around the periphery.

I took a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and looked around for a familiar face, but saw neither Hawk nor Maddie. I moved around the tables in the middle of the dome, laying hands on the emotion crystals. I was familiar with them from Vancouver, but the examples of Sommers’ work I had experienced there had been copies only, pale imitations of the real thing. Now, as I caressed crystal after crystal, vicariously experiencing a slew of emotions as raw and real as my own, I came to see why Sommers was regarded as one of the very best artists in the Expansion.

Not only did the emotions invested in each crystal hit me with a clarity that was almost shocking, but the integrity of these emotions spoke to something deep inside me. I had experienced other artists’ crystals in the past, but those had been meretricious gee-gaws, done quickly and cynically to communicate emotions as universal as love and hate, happiness and joy.

With Sommers it was different.

He had created the crystals sparingly, releasing items only when he felt he had something relevant to impart. Now I experienced the emotion of love in its true ambiguity, the consuming passion that is often tinged with anger and frustration; I felt Sommers’ anger too, but an anger that acknowledged its origin in the artist’s own self-doubt and uncertainty—the ambivalence that is at the core of all of us.

I came away from the display deeply moved; it felt as though, briefly, I had been made privy to emotions I recognised but which, until now, I’d never had the insight to acknowledge.

The visuals were another matter. They were his latest work, the centre-piece of the exhibition, and were therefore attracting much attention. However much I tried to appreciate the vast rectangular designs, I was unable to comprehend what they were attempting to communicate. After the crystals they seemed shallow, mere abstract designs with little or no emotional content—pretty patterns that most of us, with technical coaching, would have been able to produce. Which, I told myself, was the reaction of the philistine: the fault was my own, an inability to appreciate the language of the form.

Then I saw Maddie, and my pleasure at glimpsing a familiar face was soon replaced by puzzlement. She was moving along the display of crystals, pausing before each one and touching it, but only briefly. This in itself was not unusual, but what made the scene so bizarre was that she was wearing on her right hand what looked like an oven glove.

“Maddie?” I said, coming up beside her.

She beamed at me. “Mr Conway,” she said, slipping the glove into her shoulder bag.

“Less of the formality,” I said, pretending I hadn’t noticed her sleight of hand. “I’ll answer to nothing but David. What do you think of the exhibition?”

“The crystals are so… powerful, don’t you think? They put you in touch with what it is to be human.”

Someone appeared at our side. “Which is what art is all about.” It was Hawk, smiling at the catalogue he was holding up before him. “Or so it states in here. According to our illustrious Arts governor, Hermione Venus, ‘Sommers communicates his vital essence in a powerful range of unsurpassed works of genius’.”

Maddie tut-tutted. To me she said, “Hawk had a fling with Hermione last year. He’s yet to get over the experience.”