The Death of Art by Simon Bucher_Jones

Author:Simon Bucher_Jones [Bucher_Jones, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780426204817
Google: wOcCAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0426204816
Publisher: London Bridge
Published: 1996-10-14T07:00:00+00:00

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141

< The children they built were perfect and so beautiful that all clamoured to make their own children after that design. The perfection, however, was that of stasis, and the great Blight of stillness and beauty spread out over us until even normal young tortured themselves into the frozen immobility of the Beautiful Quoth. >

<How did the First Blight end, Old One?>

<It did not end. They are frozen still for all time, all those who fell victim to it remain there, without change or hope or new experience. I and the Old Ones who were made in the primal lands, but who rejected the false perfection of the Frozen Ones that would have ended all Art and all making, flexed our bodies in the way that breaks open space and let the time-winds sweep us where they would. >

< And so we came to Quoth Space? >

< Yes, so we came here. >

Emil's knowledge of astronomy was not great. His scientific studies had centred on physics and chemistry, but he had often gazed at the sky. The vision of the shattering of the Quoth's world revealed a sky more wonderful than any Emil had ever seen before. He saw it, although he knew that the Quoth did not have eyes. He smelt the burnt ash taste of its winds, although he knew the Quoth had neither noses nor tastebuds.

The sky was an incandescent mass of stars, burning with a ghostly indigo light. What could cause that, Emil wondered.

Why were the stars all identical in colour?

He was glad now that he had studied, but even so much of the history was beyond him. Briefly he pondered what these visions would have seemed like to an uneducated man; a vision of Hell perhaps, or the Apocalypse of Saint John? The seething layer of alien life splitting open under the violet pulse of the strange stars; the opening of the seventh vial?

Suddenly there was a movement within the surface of the world, pulverizing its crust and hurling matter up into space.

These sights must have looked like Doomsday. Emil strained to understand what was happening. The Quoth's memories 142

had things all askew, he thought. They pictured their world as a cylinder and their patterned layer as a thinner cylinder wrapped round below the world's surface. It was impossible that there could be such a world; any mass sufficient to support life would be pulled into a sphere by its own gravity.

Newton's equations showed that.

His mathematics faltered as he watched matter volatilized, and massive fragments were hurled far into space. One such fragment of the pattern, referred to in the Quoth's memories as the Node, had contained a pitiful fraction of the Quoth race. Torn from their Art by the cataclysm, without the resource of birthing material to fuel expansion or hope for the future, the Quoth within the Node drifted for an unknown age of pattern-lifetimes. During that time there were few memories, until the voyaging node fell towards a blue-green world, with a large dead moon orbiting a centre of gravity within it.

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