Engineman - Eric Brown [216]
I recalled the twisted travesties of the human form I had experienced in the blue light. "Now you come to mention it..." I said. "Yes, I think they were."
Ralph nodded. "Did you also notice that they were all aspects of the same person - Electra Perpetuum, his wife?"
"They were? Christ, how he must hate her!"
Ralph perched himself on the arm of a chesterfield, watching me closely. "Do you want my honest opinion, Richard?" There was a light in his eyes, enthusiasm in his attitude.
I smiled. "Do I have any choice?"
Ralph was too occupied with his own thoughts to notice my affectionate sarcasm. "I think that although Perry might want to hate her, in fact he still loves her."
I snorted. "I'm not sure he knows the meaning of the word."
"Of course he does! He's human, dammit! He might have experienced tragedy and hardship over the years, which have no doubt hardened him, but in here-" Ralph thumped his chest "-in here he's like all the rest of us. He's a fallible human being."
"What makes you think he still loves Perpetuum?"
Ralph hesitated. "I was with him when he first met Electra," he told me. "That was ten years ago - at the time he was just getting over his disastrous relationship with the vid-star Bo Ventura. We were still quite close friends, back then. He was not quite the cynic he is now, but he was getting that way - I could see that from his criticism of my work, his views on art and life in general. When he started seeing Electra, I thought perhaps she might be good for him. She was - still is - his total opposite: warm, loving, generous to a fault. She lived life at a pace which honestly frightened me. I thought that Perry might be good for her, too - might slow her down a little, provide a calming influence... I saw them at intervals of perhaps a year over the next six or seven years. I was still on socialising terms with Perry, though things were getting pretty heated between us at the end. For the first few years, everything was fine between him and Electra..."
"And then?"
"Perry became ever more distant, withdrawn into himself and his thoughts. He alienated her with his philosophy, reducing everything to basic animal responses, where emotions like love had no place. Life to him became a vast, meaningless farce. When he published the articles attacking me and my work, Electra could stand no more."
Ralph paused briefly, then went on, "Anyway, she met someone else. I know it wasn't serious. She used this man as a means to escape from Perry. That was two years ago. I saw him shortly after the separation, and on the surface it was as if nothing at all had happened. He was still working hard, turning out his empty, minimalist sculptures. But about a month after Electra left, Perry went into hiding, became a recluse for a year. He saw no one, and I guessed that he didn't want to admit to the people who knew him that he'd been affected. He turned up here a year ago, and that... that thing is his first response to the end of his relationship with Electra."
"But it's a monument of his hate for Perpetuum," I said. "How can you possibly claim he still loves her?"
Ralph shook his head, emphatic. "I know the man, Richard. He's torn apart by a great contradiction at the heart of his life. He intellectually believes that such things as love, friendship, altruism do not exist. And yet he loves Electra, he loves his daughter, even though these feelings don't fit in with his reductionism. That work he calls Experience is, in my opinion, a response to the anguish of his separation from his wife. The only way he can overcome what he sees as the aberration of his feelings for Electra is by creating a work