The Last Days of Krypton - Kevin J. Anderson [38]
Lara interrupted him, calling his name as she ran out of the artists’ guest quarters. “Jor-El, I’m glad you’re back. I want to show you something. Follow me.” She took him to the first obelisk stone she had painted, to show off what she had done. With the launch of his solar probe forgotten for now, he dutifully admired the placid image of a man whose head was shaved except for a thin, curly crown of silver hair above his ears. Around the face, the background was a confusing discordance of slashes, hues, and shapes. “Look at this obelisk and tell me what you see.”
He frowned. “I see a man’s face surrounded by pretty colored lines.” She waited. Jor-El looked at her, then back at the painting, concentrating. “Is there something else?”
With a sigh and a wry smile, she said, “This panel is called Truth, and that is Kal-Ik, a man executed during the ancient city-state wars. I copied the facial features directly from a bust in the Kandor cultural museum. Do you know the story?”
“I think I heard it once, but I didn’t pay much attention….”
Lara stood very close to him, both of them facing the portrait. “All the advisers of the chieftain Nok insisted that his war was going well, that the battles would easily be won, that all of his soldiers would fight bravely for their chieftain. The so-called advisers shielded him from what was really happening. They continued to say what the chieftain wanted to hear, just so they could save their lives. But Kal-Ik knew this was not the truth. He demanded an audience with Nok and told him the grim reality. The chieftain grew angry, and when the advisers demanded that Kal-Ik retract his statements, he insisted that truth was more important than his life. So they killed him for it. Shortly afterward Nok was defeated.”
Jor-El said, “I probably would have done the same in Kal-Ik’s position. An unpleasant reality is preferable to a kind delusion.”
“That explains the history. Now to explain the artwork.” Lara took him closer to the obelisk and carefully guided him through what she meant by the opposing lines, the symbolism in the conflicting angles, the abstract shapes around the figure of Kal-Ik. Jor-El blinked with a dawning realization as he made the connections. He seemed almost abashed. “I didn’t know that it all made any sort of…sense before.”
“Art makes sense, Jor-El, but you have to look at it through a different set of mental filters. It isn’t all quantifiable, cut and dried.” She took him to each of the other eight obelisks she had completed in the previous day, similarly explaining the concepts she meant to convey. By the time they finished, he was delighted with these new revelations. She had done swift and brilliant work.
He wasn’t looking forward to the day when Ora and Lor-Van left with their daughter and their crew back to the city. Maybe he could find some way to invite Lara to stay. He hoped so.
Without even thinking, he took her hand. “Now it’s your turn to come with me. I need your help.”
Behind the research building, he had built a paved launch zone with angled rails and scorched blast deflectors. Each one of his eight probe rockets was no more than two meters long, thin cylinders filled with concentrated explosive fuel directed through a thrust nozzle. The top of each launch tube held a transmitting probe, a scientific package that collected particles from the hurricane of the red giant’s solar wind.
Lara stared around, seeing the evidence of the hot fires from previously launched rockets. “My brother showed me this place, but we did not know what you used it for. Nobody seems to know.”
Jor-El was puzzled. “Nobody asked.”
He asked Lara to assist him in carrying one of the remaining in-system rockets. Each data package was simple and redundant, but it provided him with the direct measurements he needed. His probes studied the outer layers of the swollen red giant. Each month, he shot a probe into space and then recorded the flux levels,