Free The Quest of the Artist: A Sci-Fi novella by Phil Semler

thought.
    I have to face them, sink or swim, he thought, detouring around the wreckage of the bridges, as he made his way across the bay. At that time, Kruger didn’t know that it was Ivanova herself who’d allowed him to leave the city. She had already decided he was not essential to creating a new society. She wanted to send him away, an exile so to speak.
    After an absence of thirteen years, Kruger returned home north across the water. In his hometown, he found a kind of peace, communing with the source of his childhood memories and the quiet of the village.
    Kruger’s trip home turned out to be a strange one. He walked about, unrecognized, facing many of his old fears and ghosts from childhood. He wasn’t sure but he thought he could smell the eucalyptus when he removed his head gear. He came upon his childhood home, which had become a museum displaying his work. Just as he believed art had replaced his life, so too had art works literally filled the inside of his house, replacing all of the objects of his former life.
    Hundreds of watercolors hung on the walls filling up the whole building. Drawings of the naked Hands Hansen, chiaroscuros of Inka Holm, birth scenes, the magic mountain—Tamalpais—in its myriad of moods. His mother from every possible angle, even looking up at and down at, like an earth goddess.
    Primitive drawings he didn’t remember doing. He must have been younger than five and still in the shelter during the war.
    He suddenly remembered his youngest years, maybe two, holding pencils and crayons. His mother saying she’d gone first to an art supply superstore nearby, everybody else looting the markets for food, alcoholic beverages, useless consumer machines. She’d looted artistic supplies enough to last decades for one man.
    While in Mill Valley he continued to examine his isolation, his estrangement. He observed and was observed. He produce a kinetic art piece out of some colored glass he found. A man stopped to observe it. As it moved in the breeze, and tinkled the man laughed. Kruger felt vindicated. A validation of the artist, of his contribution to society, his understanding of culture, and even, principles and values. He wondered if he had a reputation and for a moment thought of posthumous vindication in a world finally ready to accept him. Perhaps a feeling a mortality, which his mother had always said was necessary for art and the artist.
    Just as he decided to leave his hometown, he ran into trouble with the authorities, as they  looked for a thief—an escaped criminal—who was known to be traveling. The criminal had stolen a dead person’s Tsuit—to do what? Kruger was mistaken for the criminal, which reinforced his inner suspicion that the artist must be an outsider relative to “normal” society.
    Kruger proved his identity by quickly drawing one of the authorities and, thus, his position as artist gained him some respect within his old society. However, it was still only a grudging respect, as the authority was still not fully convinced.
    He presented the authority with a painting done on the spot in minutes, his old house from his imagination.
    Kruger again saw that, while he was not totally separated from life, he still did not fully belong.
    Another of the authorities explained Kruger had been given a pass by Lisa Ivanova, a scientist, and then Kruger realized he’d been a “test subject” for Ivanova.
    Kruger accepted the equation of art and death but perhaps now more subtly. In order to create, the artist must be other than human, must be separate from human concerns and common human perceptions of respectability and propriety. This was necessary to his or her art, to his ability to create for others with attention to style, to the game, the wiles, of representation.
    True, simply having deep emotion does not produce art. Everything for the artist occurs and exists at a distance. The artist is, then, in a very particular fashion on the side of death, witnessing