Free The Shores of Death by Michael Moorcock Page B

everything he had regarded as valuable on Earth. And he had given them all up for what? A hope and a whisper of a legend? Perhaps. What he sought was time of his own, and as much as he wanted. He had enjoyed life on Earth to the full, never to excess, but he had only experienced a little of what was possible. He enjoyed life and feared death. Stronger: His enthusiasm for life was such that he would do anything to keep it. He was doing so. Yet was it possible that the very transcience of life made it enjoyable, worth having? Or even that in giving up the qualities he had valued in himself, he could no longer find in life what he had enjoyed. Maybe there were other values?
    Die Wahrheit ist konkret. Which German writer, how many centuries ago? The truth is concrete. What is true is immutable. What is true is valuable and what is valuable. . . No, not necessarily. What was now valuable to him might be only an illusion.
    The ambiguities and anomalies of life could be forgotten on Earth. In Space, where little seemed real, where everything, from the human viewpoint, seemed disordered and abnormal, it was easy to believe that truth need not be concrete. Indeed, to the individual, it might have no existence at all.
    He realised that he was confused, that he had been confused well before he first went into Space. The revelation that the galaxy as he knew it was soon to be destroyed—he had thought that that had been the original cause of his confusion, but there were probably deeper causes. In two hundred years, the end would come. He could expect to live another ninety years. There would be no children to live on through, no future, no posterity. That understanding, hard to reach, harder to remember, was what had driven him here in his useless search.
    Yet in a way he had recaptured his innocence, his belief that he could make the impossible possible. So maybe he still had something of value. If this were so, then the irony returned, for he had the cash but couldn’t spend it and, he feared, if an opportunity to spend it arose—then he would no longer have the cash.
    Outside, on Klobax, the sun beat down on a landscape of rudimentary and primordial colours. Beyond Klobax a spaceship was approaching. In it was a man with a rudimentary and primordial soul. Take had found the right planet.

nine The Tragic Giant

    B efore he leftthe next day, Marca remembered another question he had intended to ask Retorsh.
    As he stood at the door, his eyes now black and expressionless from the lenses Retorsh had given him, he turned and said to the small man: “I heard on Earth that the artist Alodios came to the Bleak Worlds. He didn’t visit Klobax did he? ”
    “He did. He was the man who arrived before you.” Retorsh frowned. “The one I told you about—didn’t I mention his name? The madman I had to fight with. That was Alodios.” He smiled. “He may be a great artist, but he’s a fool of a man.”
    Marca looked ahead of him. The raw Klobaxian colours were now muted and easier to bear, but they still retained their primary impression.
    “Where did Alodios go?”
    “He stayed on Klobax—his ship’s down there,” Retorsh pointed at the ground. “In the hangars where I’m going to put yours.”
    “But where did he go here? ”
    “I had him here for about a week. He seemed to calm down in a way, but he also seemed drained—you know, like a machine. Everything he did seemed mechanical.” Retorsh appeared to notice Marca’s impatience. “He went to the village first. I don’t know where after that. He may be dead by now. Some of them come here to die. What about you? ”
    For a confessedly incurious man, Retorsh asked plenty of questions.
    “Me? I’ve come here to—live,” said Marca.
    Retorsh bit his lip and patted Marca’s arm. “I’ll see you before you leave Klobax.” He pointed. “That’s the way you want to go—in the direction of that tall bluff.”
    Marca said some formal words of thanks and squeezed his