Free The Light That Never Was by Jr. Lloyd Biggle

trouble just in case the word leaks out and the people of Donov, not to mention the artists, have more animosity than we suspect?”
    “Go down to the Licensing Bureau,” Korak said. “Find out precisely when Harnasharn licensed this exhibit and how he described it. Then see if you can find the date that news about Franff’s death first reached Donov.”
    Wargen did so and returned with the information that Harnasharn had posted the exhibit as that of an anonymous artist five days before Franff had been declared dead on Sornor and nine days before the news reached Donov. He said sheepishly, “I’m retiring from the field of art criticism.”
    “No, you’re not,” Korak told him. “I doubt that you understand it yourself, but you have an instinctive awareness of such things. Never hesitate to pursue it. These riots have been going on for weeks, and even without the death of Franff, an art dealer on Donov might consider them ample reason for exhibiting an animaloid’s paintings anonymously. Obviously this exhibit merits our attention.”
    “I’ll keep an eye on it.”
    “Our attention.” Resignedly Korak pushed himself to his feet. “How shall we go?”
    “As tourists,” Wargen said. “A tourist’s costume excuses anything.”
    “Even a blind man attending an art exhibit?” Korak asked, chuckling. “Bring the costumes.”
    Those who knew world government thought of Korak, not as Donov’s manager, but as its creator. He had taken an impoverished, mineral-poor, backward agricultural world and made it one of the leading tourist and vacation centers of the galaxy. He had accomplished this with a stroke of genius of such breath-taking magnitude that few even comprehended how he could have thought of such a thing. Donov had nothing to offer tourists—no facilities, no attractions that were not available in better quantity and quality on dozens of competing worlds, nothing whatsoever of distinction except, in certain regions of its subtropics, a dazzling splendor of light. And what could light possibly mean to a tourist?
    For that matter, what could it mean to a world manager?
    Few were aware of Korak’s guilty secret, that in his misspent youth he had aspired to be an artist. He had, alas, a paucity of talent, and he’d been honest enough and wise enough to recognize that fact early and turn to another profession, but he remained enough of an artist to recognize perfect light when he saw it. As a young man just out of Qwant University, he had come to Donov to he interviewed for the manager’s position, and like fifty candidates before him he had been appalled by what he found there.
    But he courteously took the inspection tour that had been arranged for him, and he saw that light, the wondrous, inimitable artists’ light that flooded the Donovian seacoasts. He accepted a job that no one else wanted and remained a long lifetime.
    He had no thought of tourists. He thought only of that glorious light being wasted, and out of his miserable budget and over the indignant protests of a grumbling, miserly World Quorum, he created a dozen fellowships, offering passage money and a starvation subsistence to promising young artists who would agree to work for a year on Donov. He established them in a picturesque old fishing village on the Zrilund cliffs and told them to paint, and when their first work was shipped off to agents on other worlds it created a sensation. The deluge of artists followed, tourists began to make pilgrimages to the scenes immortalized in paint, and from that point any shrewd world manager could have exploited the situation and Korak was shrewder than most. In a single generation Donov became one of the leading art centers of the galaxy and Korak had begun the extensive development of resort hotels and vacation centers—on beaches, in the mountains, even in Donov’s diminutive deserts—that would eventually give the tourist trade a foundation solid enough for it to survive even when the