The Light That Never Was Read Online Free PDF Page A

about if. If I had, I might have made the effort. I’m sure it would be an interesting experience. Animaloids must have a unique view of the universe.”
    Korak smiled. “Everyone I’ve talked with who has had the good fortune to know an animaloid well insists that such a friendship adds an entirely new dimension to one’s awareness of one’s self.”
    “Then it’s unfortunate that we have none on Donov. I’ll send those reports as soon as I can assemble them.” He turned away, turned back again. “I think maybe you’re right. We need a word.”
    In the mountains of Donov’s southern continent, the picturesque town of Verna Plai lay—some said floated—in a valley celebrated for its mineral springs. It was Donov’s most famous health resort, and it also possessed an art colony of note. The rugged, scenic mountains that surrounded the town, with their geysers and steaming springs, provided spectacular subjects for painting.
    Art colonies came into being on Donov wherever there was anything that more than one artist wanted to paint. The Verna Plai colony was unique in that tourists had discovered the town long before the artists did, and Verna Plai tourists still tended to have an overwhelming interest in their own bodily functions and an abysmal lack of interest in art.
    Most artists were wanderers, but every colony developed its small group of perms, of artists who remained there, often in dire poverty, because they loved the place. At Verna Plai one of them was Gof Milfro.
    He painted faithfully for as many hours each day as he could hold his sprayers level, and once each week he took an armful of paintings down to the Plai. There he made the rounds of those merchants who condescended to display paintings, cheerfully verifying his assumption that none of his had been sold. Then he wandered about the hostels looking for an unwary tourist whose digestive processes had been loosened sufficiently to unblock a petrified aesthetic sense. Having failed in that, he occupied himself on the steep climb back to the artists’ colony with a searching review of his acquaintances to determine which one might be the best subject for the small loan he needed in order to exist for another week. Since he had never been known to repay one, artist creditors were as difficult to find as tourist customers. Somehow he survived and continued to work tirelessly—ragged, hungry, uncomfortable, but for all that indomitably cheerful and irrepressibly optimistic. He was an artist.
    The day he received his windfall from Gerald Gwyll, Milfro laid in a few needed art supplies, paid off a fraction of his arrears in rent, and then made the rounds of his fellow artists. Starting with a neighbor, Jharge Roln, he poked his head through the open door, said, “I just dropped in to pay you the five dons I owe you,” and tossed him a coin.
    Roln caught it and stared at him blankly. “You don’t owe me five dons.”
    “Haven’t I ever borrowed five dons from you?”
    Roln shook his head.
    “Well. Someone must owe you five dons. Consider it repaid. I’ve borrowed from so many I can’t remember them all, so I’m paying back five dons to everyone I meet as long as the money lasts.”
    When Milfro was contentedly broke again he made his way upstreet to a cavernous bistro called The Closed Door because at one time in its ramshackle history it had none. It was a favorite gathering place for artists, who had their own private annex, and there Milfro occupied the chair of honor.
    He had earned that distinction several years before, when the caterer had incautiously permitted him to do a painting in payment of a long-overdue adde bill. He astutely performed the painting during the caterer’s absence, and he painted the thing on the wall so that it could not be rejected. He portrayed himself, in the armored costume of a warrior of another world and time, mounted on a stampeding wrranel and pursuing a terrified tourist with a paint sprayer. What the