WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Sci Fi - Ballard, J. G. - The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D.txt

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Ever play Max Ernst games by staring up at that tent of blue
we prisoners call the sky? if so, I think you will appreciate this
story. If not, you can always do it over again yourself by
regarding Up. it takes a true architect of the nervous system
and the environment, however, to not only play this game,
but to play it well. 1. G. Bollard, I submit, is one of the
greatest cloud-sculptors I have ever witnessed in action.
So put on the appropriate piece by Debussy, and bear in
mind that despite Cervantes, last year's clouds are not so
useless as they may seem. No.
I chose to open the volume with this story, to set the
Magritte-mood of reality twice removed and, perhaps because
of this, twice as real. I'll double-cross you later on, I promise,
but for an opener, let's start with a piece that only Mister
Ballard could have written.

THE CLOUD-SCULPTORS OF CORAL D

J. G. Ballard

All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion
Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers
that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon
West. The tallest of the towers was Coral D, and here the
rising air  above the sand-reefs was topped  by swan-like
clumps of fair-weather cumulus. Lifted on. the shoulders of
the air above the crown of Coral D, we would carve sea-
horses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film-
stars, lizards and exotic birds. As the crowd watched from
their cars, a cool rain would fall on to the dusty roofs, weep-
ing from the sculptured clouds as they sailed across the
desert floor towards the sun.
Of all the cloud-sculptures we were to carve, the strangest
were the portraits of Leonora Chanel. As I look back to that
afternoon last summer when she first came in her white
limousine to watch the cloud-sculptors of Coral D, I kno"
we barely realised how seriously this beautiful but insaii
woman, regarded the sculptures floating above her in thi
calm sky. Later her portraits, carved in the whirlwind, wei
to weep their storm-rain upon the corpses of their sculptor;

I had arrived in Vermilion Sands three months earlier. A
retired pilot, I was painfully coming to terms with a broken
leg and the prospect of never flying again. Driving into the
desert one day, I stopped near the coral towers on the high-
way to Lagoon West. As I gazed at these immense pagodas
rtranded on the floor of this fossil sea, I heard music coming
from a sand-reef two hundred yards away. Swinging on my
crutches across the sliding sand, I found a shallow basin
among the dunes where sonic statues had run to seed beside
a ruined studio. The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-
like building to the sand-rays and the desert, and on some
half-formed impulse I began to drive out each afternoon.
From the lathes and joists left behind I built my first giant
kites  and, later,  gliders with cockpits.  Tethered by their
cables, they would hang above me in the afternoon air like
amiable ciphers.
j  One evening, as I wound the gliders down on the winch, a
j sudden gale rose over the crest of Coral D. While I grappled
S with the whirling handle, trying to anchor my crutches in
j the sand, two figures approached across the desert floor. One
was a small hunchback with a child's overlit eyes and a
deformed jaw twisted like an anchor barb to one side. He
scuttled over to the winch and wound the tattered gliders
towards the ground, bis powerful shoulders pushing me
aside. He helped me on to my crutches and peered into the
hangar. Here my most ambitious glider to date, no longer a
 kite but a sail-plane with elevators and control lines, was
'.             taking          shape         on         the         bench.
He spread a large hand over his chest. "Petit Manuel
i acrobat and weight-lifter. Nolan!" he bellowed. "Look at

this!"  His companion was squatting by the  sonic statues,
twisting their helixes so that their voices became more
resonant. "Nolan's an artist," the hunchback confided to me.
"He'll build you gliders like condors."
The tall man was wandering among the gliders, touching
their wings with a sculptor's hand. His morose eyes were
set in a face like a bored Gauguin's. He glanced at the
plaster on my leg and my faded flying jacket, and gestured
at the gliders. "You've given cockpit to them, major." The
remark contained a complete understanding of my motives.
He pointed to the coral towers rising above us into the
evening sky. "With silver iodide we could carve the clouds."
The hunchback nodded encouragingly to me, his eyes lit
by an astronomy of dreams.
So were formed the cloud-sculptors of Coral D. Although
I considered myself one of them, I never flew the gliders, but
I taught Nolan and little Manuel to fly, and later, when he
joined us, Charles Van Eyck. Nolan had found this blond-
haired pirate of the cafe terraces in Vermilion Sands, a la-
conic teuton with droll eyes and a weak mouth, and brought
him out to Coral D when the season ended and the well-to-do
tourists and their nubile daughters returned to Red Beach.
"Major ParkerCharles Van Eyck. He's a headhunter,"
Nolan commented with cold humour, "maidenheads." De-
spite their uneasy rivalry I realised that Van Eyck would
give our group a useful dimension of glamour.
From the first I suspected that the studio in the desert
was Nolan's, and that we were all serving some private
whim of this dark-haired solitary. At the time, however, I
was more concerned with teaching them to flyfirst on cable,
mastering the updraughts that swept the stunted turret of
Coral A, smallest of the towers, then ithe steeper slopes of
B and C, and finally the powerful currents of Coral D. Late
one afternoon, when I began to wind them in, Nolan cut
away his line. The glider plummeted onto its back, diving
down to impale itself on the rock spires. I flung myself to
the ground as the cable whipped across my car, shattering the
windshield. When I looked up, Nolan was soaring high in
the tinted air above Coral D. The wind, guardian of the
coral towers, carried him through the islands of cumulus that
veiled the evening light.
As I ran to the winch, the second cable went, and little
Manuel swerved away to join Nolan. Ugly crab on the
ground, in the air the hunchback became a bird with im-
mense wings, outflying both Nolan and Van Eyck. I watched
them as they circled the coral towers, and then swept down
together over the, desert floor, stirring the sand-rays into
soot-like  clouds.  Petit Manuel was  jubilant.  He  strutted
around me like a pocket Napoleon, contemptuous of my
broken leg, scooping up handfuls of broken glass and tossing
them over his head like bouquets to the air.
Two months later, as we drove out to Coral D on the day
we were to meet Leonora Chanel, something of this first
feeling of exhilaration had faded. Now that the season had
ended few tourists travelled to Lagoon West, and often we
would perform our cloud-sculpture to the empty highway.
Sometimes Nolan would remain behind in his hotel, drink-
ing by himself on the bed, or Van Eyck would disappear
for several days with some widow or divorcee, and Petit
M'anuel and I would go out alone.
Nonetheless, as the four of us drove out in my car that
afternoon and saw the clouds waiting for us above the spire
of Coral D, all my depression and fatigue vanished. Ten
minutes later the three cloud-gliders rose into the air and the
first cars began to stop on the highway. Nolan was in the
lead in his black-winged glider, climbing straight to the
crown of Coral D two hundred feet above, while Van Eyck
soared to and fro below, showing his blond mane to a mid-
dle-aged woman in a topaz convertible. Behind them came
little Manuel, his candy-striped wings slipping and churning
in the disturbed air. Shouting happy obscenities, he flew with
his twisted knees, huge arms gesticulating out of the cockpit.
The three gliders, brilliant painted toys, revolved like laz-
ing birds above Coral D, waiting for the first clouds to pass
overhead. Van Eyck moved away to take a cloud. He sailed
around its white pillow, spraying the sides with iodide
crystals and cutting away the flock-like tissue. The steaming
shards fell towards us like crumbling ice-drifts. As the drops
of condensing spray fell on my face, I could see Van Eyck
shaping an immense horse's head. He sailed up and down the
long forehead and chiselled out the eyes and ears.
As always, the people watching from their cars seemed to
enjoy this piece of aerial marzipan. It sailed overhead, carried
away on the wind from Coral D. Van Eyck followed it
down, wings lazing around the equine head. Meanwhile
Petit Manuel worked away at the next cloud. As he sprayed
its sides, a familiar human head appeared through the tum-
bling mist. Manuel caricatured the high wavy mane, strong
jaw but slipped mouth from the cloud with a series of deft
passes, wing-tips almost touching each other as he dived in
and out of the portrait.
The glossy white head, an. unmistakable parody of Van
Eyck in his own worst style, crossed the highway towards
Vermilion Sands. Manuel slid out of the air, stalling his
glider to a landing beside my car as Van Eyck stepped from
his cockpit with a forced smile.
We waited for the third display. A cloud formed over
Coral D, within a few minutes had blossomed into a pristine
fair-weather cumulus. As it hung there Nolan's black-winged
glider plunged out of the sun. He soared around .the cloud,
cutting away its tissues. The soft fleece fell towards us in a
cool rain.
There was a shout from one of the cars. Nolan turned
from the cloud, his wings slipping as if unveiling his handi-
work. Illuminated by the afternoon sun was the serene face
of a three-year-old child. Its wide cheeks framed a placid
mouth and plump chin. As one or two people clapped,
Nolan sailed over the cloud and rippled the roof into ribbons
and curls.
However, I knew that the real climax was yet to come.
Cursed by some malignant virus, Nolan seemed unable to
accept his own handiwork, always destroying it with the same
cold humour. Petit Manuel had thrown away his cigarette,
and even Van Eyck had turned his attention from the women
in the cars.
Nolan soared above the child's face, following like a
matador waiting for the moment of the kill. There was
silence for a minute as he worked away at the cloud, and
then someone slammed a car door in disgust.
Hanging above us was the white image of a skull.
The child's face, converted by a few strokes, had vanished,
but in the notched teeth and gaping orbits, large enough
to hold a car, we could still see an echo of its infant
features. The spectre moved past us, the spectators frowning
at this weeping skull whose rain fell upon their faces.
Half-heartedly I picked my old flying helmet off the
back seat and began to carry it around the cars. Two of the
spectators drove off before I could reach them. As I hovered
about uncertainly, wondering why on earth a retired and
well-to-do Air Force officer should be trying to collect these
few dollar bills. Van Eyck stepped behind me and took the
helmet from my hand.
"Not now, major. Look at what arrivesmy apoc-
alypse. . . ."
I    A white RoUs-Royce, driven by a chauffeur in 'braided
I cream livery, had turned off the highway. Through the
tinted communication window a young woman in a secre-
tary's day suit spoke to the chauffeur. Beside her, a gloved
hand still holding the window strap, a white-haired woman
with jewelled eyes gazed up at the circling wings of the
cloud-glider. Her strong  and elegant face  seemed sealed
within the dark glass of the limousine like the enigmatic
madonna of some marine grotto.
Van Eyck's glider rose into the air, soaring upwards to
the cloud that hung above Coral D. I walked back to my car,
searching the sky for Nolan. Above, Van Eyck was producing
a pastiche Mona Lisa, a picture postcard gioconda 'as au-
thentic as a plaster virgin. Its glossy finish shone in the over-
bright sunlight as if enamelled together out of some cosmetic
foam.
Then Nolan dived from the sun behind Van Eyck. Roll-
ing his black-winged glider past Van Eyck's,  he drove
through the neck of the gioconda, and with the flick of a
wing toppled the broad-cheeked head. It fell towards the
cars below. The features disintegrated into a flaccid mess,
I sections of the nose and jaw tumbling through the steam.
* Then wings brushed. Van Eyck fired his spray gun at Nolan,
) and there was a flurry of torn fabric. Van Eyck fell from the
)  air, steering his glider down to a broken landing.
I ran over to him. "Charles, do you have to play Von
I Richthofen? For God's sake, leave each other alone I"
L  Van Eyck waved me away. "Talk to Nolan, major. Fm
i not responsible for bis air piracy." He stood in the cockpit,
\ gazing over the cars as the shreds of fabric fell around 'him.
:   I walked back to my car, deciding that the time had come
' to disband the cloud-sculptors of Coral D. Fifty yards away
' the young secretary an the RoUs-Royce had stepped from the
i car and beckoned to me. Through the open door her mistress
i watched me with her jewelled eyes. Her white hair lay in a
\ coil over one shoulder like a nacreous serpent.
'    I carried my flying helmet down to the young woman.
'<:            Above         a       high        forehead      her        aubum        hair        was         swept        back        in         a
' defensive bun, as if she were deliberately concealing part of
'                          herself.                               She                         stared                         with                          puzzled                         eyes                            at                         the                         helmet                        held
out in front of her.
'                      "I      don't      want     to     flywhat      is      it?"
"A grace," I explained. "For the repose of Michelangelo,
Ed Keinholz and the cloud-sculptors of Coral D."
"Oh, my God. I think 'the chauffeur's the only one with
any money. Look, do you perform anywhere else?"
"Perform?" I glanced from this pretty and agreeable young
woman to the pale chimera with jewelled eyes in the dim
compartment of the Rolls. She was watching the headless
figure of the Mona Lisa as it moved across the desert floor
towards Vermilion Sands. "We're not a professional troupe,
as you've probably guessed. And obviously we'd need some
fair-weather cloud. Where, exactly?"
"At Lagoon West." She took a snake-skinned diary from
her handbag. "Miss Chanel is holding a aeries of garden
parties. She wondered if you'd care to perform. Of cgurse
there would be a large fee."
"Chanel . . . Leonora Chanel, the . . . 7"
The young woman's face again took on its defensive
posture, dissociating her from whatever might follow. "Miss
Chanel is at Lagoon West for the summer. By the way,
there's one condition I must point outMiss Chanel will
provide the sole subject matter. You do understand?"
Fifty yards away Van Eyck was dragging his damaged
glider towards my car. Nolan had landed, 'a caricature of
Cyrano abandoned in mid-air. Petit Manuel limped .to and
fro, gathering together the equipment. In the fading after-
noon light they resembled a threadbare circus troupe.
"All right," I agreed. "I take your point. But what about
the clouds, Miss?"
"Lafierty. Beatrice Lafferty. Miss Chanel will provide the
clouds."
I walked around the cars with the helmet, then divided
the money between Nolan, Van Eyck and Manuel. They
stood in the gathering dusk, the few bills in their hands,
watching the highway below.
Leonora Chanel stepped from the limousine and strolled
into the desert. Her white-haired figure in its cobra-skinned
coat wandered among the dunes. Sand-rays lifted around her,
disturbed  by the  random movements  of  this  sauntering
phantasm of the burnt afternoon. Ignoring 'their open stings
around her legs, she was gazing up at the aerial bestiary dis-
solving in the sky, and at the white skull a mile away over
Lagoon West that had smeared itself across the sky.
At the time I first saw her, watching the cloud-sculptors of
Coral D, I had only a half-formed impression of Leonora
Chanel. The daughter of one of the world's leading financiers,
she was an heiress both in her own right and on the death
pf her husband, a shy Monacan aristocrat, Cornte Louis
Chanel. The mysterious circumstances of his death at Cap
Ferrat on the Riviera, officially described as suicide, had
placed Leonora in a spotlight of publicity and gossip. She
had escaped by wandering endlessly across the globe, from
her walled villa in Tangier to an Alpine mansion in the
snows above Pontresina, and from there to Palm Springs,
Seville and Mykonos.
During these years of exile something of her character
emerged from the magazine and newspaper photographs:
moodily visiting a Spanish charity with the Duchess of Alba,
or seated with Saroya and other members of cafe society on
the terrace of Dali's villa at Port Lligat, her self-regarding face
gazing out with its jewelled eyes at the diamond sea of the
Costa Brava.
Inevitably her Garbo-like role seemed over-calculated, for-
ever undermined by the suspicions of her own hand in her
husband's death. The Count had been an introspective play-
boy who piloted his own aircraft to archaeological sites in the
Peloponnese and whose mistress, a beautiful young Lebanese,
was one of the world's pre-eminent keyboard interpreters of
Bach. Why this reserved and pleasant man should have com-
mitted suicide was never made plain. What promised to be a
significant exhibit at the coroner's inquest, a mutilated easel
portrait of Leonora on which he was working, was acci-
dentally destroyed before the hearing. Perhaps the painting
revealed more of Leonora's character than she chose to see.
A week later, as I drove out to Lagoon West on the morn-
ing of the first garden party, I could well understand why
Leonora Chanel had come' to Vermilion Sands, to this bizarre,
sand-bound resort with its lethargy, beach fatigue and shifting
perspectives. Sonic statues grew wild along the beach, itheir
voices keening as I swept past along the shore road. The fused
silica on. the surface of the lake formed an immense rainbow
mirror that reflected the deranged colours of the sand-reefs,
more vivid even than the cinnabar and cyclamen wing-panels
of the cloud-gliders overhead. They soared in the sky above
the lake like fitful dragonflies as Nolan, Van Eyck and Petit
Manuel flew them from Coral D.
We had entered an inflamed landscape. Half a mile away
the angular cornices of the summer house jutted into the
vivid air as if distorted by some faulty junction of time and
space. Behind it, like 'an exhausted volcano, a broad-topped
mesa rose into the glazed air, its shoulders lifting the thermal
currents high off the heated lake.
Envying Nolan and little Manuel these tremendous up-
draughts, more powerful than any we had known at Coral D,
I drove towards the villa. Then the haze cleared along the
beach and I saw the clouds.
A hundred feet above the roof of the mesa, they hung like
the twisted pillows of a sleepless giant. Columns of turbulent
air moved within the clouds, boiling upwards to the anvil
heads like liquid in a cauldron. These were not the placid,
fair-weather cumulus of Coral D, but storm-nimbus, unstable
masses of overheated air that could catch an aircraft and lift it
a thousand feet in a few seconds. Here and there the clouds
were rimmed with dark bands, their towers crossed by valleys
'and ravines. They moved across the villa, concealed from the
lakeside heat by the haze overhead, then dissolved in a series
of violent shifts in the disordered air.
As I entered the drive behind a truck filled with son et
lumiere equipment, a dozen members of the staff were
straightening lines of gilt chairs on the terrace and unrolling
panels of a marquee.
Beatrice Lafferty stepped across the cables. "Major Parker
there are the clouds we promised you."
I looked up again at the dark billows hanging like shrouds
above the white villa. "Clouds, Beatrice? Those are tigers,
tigers with wings. We're manicurists of the air, not dragon-
tamers."
"Don't worry, a manicure is exactly what you're expected
to carry out." With an arch glance, she added: "Your men do
understand that there's to be only one subject?"
"Miss Chanel herself? Of course." I took her arm as we
walked towards ithe balcony overlooking the lake. "You
know, I think you enjoy these snide asides. Let the rich
choose their materialsmarble, bronze, plasma or cloud. Why
not? Portraiture has always been a neglected art."
"My God, not here." She waited until a steward passed
with a tray of table-cloths. "Carving one's portrait in the
sky out of the sun and airsome people might say that
smacked of vanity, or even worse sins."
"You're very mysterious. Such as?"
She played games with her eyes. "I'll tell you in a month's
time when my contract expires. Now, when are your men.
coming?"
"They're here." I pointed to the sky over the lake. The
three gliders hung in the overheated air, clumps of cloud-
cotton drifting past them to dissolve in the haze. They were
following a sand-yacht that approached the quay, its tyres
throwing up .the cerise dust. Behind the helmsman sat Leonora
Chanel in a trouser suit of yellow alligator skin, her white hair
hidden inside a black raffia toque.
As the helmsman moored the craft. Van Eyck and Petit
Manuel put on an impromptu performance, shaping the frag-
ments of cloud-cotton a hundred feet above the lake. First
Van Eyck carved an orchid, 'then a heart and a pair of
lips,  while  Manuel fashioned the head of  a  parakeet, two
identical mice and the letters "L.C." As they dived and
plunged around her, their wings sometimes touching the
lake, Leonora stood on the quay, politely waving at each of
these brief confections.
When they landed beside the quay, Leonora waited for
Nolan to take one of the clouds, but he was sailing up and
down the lake in front of her like a weary bird. Watching this
strange chatelaine of Lagoon West, I noticed that she had
slipped off into some private reverie, her gaze fixed on Nolan
and oblivious of the people around her. Memories, caravels
without sails, crossed the shadowy deserts of her burnt-out
eyes.
Later that evening Beatrice Lafferty led me into the villa
through the library window. There, as Leonora greeted her
guests on the terrace, wearing a topless dress of sapphires and
organdy, her breasts covered only by their contour jewellery,
I saw the portrait? that filled the villa. I counted more than
twenty, from the formal society portraits in the drawing
rooms, one by the President of the Royal Academy, another
by Annigoni, to the bizarre psychological studies in the bar
and dining room by Dali and Francis Bacon. Everywhere we
moved, in the alcoves between the marble semi-columns, in
gilt miniatures on the mantle shelves, even in the ascending
mural that followed the staircase, we saw the same beautiful,
self-regarding face. This colossal narcissism seemed to have
become her last refuge, the only retreat for her fugitive self
in its flight from the world.
Then, in the studio on the roof, we came across a large
easel portrait that had just been varnished. The artist had
produced .a deliberate travesty of the sentimental and powder-
blue tints of a fashionable society painter, but beneath this
gloss he had visualized Leonora  as  a dead Medea.  The
stretched skin below her right cheek, the sharp forehead and
slipped mouth gave her the numbed and luminous appearance
of a corpse.
My eyes moved to the signature. "Nolan! My God, were
you here when he painted this?"
"It was finished before I cametwo months ago. She re-
fused to have it framed."
"No wonder." I went over to the window and looked
down at 'the bedrooms hidden behind their awnings. "Nolan
was here. The old studio near Coral D was his."
"But why should Leonora ask him back? They must
have"
"To paint her portrait again. I know Leonora Chanel
better than you do, Beatrice. This time, though, the size of
the sky."
We left the library and walked past the cocktails and
canapes to where Leonora was welcoming her guests. Nolan
stood beside her, wearing a suit of white suede. Now and
then he looked down at her as if playing with the possibilities
this self-obsessed woman gave to his macabre humour. Leo-
nora clutched at his elbow. With the diamonds fixed around
her eyes she reminded me of some archaic priestess. Beneath
the contour jewellery her breasts lay like eager snakes.
Van Eyck introduced himself with an exaggerated bow.
Behind him came Petit Manuel, his twisted head ducking
nervously among the tuxedos.
Leonora's mouth shut in a rictus of distaste. She glanced
at the white plaster on my foot. "Nolan, you fill your world
with cripples. Your little dwarfwill he fly too?"
Petit Manuel looked at her with eyes like crushed flowers.
The performance began an hour later. The dark-rimmed
clouds were lit by the sun setting behind the mesa, the air
crossed by wraiths of cirrus like the gilded frames of the
immense paintings to come. Van Byck's glider rose in a spiral
towards the face of the first cloud, stalling and climbing
again as the turbulent updraughts threw him across the air.
As the cheekbones began to appear, as smooth and lifeless
as carved foam, applause rang out from the guests seated on
the terrace. Five minutes later, when Van Eyck's glider
swooped down onto the lake, I could see that he had excelled
himself. Lit by the searchlights, and with the overture to
Tristan sounding from the loudspeaker on the slopes of the
mesa, as if inflating this huge bauble, the portrait of Leonora
moved overhead, a faint rain falling from it. By luck th&
cloud remained stable until it passed the shoreline, and then
broke up in the evening air as if ripped from the sky by an
irritated hand.
Petit Manuel began his ascent, sailing in on a dark-edged
cloud like an urchin accosting a bad-tempered matron. He
soared to and fro, as if unsure how to shape this unpredictable
column of vapour, then began to carve it into the approxi-
mate contours of a woman's head. He seemed more nervous
than I had ever seen him. As he finished a second round of
applause broke out, soon followed by laughter and ironic
cheers.
The cloud, sculptured into a flattering likeness of Leonora,
had begun to tilt, rotating in the disturbed air. The jaw
lengthened, the glazed smile became that of an idiot. Within
a minute the gigantic head of Leonora Chanel hung upside
down above us.
Discreetly I ordered the searchlights switched off, and
the audience's attention turned to Nolan's black-winged glider
as it climbed towards the next cloud. Shards of dissolving
tissue fell from the darkening air, the spray concealing what-
ever ambiguous creation Nolan was carving. To my surprise,
the portrait that emerged was wholly lifelike. There was a
burst of applause, a few bars of Tannhauser, and the search-
lights lit up the elegant head. Standing among her guests,
Leonora raised her glass to Nolan's glider.
Puzzled by Nolan's generosity, I looked more closely at
the gleaming face, and then realised what he had done. The
portrait, with cruel irony, was all too lifelike. The downward
turn of Leonora's mouth, the chin held up to smooth her
neck, the fall of flesh below her right cheekall these were
carried on the face of the cloud as they had been in his
painting in the studio.
Around Leonora the guests were congratulating her on the
performance. She was looking up at her portrait as it began
to break up over the lake, seeing it for the first time. The
veins held the blood in her face.
Then a fireworks display on the beach blotted out these
ambiguities in its pink and blue explosions.
Shortly before dawn Beatrice Lafferty and I walked along
the beach among the shells of burnt-out rockets and Catherine
wheels. On the deserted terrace a few lights shone through
the darkness onto the scattered chairs. As we reached .the
steps, a woman's voice cried out somewhere above us. There
was the sound of smashed glass. A french window was
kicked back, and a dark-haired man in a white suit ran
between the tables.
As Nolan disappeared along the drive, Leonora Chanel
walked out into 'the centre of the terrace. She looked at
the dark clouds surging over the mesa, and with one hand
tore the jewels from her eyes. They lay winking on the tiles
at her feet. Then the hunched figure of Petit Manuel leapt
from his hiding place in the bandstand. He scuttled past,
racing on his bent legs.
An engine started by the gates. Leonora began to walk
back to the villa, staring at her broken reflections in the glass
below the window. She stopped 'as a tall, blond-haired man
with cold and eager eyes stepped from the sonic statues out-
side the library. Disturbed by the noise, the statues had be-
gun to whine. As Van Eyck moved towards Leonora they
took up the slow beat of his steps.
The next day's performance was the last by the cloud-
sculptors of Coral D. All afternoon, before the guests ar-
rived, a dim light lay over the lake. Immense tiers of storm-
nimbus were massing behind the mesa, and any performance
at all seemed unlikely.
Van Eyck was with Leonora. As I arrived, Beatrice Lafferty
was watching their sand-yacht carry them unevenly across
the lake, its sails shipped by the squalls.
"There's no sign of Nolan or little Manuel," she told me.
"The party starts in three hours."
I took her arm. "The party's already over. When you're
finished here, Bea, come and live with me at Coral D. I'll
teach you to sculpt the clouds."
Van Eyck and Leonora came ashore half an hour later.
Van Eyck stared through my face as he brushed past. Leo-
nora clung to his arm, the day-jewels around her eyes scat-
tering their hard light across the terrace.
By eight, when the first guests began to appear, Nolan
and Petit Manuel had still not arrived. On the terrace the
evening was warm and lamplit, but overhead the storm-
'  clouds sidled past each other like uneasy giants. I walked up
the slope to where the gliders were tethered. Their wings
shivered in the updraughts.
Barely half a minute after he rose into the darkening air,
dwarfed by an immense tower of storm-nimbus, Charles Van
Eyck was spinning towards the ground, his glider toppled by
the crazed air. He recovered fifty feet from the villa and
climbed on the updraughts from the lake, well away from
the spreading chest of the cloud. He soared in again. As
Leonora and her guests watched from their seats, the glider
was buried back over their heads in an explosion of vapour,
then fell towards the lake with a broken wing.
I walked towards Leonora. Standing by the balcony were
Nolan and Petit Manuel, watching Van Eyck climb from
the cockpit of his glider three hundred yards away.
To Nolan I said: "Why bother to come? Don't tell me
you're going to fly?"
Nolan leaned against the rail, hands in the pockets of his
suit. "I'm notthat's why I'm here."
Leonora was wearing an evening dress of peacock feathers
that lay around her legs in an immense train. The hundreds
of eyes gleamed in the electric air before the storm, sheathing
\ her body in their blue flames.
"Miss Chanel, the clouds are like madmen," I apologised.
I  "There's a storm on its way."
i    She looked up at me with unsettled eyes. "Don't you
'  people expect to take risks?" She gestured at the storm-
; nimbus that swirled over our heads. "For clouds like these
} I need a Michelangelo of the sky . . . What about Nolan?
;  Is he too frightened as well?"
i   As -she shouted his name, Nolan stared at her, then turned
'  his back to us. The light over Lagoon West had changed.
I Half the lake was covered by a dim pall.
[   There was a tug on my sleeve. Petit Manuel looked up at
me with his crafty child's eyes. "Raymond, I can go. Let me
take the glider."
"Manuel, for God's sate. You'll kill"
He darted between the gilt chairs. Leonora frowned as h&
plucked her wrist.
"Miss Chanel . . ." His loose mouth formed an encourag-
ing smile. "I'll sculpt for you. Right now, a big storm-cloud,
eh?"
She stared down at him, half-repelled by this eager hunch-
back ogling her beside the hundred eyes of her peacock
train. Van Eyck was limping back to the beach from his
wrecked glider. I guessed that in some strange way Manuel
was pitting himself against Van Eyck.
Leonora grimaced, as if swallowing some poisonous phlegm.
"Major Parker, tell him to" She glanced at the dark cloud
boiling over the mesa like the effluvium of some black-
hearted volcano. "Waiti Let's see what the little cripple can
""' do!" She turned on Manuel with an over-bright smile. "Go
on, then. Let's see you sculpt a whirlwind!"
In her face the diagram, of bones formed a geometry of
murder.
Nolan ran past across the terrace, his feet crushing .the
peacock feathers as LeonOra laughed. We tried to stop
Manuel, but he raced up the slope. Stung by Leonora's
taunt, he skipped among the rocks, disappearing from sight in
the darkening air. On the terrace a small crowd gathered to
watch.
The yellow and tangerine glider rose into the sky and
climbed across the face of the storm-cloud. Fifty yards from
the dark billows it was buffetted by the shifting air, but
Manuel soared in and began to cut away at the dark face.
Drops of black rain fell across the terrace at our feet.
The first outline of a woman's head appeared, satanic
eyes lit by the open vents in the cloud, a sliding mouth like a
dark smear as the huge billows boiled forwards. Nolan
shouted in warning from the lake as he climbed into his
glider. A moment later little Manuel's craft was lifted by a
powerful updraught and tossed over the roof of the cloud.
Fighting the insane air, Manuel plunged the glider down-
wards and drove into the cloud again. Then its immense face
opened, and in a sudden spasm the cloud surged forward and
swallowed the glider.
There was silence on the terrace as the crushed body of
the craft revolved in the centre of the cloud. It moved over
our heads, dismembered pieces of the wings and ' fuselage
churned about in the dissolving face. As it reached the lake,
the cloud began its violent end. Pieces of the face slewed
sideways, the mouth was torn off, an eye exploded. It vanished
in a last brief squall.
The pieces of Petit Manuel's glider fell from the bright
air.
Beatrice Lafferty and I drove across the lake to collect
Manuel's body. After the spectacle of this death within the
exploding replica of their hostess's face, the guests began to
leave. Within minutes the drive was full of cars. Leonora
watched them go, standing with Van Eyck among the de-
serted tables.
Beatrice said nothing as we drove out. The pieces of the
shattered glider lay over the fused sand, tags of canvas and
broken struts, control lines tied into knots. Then yards from
the cockpit I found Petit Manuel's body, lying in a wet ball
like a drowned monkey.
I carried him back to the sand-yacht.
"Raymond!" Beatrice pointed to the 'shore. Storm-clouds
were massed along the entire length of the lake, and the
first flashes of lightning were striking in the hills behind the
mesa. In the electric air the villa had lost its glitter. Half a
mile away a tornado was moving along the valley floor, its
trunk swaying towards the lake.
The first gusts of air struck the yacht. Beatrice shouted
again: "Raymond! Nolan's therehe's flying inside it!"
Then I saw the black-winged glider circling under the
umbrella of the tornado, Nolan himself riding in the whirl-
wind. His wings held steady in the revolving air around the
funnel. Like a pilot fish he soared in, as if steering the tornado
towards Leonora's villa.
Twenty seconds later, when it struck the house, I lost sight
of him. An explosion of dark air overwhelmed the villa, a
churning centrifuge of shattered chairs and tiles that burst
over the roof. Beatrice and I ran from the yacht, and lay
together in a fault in the glass surface. As the tornado moved
away, fading into the storm-filled sky, a dark squall hung
over the wrecked villa, now and then flicking the debris into
the air. Shreds of canvas and peacock feathers fell around us.
We waited half an hour before approaching the house.
Hundreds of smashed glasses and broken chairs littered the
terrace. At first I could see no signs of Leonora, although her
face was everywhere, the portraits with their slashed profiles
strewn on the damp tiles. An eddying smile floated towards
me from .the disturbed air, and wrapped itself around my leg.
Leonora's body lay among the broken tables near the
bandstand, half-wrapped in a bleeding canvas. Her face was
as bruised now as the storm-cloud Manuel had tried to carve.
We found Van Eyck in the wreck of the marquee. He was
suspended by the neck from a tangle of electric wiring, his
pale face wreathed in a noose of light bulbs. The current
flowed intermittently through the wiring, lighting up his
strangled eyes.
I leaned against the overturned Rolls, holding Beatrice's
shoulders. "There's no sign of Nolanno pieces of his glider."
-~  "Poor man. Raymond, he was driving that whirlwind here.
Sotttefaow he was controlling it."
I walked across the damp terrace to where Leonora lay. I
began slightly to cover her with the shreds of canvas, the torn
faces of herself.
I took Beatrice Lafferty to live with me in Nolan's studio
in the desert near Coral D. We heard no more of Nolan, and
never flew the gliders again. The clouds carry too many
memories. Three months ago a man who saw the derelict
gliders outside the studio stopped near Coral D and walked
across to us. He told us he had seen a man flying a glider in
the sky high above Red Beach, carving the strato-cirrus into
images of jewels and children's faces. Once there was a
dwarf's head.
On reflection, that sounds rather like Nolan, so perhaps
he managed to get away from the tornado. In the evenings
Beatrice and I sit among the sonic statues, listening to their
voices as the fair-weather clouds rise above Coral D, waiting
for a man in a dark-winged glider, perhaps painted like candy
now, who will come in on the wind and carve for us images
of sea-horses and unicorns, dwarfs and jewels and children's
faces.