Painter of the Endless Gray

The troopship, scarred and bleeding plasma from a thousand wounds, thrashed down from on high, slamming into the gray planetary surface with an explosion that left a thousand men dead, and two alive who wished they weren't.

Simpson and Garza sat on gray stones beside the ship's smoldering wreckage. Both were in shock, but otherwise unharmed. They wore mimetic chemical-reclaiming refab armor, standard Marine issue, designed to allow them to go on indefinitely without food or water.

Away from the pair in all directions stretched a uniform plain of two-toned desert hardpan. The sand was white. The stones were gray. The ground was unflinchingly flat. There was no vegetation and no sign of life--save for the two surviving soldiers--and the world swirled in a blur of windblown ash.

To Simpson, a West Virginian who, before conscription, had dreamed of becoming a painter, the endless gray was a kind of damnation. He sat and stared and tried not to think.

But then Garza spoke. "Looks like we won the lottery buddy."

"Some prize," Simpson said.

"You'd rather we were dead?" Garza whistled, stood, and faced the burning wreckage, hands on hips. "Look at those flames, huh? Yellow as a golden calf. The techies may have conquered Einstein's barrier, but it looks like someone forgot to check the oil."

Simpson scowled at Garza but knew it to be a pointless gesture. The refab suits sported a chameleon casing and shifted colors to match the local environment. Garza's visor was shadow black, and the rest of him was white, mottled in gray. A hundred meters out, he'd be perfectly invisible.

What a thought, Simpson mused. Invisible at a hundred meters. Gone. Like sea foam washed out on a tide. A tremor passed through him as for the first time he felt a touch of agoraphobia. All that white and gray flatness stretching on into featureless oblivion combined with his own tenuous visibility to stir in him the sense that the place wished to dissipate him to its far reaches, to spread him thin and white and gray over the broad, sterile expanse...

***

Weeks passed. There were no nights, no days. The world remained gray, washed in eternal twilight. The axial tilt of the planetoid was such that one pole pointed directly at a dim, faraway star. Thus, planetary revolution served only to stir storms of gray dust; time was locked in bands: noon at the pole, late afternoon so many kilometers darkward, pitch-black frozen midnight over the opposite half the globe. Simpson and Garza had crashed at evening. Darkness impended inexorably yet never arrived; daylight, trapped in a perpetual state of waning, never actually waned a second. It was mellow. It was maddening.

And in this twilightscape, there was nothing. Nothing to do, nothing to gather, nothing to hope for. Nothing even to fear, save madness, which Simpson felt all around him, all the time now, sharing his suit.

Garza's voice droned relentlessly in Simpson's radio earpiece. "Why, if only I were a woman, we could start our own little Garden of Eden here. I could pump out Simpson after Simpson, and you could knit each of our unborn Simpsons his or her own little refab suit. Blue for Jimmy and pink for Sally, right? Beautiful. Just Beautiful."

Garza had been rattling on like this--jabbering nonsensical gloom--for days, maybe weeks. Simpson had long ago fallen silent. The world was dull and gray and dead.

Simpson swiveled his head, stared at the camouflaged shape that was Garza, and tried for the thousandth time to cut the other man's transmission. And for the thousandth time he failed. If only he could remove his helmet just long enough to smash the earpiece; but leaving the protection of the suit, even for a second, would mean certain death, and the sap of self-preservation was much too strong in Simpson to allow suicidal ideations.

Garza babbled on. "Alone in an uncaring universe, man is free to..."

It was no good asking him to stop. He wouldn't. So Simpson started walking. Off into the desert he strode, Garza's voice an unwelcome passenger in his ear. A hundred meters out, Simpson turned and looked back toward camp. Just as he'd suspected, Garza had disappeared into the gray.

But proximity meant nothing here. No matter how far Simpson ranged, Garza remained in his ear, speaking of Sartre and Moses and Ozymandias. "I've got it," Garza's voice said. "You be the traveler from the ancient land, and what's left of the ship, that'll be the vast and trunkless legs of stone. And I'm the sign, Simpson." And then he shouted, "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

Simpson wandered the desert for days. Unrelenting sands, slightly shifting yet ever flat, gray, and lifeless, defined this place. There was no relief, no hills or hollows, no snaking river, no gaping canyons. Across barren desolation Simpson strode, wishing only to think of nothing, while Garza's voice, tinny and disembodied, like an electronic ghost, rattled on and on.

"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, Simpson. In fact, thou shalt not covet anything, not thy neighbor's wife or car or in-ground swimming pool. Thou shalt not taste food or drink, Simpson, and thou shalt not listen to music or look at art or walk barefoot through the green, green grass of home."

Simpson had been a long time in the desert. More than anything, he wished to return to a life of color, to a place where he might recline on spring-green slopes and daub at cream-colored canvas with a bright-tipped brush, a riotously colorful palette in his lap. He dreamed of forest moss, vibrant and velvety, and the diamond-hard skies of home, achingly blue, streaked in bright white cloud runnels frozen in the wakes of commuter rockets which roared overhead on carrot-columns of orange flame.

Simpson concentrated very hard on these images, clinging to them as if they were life preservers in this ocean of vast grayness. For he now understood that the very ashy uniformity of this place wished to drown him. It did not want him dead, only lifeless, dulled to a hue and a flatness in accordance with its own. He could feel it working on him, seeping into his thoughts and images, blurring the clarity of their edges.

Simpson hadn't spoken in weeks. There had been that brief, cataclysmic climax where he'd shouted over the radio link, demanding that Garza shut his stinking mouth, but it had all been to no avail, and head ringing with fury, he'd stopped yelling, stopped speaking, and done his best to stop thinking... at least in words. He focused only on the images. The moss. The sky. The frozen streaks of flame-gouting rocket ships. But the gray was leaking into them, and Garza's voice, which ranted on like a canary trapped in his helmet, wasn't helping matters. It served only to distract Simpson from his precious images, to weaken him against the inexorable onslaught of his drab surroundings. In fact, he realized, stopping dead in his tracks, Garza's voice had at some point-very stealthily-melted into the environment, had somehow become the very voice of the grayness.

Simpson finally broke his silence. The words came from deep within him, seemingly of their own accord. "I'm going back to color." And his feet turned him and carried him forward.

There was a break in the babble. Then Garza returned. "Simpson. Where are you? I'd started to worry that something had happened."

Simpson didn't respond. He was thinking of colors, of moss green and sky blue and God-almighty-rocketblast-orange, and of all the wonderful colors with which he had painted back on Earth and of all the yet-to-be-discovered colors hidden galaxy-wide, like strange fruit for his sampling.

"Come back," Garza said. "I'm through ranting. Come on back, and I'll be civil. It's so lonely here. So goddamned lonely."

Simpson remained silent. There was only motion now, motion and the promise of colors.

It took hours to relocate the crash site.

Simpson used a heavy stone to smash the visor of Garza's helmet. He watched as Garza's face, open to the atmosphere, boiled brightly, red and roiling as storm-tossed sea of blood, then died away in a sunken caldera that grayed swiftly to the color of ash.

Simpson stood overtop the corpse and smiled. There. One last bit of color. Crimson. He'd never forget it. Now, his damnation complete, he laughed, and his laughter was a harsh grating, the sound of a coffin lid sliding home.