The Malacia Tapestry. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ of the Hoytola family, Andrus Hoytola.’

      ‘Hoytola’s hydrogenous balloon.’

      ‘That’s another matter. I’ve been here during some years now, ever since I have come from Tolkhorm with my family. There are some worse masters than Hoytola, I’ll grant you that. Here’s Bonihatch – he’s foreign to Malacia too, and a good man.’ He made reference to one of the apprentices, who loitered up in shirt-sleeves.

      Bonihatch was my age, dark, small and wiry, with untidy blonde whiskers. He nodded, looking suspiciously at my clothes without addressing me.

      ‘A recruit?’ he asked Bengtsohn.

      ‘We’ll see,’ Bengtsohn replied.

      After this enigmatic exchange, Bengtsohn, with Bonihatch in surly attendance, showed me some of his work. A small den off the main workshop was stacked with slides for magic lanterns, all categorized on shelves. He pulled slides down at random and I looked at them against a flickering oil lamp. Many of the scenes were Bengtsohn’s work. He was an artist of a rough but effective order. Some of the hand-painted transparencies, especially those depicting scenery, were attractive, the colour and perspective harsh but nevertheless effective. There was an arctic view, with a man in furs driving a sledge over ice; the sledge was pulled by a reindeer, and the whole scene was lit by a sky full of northern lights which reflected off a glacier. As I held it before the lamp, he saw something in my face and said, ‘You like it? As a young man, I have gone beyond the Northern Mountains to the ice lands. That’s what like it was. A different world.’

      ‘It’s good.’

      ‘You know how we make these slide-paintings?’

      I indicated the stacks of glass round about, and the long desk where assistants worked with brushes and a row of paint-pots. ‘Apart from your genius, Master, there’s no puzzle about the production.’

      He shook his head. ‘You think you see the process but you do not see the system behind the process. Take our topographical line, what is popular perennially. Travellers from far parts will make sketches of the fabulous places they have visited. They return home to Byzantium or Swedish Kiev or Tolkhorm or Tuscady or some other great centre, where their sketches are etched and sold, either as books or separately. Our factory then buys the books and artists are converting the pictures to slides. Only the slides live, because light itself puts the finishing touches to the painting, if you follow me.’

      ‘I follow you. I too am proud to call myself an artist, though I work in movement rather than light.’

      ‘Light is everything.’

      He led me through a choked passage where great sheets of tin stood on either side, to another shop. There, amid stink and smoke, men in aprons were making the magic lanterns which formed part of the Hoytola enterprise. Some lanterns were cheap and flimsy, others masterpieces of manufacture, with high fluted chimneys and mahogany panels bound in brass.

      Eventually, Bengtsohn led me back to the paint shop, where we watched a girl of no more than fifteen copy a view from an etching on to a glass.

      ‘The view is being transferred to the slide,’ announced Bengtsohn. ‘Pretty, perhaps, but not accurate. How could we transfer the view to the glass with accuracy? Well, now, I have developed a perfectly effective way so to do.’ He dropped his voice so that the girl – who never looked up from her work – should not catch his words. ‘The new method employs the zahnoscope.’

      Bonihatch spoke for the first time. ‘It’s revolutionary,’ was all he said.

      Gripping me by the muscle of my upper arm, Bengtsohn took me through into another room, poky and enclosed, where the window was framed by heavy curtains. A support rather like a music-stand stood at one end of the room with a lamp burning above it and a water globe next to it. In the centre of the room was something which resembled a cumbrous Turkish cannon. Constructed almost entirely of mahogany and bound in richly chased brass, its barrel comprised five square sections, each smaller than the next and tapering towards the muzzle. It was mounted on a solid base which terminated in four brass wheels.

      ‘It’s a cannon?’ I asked.

      ‘It could cause a breach in the walls of everyone’s complacency – but no, it is my zahnoscope merely, so-called after a German monk what invented the design.’

      He tapped the muzzle. ‘There’s a lens here, to trap rays from the light. That’s the secret! A special large lens such as Malacia’s glass workers do not produce. I received it from ship only this morning – it has just been fitted. You saw me with it when All-People summoned you.’

      He tapped the breech. ‘There’s a mirror in here. That’s the secret too! Now I shall show how it works.’

      Taking a coloured topographical view from a shelf, he propped it on the music-stand, turned up the wick of the lamp, and adjusted the water globe between stand and lamp so that the beams of the lamp focused brightly on the view. Then he drew the curtains across the window. The room was lit only by the oil lamp. Bengtsohn motioned me to a chair by the breech.

      It was as if I sat at a desk. The flat top of the desk was glass. And there, perfectly reproduced on the glass, was the topographical view, bright in all its original colour!

      ‘It’s beautiful, Master! Here you can have a perfect magic-lantern show.’

      ‘This is a tool not a toy. We place the glass of our slides over the viewer and can adjust the barrel – what adjusts the focal length of the lenses – until we have the exact size of picture necessary for the slide, no matter what the dimensions from the original etching. We can then simply paint over the image with accuracy.’

      I clapped my hands. ‘You are more than an artist! – You are an actor! Like me, you take the poor shadowy thing of real life and magnify it and add brighter colours to delight your audience … But what do you want me here for? I can’t handle a paintbrush .’

      He stood pulling his lower lip and squinting at me.

      ‘People come in two kinds. Either they’re too clever or too foolish to be trusted. I can’t reason out which group you’re in.’

      ‘I’m to be trusted. Everyone trusts Perian de Chirolo – ask Kemperer, for whom you once worked, who knows me minutely. His wife will also say a good word for me.’

      He brushed my speech aside, stood gazing into the distance in very much a pose I have used for Blind Kedgoree.

      ‘Well, I need a young man not too ill set-up, there’s no denying that … The older you get, the more difficult things become …’

      At last he turned back to me. ‘Very well, I shall take you in my confidence, young man; but I warn that what I tell you must not be repeated with nobody, not with your dearest friend, no, not even with your sweetest sweetheart. Come, we’ll walk in the exhibition gallery while I will explain my invention and my intention …’

      He drew back the curtains, turned down the lamp, and led me back to the workshops. We climbed some steps, went through a door, and were in another world where disorder was forgotten. We had entered the elegantly appointed gallery itself, the walls of which were lined with thousands of glass slides, aligned on racks for easy viewing. The slides could be hired for varying amounts, depending upon quality and subject. There were long sets of twenty or thirty slides which told in pictures heroic stories СКАЧАТЬ