Ballard, J G - Cloud Scultors

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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

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file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/J.%20G.%20Ballard%20-%20Cloud%20Scultors.txt

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

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Ballard, J G - Cloud Scultors

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