It was also a disturbing art. Directly before him, dominating the lobby, was a dimensional painting. If he had thought of Freeman painting before, he would have envisioned representational art of trees and flowers and blazing skies. Or a concern with light, so essential a part of the free life. What he saw, vibrating with peculiar inner tension, was a gray mass which seemed to deny both light and color. It was a shapeless blob, pulsating with—Hendley groped for the nature of his response to the painting, seeking to find the cause through the effect; it was—pain.
"Crass," someone said. "Vulgar." Another voice retorted, "Color isn't everything!" Words and phrases collided and ricocheted and split into fragments. "—isn't supposed to mean anything. It's supposed to be." "Quite mad—that's the beauty of it...." "Genius...." "The inner planes are brilliantly suggested...." "Erotic, of course...." "Feeling!" "Essence...." "I don't like it. That's the real criticism...." "—see how he used intersecting curves. Marvelous illusion, don't you think?" "Not new at all...." "—so much life...." "... death!"
Unnerved, Hendley turned away from the painting. Nik was beside him again, shoving a drink into his hand. Hendley took a brief swallow, needing it. The rising crescendo of party noise seemed to diminish as the drink coursed through his body. Its taste was unfamiliar to him, but before he could question it Nik was steering him through the crowd toward the escalator.
"The main party is downstairs," Nik said. "You can see some of the exhibits along the way. The place is bigger than it looks, isn't it?"
"Yes, from outside—"
"It wasn't built as a gallery, but it's been converted. Used to be a service building of some kind. Say, I've got to smile at a few faces I know. See you downstairs on the bottom level. Take a look around as you go down."
He was gone. The stairway wound slowly past different exhibits of paintings and sculpture. Knots of Freemen clustered before each work, talking and arguing and laughing. Curiosity forced Hendley off the stairway at the first level below the lobby. He edged his way into a crowded room whose walls and ceiling were covered with paintings. Their effect, even at first glance, was vaguely alarming. It took him a while to make a full circuit of the room. By the time he reached the last painting, a bewildering exercise in spatial relationships in which ribbons of color entwined like mangled intestines, he was badly shaken. The art was strikingly personal, each portrait a private image. The paintings seemed without form or coherent meaning. They ranged from wildly vivid explosions of light and color to somber experiments in deliberate dullness. They lacked any common viewpoint. But in spite of their singularity, they had a sameness. What they shared, what gave the exhibition a cumulative impact, was the creation in paint and plastic and metal of a world disturbed, threatened, and threatening, a world of unimaginable chaos, devoid of tranquillity or joy, a sensual world which denied the evidence of the senses, an emotional world terrorized by its feelings.
Hendley wanted to escape. He plunged through the babble and confusion, fighting his way back to the central escalator, where he leaned over the railing into the open center well like a man gasping for air. He was still carrying his glass, forgotten after the first sip in his absorption with the Freeman art, but in the crush of the crowd half the drink had been spilled. He raised the glass.
A girl pressed close to him. Her face was daubed with streaks of bright paint. "Isn't this frantic?" she breathed.
Hendley nodded. "It's that," he agreed dryly.