The Fall of Tartarus (16 page)

The
summer holiday came to an end, and I returned to Mallarme city, and when next I
came home I sought out Leah, but there was nothing between us, the spark had
died. I told my parents that I wished to leave Tartarus after all, and sailed
for Earth shortly after my fifteenth birthday.

Now
I put my arms around Leah’s shoulders and walked her from the glade. We turned
and stared down at the silent graves. At last she asked, ‘Did you ever find
anyone, Joe?’

I
shrugged. ‘There were one or two women . . . nothing lasting or serious.’ I
glanced at her. ‘You?’

‘I
met a fine man. We married, had children. You would have approved of him, Joe.
He passed away five years ago.’

Unable
to find a suitable response, I nodded. ‘You stayed here, on Tartarus?’

She
shook her head. ‘After college I left for Earth, then settled on Mars.’

A
silence descended as we stared down into the glade. Leah looked up at me, and I
saw tears in her eyes.

‘Oh,
Joe, I was so young and foolish ... I wanted to talk about what happened. I got
your address from your parents, but by the time I reached Earth you’d left. I
needed to find you, Joe, to talk to you.’ She drew a long breath and shook her
head. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. It was all my fault.’

I
squeezed her hand. ‘It was no one’s fault, Leah. No one’s. Hulse was unstable.
He wanted revenge.’

‘But
he would never have ... he would never have done what he did if it hadn’t been
for me.’

I
corrected her. ‘Leah, he resented Zur-zellian because it was the alien that
brought us together. Don’t you remember? I called Hulse’s bluff and swam across
to the island, and then you came to me in the dream-sac. Hulse had it in for
Zur-zellian ever since then.’

‘It
wasn’t that, Joe,’ she whispered in a voice as light as the breeze. ‘It was my
fault. It was because of
me
that he did what he did!’

‘Leah
. . .’ I remonstrated.

‘Listen
to me, Joe.’ She stared up at me, determination in her large brown eyes. ‘That
night, do you remember the night he attacked you, and I beat him off? Well, I
told him that I never wanted to see him again, that I hoped he’d drop dead. And
I told him we were to be married by Zur-zellian the following day.’

She
was silent for long seconds, then went on, ‘Don’t you see, Joe? If I hadn’t
told him that, then . . . then he wouldn’t have gone across to the island to
disrupt the ceremony. And Bobby and Gabby and Rona and Satch and Zur-zellian .
. . they’d all be alive, and you and me might have . . .’

I
just stared at her as silver tears coursed down her cheeks, and I thought of
our time together after the fire, her silence, her reluctance to talk about
what had happened.

She
shook her head. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to tell you during those last weeks, Joe,
and for all these years I’ve lived with the guilt.’

There
was nothing I could say; there are times when words are redundant. As I stared
at the woman I had loved a long time ago, I realised that only gestures
remained, now, to show her that I was sorry, and that I cared.

We
stood by the glade, our arms about each other, as the transporter’s siren
sounded that the time had come for us to leave.

[Interzone
122,1997]

Jonathon
Fairman had worked all night on the sculpture, less from the artist’s
fastidious need to attain perfection than from a real fear of what sleep might
bring. To work, to create something solid which before had not existed, was a
far preferable option than to submit to the nightmares which had haunted his nights
of late.

He
reached out, felt the malleable wood begin to warm to his touch. He closed his
eyes and concentrated, attempting to project the emotion which would bend the
timber to the desired shape. He opened his eyes and watched the wood dimple
beneath his fingertips, then stepped back and viewed the piece as a whole. He
could imagine the critics’ reaction. They would declare that once again
Jonathon Fairman had created a lasting work of art - and he had to admit that
in form the piece was very nearly perfect. It showed the figure of a woman
rising from the substance of the alien wood like someone emerging, explosively,
from an ocean. It was the latest in a series of six he was in the process of
completing. Each showed a female figure - his wife, Aramantha - trying to
escape from the medium of which she was forever a part. On the face of each
sculpture could be seen an expression of increasing agony. Visually the pieces
were a success, but for Fairman they failed to work on the emotional level.

For
perhaps the hundredth time that month he passed along the line of sculptures,
pausing from time to time to caress a flank, a limb, to match his wife’s
star-spread fingers with his own - and each time, although he did feel deep
within him some stirring of the emotion he had tried to communicate, the pieces
added nothing, no deeper strata of feeling, to their visual aspect.

He
had hoped that each might complement the other, that the viewer, after
beholding the’ poignancy of Aramantha’s attempt to escape, would be rocked,
when touching the pieces, by the terror and the anguish. But the emotional
content of the sculptures was vapid, weak simulations of the emotions his wife
had no doubt experienced. Oh, that might pass muster with critics who had never
in their safe, cloistered existences experienced any emotion, stronger than
envy, but in his heart Fairman knew that he had failed to do justice to his
wife’s ultimate experience - and he knew, also, why. How could he ever hope to
create a meaningful work of art from Aramantha’s death when he had for so long
denied the event?

He
paced across the room and paused beneath the arching crystal dome that covered
his penthouse studio. He stared through his grizzled reflection and looked out
over the wings of his timber mansion to the greensward sloping towards the edge
of the cliff, and the Pacific ocean beyond. Upon his return to Earth, Fairman
had sought to sequester himself far from human habitation, away from prying
eyes. He had almost succeeded.

As
ever, though, a phalanx of floating cameras hovered, with mute mechanical
propriety, just beyond the fence that demarcated his property. Trained his way,
they hoped to catch a glimpse of him in the throes of creation. Beyond the
fence, on the jade road, a small crowd of lost souls had gathered, as they did
every day, in a bid to see the great artist taking a stroll around his grounds.
Every day he took pleasure in disappointing them.

Two
years ago he had returned from Tartarus to find himself feted as one of the
greatest artists in the Expansion. On Tartarus, for the past forty years, he
and Aramantha had shut themselves away on a remote island off the uninhabited
western continent, turning out their respective works, despatching them to
their agent on Earth, and ignoring all reviews and critical reaction good or
bad. They had guessed that they were successful, or at least popular, by the
size of the cheques forwarded by their agent - monies which they had used to
fund galleries and cultural galas on their adopted homeworld.

After
Aramantha’s death Fairman had fled to Earth, to what he hoped would be a quiet,
anonymous life on the rugged coastline of the Pacific North-west. But the
illusion had been shattered by the battery of cameras and the legion of
reporters, both human and mechanical, awaiting him at the spaceport. He took
refuge in the first mansion he found up for sale, occupied himself with his
work and ignored all requests to appear in public.

Fairman
yawned as a wave of fatigue swept over him. He crossed to the bureau, slid open
a drawer and withdrew a small silver casket. He carefully opened the carved
lid. A few grains of silverdrift had collected in the corners of the box - all
that remained of the drug on which he was dependent, and not enough to dispel
the dreams should he choose to sleep. For the past month he had rationed his
nightly dose, to the point, for the past three nights, where the drug had been
ineffective against the onslaught of the nightmare images.

A
part of him knew that for the good of his art he should give rein to what the
monsters of his subconscious were trying to tell him, but that part of him
which wanted to retain its sanity cowered at the thought.

He
was wondering what had delayed Karrel - he had promised to call at noon - when
he recognised the gothic lines of his friend’s customised flier in the air
above the greensward.

He
watched the artist land the vehicle on the deck outside the studio. Seconds
later the young man stepped through the sliding door and stopped in his tracks,
something histrionic in his affectation of surprise.

‘Good
God! You’ve actually . . . You said you were thinking of . . .’ Words failing
him, Karrel circled the six statues with the circumspection of someone afraid
that they might come to life and flee. ‘Magnificent,’ he said beneath his
breath.

Karrel
was perhaps half Fairman’s age, around fifty, and still retained a youthful
head of golden hair and handsome, well-defined features. He was a third-rate
artist, very much in vogue, and he considered himself privileged to do Fairman’s
errands - even if those errands included supplying the famous artist with
silverdrift.

Wide-eyed,
Karrel looked across the studio at Fairman. He indicated the sculptures. ‘May I
. . . ?’

‘If
you must,’ Fairman muttered to himself, then aloud, ‘Why not?’

With
reverence, with an almost palpable air of expectation that seemed to Fairman
the next thing to parody, Karrel laid a hand on the first statue.

He
closed his eyes. His features melted into an expression of rapture.

Fairman
cleared his throat. He wanted nothing more than to get down to business.

Almost
reluctantly, the younger artist withdrew his hand. ‘A masterpiece,’ he
whispered. ‘Truly a masterpiece.’

Fairman
snorted. ‘I’m not happy with it. It’s lacking something.’

Karrel
pouted judiciously. ‘Well . . . perhaps it
could
do with a little
refinement, the slightest of tweaks?’

‘A
great twist, more like,’ Fairman said. ‘Anyway, less of that. How are you? Are
you working?’

‘Never
better, and I’ve landed the commission for the mural at the Diego starport.’

Fairman
was nodding to himself. How such mundane trivialities - or rather the
seriousness with which people took them - sickened him to his marrow.

‘Speaking
of which . . .’ he said.

‘Murals?’

‘Starports.’

Karrel
looked uncomfortable. He dabbed at his nose with a perfumed kerchief, feigning
interest in the last statue.

Fairman
had entrusted the artist to obtain not just his usual monthly supply of
silverdrift, but two kilos of the stuff. That much would last him for five
years, and no one addicted to the drug had survived any longer.

‘Well?’
Fairman demanded.

‘I’m
afraid there was a slight - how shall I put it? -
difficulty.’

‘You
failed to obtain a bulk consignment?’

‘You
might say that,’ Karrel murmured. ‘Not that I didn’t try. Just last week my
contact at the ‘port promised me the two kilograms.’

‘So
how much did you manage to get?’ Fairman asked.

Karrel
shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I ... I made alternative enquiries. There are other
drugs, miracle philtres that will provide the same relief as silverdrift.’

‘You
are mistaken, my friend. There is no substitute for ‘drift. I’ve tried
everything from natural drugs to manufactured substances.’ He paused. ‘How much
did you obtain?’

‘My
contact could lay his hands on not one grain. The danger involved . . . The TWC
authorities have declared the drug a banned substance.’ Karrel stood beside the
statues, seventh in line and just as immobile.

Fairman
found a chair and sat down, a finger to his lips. What a fine irony it was that
Tartarus was the sole source of silverdrift. If only he had known, when
resident on Tartarus, that one day he would be dependent on the drug . . .