The Fall of Tartarus (20 page)

She
activated the camera and filmed as she made her away across the city. The shots
would provide good background and incidental detail for the documentary. Within
minutes of leaving the hotel, she was roasting in her own juices. Sweat
dribbled between her breasts and over her stomach. Despite the increasing heat,
there were still angry crowds gathered at strategic positions in the city:
government buildings, travel agencies, and the square of St Christopher in the
centre of town. The racial mix on this continent was largely Latin and Asian;
since her arrival two days ago she’d noticed only three or four blacks. She’d
worried at first that she might fall victim to prejudice - some colony planets
of her experience were notoriously racist - but on the whole she’d found the
Tartareans friendly and helpful. She wondered if the natives were so preoccupied
with ensuring their flight from the planet that they had little time to worry
about things like the colour of a stranger’s skin.

She
heard the sustained, muffled chanting well before she reached its source. As
she approached the turning into the square, she knew the crowd would be
surrounding the building that was her destination. She should have realised
before she set out that the headquarters of the TWC Evacuation Force would be
at the epicentre of the current unrest, and called ahead to ensure she could
gain admittance.

Perhaps
two or three hundred jeering citizens were held back behind a cordon of
crash-barriers. Behind the barriers stood a line of armed security guards. The
crowd hurled insults, and the occasional bottle or brick. Once or twice the
guards fired over the heads of the protestors. They cowered as one for a
moment, then gained in courage and spat curses and threats with even greater
zeal.

Katerina
pushed through the crowd and came up against the crash-barrier. She reached out
and showed her press card to a stern-faced guard.

‘I’m
meeting Director Magnusson at ten.’ She smiled at the guard and glanced around
at the crowd. ‘I didn’t realise that half the city would want to see him, too.’

In
other circumstances she might have interpreted a tacit racial insult in his
uncompromising expression, but she reminded herself that she was on Tartarus
now. ‘Not funny? Okay, I’m no comedian. But I am Katerina De Klien, and if
Magnusson gets to know that you wouldn’t let me through he’ll have your balls
for breakfast.’

Maybe
he’d caught one of her shows and knew her tag, or her tone intimidated. He took
her card, backed off and spoke quickly into a communicator, his glance
shuttling between Katerina and her mug-shot on the card.

He
came back to the barrier, returned her card and nodded. He even made to assist
her, but Katerina ignored the proffered hand and jumped over by herself.

She
strode across the cleared cobbles before the building, filming all the way.
Another guard checked her identity before the big double doors, and yet another
- a woman this time - behind a desk in the shivery-cold atmosphere of the
air-conditioned foyer. The woman escorted her wordlessly along a corridor and
into an elevator. They rode three floors and stepped out into an identical
corridor, the sky blue carpet matching the officer’s uniform.

Across
from the elevator was a polished wooden door. Katerina’s escort knocked, waited
for a reply, then opened the door. She stood aside, gestured for Katerina to
enter, then left her alone but for a dark-haired man seated behind a desk at
the far end of a long, long room.

‘Ms
De Klien,’ Director Magnusson said in a voice so smooth it was almost a purr.
‘I’ve always wanted to ask you if your name was a pseudonym.’

Katerina
took an instant dislike to the Director.

‘I
often wondered if such a surname existed—’ he said.

‘It’s
the professional name I took when I entered journalism,’ she snapped in a tone
intended to show the Director that she had more important things to discuss.

She
dropped into a big leather bucket seat without waiting to be invited, lay back
and lodged a booted foot on her knee.

Magnusson,
she decided, had the darting eyes of a libidinous pimp, and skin as pale as
semen. She judged he was in his fifties, handsome in a washed-out, etiolated
kind of way.

‘I
know your work,’ he said. ‘One cannot get away from it, even on Tartarus. When
we began work here, it was decided that the workers of the TWC should have the
benefit of holovision, for their amusement. Though quite how your . . .
shows . .
. passed the censor, I shall never know.’

Katerina
made a tired gesture. ‘Look, you don’t know how many times I’ve met jerks who
hate my work. I’m used to getting shit, understand? You’re not going to
intimidate me by telling me how much you hate my programmes.’

Magnusson
gave a thin-lipped smile. ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I hate your
work. In fact I’ve found a couple of your films quite compelling, if cynical
and hopeless.’

‘You
sound like my best critic.’

‘So
when I heard you wanted to interview me, of course I was intrigued.’

Don’t
be, Katerina thought, you’ll not like this one bit.

‘I
take it you have a concealed camera? Is it running?’

‘Since
I walked through the door, Director.’

Some
people, on learning they were being filmed, lost their cool: Magnusson, to his
credit, remained courteous and rather formal.

‘In
that case perhaps you can tell me what your film will be about?’

‘Sure.’
Katerina sat forward in her chair, elbows on knees, and stared at the Director.
‘It’ll be a little different from my usual films. More personal, emotional.
Critics have panned my work for lacking feeling, empathy. They say I’m cruel.’
She shrugged. ‘I’m not cruel, it’s just that I don’t moralise about what I
point my camera at . . . Anyway, this film’ll be from the heart.’

She
paused. ‘Imagine a young boy, an orphan in a government home, intelligent,
ambitious. He reaches sixteen and skips Earth, goes to see the stars. He moves
from world to world, working at whatever he can. Then he decides to join the
TWC, undergoes the training, and three years later graduates. He’s posted to
the Evacuation Force, sees his first active service on Salenko before the comet
wipes out the planet. He does okay and he’s promoted, then sent to Tartarus
Major. He works here in Baudelaire a couple of years, then gets shifted to the
southern continent. On furlough back here, he comes down with some tropical
disease and dies in three days . . . Just another TWC casualty, one among
hundreds every year . . .’

Magnusson
cleared his throat and interrupted. ‘If you could get to the point.’

Katerina
gave him a long, silent stare. ‘You asked me what the film was about. I’m
telling you.’ She closed her eyes, gathering her thoughts.

‘So
. . .’ she went on, ‘the TWC tries to contact his next of kin. They know he had
a sister, but they can’t trace her. Meanwhile, little sister grows up in the
orphanage in Senegal. One day she gets the chance to quit the place - so she
runs away and never goes back. She lives on the streets in Dakar, gets a few
breaks, works hard and gets successful. She decides to try to trace her
brother. She’s a journalist, and film-maker, so she has contacts and skills.
After lots of hard work, she finds out the TWC version of the truth - the
tropical disease bit, the dead-in-three-days-and-nothing-could-be-done story.
So little sister grieves for the man she didn’t know, the brother she loved and
hoped would one day come back for her.’

Katerina
stopped there, staring at her clasped hands. Her long nails dug imprints into
the skin.

‘Then
last year I’m working on Mars on a big story about government corruption over
the Olympus dam project, and I get a call from this guy who says he worked for
the TWC and knew my brother on Tartarus. He wants to see me, so we arrange to
meet in a bar in New Vilafranca. He tells me that my brother didn’t die of some
tropical disease as it was widely believed. He says my brother left Apollinaire
and flew south into the interior, not north to Baudelaire. Only, this guy says,
he never came back. He disappeared and no trace of him or his flier was ever
found.’

Katerina
fell silent, counted to ten. She looked the Director directly in the eye. ‘My
film is about my brother, and about what really happened, and why the TWC
decided to cover up his disappearance with lies about some tropical disease.’

She
knew, already, how she would use this footage, her little speech. She would
intercut it with stills of Bobby as a young boy, with snippets from the video
home-movie he’d left with an old girlfriend on Salenko.

Along
with her slow-burning resentment, she felt that quickening visceral thrill of
creating something lasting and worthwhile.

For
someone who knew he was captured on camera, Magnusson was handling the
situation with remarkable aplomb.

He
sat back in his chair and stared levelly at Katerina, a judicial finger placed
against pursed lips. ‘You tell an interesting story, Ms De Klien.’

‘It’s
no “story”, Director. I have proof.’

She
pulled a message disc from a pocket in her shirt. ‘It’s from Bobby, to me. His
friend found it in Bobby’s locker when he heard from his commanding officer
that Bobby had died in Baudelaire.’

‘That
proves nothing,’ Magnusson began.

Katerina
raised her eyebrows. ‘No?’ She tossed the disc across the desk, indicating the
screen to Magnusson’s left. ‘Go on, access it,’ she said. ‘And don’t think
about destroying it. I’ve taken the precaution of making copies.’

Magnusson
took the disc, his expression rigidly neutral. He slipped the disc into the
screen. Katerina had viewed the message many times before, but she could not
bring herself to look upon the image of her brother now: the lean, crew-cut
twenty-two-year-old, talking to the camera on the verandah of a hostel in
Apollinaire.

She
closed her eyes as his words spoke directly to her. ‘Kat, it’s Bob. It’s been a
long time. I . . . This probably won’t ever get to you - like all the other
discs I’ve made and never sent. I want to explain, Kat, apologise. I want to
tell you how it was from my point of view, and then maybe you’ll begin to
understand. I’m leaving for the interior tomorrow, hiring a flier and heading
south—’

The
screen blanked there, became static.

‘He
terminated the message,’ Katerina explained. ‘Perhaps he meant to continue, but
never got the chance.’ She stared at Magnusson. ‘Now, Director, are you going
to tell me what really happened?’

Magnusson
rotated his swivel chair, rose and strode to the window overlooking Baudelaire.
He remained with his back to Katerina for long minutes. She kept her camera on
him; the shot would create a nice period of tension in the film.

He
turned and regarded her, forthright. ‘I’ll tell you what I can,’ he said,
surprising her. ‘I don’t know if you came here out of genuine sentiment for
your brother, or in the hope of making a popular film.’

‘I
came here to find out what happened to Bobby,’ she said angrily, because
Magnusson was uncomfortably close to the truth.

He
regarded her for what seemed like a long time before saying, ‘As it happens, I
can shed light on the mystery surrounding your brother.’

He
returned to his desk and sat down. ‘Three years ago I was not in charge of
operations here on Tartarus. A certain Director Haller had control of policy.
Of course, when I took over from him I was apprised of the various activities,
both overt and covert, that Haller had sanctioned.’ Magnusson paused. ‘How well
up are you on the history of Tartarus?’

‘I
did a little research.’

‘Did
you read up on the southern tribes?’

She
frowned. ‘The descendants of the original European colonists? I know
of
them, but next to nothing actually
about
them.’

Magnusson
nodded. ‘Five years ago the policy of the TWC concerning the tribes of Iriarte,
the southern continent, was to leave well alone. They had devolved a lot since
their forbears took to the jungles. By our standards they were a primitive
people, with correspondingly primitive belief systems. Certain tribes held that
their destiny was with the planet, and even when informed of the impending
supernova they refused the offer of evacuation and relocation on some analogue
planet in the Thousand Worlds. They were reconciled to the thought of dying in
the supernova - they even celebrated the coming conflagration. Haller estimated
that some hundred thousand tribal peoples would perish if TWC policy remained
as it was.’

‘So
he intervened?’

‘He
decided that he couldn’t sit idly by while an entire race of people went
happily to their deaths, no matter what they believed. At that time, a large
sector of Iriarte was out of bounds to the TWC. Off-world observers monitored
TWC duties on Tartarus and ensured that they did not overstep their designated
bounds.’

Katerina
was one step ahead of him. ‘So Haller sent Bobby in to reconnoitre?’

Magnusson
smiled. ‘He sounded out a few trusted officers. Your brother agreed with him
about the fate of the tribes. Bobby was a good worker, very dedicated. Just
over three years ago, Haller sent him with another officer to learn the views
of certain tribes in the interior of the continent, to see if perhaps they
might be persuaded to leave the planet. The mission was covert, of course.
Haller risked losing his post if his superiors on Earth got wind he was
contravening TWC policy.’