The Fall of Tartarus (26 page)

‘What
chance that
both
their radios packed in at the same time?’ Chang voiced
the question that was worrying Jenner. ‘Okay, boss. I’ll try to raise Mac.
Speak to you soon.’

Jenner
replaced the speaker and leaned back in his seat. He had not seen or heard
Cahla enter the room - her grace and poise was that of a practised hunter. She
stood on one leg, the foot of the other tucked easily into her upper thigh, and
leaned against the arm of his chair.

He
reached up and took her hand. She could speak English, but silence was her
preferred medium: she communicated her thoughts and feelings in other ways;
touches, glances, gestures.

Jenner
could never quite banish his amazement when he looked upon the tribes-people of
the southern continent. They were a white race, with sun-bronzed skin and
bleached fair hair - and it was incongruous to see an essentially European
people so at home in the hostile environment of the alien jungle. The tribes
were the descendants of German and Scandinavian colonists who had settled and
farmed the continent hundreds of years ago. Their devolution to the status of
semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers was still more ironic when one considered the
fact that the early settlers had belonged to a religious order seeking
isolation in which to practise their fundamentalist beliefs.

The
founding fathers would never have recognised the quick, wild spirits that
haunted the jungle with the ease of natives born.

Cahla
was seven years old, almost twelve by Terran reckoning, a slim, elfin creature
with long, tanned limbs and ragged blonde hair, through the fringe of which her
blue eyes gazed in characteristic silence, missing nothing.

Jenner
often stared into her bright blue eyes and wondered at the world she looked out
upon, and the alien landscape of her mind behind those eyes.

Now
he squeezed her fingers. She gave him a glance - she almost never smiled - and
slipped from the room.

He
was startled by the chime of the radio.

‘Martin?’

‘No
luck, boss. Not a word from McKenzie or Patel.’

‘Okay,
Martin. Thanks.’

‘Ah,
boss - do you want us to go south and search—?’

‘No,
stay where you are. This is more than likely something of nothing.’

‘Very
well,’ Chang replied, sounding far from convinced.

Jenner
cut the connection.

Cahla
was sitting on the bottom step of the verandah with her legs outstretched, the
heel of her right foot notched between the toes of her left. Jenner pushed
through the flimsy fly-netting door and eased himself down the steps, instantly
wearied by the furnace-like heat. He sat down behind Cahla. She hung her arms
over his legs and laid her head in his lap. He wondered how often they had been
together like this over the past three years. Often when the teams were out, he
and Cahla would seek each other, as if in some mutual empathic need, and spend
silent hours together. Or, sometimes, when things were not going well, not so
silent hours: he would talk to her at length, tell her his problems, how things
were going with the evacuation plans - and she would listen, the expression on
her fine, faceted face neutral as she stared off into the jungle.

He
often wondered if he really knew the girl who called herself Cahla, or if what
he assumed he knew of her, the girl’s likes and dislikes, reactions and
mannerisms, were nothing more than a collection of details seen through
positively prejudiced eyes. She was young, she was beautiful, and she looked so
much as he imagined his daughter might have looked now, had she still been
alive.

Absently
he stroked her long hair. The sun was a hazy circle high above the horizon. In
the five years since his posting to Tartarus, the sun had swollen to twice its
former size, and the activity upon its bloody surface had increased. He often
stared in fascination at the haemoglobin rush of sunspots across the swollen
disc.

Cahla
said, ‘Is missing, McKenzie? Worried, you?’

He
laid a hand across the top of her head like some benign phrenologist. ‘McKenzie
and Patel. I tried to radio them - no reply.’ He forever found himself mincing
his grammar when talking to Cahla.

‘Tallman,
darkman, funnyman, McKenzie?’

Jenner
smiled to himself, smoothing her hair. ‘Yes, all those things. I feel
responsible, Cahla.’

A
hesitation. ‘Responsible?’

‘It
means . . . because of me they went out this time, because of me they are
missing.’

There
was no response from the tamed jungle girl. He wondered if she understood.

Discounting
the malfunction of both their radios, and the possibility that their flier had
crashed, he wondered what else might have happened to McKenzie and Patel. They
had never had any trouble with the tribes-people before. That left only the
possibility of wild animals, the chowl and the ferocious primates that dwelled
in the jungle. But both team members were armed and knew how to look after
themselves.

‘I
feel bad,’ Jenner said to himself. ‘Irrational as it is, that’s how I feel.’

Six
months ago Director Magnusson, head of the evacuation programme based in
Baudelaire, had contacted Jenner. He’d taken the call in the operations room,
Cahla crouching by his chair and staring wide-eyed at the swollen image of the
Director on the wall-screen.

Regarding
the Ey’an,’ Magnusson said, glancing up from a computer read-out, ‘I’ve been
assessing your report and we’ve come to a decision.’

Jenner
had nodded, uncomfortable. He had petitioned the Director for more time in
which to win the trust of the Ey’an.

‘We’ve
decided to go ahead with the “gift to the natives” option,’ the Director said,
holding up one of the seemingly innocuous oddments. ‘Time is of the essence.
I’ll send down a consignment of knives, pots and pans for distribution among
the Ey’an. Each item will contain a radio transmitter. When the time comes,
we’ll use them to locate and round up the tribe - utilising force if necessary.
Any objections?’

Jenner
had a few, but the Director had heard them all before. He had asked a couple of
routine questions before Magnusson cut the connection. Sensing his unease, Cahla
looked up at him with concern.

When
the crate of gee-gaws had arrived, Jenner sent McKenzie and Patel to Ey’an
territory to hand out the gifts.

Four
days ago he suggested that they return to monitor the success of the
distribution. It should have been a routine field-trip; there was no way he
could have foreseen the present situation. He told himself that he should not
feel responsible for what might have happened out there, but that did nothing
to ease his nagging guilt.

That
afternoon he sat down at the computer in his study and began the monthly
report. A couple of hours later, not halfway through listing his teams’
progress, he decided to complete the report later. He moved to the
communications room and tried again to raise McKenzie and Patel, without
success.

At
sunset, Cahla found him staring at the wall. She pushed the fly-netting door
open with her toes and laid her cheek against the jamb. ‘Jen, make food I.
Hungry you?’

They
dined on the back verandah as the sun slipped over the horizon and the evening
cooled. Cahla had prepared a salad, and they ate in customary silence, Cahla
sitting cross-legged on her chair and picking through her food like a bird.
Later she fell into her hammock and swung herself to sleep, a negligent arm and
leg hanging free.

Jenner
sat and stared into the dark jungle beneath the fulminating sky, contemplating
McKenzie and what action he should take. Tomorrow, if there was still no word
from his deputy, he would contact Baudelaire and request, as he had done four
years ago when Laura went missing, that Magnusson should send out a search
party.

The
sun was a burning filament on the horizon, giving off slow-motion fountains of
molten ejecta, when he left Cahla sleeping peacefully and moved inside.

He
sat wearily on his bed before undressing. He picked up the holo-cube from the
bedside table and stared at it. His wife smiled out at him - an attractive
woman, in her late thirties when the cube was made, with a tanned, lined face
and short blonde hair streaked with grey. She had an arm around Rebecca,
pulling the little girl to her chest.

Jenner
had stared so often and so hard at the image of his daughter that now in his
mind’s eye, when he thought of Rebecca, he saw only this likeness: a laughing
face, fair hair, wide, bright blue eyes . . . Over the years the pain of grief
had muted, from a sharp, insistent agony, to a dull infrequent ache. But the
years had also dulled his memory. It was a cruel paradox that now, when at last
he could bear to think about his daughter, he had difficulty recalling specific
instances of their time together. He could no longer recall the sound of her
voice, her laughter.

The
death of their daughter, in a monorail accident on Earth seven years ago, had
brought Jenner and Laura closer together. They had been approaching the end of
their marriage contract, and in all likelihood might never have renewed it but
for their loss. They had discovered more about each other in the hollow year
that followed the accident than they had in the previous five. Jenner had found
a strength and resolve deep within Laura that made the thought of being without
her - of going through the process of finding someone else, and trying to get
to know them just as well - impossible to contemplate, and clearly Laura had
undergone a similar re-evaluation. When Jenner suggested, tentatively, afraid
of being spurned, that perhaps they should take out another contract, she had
agreed without hesitation.

Two
years later Jenner was posted to Tartarus to work on the evacuation programme,
and Laura had secured a grant from her university to study the planet’s tribal
people.

They
had lived together at the Station for a year, Laura going off on field-trips
into the interior for weeks at a time, sometimes accompanied by students, but
often alone. Their marriage settled into a comfortable, amicable relationship,
no longer passionate, but full of trust and understanding. Their only
difference of opinion concerned the fate of the tribes-people. Through her
contact with the tribes, Laura had come to sympathise with their desire to die
with their planet, a desire Jenner admitted he could understand, but could
hardly accede to . . . Their infrequent arguments centred on the fate of the
tribes: Laura had argued that as an intelligent people they should be granted
their wish to remain when the supernova blew; Jenner that they were a primitive
people who should not be allowed to commit collective suicide because of belief
in pagan gods and a desire to be reunited with their ancestors.

They
had argued bitterly on the night before she disappeared. She had tried to
persuade him to talk to Magnusson about allowing certain tribes to remain on
Tartarus, but Jenner had refused. He could not be part of sanctioning what
might be described as genocide.

The
following morning, Laura had taken a power-boat for a three week trip upriver
with the intention of filming a local tribe. They had kept in radio contact for
a day, and then she had failed to answer his call. He had not been unduly
worried at the time. Laura knew the jungle well, knew how to look after
herself. But as the next day passed without word from her, and then the next,
his earlier confidence evaporated, turned to alarm. On the fourth day he called
Baudelaire and, later, accompanied the search team on a sweep of the route she
had taken. They had found nothing, no wreckage, no personal possessions, no
trace of Laura’s passage upriver. Jenner had contacted all the tribes-people in
the area, but they had come across no sign of his wife. After a fortnight the
search was called off, and the sudden inaction pitched Jenner into despair. He
thought back to their argument on the night before she vanished, and was
consumed by guilt that their final words had been so bitter.

As
the weeks turned into months, and then, incredibly, into years, he lived day by
day with the thought always at the back of his mind that
today
she would
return, and, if not today, then certainly tomorrow. Like this, bit by bit, he
managed to survive. Over the past year he had even come to consider what before
would have been unthinkable – how Laura might have met her end: an accident on
the river, a wild animal attack, illness . . . He only hoped that, however she
had died, it had been swift and painless.

He
replaced the holo-cube on the bedside table, swallowed a couple of sleeping
pills, and passed a dreamless night.

The
following morning Jenner was in the communications room, having once again
failed to reach McKenzie and Patel, when Cahla burst in. The screen door
smashed against the wall and shivered in its flimsy frame. She stood in the
opening, eyes wide. ‘Jen! Come, now. Come!’

‘What’s
wrong, Cahla?’ He had rarely seen her this animated.

She
leaned forward, balling her fists and banging the air in frustration. ‘Come
now! Out there - person!’

She
grabbed his hand and tugged him from his chair.