The Fall of Tartarus (31 page)

She
lowered the dagger until its point touched the tanned flesh of his chest. Then
she applied pressure. He let out a breath. A droplet of blood welled. She drew
the dagger lightly down his torso, from sternum to abdomen, alternately scoring
a bloody line and a thin white scratch across his skin. He gripped the side of
the bunk, breathing hard, staring at her.

When
she reached the muscles of his stomach, she raised the dagger and stood. With
trembling fingers she unlaced her dress, let it drop and stepped from it. She
stood before him naked, but his eyes never left her face. She raised the dagger
for a second time, pressed it to the skin between her breasts, and winced as
she dug the point home and scored it down her body. Then she threw aside the
dagger and joined Connery, wound to wound, on the bed.

For
a few seconds as he came awake, Connery felt the weight of the girl in his arms
and his thoughts were filled with the notion of Madelaine. He convinced himself
that he could smell the natural scent of her small body, hear the familiar
sound of her breathing.

Then
he regained his senses and his awareness was flooded with the memories of Leona
and her strange courtship rite. An immediate, stabbing sense of regret was soon
sluiced away by the memory of what had passed between them. It was more than
five years since he had last made love to a woman, during which time he told
himself that he missed neither the intimacy nor the affection: the truth was
that he had missed both, but as the years passed by he found it ever more
difficult to initiate a relationship. Whether this inability was caused by the
fear of losing a loved one for a second time, or the thought that he was being
unfaithful to the memory of Madelaine, he did not know.

He
carefully disengaged himself from her limbs and left her sleeping on the bunk.
He dressed quickly, hardly taking his eyes from the girl. She rolled onto her
back, into the space he had vacated, and twitched slightly in her sleep.

He
was about to leave the dome to check his equipment before the surfacing of the
Vulpheous when Leona spasmed, her whole body convulsing for an instant as if
electrocuted. This brought her awake; she sat up, shivering and staring across
at him. Her mouth moved, but no words came. She lay back, staring up at the
apex of the dome and crying. She was hugging her shoulders and pulling her
knees up to her chest, as if in an effort to warm herself. Connery rushed
across to her, tried to hold her. She pushed his arms away, pointed across the
chamber to her pack on the floor. ‘In there’ she gasped. ‘Powder.’

He
almost tore the pack apart in a bid to get at its contents. He pulled out half
a dozen pouches heavy with crystallised substances and stared across at Leona.

‘Water!’
she cried.

He
fetched a water container and a cup. ‘Now what? For chrissake what do I do?’

‘A
little ... a little of each powder in the cup.’

His
fingers huge and useless, he pulled the drawstring on the first pouch and
nipped out an amount of yellow powder. He held it up to Leona, who nodded,
watching him with eyes wide in desperation as he transferred the powder to the
cup. He did the same with the second and third pouch, but when he came to the
fourth, Leona screamed aloud. ‘No! Less . . . That much can kill!’

He
dropped a few grains into the cup, then continued with the two remaining
powders. He stirred the concoction with a finger, surprised to see it turn
blood-red and viscous, then carried it over to the girl. He put an arm around
her shoulders and lifted the cup to her lips. Steadying it with both hands, she
drank the fluid in grateful gulps. She seemed immediately to relax. He lay her
back on the bunk, stroking a sweat-soaked strand of hair from her forehead.

‘You
are ill,’ he whispered.

She
shook her head. ‘No ... I will be fine.’ She smiled at him, a dreamy
half-smile, as her eyes closed in sleep.

He
remained with her for a while, watching her even breathing and working to calm
himself. Through the wall of the dome he could see the fiery night sky slowly
replacing the magnesium glare of daytime, the streaked scarlets and tangerines
gaining in strength. He stroked Leona’s hair one last time and left the dome,
the heat and humidity breaking over him in an almost palpable wave.

There
was something unnatural about the scene as he stood beneath the canopy and
stared out across the lake, the green circle of water beneath the two-tone sky
suggesting the garish nightmare of a crazed expressionist. Connery had never
felt at home on Tartarus, among its many strange peoples and even stranger
places. He would breathe easier when finally he took his leave of the dying
planet. His yacht was anchored in a sheltered cove on the other side of the island,
and sailing time to Baudelaire was a matter of three or four weeks. He thought
of Leona, the fact that she had told him she would remain here ‘to pay her
respects’, as she had said, for a year or more . . .

He
checked and rechecked the settings and calibrations of his equipment. All was
as it should be. The lasers, grapples and hawsers were primed to activate when
he keyed in the single command on the terminal beside him. All that remained
was for the Vulpheous to show itself.

He
heard the outer door of the dome open and watched Leona pick her way across to
him. She was shy in the aftermath of their lovemaking, her eyes downcast. They
sat on the shore of the lake and Connery put an arm around her shoulders.

At
last he asked, ‘Do you have to stay here for a year? Couldn’t you leave in a
few days?’

Her
shoulders moved in a shrug beneath his forearm. ‘I must...at
least
a
year. I wish I could leave soon, but that is impossible.’

‘Why,
Leona? What are you doing here?’

She
shook her head, as if she found it impossible to explain. She glanced at him,
and he saw tears in her eyes. ‘And you?’ she asked. ‘When do you leave?’

He
hesitated. Soon, in a year or so, the sun would blow. He would be long gone by
then. The gift he would give to the Thousand Worlds could not be jeopardised by
needless delay.

‘I
don’t know,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of leaving soon.’

She
glanced at him, then past him at his arrayed machinery. ‘Your work will be
finished then?’

He
nodded. ‘With luck, yes, it will.’

She
looked from his equipment and out across the lake, then returned her gaze to
him. ‘What are they for, Connery?’

He
sighed. He had prevaricated earlier when she had asked him the same question.
Now he felt compelled to tell her what he was doing, to try to explain himself.

‘A
great creature lives out there in the lake,’ he told her. ‘The Vulpheous. For
five years I’ve tracked it across the southern seas. It’s the last of its kind
and it has returned here to die.’ He shrugged. ‘Soon, when it surfaces, I will
kill it humanely and drag its carcass to the shore—’

He
stopped when he felt her stiffen beneath his arm. She pulled away and stared at
him. ‘Kill it? You want to
kill
it?’

‘Leona,
I know it seems barbaric—’

He
stopped. At that second, a slow series of air-bubbles broke the surface of the
lake.

Connery
slipped into the seat behind the laser cannon, sighting down the ‘scope at the
ripples radiating from close to the marker buoy. Now that the time had come,
the culminating event of five years’ hard work, his awareness of the world was
reduced to the surfacing creature, the laser and himself. He stared down the
‘scope, the blood pounding in his temples, and cried out as the domed head of
the Vulpheous butted ponderously through the mat of algae, emerging with the
slow grace of all colossal creatures. Connery reached out to the terminal
keyboard.

He
heard a scream, and saw a flash of movement from the corner of his eye. Leona
dived at the laser cannon as his finger struck the command key. The piercing
blue needle shot high and wide of its target as the cannon toppled with the
girl clinging to its barrel. Timed to activate seconds after the laser, the
harpoon and grapples exploded out from beneath the canopy, missing Leona by
centimetres. Connery watched as the harpoon struck the water before the
Vulpheous. Then the hawser sprang into programmed action, hauling in the
grapples empty but for gouts of algae and weed.

The
Vulpheous, either alarmed by the unaccustomed activity or sated with air, began
its leisurely descent. The bulk of its body disappeared slowly, followed by its
ugly, domed head. Its tiny yellow eyes seemed to bore across the lake at
Connery, at once mocking and accusing.

Leona
scrambled from the tangle of machinery, righted herself and ran up the slope.
She disappeared behind the dome and seconds later Connery heard her muffled
sobs.

He
picked up the laser, checking it for damage, and did the same with the hawser
and grapples. He recalibrated the weapon and recovery equipment, the weight of
aborted expectation settling over him like a depression. He told himself that
nothing was lost, that he would try again when the Vulpheous next emerged, and
this time succeed.

He
spent an hour needlessly going over the programme, waiting until Leona’s sobs
abated. When there was silence he left the canopy and walked around the dome.
He found her seated on a low boulder, her face lowered to her palms. She looked
up as his footsteps scattered pumice, wincing as if she thought he might strike
her.

He
sat down on the rock next to the girl and was silent for long minutes. At last
he reached out and gripped the back of her neck, her skin hot to his touch. He
pulled her towards him so that her head pressed against his chest.

In
a whisper, he asked, ‘Is the Vulpheous special to your people?’

She
drew a breath, hiccupped on a last sob, nodded. ‘We call it ultarrak,’ she
murmured. ‘It is as you say –
special.’

Connery
nodded, silently massaging her neck. ‘I want to tell you something,’ he said,
almost in a whisper. ‘I don’t know if you’ll understand, but I’ll tell you
anyway.’

He
was silent for a while, marshalling his thoughts, going over the events of the
past and sorting them into some kind of consecutive order.

‘Twelve
years ago my wife was told that she was suffering from an illness known as
Hartmann’s disease. It was very rare and very deadly. Only a hundred or so
cases had been diagnosed since records were kept on all the planets of the
Thousand Worlds, and most of the sufferers had succumbed to the disease. It was
a viral infection that invaded the lymphatic system, causing paralysis and
death within six months. My wife’s specialist held out no hope. I took her home
and hired a nurse to help me look after her. I resigned from my job as a
physicist with the TWC and spent all my time investigating the disease. The
last ten victims, spread far and wide across the Worlds, had all died within
the allotted six months, but I discovered that two sufferers had survived.
However, these people had lived fifty years ago - their medical records were
scant and both men were no longer alive. You can’t imagine, though, how the
knowledge that Hartmann’s could be beaten filled me with a hope that in
retrospect seemed futile, but at the time kept me alive ... I spent a fortune
travelling around the Worlds, interviewing people, talking to doctors and
scientists, quacks and charlatans ... I got nowhere. Back on Earth, my wife was
slowly deteriorating. I reached the point where I recognised that I had to give
up, return to Madelaine and nurse her through her last months.’

He
paused, suddenly pitched into the present with the tribal girl in the crater of
an extinct volcano, on a dying world a long, long way from Earth. Leona was
silent but for an occasional sniff, her cheek against his chest.

‘After
her death I left Earth and the memories and travelled to some of the Thousand
Worlds I’d never seen before . . .’

He
was running away, and he knew it, but it seemed the right thing to do at the
time. He could not face Earth and the painful associations it provoked, and he
told himself that a few years away from the place would work wonders. In time,
when the thought of Madelaine’s passing no longer tore at his insides, he would
return.

He
was in a bar in an exotic port city on a world called Solomon’s Reach when he
fell into conversation with a fellow drunk, who introduced himself and added
that he was a doctor of medicine. Connery was inebriated and maudlin and it was
perhaps natural that the topic of conversation should turn to his late wife and
the disease that had taken her life. The information that Madelaine had
succumbed to Hartmann’s had an odd effect on the doctor. He hiccupped and
straightened on his bar-stool, with that comical attempt at sobriety that
sometimes affects those drunks who wish to make a point.

The
doctor told Connery that he had heard of Hartmann’s disease. Not only that, but
had actually studied the virus at medical school, paying particular attention
to the case histories of the two victims who had survived the disease.

‘They
were saved by ... by some substance derived from the liver of a beast that
lived on the world of Tartarus, a backwoods planet along the arm.’