The Fall of Tartarus (35 page)

When
Alvarez had left the room, Hunter quickly crossed to the bed and took up the
‘phone. His heart leapt at the thought of listening to his wife’s voice. He
inserted the ‘phone in his right ear, activated it.

Tears
came to his eyes. Her words brought back a slew of poignant memories. He saw
her before him, her calm oval face, dark hair drawn back, green eyes staring
into space as she spoke into the recorder.

Hunter
lay on the bed and closed his eyes.

Apollinaire Town. Mary’s day, 33rd St Jerome’s month, 1720 -
Tartarean calendar.

By
Galactic Standard it’s ... I don’t know. I know I’ve been here for months, but
it seems like years. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that anything exists
beyond this damned planet. The sun dominates everything. During the day it
fills the sky, bloated and festering. Even at night the sky is crimson with its
light. It’s strange to think that everything around me, the everyday reality of
Tartarus I take for granted, will be incinerated in less than a year. This fact
overwhelms life here, affecting everyone. There’s a strange air of apathy and
lassitude about the place, as people go about their business, marking time
before the wholesale evacuation begins. The crime rate has increased; violence
is commonplace. Bizarre cults have sprung up - and I mean even weirder than the
official Church of the Ultimate Sacrifice.

Alvarez,
I want you to pass this recording on to Hunter when he’s fit and well. I know
you want a progress report, and you’ll get one. But I want to talk to my
husband, if you don’t mind.

I’m
staying at the Halbeck House hotel, Hunter - in the double room overlooking the
canal. I’m dictating this on the balcony where we did the editing for the last
film. I’m watching the sun set as I speak. It’s unpleasantly hot, but at least
there’s a slight breeze starting up. In the trees beside the canal, a flock of
nightgulls are gathering. You’ll be able to hear their songs a little later,
when night falls. A troupe of Leverfre’s mandrills are watching me from the far
balcony rail. I know you never liked the creatures, Hunter - but I find
something inexpressibly melancholy in their eyes. Do you think they know their
time is almost up?

(Oh,
by the way, the hotel still serves the most superb lemon beer in Apollinaire.
Mmm.)

Okay,
Alvarez, I know - you want to hear how I’m progressing.

Three
days ago I got back from a month-long trip into the interior. I’d been getting
nowhere in either Apollinaire or Baudelaire. The leads I wanted to follow up
all ran out - people were reluctant to talk. A couple of people I wanted to
interview - the freelance film-maker who recorded
something
ten years
ago, and the uranium prospector who claimed he’d seen a Slarque . . . well, the
film-maker left Tartarus a couple of years back, and the prospector is dead. I
tried to make an appointment with the Director of the Natural History museum,
but he was away and wasn’t due back for a week. I left a message for him, then
decided to take a trek into the interior.

Hunter,
the ornithopter service no longer runs from Apollinaire. Gabriella’s sold up
and left the planet, and the new owner has resited the operation in Baudelaire.
It’s understandable, of course. These days there are few naturalists,
geologists, or prospectors interested in the southern interior. The only
visitors to the area are the members of one of the crackpot cults I mentioned,
the so-called
Slarquists,
who come here on their way to the alien
temples down the coast. I don’t know what they do there. There are rumours that
they make sacrifices to the all-powerful God of the Slarque. Don’t ask me what
kind of sacrifices.

Anyway,
with no ornithopters flying, I hired a tracked bison and two armed guards, and
set off inland.

It
took four days to reach the site of our first camp, Hunter - the rock pool
beneath the waterfall, remember? From there it was another two days to the foot
of the plateau, to the place where you . . . where the attack happened. It was
just how I remembered it - the opening in the smaller salse trees, the taller,
surrounding trees providing a high level canopy that blotted out the sun ... I
left the guards in the bison and just stood on the edge of the clearing and
relived the horror of what happened three years ago.

I
can hear you asking why I went back there, why did I torture myself? Well, if
you recall, I’d set up a few remote cameras to record some of the more timorous
examples of the area’s wildlife while we went trekking. After the attack ...
I’d left the cameras and equipment in my haste to get to Baudelaire. It struck
me that perhaps if the Slarque - if Slarque they were - had returned, then they
might be captured on film.

That
night in the clearing I viewed all the considerable footage. Plenty of shots of
nocturnal fauna and grazing quadrupeds, but no Slarque.

The
following day I took forensic samples from the area where the attack happened -
broken undergrowth, disturbed soil, etc, for Alvarez’s people to examine when
they get here. Then I set up more cameras, this time fixed to relay images back
to my base in Apollinaire.

I
decided to make a few exploratory forays into the surrounding jungle. We had
food and water for a couple of weeks, and as the guards were being paid by the
hour they had no reason to complain. Every other day we made circular treks
into the jungle, finishing back at the campsite in the evening. I reckon we
covered a good two hundred square kilometres like this. I filmed constantly,
took dung samples, samples of hair and bone . . . Needless to say, I didn’t
come across the Slarque.

Just
short of a month after leaving Apollinaire, we made the journey back. I felt
depressed. I’d achieved nothing, not even laid the terror of that terrible day.
It’s strange, but I returned to Tartarus on this mission for Alvarez with
extreme reluctance - if not for the fact that I was working for him to cover
the cost of your treatment, I would have been happy to leave Tartarus well
alone and let the Slarque fry when the sun blew. That was then. Now, and even
after just a few days on the planet, I wanted to know what had killed you, if
it were a Slarque. I wanted to find out more about this strange, devolved race.

I
left the interior having found out nothing, and that hurt.

When
I got back to Halbeck House, there was a message for me from the Director of the
Natural History Museum at Apollinaire. He’d seen and enjoyed a couple of our
films and agreed to meet me.

Monsieur
Dernier was in his early eighties, so learned and dignified I felt like a kid
in his company. I told him about the attack, that I was eager to trace the
animal responsible. It happened that he’d heard about the incident on the
newscasts - he was happy to help me. Now that it came to it, I was reluctant to
broach the subject of the Slarque, in case Dernier thought me a complete crank
- one of the many crazy cultists abroad in Apollinaire. I edged around the
issue for a time, mentioned at last that some people, on viewing the film, had
commented on how the beast did bear a certain superficial resemblance to fossil
remains of the Slarque. Of course, I hastened to add, I didn’t believe this
myself.

He
gave me a strange look, told me that he himself subscribed to the belief,
unpopular though it was, that devolved descendants of the Slarque still
inhabited the interior of the southern continent.

He’d
paused there, then asked me if I’d ever heard of Rogers and Codey? I admitted
that I hadn’t.

Dernier
told me that they had been starship pilots back in the eighties. Their shuttle
had suffered engine failure and come down in the central mountains, crash-landed
in a remote snowbound valley and never been discovered. They were given up for
dead - until a year later when Rogers staggered into Apollinaire,
half-delirious and severely frostbitten. The only survivor of the crash, he’d
crossed a high mountain pass and half the continent - it made big news even on
Earth, thirty years ago. When he was sufficiently recovered to leave hospital,
Rogers had sought out M. Dernier, a well-known advocate of the extant Slarque
theory.

Lieutenant
Rogers claimed to have had contact with the Slarque in their interior mountain
fastness.

Apparently,
Rogers had repeated, over and over, that he had seen the Slarque, and that the
meeting had been terrible - and he would say no more. Rogers had needed to
confess, Dernier felt, but, when he came to do so, the burden of his experience
had been too harrowing to relive.

I
asked Dernier if he believed Rogers’ story.

He
told me that he did. Rogers hadn’t sought to publicise his claim, to gain from
it. He had no reason to lie about meeting the creatures. Whatever had happened
in the interior had clearly left the lieutenant in a weakened mental state.

I
asked him if he knew what had become of Lt Rogers, if he was still on Tartarus.

‘Thirty
years ago,’ Dernier said, ‘Lt Rogers converted, became a novice in the Church
of the Ultimate Sacrifice. If he’s survived this long in the bloody
organisation, then he’ll still be on Tartarus. You might try the monastery at
Barabas, along the coast.’

So
yesterday I took the barge on the inland waterway, then a pony and trap up to
the clifftop Monastery of St Cyprian of Carthage.

I
was met inside the ornate main gate by a blind monk. He listened to my
explanations in silence. I said that I wished to talk to a certain Anthony
Rogers, formerly Lt Rogers of the Tartarean Space Fleet. The monk told me that
father Rogers would be pleased to see me. He was taking his last visitors this
week. Three days ago he had undergone extensive penitent surgery, preparatory
to total withdrawal.

The
monk led me through ancient cloisters. I was more than a little apprehensive.
I’d seen devotees of the Ultimate Sacrifice only at a distance before. You know
how squeamish I am, Hunter.

The
monk left me in a beautiful garden overlooking the ocean. I sat on a wooden
bench and stared out across the waters. The sky was white hot, the sun huge
above the horizon as it made its long fall towards evening.

The
monk returned, pushing a ... a
bundle
in a crude wooden wheelchair. Its
occupant, without arms or legs, jogged from side to side as he was trundled
down the incline, prevented from falling forwards by a leather strap buckled
around his midriff.

The
monk positioned the carriage before me and murmured that he’d leave us to talk.

I
. . . even now I find it difficult to express what I thought, or rather
felt,
on meeting Father Rogers in the monastery garden. His physical
degradation, the voluntary amputation of his limbs, gave him the unthreatening
and pathetic appearance of a swaddled infant - so perhaps the reason I felt
threatened was that I could not bring myself to intellectually understand the
degree of his commitment in undergoing such mutilation.

Also
what troubled me was that I could still see, in his crew-cut, his deep tan and
keen blue eyes, the astronaut that he had once been.

We
exchanged guarded pleasantries for a time, he suspicious of my motives, myself
unsure as to how to begin to broach the subject of his purported meeting with
the aliens.

I
recorded our conversation. I’ve edited it into this report. I’ve cut the
section where Fr Rogers rambled - he’s in his nineties now and he seemed much
of the time to be elsewhere. From time to time he’d stop talking altogether,
stare into the distance, as if reliving the ordeal he’d survived in the
mountains. In the following account I’ve included a few of my own comments and
explanations.

I
began by telling him that, almost three years ago, I lost my husband in what I
suspect was a Slarque attack.

Fr
Rogers: Slarque? Did you say Slarque?

Sam:
I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure. I might be mistaken. I’ve been trying to
find someone with first-hand experience of . . .

Fr
Rogers: The Slarque . . . Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on their wayward souls.
It’s such a long time ago, such a long time. I sometimes wonder . . . No, I
know it happened. It can’t have been a dream, a nightmare. It happened. It’s
the reason I’m here. If not for what happened out there in the mountains, I
might never have seen the light.

Sam:
What happened, Father?

Fr
Rogers: Mmm? What happened? What
happened
? You wouldn’t believe me if I
told you. You’d be like all the others, disbelievers all—

Sam:
I have seen a Slarque, too.

Fr
Rogers: So you say, so you say ... I haven’t told anyone for a long time.
Became tired of being disbelieved, you see. They thought I’d gone mad . . . But
I didn’t tell anyone what really happened. I didn’t want the authorities to go
and find Codey, arrest him.

Sam:
Codey, your co-pilot? But I thought he died in the crash-landing?

Fr
Rogers: That’s what I told everyone. Easier that way. He wanted people to think
he hadn’t survived, the sinner.

Sam:
Father, can you tell me what happened?

Fr
Rogers: It’s . . . how long ago? Thirty years? More? There’s little chance
Codey will still be alive. Oh, he had supplies aplenty, but up here ... up here
he was sick and getting worse. He made me promise that I’d keep quiet about
what he did - and until now I have. But what harm can it do now, with Codey
surely long dead?