The Fall of Tartarus (10 page)

The
Golden Swan
drew alongside the harbour wall, and we carried Gastarian
ashore on our shoulders. I found my land-legs with difficulty. The quayside was
crowded with islanders, a reception committee of local dignitaries and a clan
of Blackmen beside them. The Mayor approached Gastarian and escorted him across
the cobbles, Blackman at his side. Gastarian was called upon to say a few
words. I feared that soon I too would be forced to add my views. I whispered to
Loi that I needed a few minutes to myself, then slipped from the crowd and up
the hillside towards the township.

I
asked directions to the Race Museum and found it on a high greensward
overlooking the strait, a single-storey weatherboard building painted white. I
climbed the steps and pushed open the door. There was no one else inside, and I
was thankful for the privacy.

The
single room was long and low, with a polished timber floor and a plate-glass
window looking out to sea. The room had the hushed air and stillness of all
museums, as if the events of the past which it exhibited were sacrosanct. On
one side of the room were scale models of every ship that had won the race for
the last fifty years. On the wall above each ship was a roll-call of their
crews, and above them portraits of their victorious shipmasters. Below the
lists of the triumphant crews were, in smaller print, the names of all the many
sailors who had perished.

I
walked slowly along the length of the room, counting off the years.

When
I came to the model of the ship that had won the race six years ago, I read the
names of the sailors who had succumbed to the many dangers of the river
Laurent. I was aware of a constriction in my throat. I expected at any second
to come across the name of my father - but, to my surprise, it was not among
the two hundred names of the dead of that year. Very well ... I moved on to the
next year, and began the laborious process again, reading off the names of the
dead. The more names I read without arriving at my father’s, the more I
considered the possibility that he might have survived.

If
I located his name, and he was indeed dead, then all would be explained. But if
he had survived - then what had become of him? Had he eluded me yet again, a
cruel second time?

His
name was not among those sailors who had died three and four years ago, so I
tried the list from two years ago ... to no avail.

Was
it possible, then, that his ship had won?

I
was moving back to the list from four years ago, when I happened to glance up .
. . and what I saw stopped me in my tracks.

Staring
down at me from the wall was a portrait of my father, the Shipmaster of the
Flying Prince
, the championship boat of the year 1516.

Beneath
the portrait was a long caption outlining his achievement. My heart hammering
in my ears, hardly able to believe what I was seeing, I read.

I
came to the end of the caption, stunned, and looked up into the eyes of my
father - not the jubilant eyes of a winning master, but eyes dark and haunted
by past events.

For
perhaps the fifth time I read the final paragraph of the caption. ‘Gregor
Singer was a criminal captain, who faced the death penalty for deserting a
private army if he refused a Shipmaster’s commission. He accepted, won the race
in true style and, as is the custom, applied to join the Guild of Blackmen. He
was accepted, and taken . . .’

I
read no more. I backed away from the photograph of my father and stood in the
centre of the room as if paralysed.

He was accepted by the Guild of Blackmen . . .

Only
slowly, by degrees, did awareness overcome me.

I
sprinted from the museum and down the hill. The crowd was still gathered on the
quayside, arranged to view some spectacle. Only as I joined them and pushed my
way through the press, did I see the focus of their interest. A dozen Blackmen
in coloured leathers were already rising into the air. To my despair I saw that
among them was the Blackman in jet leathers, my father.

I
stood mute, watching him ascend. The other Blackmen formed a circle around him
as they climbed ever higher, towards the sun. I fancied that my father could
see me, was watching me, a small figure in the crowd, standing mesmerised as he
gained altitude.

The
twelve Blackmen circled my father, moving faster, until they became a Catherine
wheel blur about the tiny figure of the central Blackman; then they fell away
... He raised his arms above his head in a gesture like a benediction. A
tension communicated itself through the crowd, and I could hardly bring myself to
watch.

Then
he began to glow, at first orange, and then red, and the crowd around me
murmured their appreciation of a sight so aesthetic. I wanted to cry out, to
halt the process, but at the same time knew that this was his destiny.

His
detonation, his explosion into a million golden fragments, drew from the
observers as many gasps as exclamations, and from me only tears.

I
slipped from the crowd. The concerns of the islanders, enjoying their banal
routines, filled me with anger. How simple were other people’s lives when
compared to the complexity of one’s own!

How
youthful I was then . . .

I
walked along the pebble beach and sat down before the sea. For perhaps an hour
I remained there, reliving my time with the Blackman, wishing that somehow he
could have overcome his programming and told me of his true identity.

A
small voice drew me from my reverie.

I
turned and watched Loi pick her way towards me across the sharp pebbles, her
expression one of tortured determination. ‘So here you are! I wondered where you’d
gone.’

She
had her hands behind her back, as if concealing something from me. ‘Sinclair, I
tried to find you. Did you see Blackman’s finale?’

I
nodded that I had.

She
smiled at me. ‘He gave me this, Sinclair - to give to you.’ From behind her
back she produced my persona-cube and handed it to me.

She
must have sensed that I needed to be alone. ‘See you later,’ she whispered.
‘I’ll be in the quayside tavern. Gastarian and his crew are celebrating our
victory, and mourning the dead and gone.’

I
watched her leave the beach, then turned my attention to the cube in my lap.
With trembling fingers I turned it on. My father - the Blackman - stared out at
me. He was seated in his hotel room, his dark presence dominating the scene.

‘Father,’
I whispered.

‘Sinclair,’
he said. ‘You must have many questions, and I have so much to explain . . .’

As
the sun set, and the fiery light of night filled the sky, I sat on the beach
and talked with my father.

[Interzone 96,1995]

I
made my farewells to the house, moving from room to open-plan room, standing in
doorways and viewing in my mind’s eye scenes and incidents long gone. The house
was grown from Tartarean wildwood, without doors or windows, and admitted the
cooling northern breeze, great dancing butterflies and the mingled fragrances
from the abundant flowers in the garden. I moved to the verandah and leaned
against the rail, staring down across the vale to the shimmering blue lake and,
in the distance, the lofty mountains of Mallarme. Now that the time had come
for me to leave the playground of my youth, I felt compelled to stay a while
longer, to linger, to bathe in the memories that flooded back like an incoming
tide.

Two
momentous events occurred that summer fifty years ago, when I was fourteen and
life seemed a thing of limitless possibilities and boundless hope. I suffered a
loss that affects me still, and for the first time I fell in love. So bound
together were these incidents in my memory, as I looked back over the years at
the shallow but honest boy I was then, that I could not recall one without
being reminded of the other. My childhood was a halcyon period of endless
summers, and it was the first time that real tragedy, and inexorable passion,
had touched upon my life. The combination of events changed me - for better or
for worse, I do not know, but changed me nevertheless - from the starry-eyed
youth I was then to the man I am today.

Perhaps
the beginning of the end was the first day of my holiday, when my father called
me to say that he and my mother wished to speak with me. The summons, via the
speaking-pipe beside my bed, awoke me to a brilliant, sunlit morning tempered
by a cool breeze from the mountains. My room was a thoroughfare for all manner
of iridescent flying insects, and flowers curled their inquisitive heads
through the window-hole as if to witness my awakening. I had arrived home the
night before from my boarding school in Mallarme city a thousand kilometres to
the south, and I could think of no greater contrast than between the drab
confines of my dormitory and my own room. I had been released from the prison
sentence of school - the long months of the holidays seemed to stretch ahead
without end - and my room was a symbol of all that was good in life.

After
my father’s terse summons, I pulled on my shorts and shirt and, my feet bare to
the warmth of the wildwood, made my leisurely way down the many stairs to the
ground-floor. My parents’ possessions - the wooden carvings from Earth, the
artwork from around the Thousand Worlds, the Tartarean rugs and tapestries -
were familiar from my many summer and winter holidays here in the past, but at
the same time new and exotic after the spartan furnishings of my school.

My
parents, likewise, seemed to be creatures at once familiar and yet larger than
life, like well-loved characters from a much-read novel. I could not say that I
knew them well, nor could I claim to have loved them - they seemed to me to be
stereotypical parents, offering safety and succour, and demanding in return only
my attention and obedience, a contract that suited me, in my already
semi-independent way, very well.

I
had spoken only briefly to my father the night before, when he had met me at
the vench-train station of Verlaine, and we had not broached the topic of my
falling grades. I expected that this was what they wished to speak to me about
this morning. I envisaged the dialogue as I knocked upon the archway to the
study and entered: my father’s demand to know the reason for my lack of
success, my usual excuses, my mother’s entreaties that I would do better next
term, my earnest promises that I would. Already I was eager to be away from the
house, to be with my friends in the tree beside the lake. They had been on
holiday for the past week - I had been kept back to repeat an exam - and I was
impatient to catch up with events, afraid of missing out on shared experiences
that would subtly exclude me from the camaraderie of their company.

My
father was seated behind his vast desk, a big man with a florid face and curling
silver hair: he was cheerful and lenient by nature, only occasionally
stipulating bounds that were not to be crossed, and never were. My mother stood
before the arch that overlooked the garden and the lake. I had once overheard a
guest at a house party describe her as beautiful, which had surprised me at the
time, as one never thinks of one’s mother as being the object of such
attention. She might have been beautiful, but she was also cool and distant.
She seemed to me to go through the motions of being a mother, like an
inadequate actress playing a part for which she was manifestly unsuited. They
were both botanists who had come from Earth to study the flora of Tartarus,
fallen in love with the province of Mallarme and decided to stay.

My
mother moved from the arch and perched herself on the corner of the desk, while
I sat on the facing chair, my feet dangling inches above the polished timber
tiles.

My
father tapped something before him, hidden from me by the elevation of the
desk. ‘How much have they taught you at school about the supernova?’ he asked.

I
was surprised and relieved that I was not to receive a lecture. ‘Well . . .’ I
began. ‘We’ve studied all about the atomic processes—’

My
mother gave a tolerant half-smile. ‘No,’ my father said, ‘I mean
our
supernova - the effects it will have on Tartarus?’

I
frowned. I failed to see the reason for the question. ‘We were taught that one
day the sun will blow and destroy the planet.’