The Fall of Tartarus (18 page)

But
he kept silent. The Messenger believed, and who was he to gainsay such faith
with his cynical rationalisations?

If
such things as ghosts did, indeed, exist . . .

Quite
suddenly the mist lifted, and ahead Fairman made out the rocky bastion of
Kithira’s coastline. Inland, a spectacular range of mountains rose against the
great white orb of the sun. Fairman set the flier on a course parallel to the
shore, heading towards the southern seas where the continent stuttered to an
end in a diminishing chain of archipelagic islets.

He
cleared his throat. ‘You said you were summoned by the ghost of Aramantha? How
did this happen?’

The
creature spread her delicate fingers. ‘In ages past, long before humans came to
Tartarus, long before even the Slarque walked the planet, others lived here,
aliens from another star - the Tharseans. They did not die as we do, but lived
on as ghosts - or rather as what we call ghosts. The phantoms of this alien
race still live here, and occasionally they are joined by human ghosts, chosen
by the legion of the Tharseans. Aramantha Fairman is one such.’

‘And
this . . . this ghost - it summoned you?’

‘She
summoned me, said that she wished to speak with you. That is all I know.’ The
Messenger fell silent.

Fairman
sat back in his couch and contemplated what she had said. He considered
Aramantha, and what they had witnessed, more than once, on the island where
they had made their home.

Almost
every evening, after a long day’s work, they would take bread and cheese, fruit
and wine, and leave the villa. They would walk until they reached a suitable location,
and eat and drink and enjoy the view, talk about their work and what they hoped
to produce.

A
favourite place, to which they returned again and again, was the amphitheatre
on the western peninsula, a fan-shaped banking of marble-like tiers overlooking
the performance area beside the sea. The amphitheatre pre-dated the Slarque,
and was said to be the work of the aliens who had made Tartarus their home
aeons ago.

The
mystique of the place was emphasised by the fact, or so Aramantha had claimed,
that it was haunted. On perhaps a dozen occasions during their forty years on
the island they had heard strange sounds issue from the performance area of the
amphitheatre - the occasional cry, of pain or joy they could not tell, a string
of what might have been words in an unknown language, lofty and declarative,
and once, briefly, the sound of someone or something weeping. At least,
Aramantha had anthropomorphised them so. Although Fairman had heard them too,
he had rationalised the sounds, ascribed them to freak effects of the wind, or
the amplification of an animal noise by the excellent acoustics of the ruin.
And anyway, the incidents had been so infrequent, and then so brief, that
Fairman had tended to pay them little attention beside the all-consuming passion
for his wife and his work.

Harder
to explain away, however, were the visual manifestations witnessed by Aramantha
and himself. On two occasions - and these twenty years apart - they had both
become aware of a fleet, shifting form in the warm night air. The first time,
while drinking wine in the upper tiers of the amphitheatre, they had turned as
one, just in time to see a rapid blur vanish from sight down in the performance
area. Fairman had managed to convince himself that what he had seen was nothing
more than either the movement of a wild animal, or a dust-devil created by the
warm night winds that came in off the sea.

The
second incident had been more difficult to dismiss. They had approached the
amphitheatre from the beach, a little drunk with wine, and stopped dead before
they reached the performance area. To their right had appeared briefly - for
perhaps five seconds, no more - a flickering, humanoid form, an arm raised in a
gesture of valediction. Then it vanished, and Fairman and Aramantha had stared
at each other as if to corroborate what each had seen.

‘The
wine,’ he had muttered to himself.

And
down the years, while Fairman had tended to minimise the import of the
apparition - citing scientific rationalisations like hallucinations or
sympathetic mental imagery - Aramantha convinced herself that the amphitheatre
was indeed haunted. She had even produced a performance piece entitled, ‘The
Phantom of the Isle’.

And
now, if the Messenger was to be believed, she herself had returned as a
phantom.

They
sped south, on a course parallel with the coast. The inland mountains gave way
to broad plains, once green but burned ochre now by the ministrations of the
sun. The gentle sea lapped at isolated coves and beaches, incessant activity
that had gone on from time immemorial, and which few human eyes had seen - and
which, in twenty years, would be no more. Such beauty, Fairman thought, such
innocent beauty destroyed by unimaginably vast forces.

The
sun was a great, nebulous orb balanced on the horizon. It was setting, though
the process would take hours, and in its wake would not come night as such but
a bloody and baleful twilight. Fairman felt himself nodding off, but fought the
urge.

Hours
later, the flier on automatic, he did finally doze, only to be awoken after
what seemed like minutes by a frightful nightmare image. He thrust a dagger
into Aramantha’s heart, and then stood back in horror, while all around him in
the amphitheatre spectators denounced him as a traitor.

He
sat upright with a small cry, and was rewarded by the sight of the archipelago
ahead, a series of evenly spaced islands diminishing over the bow of the sea.
The panorama, a duplication of the scene he had beheld many times over the
years, brought tears to his eyes.

He
lowered the flier so that it was wave-hopping, and one by one passed the
uninhabited islands, dark against the broad disc of the setting sun. Two hours
later he came upon the penultimate island of the archipelago. He decelerated,
planed the flier in across a sheltered cove and settled it on the beach.

The
Messenger frowned at the island. ‘But this is not Lyssia,’ she said.

‘No
- there is . . . I have business to complete here, before . . .’ Reluctant to
discuss his addiction, he quickly pulled two canisters from beneath the couch.
He set off up the beach, towards the forest which covered the island.

The
heat of the sun scorched his skin and seared his lungs with every breath. He
recalled the long evenings he had spent with Aramantha on their island, the
cooling sea breezes which had tempered the heat of the day.

It
was quiet within the forest, and cooler; high overhead the foliage filtered the
light into slanting columns, through which motes of sparkling dust eddied and
swirled on their lazy descent from the silver trees to the forest floor.
Fairman took a deep breath, and was aware almost instantly of the intoxicating
effect of the unprocessed drug. The dust coated the mucous membranes of his
nose and mouth with a sweet, perfumed taste, rich with the promise of
dream-free sleep.

He
and Aramantha had taken their boat to this island perhaps once a year, stayed
for a day and night during which they had swum in the rock pools, made love on
the moss-carpeted forest floor, and become blissfully high on the air-borne
stimulant. Taken this way, so infrequently, it was neither addictive nor
harmful.

He
came upon a shallow dell in the forest, filled with a drift of the silver
spores. He knelt and scooped handfuls into the canisters. The dust coruscated
in his palm, reflecting the light of the setting sun like diamond filings. He
filled the canisters and replaced their caps. He judged that he had sufficient
silverdrift to last him five years. His only thought was that it would make his
existence bearable again, his nights tolerable ... So what if in five, six
years the cumulative effect of the substance would rot the synapses of his
brain, scale the byways of his ganglia with its virulent chemical crud, and
bring about motor neurone dysfunction and rapid death?

He
returned to the beach and stowed away the canisters, the Messenger watching him
with a neutral expression. He lifted the flier and headed across the sea
towards Lyssia. Within minutes, emotion blocking his throat, he powered up the
white beach and came to a halt outside the studio-villa he had shared with
Aramantha.

He
climbed out and stood in the fine sand, staring up at the two-tier edifice. The
Messenger was beside him, yawning and stretching, luxuriating in the heat of
the sun.

‘The
ghost is—’

‘I
know,’ Fairman snapped. ‘In the amphitheatre.’

The
Messenger stared at him with wide eyes, then nodded silently.

‘If
you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘I’d rather be alone.’ Before she could reply, he set
off up the sloping beach towards the villa, relieved that the Messenger made no
move to follow him.

He
walked through the rose garden, neglected and overgrown these past two years,
and climbed the steps to the second level deck. The sliding door was not
locked. He passed inside.

Unable
to recall how he had left the villa, he had expected bare rooms made anonymous
by the removal or storage of their possessions. He was shocked to find that the
room was as he recalled it from when he had lived here. He looked about him,
saw a few of Aramantha’s favourite pieces - a portrait of herself she had
commissioned from a friend, a landscape of the mountainous southern continent
they had both loved. The sight of these objects now brought back a flood of
painful memories. He realised that all that was missing from the scene was
Aramantha herself.

He
hurried quickly through the lounge and into his old studio. This room was bare,
empty. He had taken his own tools and materials with him to Earth; Aramantha
had worked in another studio on the ground floor. He resolved not to revisit
that room.

He
took the spiral staircase to the garden behind the house - the sloping rockery
in which Aramantha had lovingly reared her favourite blooms. He strolled up the
zigzag path, and at the top of the garden sat down on the bench which
overlooked the villa and, beyond it, the sea.

How
many times had they sat side by side on this very bench, discussing life, their
work, art in general? Now Aramantha’s absence was hard to bear, a physical pain
within his chest. He could hear her voice, smell her scent, see her face
radiant in the light of the setting sun. He was aware that his cheeks were wet
with tears.

One
of his final memories of Aramantha was of her returning from her physician in
Baudelaire. For months previously she had complained of listlessness, frequent
migraines, and eventually she had set aside her natural mistrust of the medical
profession and, on Fairman’s behest, consulted a doctor.

The
diagnosis was that she was suffering from a rare neurological disease - Fairman
could not recall the precise nature of her illness, as he had had this edited
from his memory - and had only months to live. It had been a vicious blow that
came at them without warning; they had been looking forward to another fifty
years in each other’s company. They had never even dreamed of one being parted
from the other, still less parted by a fatal disease in this relatively
disease-free age.

Two
months after the diagnosis, Aramantha had died, though he retained memories
only of the first month. It had been a limbo period of disbelief, of anger and
grief. They had had to readjust themselves to the knowledge of her eventual
end, redefine their relationship. Fairman had been solicitous of his sick wife
and had cosseted her - which Aramantha had not wanted. In death, as in life,
she demanded to be treated as an equal, with no sympathy, no special pleading
or dispensation. Fairman recalled that she had worked hard on her final
project, which she had kept secret from him with the promise that she would
tell him what she was doing in due course. But if she had ever let him in on
her secret, then he’d had that wiped from his consciousness too.

Not
for the first time he wondered why he had undergone the memory erasure
programme. He had loved Aramantha as he had loved no one else, and the
knowledge of her illness had nearly destroyed him - but others had suffered the
loss of loved ones without resorting to memory erasure. He had lived all his
adult life with the philosophy that if he was to strive to create art from the
reality around him, then all experience was worthwhile. Why had he not learned
from the tragedy, transcended Aramantha’s death and grown in mental stature
like the artist he claimed to be? What had been so terrible about his wife’s
end that he should have had it excised from his mind?

He
stood suddenly and walked from the garden, up the incline to the greensward
that was the highest point on the island. It was a stroll of thirty minutes to
the coast and the amphitheatre there, but Fairman made it in half that time.
The combination of exertion and anticipation, and the heat, had him sweating as
he came upon the amphitheatre, paused on the top tier and stared down into the
performance area. He could almost make-believe that Aramantha was at his side,
sharing the magnificence of the view.

He
recalled the phenomena he and Aramantha had witnessed here all those years ago.
More than anything he wanted to accept that somehow, in some way, his beloved
had outlived death - but how could he forego the tenets of a life of
rationalism because now, in extremis, some bereaved part of his psyche needed
to believe in the impossible?