The Fall of Tartarus (19 page)

He
walked down the tiered steps, taking the descent with care. The temperature had
increased, as if the shape of the amphitheatre had captured and contained the
heat, like a cauldron. Ahead, the upper hemisphere of the setting sun spanned
the embrasure between the headlands.

He
reached the performance area, then stood still, a lone actor on an empty stage
awaiting the rise of the curtain. He looked about him, at the dizzying incline
of the tiers on three sides. He felt as though he were being watched by a
Thousand invisible spectators.

He
realised then that he was weeping, and when he spoke his voice cracked with
emotion. ‘Aramantha?’

He
turned at the suggestion of some sound behind him, and tried to focus on the
air between him and the banked tiers. The feeling that he was being watched
intensified.

‘Jonathon
. . .’ The sound reached his ears softly, the faintest breath.

He
spun around, seeing nothing. ‘Aramantha!’ His heart was thudding.

He
heard something, the merest whisper, what might have been: ‘You have come.’

He
said her name again. He stared at a point in the air three metres before him,
from where he imagined the voice had issued.

And
there, before the rising tiers, Fairman made out a shimmering, insubstantial
form - that, unmistakably, of a woman. Although the strata of the tiers could
be seen through the phantom figure, he could make out the strong, handsome
features, the piled dark hair, of Aramantha.

She
shimmered before him, an arm outstretched.

‘Jonathon
- you came. I wished to talk to you, to ensure that you were well, that I was
happy.’ Her voice, exactly as he remembered it, echoed in the air around him,
as if emanating from the stones of the amphitheatre.

Fairman
regained control of his breathing. He found his voice. ‘What . . . what are
you?’

The
ghost laughed, the sound so familiar. ‘Jonathon, Jonathon . . . you were ever
the rationalist. You could never bring yourself to believe in the ghosts that
haunted the arena.’ Aramantha gestured, a quick spreading of her fingers he
recalled so well.

‘What
am I? Am I a ghost? Am I the Aramantha you loved and lost?’ Her expression,
hovering before him like a faded super-imposition over the tiers, frowned as if
in concentration.

‘Strictly
speaking, I am not Aramantha - but a continuation of her. I have her memories,
her personality and beliefs.’

‘I
don’t understand.’

‘Then
again,’ the phantom went on, seeming to ignore him, ‘perhaps I am Aramantha.
How does one distinguish between an individual entity like your living wife,
and something that is an exact copy which began where the original left off?’

‘You’re
speaking in riddles!’ Fairman cried.

Aramantha
- he could call the spectre by no other name - sighed. She gestured around her
at the amphitheatre. ‘This place, and others like it across Tartarus, was built
millions of years ago by the Tharseans. You recall the myths, the tales told by
the Messengers of the proud star-faring race that rose to prominence and became
extinct before Earth even came into existence. They built many wonders on many
worlds, but perhaps none so great as this . . .’ She paused. ‘I suppose you
could call it an
eschatarium.
This is a place where the dead come back
to life, or at least where the identities of the dead are stored, living out
their own abstract existences.’

‘Here?’

‘In
the very fabric of the stones which constitute the arena is enmeshed a
technology so miniature as to be undetectable by the clumsy sciences of
humanity. This is where the dead of the Tharseans reside. You and I witnessed
these phantoms, though much faded and atrophied by the passage of time. The
aliens brought their loved ones here to die, and duly they were absorbed into
the technology of the amphitheatre, granted an extended existence - depending,
of course, upon one’s beliefs.’

Fairman
was shaking his head. ‘I ... I find it all very hard to believe.’

Aramantha
spread her arms wide, a shaft of dying sunlight falling through her torso.
‘Believe,’ she said. ‘Behold and believe.’

Fairman
stared at her shimmering form. He said at last, ‘The Tharseans brought their
loved ones here to die? Then how did you come to be ... ?’

‘I
was lucky, Jonathon. The play - my final performance.’

He
echoed her words.

She
laughed. ‘Surely you cannot have forgotten? The event we enacted upon this
stage? The last act of Julius and Hippolyte.’

‘Aramantha
. . . when I returned to Earth, the grief ... it was obviously to much for me
to bear.’ And he told her of how he had had his memory of the final weeks
erased from his consciousness.

He
shook his head, some detail beyond his understanding. ‘But if I agreed to enact
the sequence with you . . .’ He recalled the scene in the Martian epic, in
which Julius passed his dying lover the chalice of poison. Presumably, then, he
had played this part in Aramantha’s ultimate performance. He could understand
that he would have been duly grief-stricken - but to the extent where he would
have had the memory wiped from his mind? ‘If I agreed to take the part of
Julius, why did I have the memory wiped?’

Aramantha
was shaking her head. ‘Jonathon, Jonathon . . . What torture you must have
passed through before the memory erasure.’

‘But
why? I don’t understand! Why could I not live with the memory, grieve and come
to some reconciliation of what had happened? Surely to have you take the poison
was preferable to seeing you waste away in pain?’

Aramantha
was regarding him with dark, compassionate eyes. ‘Jonathon - I think that it
was not what happened in this arena that you wished to forget, but what transpired
later.’

His
mouth was dry. ‘What?’ he managed at last.

Aramantha
said, ‘What do you recall, Jonathon? What is your last memory of our time
together?’

He
shook his head to clear his thoughts. ‘You were ill - very ill. It was a month
after the diagnosis. I was nursing you. On good days we’d sit in the garden and
talk. You were planning some new project, but you wouldn’t tell me what.’ He
could not go on without weeping. He let the silence lengthen, then said,
‘That’s my last recollection of our time together - sitting in the garden.’

Aramantha
smiled at him. ‘I decided that I didn’t want to let the disease run its course.
I didn’t want to waste away, physically and mentally. Julius and Hippolyte has
always been one of my favourites, and its theme of love, illness and mortality
seemed suited to my situation. I told you what I wanted - to enact the final
scene, just the two of us in the amphitheatre, and you agreed. We prepared for
a week. We decided not to record this particular performance, that it would be
our own private affair. We chose a day, and that day came and we played out the
scene. You passed me the chalice and I drank, and I died in your arms, and yet
miraculously I did not die. I was . . . reborn, renewed, without the pain that
had wracked me so. I was the first sentient being to take advantage - albeit
unwittingly - of the eschatarium for millennia. I became part of a ... I
suppose you could call it a memory bank, stocked with the identities of the
Tharseans, alien but so similar to humans in many respects. By the time I
learned to manifest myself, days later, I saw your flier leave the island. I
was inconsolable. You had said you would stay on until the final evacuation,
and I had hoped that you might revisit the amphitheatre so that we might be
reunited. Only later did I find out why you left so soon . . .

‘We
are in contact with the Messengers, and one of their guild told me what had
occurred to make you flee the planet so precipitously.’

Fairman
felt weak. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘Two
days after my death, a Messenger arrived at the villa, from Baudelaire. A solar
pulse had made radio communications impossible. The Messenger had a communiqué
from my physician, regarding my diagnosis. My doctor had sent my case notes and
biopsies off-planet, seeking a second opinion. A doctor on Avalon, a specialist
in xeno-biological maladies, questioned my physician’s findings, suggested that
I had a less severe form of the disease which might respond well to treatment.
The Messenger had come to tell me to return immediately to Baudelaire, to begin
the cure. Of course, by this time it was too late. When you heard what the
Messenger had come to tell you . . .’

Aramantha
reached out a hand to him. ‘Jonathon, my poor Jonathon. Is it any wonder you
left Tartarus, had your memories erased?’

Fairman
found his way to the nearest tier and sat down. He could not recall what the
Messenger had told him, of course, could not recall the grief and pain he must
have experienced then - but on hearing now what had happened, two years ago, he
realised the anguish he must have suffered, understood now the terrible irony
of their tragedy.

Aramantha
reached out to him, her hand passing through his arm. Fairman told himself that
he detected warmth.

‘Jonathon,
do not grieve. See for yourself, look at me - can you deny that I am reborn? I
live, Jonathon, I experience. Rejoice in that fact!’

He
smiled. He tried to see past his own loss and apprehend Aramantha’s
resurrection.

‘But
when the sun blows—’ he began.

Aramantha
was smiling. ‘Oh, no, Jonathon. We cannot be harmed by the supernova. The
technology that gives us awareness is so small that it cannot be affected by
the cataclysm. We will ride forever through the galaxy on a wondrous wave of
light.’

Fairman
stared at her. ‘With the guild of Messengers?’ he asked.

‘With
the guild,’ she said, ‘and whoever else wishes to join us.’

Fairman
returned to the beach.

The
Messenger was perched upon the hood of the flier, flexing her great gossamer
membranes. They swept back and forth and Fairman was fanned by wafts of warm,
displaced air.

“You
found your wife?’ the Messenger asked.

‘I
found her ghost,’ he replied.

‘And?’
The creature regarded him, head cocked. ‘Will you be joining us in our glorious
ascent?’

Without
answering, Fairman turned and stared across the ocean. The sun had set, and
overhead the night sky flickered with the vestiges of its fiery radiation.

He
had pondered long after the phantom’s request, but something had made him
decline her offer, some residual cynicism, or perhaps cowardice, or even the
desire to create a work of art to stand as a statement of what he had learned
in the amphitheatre.

On
beating wings, the Messenger rose vertically into the air, legs dangling.
‘Farewell, Fairman,’ she called.

He
waved. ‘Farewell, Messenger.’

He
watched the creature rise into the air until she was no more than a tiny
crucifix, riding high. Then he boarded the flier, turned it on its axis and
headed out to sea, a scintillating cloud of silverdrift trailing in his wake.

[Spectrum SF 4, 2000]

There
was a spectacular aurora in the early hours of the morning, a dancing sheet of
magnesium-white light which illuminated the night sky and brought a premature
daylight to the darkside of Tartarus Major.

The
flare awoke Katerina from a dream about her brother, and it seemed a long time
before she could get back to sleep. She woke again when the rapid increase in
temperature indicated that the sun was up, and she was instantly aware of noise
in the street outside: the loud discontent of a mob. From research she’d
conducted before arriving on Tartarus, she knew that the flares always provoked
civilian unrest, riots the result of genuine fear that the supernova had come
fifteen years too soon, and a desire by a minority to take advantage of the
chaos to loot and pillage. As she took a cold shower, then dressed in her
near-weightless tropical garb, she listened to the chanting. She made out calls
for the Director of the Evacuation Force to be replaced, mixed with cries from
cultists that the end was nigh. She applied uv-block to her face, neck and
arms, gathered her dreadlocks in the headband which also contained her camera,
then left the hotel.