The Fall of Tartarus (21 page)

Magnusson
stopped there, and the silence stretched. Katerina was aware of a tightness in
her throat. At last she asked. ‘And what happened, Director?’

‘Their
flier went down, some kind of systems failure. The wreckage was discovered a
few days later.’

‘And
Bobby?’

Magnusson
seemed unable to meet her unwavering gaze.

‘His
partner was discovered in the wreckage. He’d died instantly upon impact. There
was evidence that Bobby had managed to extricate himself from the wreckage.’

‘What
evidence?’ she whispered. It was imperative that she gather every detail, be in
possession of every fact, no matter how trifling or insignificant.

Magnusson
sighed, something in the sound indicating distaste. ‘If you must know, Ms De
Klien, there was a lot of blood leading from the flier into the jungle.’

‘What
happened to him?’

Magnusson
shook his head. ‘His remains were never found. The area where they came down
was dangerous and impenetrable. The rescue mission did all it could.’

‘Then
he might still be alive?’

‘I’m
sorry. That’s impossible. The jungles of Earth are hostile enough - those of
the Iriarte are hell by comparison. Quite apart from the intense heat and lack
of water, the diseases, the poisonous insects and plants . . . Expert opinion
reckoned that he would have been lucky, even if fully fit, to have survived a
day in those conditions.’

Katerina
thought through what the Director had told her. ‘So Haller concocted the story
about Bobby dying of a tropical disease in Baudelaire?’

‘He
would have lost his command if the truth had reached the observers. He decided
that a cover-up was necessary. Since then, TWC policy has changed as regards the
southern tribes. We’re doing everything we can to facilitate their evacuation.’

‘Do
you have information about where Bobby went down, maps of the area?’

‘You
aren’t thinking of venturing into the interior? I wouldn’t advise—’

‘Director
Magnusson, I don’t give up on a story halfway through. I want to find out
exactly what happened to Bobby.’

Magnusson
turned to the screen on his desk, typed a command into the keyboard set in the
arm of his swivel chair. Seconds later a large-scale map of Iriarte appeared on
the screen. He magnified a certain section, bringing geographical details into
sharp relief. He ordered a printout and passed the resulting hard copy to
Katerina.

‘I’ve
marked where the flier went down.’

Katerina
studied the map, aware that her hands were shaking. She was holding, here, the
first evidence she had as to Bobby’s fate. She spread the map across the desk
and pointed. ‘What are these features, here and here?’

‘Those
are native settlements, temporary villages. The natives of this region are nomadic.
The settlements are situated about a hundred kilometres south of where the
wreckage was found. This is a monastery, a couple of hundred kays south of
where the flier went down - some schism of the Church of the Ultimate
Sacrifice.’

‘And
this is a river, right?’ She indicated a broad band of blue winding its way
between the green shading of the jungle, at it closest point about fifty kays
from the crash site. She looked up at Magnusson. ‘What about transport?’

‘There’s
a daily ferry from Baudelaire to Apollinaire. From Apollinaire, ferries into
the interior run about once a week.’

‘What
about fliers?’

Magnusson
was smiling. ‘Even the famous Katerina De Klien would have difficulty finding a
flier for hire since the evacuations began.’

Katerina
folded the map and made to leave. ‘I appreciate your help, Director. You’ve
made my job a lot easier.’

‘But
I still advise you not to venture south,’ he began.

Katerina
just stared at him. ‘And I’ll give your advice the consideration it deserves,’
she said.

Magnusson
inclined his head. ‘Good luck, Ms De Klien.’

Katerina
left the TWC headquarters. The protesters had disappeared, driven away by the
merciless heat of the midday sun, and the streets of Baudelaire were deserted.

Alien
and off-world fortune-tellers had set up their tents inside the terminal
building of the Baudelaire-Apollinaire sea ferry. The vast shed was packed with
travellers. Families camped in the central area, huddled around the pathetic
bundles of their possessions. Katerina bought a ticket for the Apollinaire
ferry, due to depart in one hour, a tortilla and some strange-looking fruit
from a vendor, and lugged her pack into the cavernous building. A warm breeze
lapped in from the ocean beyond the open end of the shed, stirring the hot air
and circulating the combined smells of sweat and cooking food. The sun had set
one hour ago, leaving in its wake a flickering aurora of crimson and gold as
brilliant as any cinematic effect.

She
sat on her pack and ate, looking around at the crowd milling to and from the
ferries constantly docking and embarking. The criss-crossing melee of scurrying
individuals resembled one vast beast, a gestalt organism continually renewing
itself. She recalled arriving in Dakar all those years ago and sitting on the
corner of Hugo boulevard, watching the crowd swarming through the junction and
thinking how insignificant and alone she was.

She
had been taken in by Sophia, a mountainously fat women in her forties who read
palms and told fortunes and claimed that her father had been a Fulani
witch-doctor before the war. On their first meeting, Sophia had taken one look
at Katerina’s soiled palm and made eyes as big as the moon. ‘Girl, are you
gonna go places, and I mean
go
places!’

Now
Katerina scanned the bizarre and gaudy tents set up around the walls of the
terminal. There were at least a dozen fortune-tellers to choose from, native
Tartareans and off-worlders alike. She’d heard bad stories about alien tellers,
like some who could and would tell you the exact day you were due to die,
others who could take over your body and use it for their own purposes in the
dead of night.

She
was intrigued by one particular tent, and the figure who sat outside it. The
tent was conical and silver, with words in French scrolling down its sloping sides.
It advertised the skill of Sabine, mind-reader and future-seer. The girl on the
stool before the tent was young and beautiful, her head shaven and embroidered
with a micro-mesh scalp implant. She looked North African, her skin as gold as
the Saharan sand at dawn, her pose noble and yet resigned, as if she were
burdened with the knowledge of some terrible and inexpressible tragedy.

Katerina
activated her camera, shouldered her pack and approached the tent. The girl
regarded her from beneath long eyelashes, and casually turned her wrist to
gesture Katerina through the flap. The girl slipped in after her, indicating
that Katerina should remove her shoes and sit on a cushion on the ground. The
girl - Sabine, presumably - seated herself opposite with a negligent languor
born of repetition.

Her
eyes downcast, Sabine murmured her rates. ‘For one week ahead, one hundred
units, for two, two hundred - like this, okay?’

‘Two
weeks will be fine,’ Katerina said.

Sabine
placed a velvet pillow between them, then nested upon the pillow a magnificent,
many faceted crystal.

‘Put
your hand there, listen to my questions and answer them truthfully.’

Katerina
accommodated her palm to the crystal’s uneven surface. The girl placed her
small hand on Katerina’s and bowed her head. As the seconds passed, Katerina
watched the symmetrical pattern of silver wires on her scalp begin to glow.

Sabine
asked, ‘Tell me why you came to Tartarus?’

Katerina
said that she had come to learn the fate of her brother.

‘And
have you learned of his fate?’

‘I
fear he’s dead.’

Sabine
looked up, her large oasis eyes enquiring. ‘But I feel you knew this before you
left Earth?’

‘I
had been told that he was dead, but I didn’t know the exact circumstances.’

Sabine
fell silent. She bowed her head again, as if in concentration.

‘But
you cannot bring yourself to grieve for your brother, for Bobby.’

Katerina
stared, shocked. ‘How do you know his name?’

Sabine
merely smiled and repeated her question. ‘You cannot grieve for your brother,
no?’

Katerina
gathered herself. ‘I ... I feel a sadness, a loss. But we had no contact for
years.’

‘This
is not the only reason you cannot grieve for Bobby.’

It
was a statement of fact that shocked Katerina. ‘No . . . No, it isn’t.’

‘You
feel anger, resentment.’

Her
mouth suddenly dry, Katerina nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’

She
recalled how Bobby had left the orphanage when he was sixteen, had left her to
face alone the harsh and loveless routine of the institution that he had hated
as much as she did. He had known the hell to which he had consigned Katerina,
and yet that had not stopped him walking out.

And
then one day at dawn she had slipped from the orphanage to bathe illicitly in a
nearby river. She had spent the morning swimming naked beneath the sun, and by
noon she had made her decision: she would not return to the orphanage. She left
her uniform beside the river, changed into her casual clothes, and caught the
three o’clock express to Dakar. She had rode all the way on the roof, and the
wind that roared in her face was her first real taste of freedom.

Sabine
lifted Katerina’s hand from the crystal, then placed the stone in her lap. She
hung her head low, her eyes closed, both hands resting on the crystal.

At
last she looked up. ‘I feel now that I know you. I can tell you what lies
ahead.’

Katerina
felt the tension build within her. Unlike her Western colleagues back on Earth,
who sometimes mocked her belief as superstitious, she had faith that
fortune-tellers’ predictions would to varying degrees come true. How it worked,
how these people could read the future, she had no idea - all she knew was that
in her experience the many tellers she had consulted, from Sophia onwards, had
correctly divined her destiny.

Now
Sabine said, ‘Your brother is alive. You will find him, and he will apologise and
explain himself. That is all I can see.’

Katerina
shook her head, unable to speak. She experienced an effect of shock: a rapid
warmth rising from her chest. At last she managed, ‘But I was told he was dead.
That there was no way could he have survived . . .’ She pressed fingers into
her eyes, then stared through the gloom at the Arab girl. ‘How . . . where is
he? How do I find him?’

‘I’m
sorry. I know none of these things. I see you speaking to him, I see your
tears.’

‘Tears
of joy?’

Sabine
avoided her eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Tears of sorrow.’

From
the pier outside the terminal building, the ugly double note of a klaxon rent
the humid air. ‘My boat. I must go.’

‘Take
care,’ Sabine said. ‘And good luck.’

It
was the second time she had been wished good luck that day. Impulsively, she
leaned forward and touched the fortune-teller’s cheek. Then she paid Sabine and
hurried from the tent, and when she looked back the girl had emerged and
resumed her seat, the knowledge of future events informing her pose with tragedy.

That
night, as she slept in her berth aboard the ancient diesel-powered ferry that
carried her south across the Sea of Baudelaire, Katerina dreamed of Bobby. He
was standing in the jungle, blood flowing from a dozen lacerations, his arms
outstretched in supplication.

And
he was calling out her name.

Katerina
arrived in Apollinaire at dawn and booked into a quiet canal-side hotel. The
ancient metropolis consisted solely of two-storey timber buildings on a
grid-pattern of man-made waterways. The place had about it an air of premature
abandonment, as over the years half the population had moved to Baudelaire, and
then off-planet. The citizens who remained did not fill the city, and entire
quarters had succumbed to gradual neglect. The jungle, hacked back when the
city had been built hundreds of years ago, was reclaiming its territory street
by street: creeping vines and huge tropical blooms gave buildings the surreal
appearance of things at once familiar, yet strangely transformed.

Magnusson
had been right about the impossibility of hiring a flier for the trip into the
interior. Of the three vehicle hire agencies in the city, two had long since
closed and the third hired out only ground-effect vehicles. The owner told her
that with the exodus from Tartarus there was no longer a demand for the fliers
from the rich and adventurous, and that the only way to travel into the heart
of the continent was by steamer.

She
made enquiries at the steamboat headquarters and learned that the next ferry
left for the interior in three days. She spent the period wandering through the
moribund city, talking to those citizens yet to be evacuated and creating,
through a montage of interviews, a picture of life on the dying planet of
Tartarus.