The Fall of Tartarus (25 page)

Katerina
sat down. Her voice tight with emotion, she said, ‘Can I see him?’

‘That
is for him to decide. You may speak to him.’

The
monk retreated to the slit windows at far side of the room and stood with his
back to Katerina, contemplating the jungle below.

‘Bobby?’
she whispered.

‘Kat
. . . Kat, is it you? Is it really you?’ She recognised his voice, fraught with
disbelief.

‘It’s
me,’ she said. She paused, considering her words. ‘You didn’t come for me,
Bobby ... so I came for you.’

She
heard a stifled cry.

‘Bobby?’

‘No!’

‘Bobby
. . . please, what is it?’

She
heard a deep, drawn breath as he gathered himself. ‘No...you’re dead. They told
me you were dead!’

‘Bobby
. . .’ she said. ‘Who told you?’

‘The
teachers at the home . . . they told me you’d drowned in the river, your body
swept downstream.’

Katerina
held her head in her hands. ‘I went swimming, Bobby. I had to get away from the
orphanage. I took the train to Dakar, started a new life.’

Katerina
heard a cry from behind the curtain. ‘I thought you’d taken your own life when
I failed to come for you. I was delayed, Kat. Sigma sent me out to the Rim. Oh,
my God . . . For so long I thought you were dead. You can’t imagine the guilt I
felt.’

Katerina
recalled the message disc, the others that Bobby had spoken of recording. ‘But
the disc you left,’ she began. ‘If you thought I was dead, then—?’

‘It
was because I thought you were dead that I made them,’ Bobby replied. ‘I made
dozens, hundreds, explaining myself to you, asking for your forgiveness.’

Katerina
rubbed tears from her cheeks. ‘For so long I hated you, Bobby. I hated you for
not coming for me. For years I couldn’t bring myself to forgive.’

She
reached out to take the curtain. She hesitated. ‘Bobby, can I . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I
want to see you.’

‘Kat
. . . Please, don’t. I have undergone penance.’

‘What
have they done to you?’ she whispered. ‘What penance?’

‘Penance physicale,’
Bobby said, ‘that
most holy of sacrifices.’

She
snatched the curtain aside. She stood and stared at the revealed sight,
disbelief quickly followed by understanding, and then revulsion. She slumped
onto the stool and looked upon the remains of her brother.

He
was seated in an invalid carriage, to serve as the legs he’d had removed. He
was without arms to hold her, eyes to look upon her. His face was a parody,
with evacuated eye sockets, and two hideous holes where his nose should have
been. He was naked and Katerina saw - the final depredation - that he had been
emasculated, too.

She
wanted to cry out in denial at the thing her brother had become. She cursed the
past, the terrible sequence of events that had brought him to this end.

‘Bobby
. . .’ she managed at last. ‘Why . . . ? Why
this?’

‘Don’t
you understand, Kat?’ He turned his head towards her, his stitched-up eyelids
staring blindly. ‘For a long time I had been searching for something,’ he said.
‘And then I crashed in the jungle and was saved by the Bourg. They accepted me
as one of them, and initiated me into their religion. From time to time one of
their number would join the Brothers. I had so much guilt to atone for, and
above all the desire to sacrifice myself for the salvation of others. My
suffering will halt the process of the supernova.’

Katerina
stared at him. ’
No . . . !’

‘Tomorrow,’
Bobby went on, ‘I make the ultimate sacrifice. With the other brothers of my
year, I will take to the cross beneath the sun and allow its heat to flense my
soul.’

Katerina
moaned in pain. She reached for her brother, wanting to take him in her hands,
but recoiled from the limbless torso he had become.

‘You
can’t do this, Bobby!’ she cried. ‘What’s happened to you? Don’t you see, it
won’t work! Your sacrifice . . . Think about it. How can your death stop the
process—?’

His
lips formed a rictus of pain. ‘Kat . . . Kat, I believe. Don’t you understand
that? Faith is all. If you believe in something with sufficient conviction,
then you will succeed. The age of miracles is upon us, Kat! Believe and you
will be saved!’

‘What
happened to you, Bobby?’ she whispered. ‘What happened?’

What
had happened to him on the day he had returned to Earth, to discover that she
had drowned? If only she had returned to the orphanage . . .

Into
her head came an image of the boy Bobby had been, the awkward, studious child
she had loved. She looked upon the person he had become, the mutilated wreckage
of his body, and it came to her that she no longer knew the man who called
himself Brother Robert.

‘Kat,
don’t you see? Don’t you understand? I need to do what I am doing in order to
make myself whole again in spirit.’

He
had gone too far, she realised, to be saved as she wished to save him. She had
to let him go, now; somehow manage her pain and try to come to some acceptance
her brother’s choice.

She
reached out and touched Bobby’s shoulder. In response - perhaps the only
gesture of reciprocation he could make in the circumstance - he moved his head
and touched her fingers with his cheek.

They
remained like this for long minutes, Katerina lost in contemplation of past
events and their consequences.

She
recalled her meeting with the fortune-teller, Sabine.

Tears of joy? No, tears of sorrow . . .

Silently,
so that Bobby might not hear her, Katerina hung her head and wept.

She
slept badly that night, and in the early hours left her cell and crossed the corridor
to Henrique’s. She lay beside him on the bed, and presently he put an arm
around her shoulders and drew her to him.

In
the morning they were escorted from the monastery to a high, lonely plateau of
rock. Bobby and the other sacrificial monks sat in carriages beneath the
burning sun. A dozen crucifixes lay upon the rock.

Steeling
herself, Katerina released Henrique’s hand and crossed the plateau to where
Bobby sat in his carriage. She knelt beside him, touched his shoulder. ‘Bobby,
it’s me.’

His
lips twitched in the semblance of a smile. ‘Kat . . . Kat, I’m glad you’ve
come. I wish . . . Oh, I wish there was some way I could make you see how . . .
how
right
this is for me.’

She
leaned forward and kissed his forehead. ‘There’s no need, Bobby,’ she whispered.
‘I think I understand.’

Someone
touched her arm. It was the Nordic monk. ‘The ceremony is about to commence.’

A
choir of monks began a dolorous plainsong.

‘Goodbye,
Bobby,’ she said.

She
stood quickly and hurried over to Henrique. As they watched, the dozen monks
were taken from their carriages, carried with loving care across the plateau,
and lashed to the timbers. Then the crucifixes were hauled upright and slotted
into holes in the rock.

Even
as Katerina watched, some part of her - that hardened half that had made her
what she was, that had fought to succeed against all odds, considering no one
but herself and her own interests - realised what a fitting finale to her
documentary this crucifixion would make. She could envisage the power of the shot:
Bobby’s limbless torso lashed to the cross in the full heat of the midday sun.

But
she could not bring herself to activate the camera.

After
perhaps an hour, Henrique touched her hand and suggested that she had seen
enough. She nodded, dumbly, and he walked her from the plateau to the garden
and the flier.

They
rose and banked from the monastery, heading out across the jungle. Katerina
stared down at the rapidly diminishing plateau, at the dozen crucifixes and
their burdens.

Then
she looked ahead and considered the long, long journey home.

[Interzone 150,1999]

That
night the sun sank in a blaze of crimson and burnt-orange strata, and Jenner
slept badly. He dreamed that his wife had returned to the Evacuation Station,
emaciated and close to death after four years in the jungle. He experienced
shock at her condition, elation at her return - soon dashed, upon waking, by
the realisation that he was still without her.

In
the quiet of the night he could hear the occasional call of a bird beyond the
perimeter fence, foretokening dawn. As he watched the white light of day
brighten, it came to him why he had dreamed, for the first time in months, of
Laura.

He
thought of his deputy, McKenzie, and wondered at the chances of establishing
contact today.

He
carried a fruit juice from the kitchen and paused on the verandah. The Station
overlooked a packed-earth compound, on the periphery of which were the hundred
small timber huts, temporary accommodation for the tribal peoples before their
transit off-planet. The provisional nature of the Station symbolised the
eventual destruction of the planet, the day in ten years when the supernova
would obliterate all life on Tartarus. The irony was that the very existence of
the camp, and his post of Director of Evacuation (Southern Sector), was a
nagging reminder that the people he was here to help, the tribes who dwelled in
the hostile interior of the continent, were often resentful of his
interference. More than one tribe had made it known that they wished to remain
and perish with their planet.

He
finished his drink and moved to the operations room. He would spend the next
hour in radio contact with the teams working at sites across the continent, and
then . . . He peered through the window, looking for the young girl he
considered his adopted daughter. Later, he would seek out Cahla, perhaps play a
game of
out,
or merely sit with her in companionable silence.

He
contacted the teams one by one and found that, in general, things were going
well. They had re-contacted nine of the ten tribes inhabiting the two thousand
square kilometres of the continent, and perhaps half of them were proving
amenable to reason: they had agreed to consider gathering at certain pick-up
points when the evacuations began a year from now.

Jenner
wished that the Ey’an people were so tractable. There had only ever been one
meeting between them and an evacuation team, and though they said that they
fully understood the implications of remaining on Tartarus, their religious
belief forbade them to leave. Three days ago Jenner had sent in his best team
to re-contact the hunter-gatherers.

The
day before yesterday he had lost radio contact with Bill McKenzie and his
colleague, Susan Patel. The situation called to mind what had happened four
years ago, when he had lost the radio link with Laura, and now Jenner felt that
he had every reason to worry.

He
tried to raise McKenzie by radio, but the only reply was the buzz and hiss of
static. ‘McKenzie . . . Jenner calling. Come in, McKenzie.’ He gave it three
long minutes, then slammed down the speaker. He tried getting through to Patel
on her own frequency, with the same result.

He
wiped his palms down the front of his shirt and picked up the speaker. He drew
his swivel chair closer to the desk and leaned over the set.

For
the second time that morning he got through to Martin Chang, at a position not
far from where McKenzie and Patel should have been. The receiver crackled.
‘Chang here, boss. Anything wrong?’

‘Martin,
nothing to worry about.’ The lie came easily. He didn’t want to spook his men
with alarmist talk of disappearances. ‘I’m having difficulty contacting Bob.
He’s down in Ey’an territory. Will you try to raise him or Sue and have them
get back to me?’

Chang
was no fool. ‘The Ey’an sector should be within your range, boss . . . You
don’t think they’re in difficulty? Their flier—’

‘There’s
been no distress signals, Martin.’