The Fall of Tartarus

by Eric Brown

  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 need ed to believe in the impossible?

  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 w here 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 rec
all 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.’