by Eric Brown
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 wi th 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.
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* * * *
The Ultimate Sacrifice
T
here 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.
She activated the camera and filmed as she made her away across the city. The shots would provide good background and incidental detail for the documentary. Within minutes of leaving the hotel, she was roasting in her own juices. Sweat dribbled between her breasts and over her stomach. Despite the increasing heat, there were still angry crowds gathered at strategic positions in the city: government buildings, travel agencies, and the square of St Christopher in the centre of town. The racial mix on this continent was largely Latin and Asian; since her arrival two days ago she’d noticed only three or four blacks. She’d worried at first that she might fall victim to prejudice - some colony planets of her experience were notoriously racist - but on the whole she’d found the Tartareans friendly and helpful. She wondered if the natives were so preoccupied with ensuring their flight from the planet that they had little time to worry about things like the colour of a stranger’s skin.
She heard the sustained, muffled chanting well before she reached its source. As she approached the turning into the square, she knew the crowd would be surrounding the building that was her destination. She should have realised before she set out that the headquarters of the TWC Evacuation Force would be at the epicentre of the current unrest, and called ahead to ensure she could gain admittance.
Perhaps two or three hundred jeering citizens were held back behind a cordon of crash-barriers. Behind the barriers stood a line of armed security guards. The crowd hurled insults, and the occasional bottle or brick. Once or twice the guards fired over the heads of the protestors. They cowered as one for a moment, then gained in courage and spat curses and threats with even greater zeal.
Katerina pushed through the crowd and came up against the crash-barrier. She reached out and showed her press card to a stern-faced guard.
‘I ’m meeting Director Magnusson at ten.’ She smiled at the guard and glanced around at the crowd. ‘I didn’t realise that half the city would want to see him, too.’
In other circumstances she might have interpreted a tacit racial insult in his uncompromising expression, but she reminded herself that she was on Tartarus now. ‘Not funny? Okay, I’m no comedian. But I am Katerina De Klien, and if Magnusson gets to know that you wouldn’t let me through he’ll have your balls for breakfast.’
Maybe he’d caught one of her shows and knew her tag, or her tone intimidated. He took her card, backed off and spoke quickly into a communicator, his glance shuttling between Katerina and her mug-shot on the card.
He came back to the barrier, returned her card and nodded. He even made to assist her, but Katerina ignored the proffered hand and jumped over by herself.
She strode across the cleared cobbles before the building, filming all the way. Another guard checked her identity before the big double doors, and yet another - a woman this time - behind a desk in the shivery-cold atmosphere of the air-conditioned foyer. The woman escorted her wordlessly along a corridor and into an elevator. They rode three floors and stepped out into an identical corridor, the sky blue carpet matching the officer’s uniform.
Across from the elevator was a polished wooden door. Katerina’s escort knocked, waited for a reply, then opened the door. She stood aside, gestured for Katerina to enter, then left her alone but for a dark-haired man seated behind a desk at the far end of a long, long room.
* * * *
‘Ms De Klien,’ Director Magnusson said in a voice so smooth it was almost a purr. ‘I’ve always wanted to ask you if your name was a pseudonym.’
Katerina took an instant dislike to the Director.
‘I often wondered if such a surname existed—’ he said.
‘It’s the professional name I took when I entered journalism,’ she snapped in a tone intended to show the Director that she had more important things to discuss.
She dropped into a big leather bucket seat without waiting to be invited, lay back and lodged a booted foot on her knee.
Magnusson, she decided, had the darting eyes of a libidinous pimp, and skin as pale as semen. She judged he was in his fifties, handsome in a washed-out, etiolated kind of way.
‘I know your work,’ he said. ‘One cannot get away from it, even on Tartarus. When we began work here, it was decided that the workers of the TWC should have the benefit of holovision, for their amusement. Though quite how your . . . shows . . . passed the censor, I shall never know.’
Katerina made a tired gesture. ‘Look, you don’t know how many times I’ve met jerks who hate my work. I’m used to getting shit, understand? You’re not going to intimidate me by telling me how much you hate my programmes.’
Magnusson gave a thin-lipped smile. ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I hate your work. In fact I’ve found a couple of your films quite compelling, if cynical and hopeless.’
‘You sound like my best critic.’
‘So when I heard you wanted to interview me, of course I was intrigued.’
Don’t be, Katerina thought, you’ll not like this one bit.
‘I take it you have a concealed camera? Is it running?’
‘Since I walked through the door, Director.’
Some people, on learning they were being filmed, lost their cool: Magnusson, to his credit, remained courteous and rather formal.
‘In that case perhaps you can tell me what your film will be about?’
‘Sure.’ Katerina sat forward in her chair, elbows on knees, and stared
at the Director. ‘It’ll be a little different from my usual films. More personal, emotional. Critics have panned my work for lacking feeling, empathy. They say I’m cruel.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not cruel, it’s just that I don’t moralise about what I point my camera at . . . Anyway, this film’ll be from the heart.’
She paused. ‘Imagine a young boy, an orphan in a government home, intelligent, ambitious. He reaches sixteen and skips Earth, goes to see the stars. He moves from world to world, working at whatever he can. Then he decides to join the TWC, undergoes the training, and three years later graduates. He’s posted to the Evacuation Force, sees his first active service on Salenko before the comet wipes out the planet. He does okay and he’s promoted, then sent to Tartarus Major. He works here in Baudelaire a couple of years, then gets shifted to the southern continent. On furlough back here, he comes down with some tropical disease and dies in three days . . . Just another TWC casualty, one among hundreds every year . . .’
Magnusson cleared his throat and interrupted. ‘If you could get to the point.’
Katerina gave him a long, silent stare. ‘You asked me what the film was about. I’m telling you.’ She closed her eyes, gathering her thoughts.
‘So . . .’ she went on, ‘the TWC tries to contact his next of kin. They know he had a sister, but they can’t trace her. Meanwhile, little sister grows up in the orphanage in Senegal. One day she gets the chance to quit the place - so she runs away and never goes back. She lives on the streets in Dakar, gets a few breaks, works hard and gets successful. She decides to try to trace her brother. She’s a journalist, and film-maker, so she has contacts and skills. After lots of hard work, she finds out the TWC version of the truth - the tropical disease bit, the dead-in-three-days-and-nothing-could-be-done story. So little sister grieves for the man she didn’t know, the brother she loved and hoped would one day come back for her.’
Katerina stopped there, staring at her clasped hands. Her long nails dug imprints into the skin.
‘Then last year I’m working on Mars on a big story about government corruption over the Olympus dam project, and I get a call from this guy who says he worked for the TWC and knew my brother on Tartarus. He wants to see me, so we arrange to meet in a bar in New Vilafranca. He tells me that my brother didn’t die of some tropical disease as it was widely believed. He says my brother left Apollinaire and flew south into the interior, not north to Baudelaire. Only, this guy says, he never came back. He disappeared and no trace of him or his flier was ever found.’
Katerina fell silent, counted to ten. She looked the Director directly in the eye. ‘My film is about my brother, and about what really happened, and why the TWC decided to cover up his disappearance with lies about some tropical disease.’
She knew, already, how she would use this footage, her little speech. She would intercut it with stills of Bobby as a young boy, with snippets from the video home-movie he’d left with an old girlfriend on Salenko.
Along with her slow-burning resentment, she felt that quickening visceral thrill of creating something lasting and worthwhile.
For someone who knew he was captured on camera, Magnusson was handling the situation with remarkable aplomb.
He sat back in his chair and stared levelly at Katerina, a judicial finger placed against pursed lips. ‘You tell an interesting story, Ms De Klien.’
‘It’s no “story”, Director. I have proof.’
She pulled a message disc from a pocket in her shirt. ‘It’s from Bobby, to me. His friend found it in Bobby’s locker when he heard from his commanding officer that Bobby had died in Baudelaire.’
‘That proves nothing,’ Magnusson began.
Katerina raised her eyebrows. ‘No?’ She tossed the disc across the desk, indicating the screen to Magnusson’s left. ‘Go on, access it,’ she said. ‘And don’t think about destroying it. I’ve taken the precaution of making copies.’
Magnusson took the disc, his expression rigidly neutral. He slipped the disc into the screen. Katerina had viewed the message many times before, but she could not bring herself to look upon the image of her brother now: the lean, crew-cut twenty-two-year-old, talking to the camera on the verandah of a hostel in Apollinaire.
She closed her eyes as his words spoke directly to her. ‘Kat, it’s Bob. It’s been a long time. I . . . This probably won’t ever get to you - like all the other discs I’ve made and never sent. I want to explain, Kat, apologise. I want to tell you how it was from my point of view, and then maybe you’ll begin to understand. I’m leaving for the interior tomorrow, hiring a flier and heading south—’
The screen blanked there, became static.
‘He terminated the message,’ Katerina explained. ‘Perhaps he meant to continue, but never got the chance.’ She stared at Magnusson. ‘Now, Director, are you going to tell me what really happened?’
Magnusson rotated his swivel chair, rose and strode to the window overlooking Baudelaire. He remained with his back to Katerina for long minutes. She kept her camera on him; the shot would create a nice period of tension in the film.
He turned and regarded her, forthright. ‘I’ll tell you what I can,’ he said, surprising her. ‘I don’t know if you came here out of genuine sentiment for your brother, or in the hope of making a popular film.’
‘I came here to find out what happened to Bobby,’ she said angrily, because Magnusson was uncomfortably close to the truth.
He regarded her for what seemed like a long time before saying, ‘As it happens, I can shed light on the mystery surrounding your brother.’
He returned to his desk and sat down. ‘Three years ago I was not in charge of operations here on Tartarus. A certain Director Haller had control of policy. Of course, when I took over from him I was apprised of the various activities, both overt and covert, that Haller had sanctioned.’ Magnusson paused. ‘How well up are you on the history of Tartarus?’
‘I did a little research.’
‘Did you read up on the southern tribes?’
She frowned. ‘The descendants of the original European colonists? I know of them, but next to nothing actually about them.’
Magnusson nodded. ‘Five years ago the policy of the TWC concerning the tribes of Iriarte, the southern continent, was to leave well alone. They had devolved a lot since their forbears took to the jungles. By our standards they were a primitive people, with correspondingly primitive belief systems. Certain tribes held that their destiny was with the planet, and even when informed of the impending supernova they refused the offer of evacuation and relocation on some analogue planet in the Thousand Worlds. They were reconciled to the thought of dying in the supernova - they even celebrated the coming conflagration. Haller estimated that some hundred thousand tribal peoples would perish if TWC policy remained as it was.’
‘So he intervened?’
‘He decided that he couldn’t sit idly by while an entire race of people went happily to their deaths, no matter what they believed. At that time, a large sector of Iriarte was out of bounds to the TWC. Off-world observers monitored TWC duties on Tartarus and ensured that they did not overstep their designated bounds.’
Katerina was one step ahead of him. ‘So Haller sent Bobby in to reconnoitre?’
Magnusson smiled. ‘He sounded out a few trusted officers. Your brother agreed with him about the fate of the tribes. Bobby was a good worker, very dedicated. Just over three years ago, Haller sent him with another officer to learn the views of certain tribes in the interior of the continent, to see if perhaps they might be persuaded to leave the planet. The mission was covert, of course. Haller risked losing his post if his superiors on Earth got wind he was contravening TWC policy.’
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?’
<
br /> 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.’
