by Eric Brown
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.
<
* * * *
The People of the Nova
T
hat 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 overloo
ked 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 t hey 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.’
‘What chance that both their radios packed in at the same time?’ Chang voiced the question that was worrying Jenner. ‘Okay, boss. I’ll try to raise Mac. Speak to you soon.’
Jenner replaced the speaker and leaned back in his seat. He had not seen or heard Cahla enter the room - her grace and poise was that of a practised hunter. She stood on one leg, the foot of the other tucked easily into her upper thigh, and leaned against the arm of his chair.
He reached up and took her hand. She could speak English, but silence was her preferred medium: she communicated her thoughts and feelings in other ways; touches, glances, gestures.
Jenner could never quite banish his amazement when he looked upon the tribes-people of the southern continent. They were a white race, with sun-bronzed skin and bleached fair hair - and it was incongruous to see an essentially European people so at home in the hostile environment of the alien jungle. The tribes were the descendants of German and Scandinavian colonists who had settled and farmed the continent hundreds of years ago. Their devolution to the status of semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers was still more ironic when one considered the fact that the early settlers had belonged to a religious order seeking isolation in which to practise their fundamentalist beliefs.
The founding fathers would never have recognised the quick, wild spirits that haunted the jungle with the ease of natives born.
Cahla was seven years old, almost twelve by Terran reckoning, a slim, elfin creature with long, tanned limbs and ragged blonde hair, through the fringe of which her blue eyes gazed in characteristic silence, missing nothing.
Jenner often stared into her bright blue eyes and wondered at the world she looked out upon, and the alien landscape of her mind behind those eyes.
Now he squeezed her fingers. She gave him a glance - she almost never smiled - and slipped from the room.
He was startled by the chime of the radio.
‘Martin?’
‘No luck, boss. Not a word from McKenzie or Patel.’
‘Okay, Martin. Thanks.’
‘Ah, boss - do you want us to go south and search—?’
‘No, stay where you are. This is more than likely something of nothing.’
‘Very well,’ Chang replied, sounding far from convinced.
Jenner cut the connection.
Cahla was sitting on the bottom step of the verandah with her legs outstretched, the heel of her right foot notched between the toes of her left. Jenner pushed through the flimsy fly-netting door and eased himself down the steps, instantly wearied by the furnace-like heat. He sat down behind Cahla. She hung her arms over his legs and laid her head in his lap. He wondered how often they had been together like this over the past three years. Often when the teams were out, he and Cahla would seek each other, as if in some mutual empathic need, and spend silent hours together. Or, sometimes, when things were not going well, not so silent hours: he would talk to her at length, tell her his problems, how things were going with the evacuation plans - and she would listen, the expression on her fine, faceted face neutral as she stared off into the jungle.
He often wondered if he really knew the girl who called herself Cahla, or if what he assumed he knew of her, the girl’s likes and dislikes, reactions and mannerisms, were nothing more than a collection of details seen through positively prejudiced eyes. She was young, she was beautiful, and she looked so much as he imagined his daughter might have looked now, had she still been alive.
Absently he stroked her long hair. The sun was a hazy circle high above the horizon. In the five years since his posting to Tartarus, the sun had swollen to twice its former size, and the activity upon its bloody surface had increased. He often stared in fascination at the haemoglobin rush of sunspots across the swollen disc.
Cahla said, ‘Is missing, McKenzie? Worried, you?’
He laid a hand across the top of her head like some benign phrenologist. ‘McKenzie and Patel. I tried to radio them - no reply.’ He forever found himself mincing his grammar when talking to Cahla.
‘Tallman, darkman, funnyman, McKenzie?’
Jenner smiled to himself, smoothing her hair. ‘Yes, all those things. I feel responsible, Cahla.’
A hesitation. ‘Responsible?’
‘It means . . . because of me they went out this time, because of me they are missing.’
There was no response from the tamed jungle girl. He wondered if she understood.
Discounting the malfunction of both their radios, and the possibility that their flier had crashed, he wondered what else might have happened to McKenzie and Patel. They had never had any trouble with the tribes-people before. That left only the possibility of wild animals, the chowl and the ferocious primates that dwelled in the jungle. But both team members were armed and knew how to look after themselves.
‘I feel bad,’ Jenner said to himself. ‘Irrational as it is, that’s how I feel.’
Six months ago Director Magnusson, head of the evacuation programme based in Baudelaire, had contacted Jenner. He’d taken the
call in the operations room, Cahla crouching by his chair and staring wide-eyed at the swollen image of the Director on the wall-screen.
Regarding the Ey’an,’ Magnusson said, glancing up from a computer read-out, ‘I’ve been assessing your report and we’ve come to a decision.’
Jenner had nodded, uncomfortable. He had petitioned the Director for more time in which to win the trust of the Ey’an.
‘We’ve decided to go ahead with the “gift to the natives” option,’ the Director said, holding up one of the seemingly innocuous oddments. ‘Time is of the essence. I’ll send down a consignment of knives, pots and pans for distribution among the Ey’an. Each item will contain a radio transmitter. When the time comes, we’ll use them to locate and round up the tribe - utilising force if necessary. Any objections?’
