by Eric Brown
I stood mute, watching him ascend. The other Blackmen formed a circle around him as they climbed ever higher, towards the sun. I fancied that my father could see me, was watching me, a small figure in the crowd, standing mesmerised as he gained altitude.
The twelve Blackmen circled my father, moving faster, until they became a Catherine wheel blur about the tiny figure of the central Blackman; then they fell away ... He raised his arms above his head in a gesture like a benediction. A tension communicated itself through the crowd, and I could hardly bring myself to watch.
Then he began to glow, at first orange, and then red, and the crowd around me murmured their appreciation of a sight so aesthetic. I wanted to cry out, to halt the process, but at the same time knew that this was his destiny.
His detonation, his explosion into a million golden fragments, drew from the observers as many gasps as exclamations, and from me only tears.
I slipped from the crowd. The concerns of the islanders, enjoying their banal routines, filled me with anger. How simple were other people’s lives when compared to the complexity of one’s own!
How youthful I was then . . .
I walked along the pebble beach and sat down before the sea. For perhaps an hour I remained there, reliving my time with the Blackman, wishing that somehow he could have overcome his programming and told me of his true identity.
A small voice drew me from my reverie.
I turned and watched Loi pick her way towards me across the sharp pebbles, her expression one of tortured determination. ‘So here you are! I wondered where you’d gone.’
She had her hands behind her back, as if concealing something from me. ‘Sinclair, I tried to find you. Did you see Blackman’s finale?’
I nodded that I had.
She smiled at me. ‘He gave me this, Sinclair - to give to you.’ From behind her back she produced my persona-cube and handed it to me.
She must have sensed that I needed to be alone. ‘See you later,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll be in the quayside tavern. Gastarian and his crew are celebrating our victory, and mourning the dead and gone.’
I watched her leave the beach, then turned my attention to the cube in my lap. With trembling fingers I turned it on. My father - the Blackman - stared out at me. He was seated in his hotel room, his dark presence dominating the scene.
‘Father,’ I whispered.
‘Sinclair,’ he said. ‘You must have many questions, and I have so much to explain . . .’
As the sun set, and the fiery light of night filled the sky, I sat on the beach and talked with my father.
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* * * *
A Prayer far the Dead
I
made my farewells to the house, moving from room to open-plan room, standing in doorways and viewing in my mind’s eye scenes and incidents long gone. The house was grown from Tartarean wildwood, without doors or windows, and admitted the cooling northern breeze, great dancing butterflies and the mingled fragrances from the abundant flowers in the garden. I moved to the verandah and leaned against the rail, staring down across the vale to the shimmering blue lake and, in the distance, the lofty mountains of Mallarme. Now that the time had come for me to leave the playground of my youth, I felt compelled to stay a while longer, to linger, to bathe in the memories that flooded back like an incoming tide.
Two momentous events occurred that summer fifty years ago, when I was fourteen and life seemed a thing of limitless possibilities and boundless hope. I suffered a loss that affects me still, and for the first time I fell in love. So bound together were these incidents in my memory, as I looked back over the years at the shallow but honest boy I was then, that I could not recall one without being reminded of the other. My childhood was a halcyon period of endless summers, and it was the first time that real tragedy, and inexorable passion, had touched upon my life. The combination of events changed me - for better or for worse, I do not know, but changed me nevertheless - from the starry-eyed youth I was then to the man I am today.
Perhaps the beginning of the end was the first day of my holiday, when my father called me to say that he and my mother wished to speak with me. The summons, via the speaking-pipe beside my bed, awoke me to a brilliant, sunlit morning tempered by a cool breeze from the mountains. My room was a thoroughfare for all manner of iridescent flying insects, and flowers curled their inquisitive heads through the window-hole as if to witness my awakening. I had arrived home the night before from my boarding school in Mallarme city a thousand kilometres to the south, and I could think of no greater contrast than between the drab confines of my dormitory and my own room. I had been released from the prison sentence of school - the long months of the holidays seemed to stretch ahead without end - and my room was a symbol of all that was good in life.
After my father’s terse summons, I pulled on my shorts and shirt and, my feet bare to the warmth of the wildwood, made my leisurely way down the many stairs to the ground-floor. My parents’ possessions - the wooden carvings from Earth, the artwork from around the Thousand Worlds, the Tartarean rugs and tapestries - were familiar from my many summer and winter holidays here in the past, but at the same time new and exotic after the spartan furnishings of my school.
My parents, likewise, seemed to be creatures at once familiar and yet larger than life, like well-loved characters from a much-read novel. I could not say that I knew them well, nor could I claim to have loved them - they seemed to me to be stereotypical parents, offering safety and succour, and demanding in return only my attention and obedience, a contract that suited me, in my already semi-independent way, very well.
I had spoken only briefly to my father the night before, when he had met me at the vench-train station of Verlaine, and we had not broached the topic of my falling grades. I expected that this was what they wished to speak to me about this morning. I envisaged the dialogue as I knocked upon the archway to the study and entered: my father’s demand to know the reason for my lack of success, my usual excuses, my mother’s entreaties that I would do better next term, my earnest promises that I would. Already I was eager to be away from the house, to be with my friends in the tree beside the lake. They had been on holiday for the past week - I had been kept back to repeat an exam - and I was impatient to catch up with events, afraid of missing out on shared experiences that would subtly exclude me from the camaraderie of their company.
My father was seated behind his vast desk, a big man with a florid face and curling silver hair: he was cheerful and lenient by nature, only occasionally stipulating bounds that were not to be crossed, and never were. My mother stood before the arch that overlooked the garden and the lake. I had once overheard a guest at a house party describe her as beautiful, which had surprised me at the time, as one never thinks of one’s mother as being the object of such attention. She might have been beautiful, but she was also cool and distant. She seemed to me to go through the motions of being a mother, like an inadequate actress playing a part for which she was manifestly unsuited. They were both botanists who had come from Earth to study the flora of Tartarus, fallen in love with the province of Mallarme and decided to stay.
My mother moved from the arch and perched herself on the corner of the desk, while I sat on the facing chair, my feet dangling inches above the polished timber tiles.
My father tapped something before him, hidden from me by the elevation of the desk. ‘How much have they taught you at school about the supernova?’ he asked.
I was surprised and relieved that I was not to receive a lecture. ‘Well . . .’ I began. ‘We’ve studied all about the atomic processes—’
My mother gave a tolerant half-smile. ‘No,’ my father said, ‘I mean our supernova - the effects it will have on Tartarus?’
I frowned. I failed to see the reason for the question. ‘We were taught that one day the sun will blow and destroy the planet.’
‘In one or two hundred years from now?’
I nodded. I had never really sto
pped to think that the beauty I took for granted would one day be no more. To a child of fourteen, a century or two means the same as a million years.
My father said, ‘The scientists have revised their estimates. They’ve noticed increased activity in the sun itself.’
He smiled at my expression of blank incomprehension. ‘The scientists say that the sun will blow not in a hundred years, but in fifty or sixty.’
Now fifty years is a sum manageable to the mind of a young boy; fifty years was well within the expectancy of my life span, and my father’s words touched something deep, and until then unplumbed, within me. I felt a kind of awed appreciation of the fate that would befall Tartarus, my home and all I knew.
Beyond my mother and father, through the arch, I saw a group of kids running down the lane that led to the lake. I made out Gabby and Bobby, Satch and Rona. Then I saw the detestable Hulse, whose name seemed to suit him, and saw too that he had his arm about the shoulders of little Leah Reverdy, and that she seemed not at all bothered by this gross imposition - in fact, by her tinkling laugh that reached me on the wind, was rather enjoying his attention. The sudden surge of jealousy I felt then was overtaken by pique that they had not called upon me to join them - then I rationalised that they could not have known I was home.
I was impatient to join them, to impart the portentous news that within our lifetimes Tartarus would be destroyed. It seemed important that I share my discovery with them, so that perhaps I might judge from their reaction how I myself felt about the impending catastrophe.
‘The reason we’re telling you this,’ my father continued, ‘is that we want to know what you would like to do.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You were due to leave school next year,’ he said, ‘and work a year with us before starting college at Baudelaire.’
My mother took over. ‘If you did that, you might feel . . . shall I say, emotionally tied to Tartarus? You would be in your twenties before you graduated, and feel less like leaving the planet. By the time you are fifty, the evacuations will have begun, and it will be much more wrenching to leave then.’
‘The alternative,’ my father said, ‘is to attend college next year on Earth, break the link with Tartarus now.’
My mind was in confusion. For so long my future had been certain - study at Mallarme, then Baudelaire, with frequent visits home - and I could hardly conceive of this new plan.
‘No. No, I don’t want to leave.’ I thought of Leah, and the hopeless possibility that one day I might have her as my own - and it seemed that if I left Tartarus next year then my chances, even as slim as they were now, would be nil.
‘Perhaps you should have some time to think it over,’ my mother said. ‘It’s different for your father and I. By the time of the supernova, we’ll no longer be around.’
I could not bring myself to meet her gaze. If I indicated that I understood her I would seem heartless, while if I feigned ignorance I might appear foolish.
‘At least you know the situation now,’ my father said, bringing the subject to a close.
‘May I leave now?’
‘What about breakfast?’ my mother asked.
I told her that I’d grab some fruit on the way down to the lake - berries and citruses were bountiful in the hedges of the lane - and left the room. I could have gone around the desk and through the arch, but I felt that I would be impinging on my parents’ territory, and perhaps by doing so provoke more questions. I wanted nothing more than to rendezvous with my friends.
I left the house and sprinted down the track to the tall hollow-tree that over the years we had made our own. So impatient was I to tell my news that I failed to gather my breakfast on the way.
The entrance in the bole of the tree was concealed by ferns, which I brushed aside. Over the years, since first discovering the tree, we had worn the bark of the narrow defile to a lustrous glow with our continual passage back and forth. I slipped easily inside, found the footholds in the darkness and climbed. The tight chimney corkscrewed up the trunk of the tree, and I wondered how Hulse was finding the climb these days. He was a year older than me, and big for his age. I considered what might happen when he found he could no longer fit through the entrance: he was the nominal leader of our little gang, and knowing him as I did I guessed that he would call the hollow-tree out of bounds, a childish rendezvous anyway, and suggest that we meet at the cafe on the jetty instead.
My ascent was illuminated by the leaf-filtered sunlight that spilled through the exit hole in the trunk high above. I came to the oval slit, breathing hard, and paused before climbing through. The wide branch thrust from the tree at right angles, and over the centuries a great fungal growth had spread from this branch to the next, creating a triangular platform perhaps ten metres in length. Seated at the far end of this platform, their backs to me and their legs dangling over the edge as they stared down at the lake, were Rona, Gabby, Bobby - and Hulse, with his arm around Leah. I looked up to find Satch, and as expected detected his shape through the membrane of the dream-sac suspended from the branch above. For as long as I’d known him, he’d made every excuse to slope off and climb into the parasite plant and hallucinate the hours away.
Now that the time had come to tell my friends about the imminence of the supernova, I was overcome with an odd reluctance. Although we all, with the exception of Leah, attended boarding schools in Mallarme, these schools were different and we rarely saw each other during term. Only three times a year, during the holidays, did we renew our friendships: always the reunions were fraught and embarrassing affairs, for me at least, as I fought to overcome my shyness and regain the degree of intimacy attained during the last break.
Rona turned and saw me. ‘It’s Joe,’ she said, waving.
Gabby and Bobby both turned and waved in greeting, but, pointedly I thought, Hulse and Leah remained with their backs to me, absorbed in each other.
Forced to make an entry now, I waved and crawled on hands and knees from the tree trunk and across the fungal platform. Rona, Gabby and Bobby joined me and we exchanged the usual stilted greetings. We chattered about the past term, and I made a joke of my poor grades, only to be matched by Bobby who had failed all his major subjects and would be kept down next term. Of all of them, Bobby was my best friend, the one with whom the gap of months between meetings seemed like mere hours. He and Gabby were brother and sister, both tall and blindingly blonde, but whereas Gabby was all laughs and chatter, Bobby was quiet and self-absorbed, perhaps even a little slow. Rona was small and freckled and really quite ugly, but friendly and funny.
Gabby grabbed my hand to silence me, opened her eyes wide and leaned forward. She was about to divulge a secret, and I sensed that Rona and Bobby were far from happy.
‘Joe,’ said Gabby, prolonging the suspense, ‘guess what?’
‘What?’ I laughed, looking from Bobby to Rona.
‘Gabby . . .’ Bobby protested.
Gabby threw back her blonde head and laughed. ‘Rona and my brother,’ she declared in a primly theatrical voice, ‘are lovers!’
Oddly, it was me who reddened. The couple in question just looked at each other with that quiet complaisant smile of all newly joined couples.
Bobby then elbowed his sister in the ribs. ‘And who does it in the sac with Satch?’
Gabby bit her bottom lip and frowned up at where the dream-sac hung heavy with Satch’s weight above us. ‘Well, where else can we do it? He never comes out of there!’
Rona clasped her hands over her heart. ‘Can you even imagine it? Gabby and Satch in love!’
‘It’s not love,’ Gabby said with a frankness beyond her years, ‘just lust. How could I love someone who’s always so high?’
Rona, perhaps to make me feel less left out of the pairing off that had gone on in my absence, took my hand and hauled me to the edge of the fungal patio. ‘Just look at the view, Joe! I swear it gets better every year.’
We sat side by side, o
ur legs dangling over the edge, and stared out across the lake. We were perhaps twenty metres above the scintillating blue expanse, and the aerial view of the long body of water wedged between the gentle green hills made me think, as always, that I must surely live in the most beautiful region on all Tartarus. In the middle of the lake was the Zillion’s island, but there was no sign of the creature today.
‘Joe bombed and had to resit his maths exam,’ Gabby told Hulse and Leah.
Hulse just grunted. ‘You never could count, kid,’ he said.
Beyond him, Leah leaned forwards, like a queen in a hand of cards. She pushed her lips to the side of her face in a too-bad grimace that sent my heart pounding. ‘Hi, Joe,’ she said, lazy and laconic, and in the same way waved her fingers at me, minimally.