by Eric Brown
The island went up in a sheet of flame. One second it was an idyllic, grassy isle, and the next it was transformed into a blazing torch. Even Hulse, aware of what he intended, could do nothing to escape the conflagration. He turned and ran as the flames whipped about him, then fell as gouts of fire leapt at him like wild animals. The others stood no chance. Within seconds they were surrounded by a circle of fire, tiny, petrified figures huddling together on the knoll. I cried out for them to run, but, even as I yelled, the fire consumed them and they fell to the ground and rolled in a futile attempt to douse the raging flames. The furnace roar swept across the water, and seconds later I felt the full force of its heat in my face. I cried out Leah’s name. I could not believe that our special day had turned within seconds to tragedy.
I never made it to the island. I was floundering, perhaps a hundred metres from the beach, when I heard a sudden roar and a powerboat cut its engines nearby. Strong hands reached out and dragged me, protesting, to safety. The last I saw, as I grasped the gunnel and stared at the island, was Zur-zellian. He was kneeling on the knoll with his arms in the air, consumed by flame and reconciled to his destiny.
* * * *
I left the hollow-tree and walked along the road and up the hill to the grave-garden overlooking the lake.
The TWC transporter waited on the greensward beyond the cemetery. I judged that I had time to pay my last respects before it departed. I entered the garden and walked through the trees and the gravestones.
Other citizens had come to say their last farewells, too, but the glade that was my destination was empty. I paused on the incline, staring down at the gravestones side by side. Fighting back the tears, I stepped forward and made my way down the slope.
I paused before the first headstone, set proudly in the short, well-tended grass. I wiped my eyes and read the name. ‘Bobby,’ I said. I moved to the next stone. ‘Gabby.’ And the next two. ‘Rona, Satch . . .’ I paused before the next headstone, even now unable to suppress the bitterness that welled up within me. ‘Hulse Gabor,’ I read, and asked him, as I’d asked so many times before, why?
The last stone of all was set a little apart from the others. I crossed to it, knelt and bowed my head. We do these things, we follow well-worn protocol, even though the dead are dead and nothing we can do, no respect we pay, can ever alter that. We go through these meaningless rituals in order to help ourselves, but I knew that in my case it was no help.
I read the headstone: ‘Zur-zellian of Zanthar, an alien visitor to Tartarus, 1271? -1671.’
I closed my eyes and heard the songs of the birds in the trees, felt the heat of the sun on my face. I was almost ready to go, to leave the planet of my birth forever, when I heard a sound behind me.
* * * *
‘Joe . . . Joe Sanders?’ A woman’s voice. ‘Is it you, Joe?’
I turned and stared and was filled with a powerful emotion - that heart-wrenching ache we experience when confronted with a reminder of who we once were, of who we might have become.
‘Leah?’ I said.
She was small, and dark, and the passing years had been kind. She was as beautiful as I remembered her, with just a touch of grey in her short, dark hair.
‘Joe, it’s been so long.’
Instinctively we both reached out, and at arm’s length held hands, and with the physical contact the years seemed to fall away.
I was back aboard the powerboat as it edged around the island, and I felt again that sudden, heart-exploding joy when I saw Leah swimming away from the island. She had climbed aboard the boat and collapsed into my arms with tears of pain and relief, but it had never been the same again.
We had tried to renew our relationship after the tragedy - oh, how I had tried. We met every day during that last month before we returned to our respective schools, but something had happened to change the girl I loved. I tried to talk about what had occurred that day on the island, but Leah remained determinedly locked in the fastness of her silence. Our love had brought about, however indirectly, the deaths of our friends and the alien, and this knowledge was too much for Leah.
The summer holiday came to an end, and I returned to Mallarme city, and when next I came home I sought out Leah, but there was nothing between us, the spark had died. I told my parents that I wished to leave Tartarus after all, and sailed for Earth shortly after my fifteenth birthday.
Now I put my arms around Leah’s shoulders and walked her from the glade. We turned and stared down at the silent graves. At last she asked, ‘Did you ever find anyone, Joe?’
I shrugged. ‘There were one or two women . . . nothing lasting or serious.’ I glanced at her. ‘You?’
‘I met a fine man. We married, had children. You would have approved of him, Joe. He passed away five years ago.’
Unable to find a suitable response, I nodded. ‘You stayed here, on Tartarus?’
She shook her head. ‘After college I left for Earth, then settled on Mars.’
A silence descended as we stared down into the glade. Leah looked up at me, and I saw tears in her eyes.
‘Oh, Joe, I was so young and foolish ... I wanted to talk about what happened. I got your address from your parents, but by the time I reached Earth you’d left. I needed to find you, Joe, to talk to you.’ She drew a long breath and shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. It was all my fault.’
I squeezed her hand. ‘It was no one’s fault, Leah. No one’s. Hulse was unstable. He wanted revenge.’
‘But he would never have ... he would never have done what he did if it hadn’t been for me.’
I corrected her. ‘Leah, he resented Zur-zellian because it was the alien that brought us together. Don’t you remember? I called Hulse’s bluff and swam across to the island, and then you came to me in the dream-sac. Hulse had it in for Zur-zellian ever since then.’
‘It wasn’t that, Joe,’ she whispered in a voice as light as the breeze. ‘It was my fault. It was because of me that he did what he did!’
‘Leah . . .’ I remonstrated.
‘Listen to me, Joe.’ She stared up at me, determination in her large brown eyes. ‘That night, do you remember the night he attacked you, and I beat him off? Well, I told him that I never wanted to see him again, that I hoped he’d drop dead. And I told him we were to be married by Zur-zellian the following day.’
She was silent for long seconds, then went on, ‘Don’t you see, Joe? If I hadn’t told him that, then . . . then he wouldn’t have gone across to the island to disrupt the ceremony. And Bobby and Gabby and Rona and Satch and Zur-zellian . . . they’d all be alive, and you and me might have . . .’
I just stared at her as silver tears coursed down her cheeks, and I thought of our time together after the fire, her silence, her reluctance to talk about what had happened.
She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to tell you during those last weeks, Joe, and for all these years I’ve lived with the guilt.’
There was nothing I could say; there are times when words are redundant. As I stared at the woman I had loved a long time ago, I realised that only gestures remained, now, to show her that I was sorry, and that I cared.
We stood by the glade, our arms about each other, as the transporter’s siren sounded that the time had come for us to leave.
<
* * * *
The Eschatarium at Lyssia
J
onathon Fairman had worked all night on the sculpture, less from the artist’s fastidious need to attain perfection than from a real fear of what sleep might bring. To work, to create something solid which before had not existed, was a far preferable option than to submit to the nightmares which had haunted his nights of late.
He reached out, felt the malleable wood begin to warm to his touch. He closed his eyes and concentrated, attempting to project the emotion which would bend the timber to the desired shape. He opened his eyes and watched the wood dimple beneath his fingertips, then stepped back and viewed the p
iece as a whole. He could imagine the critics’ reaction. They would declare that once again Jonathon Fairman had created a lasting work of art - and he had to admit that in form the piece was very nearly perfect. It showed the figure of a woman rising from the substance of the alien wood like someone emerging, explosively, from an ocean. It was the latest in a series of six he was in the process of completing. Each showed a female figure - his wife, Aramantha - trying to escape from the medium of which she was forever a part. On the face of each sculpture could be seen an expression of increasing agony. Visually the pieces were a success, but for Fairman they failed to work on the emotional level.
For perhaps the hundredth time that month he passed along the line of sculptures, pausing from time to time to caress a flank, a limb, to match his wife’s star-spread fingers with his own - and each time, although he did feel deep within him some stirring of the emotion he had tried to communicate, the pieces added nothing, no deeper strata of feeling, to their visual aspect.
He had hoped that each might complement the other, that the viewer, after beholding the’ poignancy of Aramantha’s attempt to escape, would be rocked, when touching the pieces, by the terror and the anguish. But the emotional content of the sculptures was vapid, weak simulations of the emotions his wife had no doubt experienced. Oh, that might pass muster with critics who had never in their safe, cloistered existences experienced any emotion, stronger than envy, but in his heart Fairman knew that he had failed to do justice to his wife’s ultimate experience - and he knew, also, why. How could he ever hope to create a meaningful work of art from Aramantha’s death when he had for so long denied the event?
He paced across the room and paused beneath the arching crystal dome that covered his penthouse studio. He stared through his grizzled reflection and looked out over the wings of his timber mansion to the greensward sloping towards the edge of the cliff, and the Pacific ocean beyond. Upon his return to Earth, Fairman had sought to sequester himself far from human habitation, away from prying eyes. He had almost succeeded.
As ever, though, a phalanx of floating cameras hovered, with mute mechanical propriety, just beyond the fence that demarcated his property. Trained his way, they hoped to catch a glimpse of him in the throes of creation. Beyond the fence, on the jade road, a small crowd of lost souls had gathered, as they did every day, in a bid to see the great artist taking a stroll around his grounds. Every day he took pleasure in disappointing them.
Two years ago he had returned from Tartarus to find himself feted as one of the greatest artists in the Expansion. On Tartarus, for the past forty years, he and Aramantha had shut themselves away on a remote island off the uninhabited western continent, turning out their respective works, despatching them to their agent on Earth, and ignoring all reviews and critical reaction good or bad. They had guessed that they were successful, or at least popular, by the size of the cheques forwarded by their agent - monies which they had used to fund galleries and cultural galas on their adopted homeworld.
After Aramantha’s death Fairman had fled to Earth, to what he hoped would be a quiet, anonymous life on the rugged coastline of the Pacific North-west. But the illusion had been shattered by the battery of cameras and the legion of reporters, both human and mechanical, awaiting him at the spaceport. He took refuge in the first mansion he found up for sale, occupied himself with his work and ignored all requests to appear in public.
Fairman yawned as a wave of fatigue swept over him. He crossed to the bureau, slid open a drawer and withdrew a small silver casket. He carefully opened the carved lid. A few grains of silverdrift had collected in the corners of the box - all that remained of the drug on which he was dependent, and not enough to dispel the dreams should he choose to sleep. For the past month he had rationed his nightly dose, to the point, for the past three nights, where the drug had been ineffective against the onslaught of the nightmare images.
A part of him knew that for the good of his art he should give rein to what the monsters of his subconscious were trying to tell him, but that part of him which wanted to retain its sanity cowered at the thought.
He was wondering what had delayed Karrel - he had promised to call at noon - when he recognised the gothic lines of his friend’s customised flier in the air above the greensward.
He watched the artist land the vehicle on the deck outside the studio. Seconds later the young man stepped through the sliding door and stopped in his tracks, something histrionic in his affectation of surprise.
‘Good God! You’ve actually . . . You said you were thinking of . . .’ Words failing him, Karrel circled the six statues with the circumspection of someone afraid that they might come to life and flee. ‘Magnificent,’ he said beneath his breath.
Karrel was perhaps half Fairman’s age, around fifty, and still retained a youthful head of golden hair and handsome, well-defined features. He was a third-rate artist, very much in vogue, and he considered himself privileged to do Fairman’s errands - even if those errands included supplying the famous artist with silverdrift.
Wide-eyed, Karrel looked across the studio at Fairman. He indicated the sculptures. ‘May I . . . ?’
‘If you must,’ Fairman muttered to himself, then aloud, ‘Why not?’
With reverence, with an almost palpable air of expectation that seemed to Fairman the next thing to parody, Karrel laid a hand on the first statue.
He closed his eyes. His features melted into an expression of rapture.
Fairman cleared his throat. He wanted nothing more than to get down to business.
Almost reluctantly, the younger artist withdrew his hand. ‘A masterpiece,’ he whispered. ‘Truly a masterpiece.’
Fairman snorted. ‘I’m not happy with it. It’s lacking something.’
Karrel pouted judiciously. ‘Well . . . perhaps it could do with a little refinement, the slightest of tweaks?’
‘A great twist, more like,’ Fairman said. ‘Anyway, less of that. How are you? Are you working?’
‘Never better, and I’ve landed the commission for the mural at the Diego starport.’
Fairman was nodding to himself. How such mundane trivialities - or rather the seriousness with which people took them - sickened him to his marrow.
‘Speaking of which . . .’ he said.
‘Murals?’
‘Starports.’
Karrel looked uncomfortable. He dabbed at his nose with a perfumed kerchief, feigning interest in the last statue.
Fairman had entrusted the artist to obtain not just his usual monthly supply of silverdrift, but two kilos of the stuff. That much would last him for five years, and no one addicted to the drug had survived any longer.
‘Well?’ Fairman demanded.
‘I’m afraid there was a slight - how shall I put it? - difficulty.’
‘You failed to obtain a bulk consignment?’
‘You might say that,’ Karrel murmured. ‘Not that I didn’t try. Just last week my contact at the ‘port promised me the two kilograms.’
‘So how much did you manage to get?’ Fairman asked.
Karrel shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I ... I made alternative enquiries. There are other drugs, miracle philtres that will provide the same relief as silverdrift.’
‘You are mistaken, my friend. There is no substitute for ‘drift. I’ve tried everything from natural drugs to manufactured substances.’ He paused. ‘How much did you obtain?’
‘My contact could lay his hands on not one grain. The danger involved . . . The TWC authorities have declared the drug a banned substance.’ Karrel stood beside the statues, seventh in line and just as immobile.
Fairman found a chair and sat down, a finger to his lips. What a fine irony it was that Tartarus was the sole source of silverdrift. If only he had known, when resident on Tartarus, that one day he would be dependent on the drug . . .
‘Very well. No doubt you did your best.’ His calm words did not reflect his mental turmoil.
Karrel ventured a smile. �
�In the event, it might prove a blessing. Silverdrift kills. In five years . . . The galaxy cannot afford to lose an artist of your standing.’
Fairman wanted to tell the man to shut up. Karrel did not have the merest inkling of what the ‘drift meant to him, how only the nightly balm of the cool sparkling powder made his existence bearable.
Instead, he merely gestured wearily. ‘Forgive me, Karrel. I have work to do.’ He indicated the line of statues.
Karrel backed from the chamber, promising that he would look in upon Fairman at the soonest, that if he should need anything, anything at all . . .
Then he was gone. Fairman heaved a great sigh.