The Fall of Tartarus

by Eric Brown

  ‘Then he might still be alive?’

  ‘I’m sorry. That’s impossible. The jungles of Earth are hostile enough - those of the Iriarte are hell by comparison. Quite apart from the intense heat and lack of water, the diseases, the poisonous insects and plants . . . Expert opinion reckoned that he would have been lucky, even if fully fit, to have survived a day in those conditions.’

  Katerina thought through what the Director had told her. ‘So Haller concocted the story about Bobby dying of a tropical disease in Baudelaire?’

  ‘He would have lost his command if the truth had reached the observers. He decided that a cover-up was necessary. Since then, TWC policy has changed as regards the southern tribes. We’re doing everything we can to facilitate their evacuation.’

  ‘Do you have information about where Bobby went down, maps of the area?’

  ‘You aren’t thinking of venturing into the interior? I wouldn’t advise—’

  ‘Director Magnusson, I don’t give up on a story halfway through. I want to find out exactly what happened to Bobby.’

  Magnusson turned to the screen on his desk, typed a command into the keyboard set in the arm of his swivel chair. Seconds later a large-scale map of Iriarte appeared on the screen. He magnified a certain section, bringing geographical details into sharp relief. He ordered a printout and passed the resulting hard copy to Katerina.

  ‘I’ve marked where the flier went down.’

  Katerina studied the map, aware that her hands were shaking. She was holding, here, the first evidence she had as to Bobby’s fate. She spread the map across the desk and pointed. ‘What are these features, here and here?’

  ‘Those are native settlements, temporary villages. The natives of this region are nomadic. The settlements are situated about a hundred kilometres south of where the wreckage was found. This is a monastery, a couple of hundred kays south of where the flier went down - some schism of the Church of the Ultimate Sacrifice.’

  ‘And this is a river, right?’ She indicated a broad band of blue winding its way between the green shading of the jungle, at it closest point about fifty kays from the crash site. She looked up at Magnusson. ‘What about transport?’

  ‘There’s a daily ferry from Baudelaire to Apollinaire. From Apollinaire, ferries into the interior run about once a week.’

  ‘What about fliers?’

  Magnusson was smiling. ‘Even the famous Katerina De Klien would have difficulty finding a flier for hire since the evacuations began.’

  Katerina folded the map and made to leave. ‘I appreciate your help, Director. You’ve made my job a lot easier.’

  ‘But I still advise you not to venture south,’ he began.

  Katerina just stared at him. ‘And I’ll give your advice the consideration it deserves,’ she said.

  Magnusson inclined his head. ‘Good luck, Ms De Klien.’

  Katerina left the TWC headquarters. The protesters had disappeared, driven away by the merciless heat of the midday sun, and the streets of Baudelaire were deserted.

  * * * *

  Alien and off-world fortune-tellers had set up their tents inside the terminal building of the Baudelaire-Apollinaire sea ferry. The vast shed was packed with travellers. Families camped in the central area, huddled around the pathetic bundles of their possessions. Katerina bought a ticket for the Apollinaire ferry, due to depart in one hour, a tortilla and some strange-looking fruit from a vendor, and lugged her pack into the cavernous building. A warm breeze lapped in from the ocean beyond the open end of the shed, stirring the hot air and circulating the combined smells of sweat and cooking food. The sun had set one hour ago, leaving in its wake a flickering aurora of crimson and gold as brilliant as any cinematic effect.

  She sat on her pack and ate, looking around at the crowd milling to and from the ferries constantly docking and embarking. The criss-crossing melee of scurrying individuals resembled one vast beast, a gestalt organism continually renewing itself. She recalled arriving in Dakar all those years ago and sitting on the corner of Hugo boulevard, watching the crowd swarming through the junction and thinking how insignificant and alone she was.

  She had been taken in by Sophia, a mountainously fat women in her forties who read palms and told fortunes and claimed that her father had been a Fulani witch-doctor before the war. On their first meeting, Sophia had taken one look at Katerina’s soiled palm and made eyes as big as the moon. ‘Girl, are you gonna go places, and I mean go places!’

  Now Katerina scanned the bizarre and gaudy tents set up around the walls of the terminal. There were at least a dozen fortune-tellers to choose from, native Tartareans and off-worlders alike. She’d heard bad stories about alien tellers, like some who could and would tell you the exact day you were due to die, others who could take over your body and use it for their own purposes in the dead of night.

  She was intrigued by one particular tent, and the figure who sat outside it. The tent was conical and silver, with words in French scrolling down its sloping sides. It advertised the skill of Sabine, mind-reader and future-seer. The girl on the stool before the tent was young and beautiful, her head shaven and embroidered with a micro-mesh scalp implant. She looked North African, her skin as gold as the Saharan sand at dawn, her pose noble and yet resigned, as if she were burdened with the knowledge of some terrible and inexpressible tragedy.

  Katerina activated her camera, shouldered her pack and approached the tent. The girl regarded her from beneath long eyelashes, and casually turned her wrist to gesture Katerina through the flap. The girl slipped in after her, indicating that Katerina should remove her shoes and sit on a cushion on the ground. The girl - Sabine, presumably - seated herself opposite with a negligent languor born of repetition.

  Her eyes downcast, Sabine murmured her rates. ‘For one week ahead, one hundred units, for two, two hundred - like this, okay?’

  ‘Two weeks will be fine,’ Katerina said.

  Sabine placed a velvet pillow between them, then nested upon the pillow a magnificent, many faceted crystal.

  ‘Put your hand there, listen to my questions and answer them truthfully.’

  Katerina accommodated her palm to the crystal’s uneven surface. The girl placed her small hand on Katerina’s and bowed her head. As the seconds passed, Katerina watched the symmetrical pattern of silver wires on her scalp begin to glow.

  Sabine asked, ‘Tell me why you came to Tartarus?’

  Katerina said that she had come to learn the fate of her brother.

  ‘And have you learned of his fate?’

  ‘I fear he’s dead.’

  Sabine looked up, her large oasis eyes enquiring. ‘But I feel you knew this before you left Earth?’

  ‘I had been told that he was dead, but I didn’t know the exact circumstances.’

  Sabine fell silent. She bowed her head again, as if in concentration.

  ‘But you cannot bring yourself to grieve for your brother, for Bobby.’

  Katerina stared, shocked. ‘How do you know his name?’

  Sabine merely smiled and repeated her question. ‘You cannot grieve for your brother, no?’

  Katerina gathered herself. ‘I ... I feel a sadness, a loss. But we had no contact for years.’

  ‘This is not the only reason you cannot grieve for Bobby.’

  It was a statement of fact that shocked Katerina. ‘No . . . No, it isn’t.’

  ‘You feel anger, resentment.’

  Her mouth suddenly dry, Katerina nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’

  She recalled how Bobby had left the orphanage when he w as sixteen, had left her to face alone the h arsh and loveless routine of the institution that he had hated as much as she did. He had known the hell to which he had consigned Katerina, and yet that had not stopped him walking out.

  And then one day at dawn she had slipped from the orphanage to bathe illicitly in a nearby river. She had spent the morning swimming naked beneath the sun, and by noon she had made her decision: she would not return to the
orphanage. She left her uniform beside the river, changed into her casual clothes, and caught the three o’clock express to Dakar. She had rode all the way on the roof, and the wind that roared in her face was her first real taste of freedom.

  Sabine lifted Katerina’s hand from the crystal, then placed the stone in her lap. She hung her head low, her eyes closed, both hands resting on the crystal.

  At last she looked up. ‘I feel now that I know you. I can tell you what lies ahead.’

  Katerina felt the tension build within her. Unlike her Western colleagues back on Earth, who sometimes mocked her belief as superstitious, she had faith that fortune-tellers’ predictions would to varying degrees come true. How it worked, how these people could read the future, she had no idea - all she knew was that in her experience the many tellers she had consulted, from Sophia onwards, had correctly divined her destiny.

  Now Sabine said, ‘Your brother is alive. You will find him, and he will apologise and explain himself. That is all I can see.’

  Katerina shook her head, unable to speak. She experienced an effect of shock: a rapid warmth rising from her chest. At last she managed, ‘But I was told he was dead. That there was no way could he have survived . . .’ She pressed fingers into her eyes, then stared through the gloom at the Arab girl. ‘How . . . where is he? How do I find him?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I know none of these things. I see you speaking to him, I see your tears.’

  ‘Tears of joy?’

  Sabine avoided her eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Tears of sorrow.’

  From the pier outside the terminal building, the ugly double note of a klaxon rent the humid air. ‘My boat. I must go.’

  ‘Take care,’ Sabine said. ‘And good luck.’

  It was the second time she had been wished good luck that day. Impulsively, she leaned forward and touched the fortune-teller’s cheek. Then she paid Sabine and hurried from the tent, and when she looked back the girl had emerged and resumed her seat, the knowledge of future events informing her pose with tragedy.

  That night, as she slept in her berth aboard the ancient diesel-powered ferry that carried her south across the Sea of Baudelaire, Katerina dreamed of Bobby. He was standing in the jungle, blood flowing from a dozen lacerations, his arms outstretched in supplication.

  And he was calling out her name.

  * * * *

  Katerina arrived in Apollinaire at dawn and booked into a quiet canal-side hotel. The ancient metropolis consisted solely of two-storey timber buildings on a grid-pattern of man-made waterways. The place had about it an air of premature abandonment, as over the years half the population had moved to Baudelaire, and then off-planet. The citizens who remained did not fill the city, and entire quarters had succumbed to gradual neglect. The jungle, hacked back when the city had been built hundreds of years ago, was reclaiming its territory street by street: creeping vines and huge tropical blooms gave buildings the surreal appearance of things at once familiar, yet strangely transformed.

  Magnusson had been right about the impossibility of hiring a flier for the trip into the interior. Of the three vehicle hire agencies in the city, two had long since closed and the third hired out only ground-effect vehicles. The owner told her that with the exodus from Tartarus there was no longer a demand for the fliers from the rich and adventurous, and that the only way to travel into the heart of the continent was by steamer.

  She made enquiries at the steamboat headquarters and learned that the next ferry left for the interior in three days. She spent the period wandering through the moribund city, talking to those citizens yet to be evacuated and creating, through a montage of interviews, a picture of life on the dying planet of Tartarus.

  At night she drank in a bar she’d heard was frequented by the last of the traders who had once made regular forays into the heart of the continent. On the night before her departure, she bought drinks for half a dozen sun-scorched, jungle-toughened men and women, merchants and explorers, who sat around the table on the verandah of the Ace of Spades bar.

  She spread her map across the table and told her story. She said that she was trying to find out what had happened to her brother who had crash-landed in the jungle.

  A bald-headed prospector looked up from the map. ‘How long ago did you say this was?’

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘And he came down here, in Kruger territory? He’d be lucky to survive half a day.’

  The others nodded and murmured their agreement.

  ‘I’ve good grounds to believe he survived the crash.’

  A muscled old woman with skin like mahogany peered at her. ‘You have? What grounds?’

  ‘The word of a future seer,’ Katerina said.

  The old woman laughed. A couple of her companions, more superstitious, made gestures appropriate to their religions.

  ‘Surely we’d have heard of a crash,’ the bald prospector said, ‘and for certain if he’d survived.’

  His neighbour judiciously shook his head. ‘You think? In Kruger territory? When was the last time we heard anything out of Kruger territory?’

  One or two of the others nodded, filling her with hope.

  ‘It’s jungle heartland,’ the old woman explained. ‘Think of all the poisonous snakes and plants you know, then double them and add a dozen nasty viruses for spice. There’s only one tribe able to survive in there - the Bourgs, and they’re nomadic. They pass through the Territory once a year to harvest the golden fruit, and then get out.’

  A silence came down on the group as they contemplated their beers. Katerina noticed an exchange of glances, as if the motley crew were trying tacitly to determine whether or not to tell her more.

  ‘What is it?’

  The bald prospector looked up. ‘Old Henrique,’ he said. ‘If you’re lucky you might find him at Lapierre’s Landing.’

  ‘Heard he’d caught a killer virus,’ someone said.

  The prospector shook his head. ‘If he had, he’s shook it off. He’s back on his feet now and trading. Tough character, Henrique. If he’s not in the interior, he’ll be found at Sookie’s place in Lapierre’s Landing, three hundred kays upriver.’

  The old woman nodded. ‘If anyone’ll be able to tell you about your brother, Old Henrique’s your man. Knows Kruger territory like his backyard, has the ear of the Bourg people. He’s partial to a flagon of sour feti, so make him a present and tell him Lizzie sent you.’

  Katerina ordered another round. She raised her glass. ‘To Old Henrique,’ she said.

  The following morning, her head aching from the beer, Katerina boarded the ramshackle steamboat, the Iriarte Queen, for the slow voyage into the interior.

  She was allocated an insect-infested cabin on the top deck, with a narrow, uncomfortable bed and a spluttering shower. There were only two other passengers beside herself, a wizened old couple she saw boarding the steamer on the morning of departure. The oldsters were white tribes-people, descendants of the original European settlers. They went barefoot and wore baggy shorts and soiled T-shirts, more to appease the nudity taboo of the so-called civilised w orld than to make any fashion statement. Katerina’s onl y other travelling companions were the Captain and his mate, a young Oriental barely into his teens who doubled as ship’s cook.

  She soon slipped into the shipboard routine. This close to the equator, you slept during the heat of the day and awoke at sunset to enjoy the relatively cooler hours of night. There w ere two meals a day; a breakfast of fruit and bitter coffee at sunset, and a spiced stew with rice in the early hours of morning. Katerina spent the evenings in the ship’s mildewed bar, making the mos t of the journey’s only luxury: a constant and cheap supply of bottled lager beer, chilled to perfection. She interviewed the captain and his lad - local colour for the film - but had no such luck with the tribes-people: they spoke a corrupted form of German she had no hope of understanding.

  The river was a broad, brown swath winding between the monotonous, canyon-like walls of the jungle. For a few
hours on the first night, Katerina stared out into the jungle from her seat in the bar, trying to discern some feature of interest in the passing landscape. By the fourth night, alone in the bar, she found the regularity of the jungle strangely threatening: other than the ship, there was no sign that humankind had imposed its mark upon the land. The jungle was inhospitable and inimical, and every hour she was travelling further into its alien heart. The foliage that often overhung the river seemed to be reaching out, eager to absorb both the water and the ship. She tried to busy herself with filming and commenting on the journey so far, but there was only so much to film, and she knew she would not use much of her narration: in her films to date she preferred to allow the moving image and the words of the locals to shape the course of the narrative. She was speaking now for the sake of something to do, the sound of her voice intrusive against the incessant throbbing of the ship’s engine and the occasional bird-call from the jungle.