The Eschatarium at Lyssia

By Eric Brown

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 piece 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.

He positioned his chair before the curving face of the dome and stared out at the early evening landscape. The sun was setting on the oceanic horizon, laying down orange and scarlet strata. The red dome of the sun reminded him of the coming night. He wondered how he might see it through with no ‘drift to assuage his fevered mind.

He had at one time considered doing without the drug voluntarily, so that he would become cognizant of the terrors of his past that were locked within his subconscious. He was an artist, was he not? Why keep that great storehouse locked - even if its content proved too harrowing to bear? If he was to produce art out of life, which after all should be the tenet of all great artists, then surely all experience was valid?

But over the months his nightmares had grown ever more terrible, and he found himself unable to cope with the ghastly images within his head. He had steadily increased his intake of silverdrift, until a week ago when it began to run low and he had had to ration himself.

Three nights ago, on a quarter of his usual dosage, he had been tortured by a procession of unbearable visions. All featured Aramantha in agony, begging him not to let her die. In the nightmare he had been visited by pangs of guilt almost physical in their agony. He’d awoken screaming, covered in sweat, still haunted by images of Aramantha, their villa on Tartarus, and the rugged Grecian landscape of the island.

Two nights ago he had dreamed that he himself had brought about Aramantha’s death, and a sense of guilt had haunted him all the following day.

Last night he had remained awake, working, determined not to give in to sleep. He wondered now if he could remain awake a second night, or a third? And how soon might it be before his subconscious unburdened its freight of anguish upon his conscious self in the form of hypnagogic hallucinations just as terrible as his nightmares?

A little over two years ago Aramantha had contracted a rare terminal disease, and had spent her final months on the island with Fairman. A week after her death, Fairman had left Tartarus and returned to Earth. Then, not long after his arrival, he had employed the services of a neurosurgeon to edit his memories of Aramantha’s illness. The agony, obviously, had been too much to bear.

The process was illegal - for obvious reasons. Memories could never be comprehensively erased. Sooner or later they re-emerged, warped and deformed, as Fairman’s were doing now.

A part of him was curious to know exactly what had happened during Aramantha’s last months - even though he was aware he would probably regret the knowledge; after all, he had thought it wise to have it edited in the first place. The note he had written to himself had informed him of all he thought he should know: ‘Aramantha died on Tartarus on the 40th of St Jude’s month. You had your memory wiped of this, and her illness, to save your sanity. Let it be.’

As the sun sank from sight and the stars appeared in the night sky one by one, Fairman repeatedly caught himself on the brink of sleep. He awoke for perhaps the fifth time with a start, and was wondering how he might keep himself awake when he became aware of a dark shape against the luminous starfield.

At first he thought it was yet another of the floating cameras, though larger. Then he saw that it had wings. Could it be the latest creation of one of the gene-artisans who lived a hundred kilometres down the coast, a DNA-created replica of a bald eagle or condor, extinct these past thousand years?

Then, as the creature drew closer, his heart began a laboured pounding. He realised that he was sweating. There could be no doubting it - unless this was just another peculiar facet of his dreams: the creature advancing through the air towards his mansion was none other than a Tartarean Messenger. He experienced a quick stab of panic at the sight of the creature, and wondered why? Why?

The delicate Messenger descended to the deck and hovered an inch above the surface, its great wings a blur of shimmering motion. It proceeded in light, tip-toe steps towards the entrance, its long wings coming together behind its back.

It spoke into the receiver, ‘Monsieur Fairman?’ Its voice was light, piping.

Fairman cleared his throat. ‘The same. Your duty?’

‘To relay to you a message.’

He hesitated. ‘From Tartarus?’

The Messenger blinked. It was bald, as pure in facial feature as a child. It wore a silver bodysuit, from the shoulder blades of which its wings sprouted on wrist-thick columns of cartilage. The wings themselves were not feathered, but as diaphanous as fine lace, like those of a dragonfly.

‘Where else?’ the Messenger responded at last. ‘Perhaps, if you let me in, we might talk further?’

Fairman spoke, and the door slid open. The Messenger stepped through, followed by the length of its wings. The creature stood within reach of Fairman before the transparent membranes, fully three metres long, cleared the entrance. This close, he was amazed at how small the creature was - the apex of its shaven pate barely reached his chest.

For all he knew the Messenger to be of human stock, there was something nevertheless alien about it: the pale skin, large eyes and thin-lipped mouth - though, at the same time, it was not without a strange, severe beauty. Fairman detected the slight rise of breasts beneath the bodysuit; it was female, then.

‘I come from Tartarus; generally, from the western continent, specifically from the isle of Lyssia.’

Fairman experienced a second’s disbelief. ‘I lived there,’ he whispered, then quickly, ‘Who sent you?’

‘I was summoned by the ghost of your wife, Monsieur Fairman.’

‘No!’ What cruel joke was being played on him? ‘My wife?’

‘She haunts the western peninsula of the isle. I was traversing the archipelago when she manifested herself and called a summons. Messengers ignore no summons, especially those of a ghost.’

Fairman was shaking his head. The western peninsula? He recalled the amphitheatre, what he and Aramantha had seen and heard there. Could it be? His heart leaped at the thought.

‘Aramantha wishes to talk to you,’ the Messenger said.

He considered Aramantha, her alleged ghost. Then it came to him that on the island neighbouring Lyssia was a forest of silver trees . . .

‘But a ship—?’ he began.

‘Boats leave Diego daily, bound for Tartarus,’ the Messenger said. ‘I have made arrangements.’

‘And you?’

‘I will accompany you, of course. It is my destiny to go with the glory of Tartarus when the sun blows in twenty years.’

Fairman looked across the studio at the six statues. ‘Give me a little time. I have one or two tasks to complete.’

The Messenger inclined her head. She turned, mindful of her wings, and processed herself through the exit.

Fairman approached the sculptures. He would meld them back into the block from which they had come. He did not wish these sub-standard pieces to stand as his last work, should tragedy befall him on Tartarus.

* * * *

The landing on Tartarus suggested that much had changed. In the past the transition from omega-space to planetary atmosphere had been achieved without the passengers’ realisation. This time, the ancient barque bucked and juddered as it entered the orbit of Tartarus, then was rattled almost to the point of disintegration by the planet’s overheated troposphere. The touchdown itself seemed more of a drop from a great height, which jarred Fairman’s bones and left the ship creaking ominously.

An even greater shock was in store when the ramp was lowered and the passengers, with Fairman and the tiny Messenger in their wake, swarmed out. The surrounding hills of Baudelaire, once emerald green, were parched and straw-coloured now.

In the sky, dominating and oppressing the landscape, was the cause. The sun - once the size of an orange held at arm’s length - filled a quarter of the heavens, a blinding white disc.

Fairman selected a flier from the port hire service, hoisted it into the searing, white expanse of the sky and banked away in the direction of the western continent. The Messenger insisted on accompanying him in the flier. The creature claimed it was her duty to take him to she who had summoned him, and though Fairman wished to travel alone - something about the Messenger still troubling him - he was too exhausted to argue after the uncomfortable voyage, too apprehensive as to what he might find on the island. She folded her wings and sat beside him in silence.

They flew over the sluggish sea of Marea, the equatorial ocean that stretched for two thousand kilometres between the densely populated landmass they had just left and the sequestered western continent of Kithira. The heat was such that the sea gave off foul-smelling veils of steam; it seemed that the higher they flew, the hotter the air became, and Fairman chose to keep the flier at low altitude, preferring the reeking discharge to the wilting heat.

Fairman reclined on the comfortable control couch before the bulbous viewscreen, the side-panels open to admit what little breeze their passage generated. He had to fight to keep from falling asleep; repeatedly he awoke with a start and busied himself needlessly with minor adjustments to the controls.

Although sedated for the three day duration of the voyage from Earth, he had managed only a few hours of genuine sleep, and predictably these were haunted by familiar images. Prominent were those of his wife, her handsome Latin features twisted into a mask of agony, her body, once fulsome, reduced now to parlous skin and bone. More terrifying had been the mental anguish that Fairman had experienced: the sense of guilt, of hopelessness and grief that had threatened to take his sanity.

He had emerged from sedation just before transition, and the realisation of where he was, and the promise of the silverdrift, had served to push back the horror and give him hope.

The Messenger perched beside him on the passenger couch, leaning forward, her posture suggesting an attitude of observation, an eagerness to arrive at journey’s end.

They had spoken hardly a word to each other since their communication at his mansion. Fairman had wanted to ask her more about her meeting with Aramantha’s ghost, but had found the creature’s silence, her absorption in a reality that seemed at many removes from his own, a powerful deterrent to enquiry.

Now, as a roundabout way of finding out what he wanted to know, he determined to ask the creature about herself.

‘Why is it that your Guild has vowed to remain on Tartarus?’

The Messenger turned her large dark eyes on him, as if deciding whether she should deign to reply.

‘We were created to communicate,’ she said, ambiguously.

‘Yes, but why?’

‘In the early days we were created to act as liaisons between the many castes of colonists who were forbidden, for reasons of etiquette, to speak to each other. Our wings, our eidetic memories, were designed to aid this function.’

‘And when the castes were no more?’

‘There were always tasks we could perform. Many of my forbears were bards, poets, reciters of the Tartarean sagas.’

‘And then, with the swelling of the sun, you again come into your own.’

‘That is so. And when the sun explodes, we will effect the final communication.’

Fairman stared at the childlike Messenger. ‘How so?’

‘On the day before the apocalypse we will gather at prearranged sites around Tartarus and end our lives of flesh. Then, when the sun blows, our collective consciousness will be fired outwards, our atoms will commingle with the cosmos, communicating with all sentient life in the galaxy, telling of our sacrifice, our elevation.’ The creature fell silent, as if contemplating this hallowed event.

Fairman shook his head, but remained silent. He wanted to point out to the fey being just what would happen, come the day of destruction. First, the breathable atmosphere of the planet would be burned up by the intensifying heat of the sun, the seas would boil and evaporate and all organic matter would ignite in a world-wide conflagration; then the photon sleet of the exploding sun would blast all that remained from the planet’s surface.

But he kept silent. The Messenger believed, and who was he to gainsay such faith with his cynical rationalisations?

If such things as ghosts did, indeed, exist . . .

Quite suddenly the mist lifted, and ahead Fairman made out the rocky bastion of Kithira’s coastline. Inland, a spectacular range of mountains rose against the great white orb of the sun. Fairman set the flier on a course parallel to the shore, heading towards the southern seas where the continent stuttered to an end in a diminishing chain of archipelagic islets.

He cleared his throat. ‘You said you were summoned by the ghost of Aramantha? How did this happen?’

The creature spread her delicate fingers. ‘In ages past, long before humans came to Tartarus, long before even the Slarque walked the planet, others lived here, aliens from another star - the Tharseans. They did not die as we do, but lived on as ghosts - or rather as what we call ghosts. The phantoms of this alien race still live here, and occasionally they are joined by human ghosts, chosen by the legion of the Tharseans. Aramantha Fairman is one such.’

‘And this . . . this ghost - it summoned you?’

‘She summoned me, said that she wished to speak with you. That is all I know.’ The Messenger fell silent.

Fairman sat back in his couch and contemplated what she had said. He considered Aramantha, and what they had witnessed, more than once, on the island where they had made their home.

Almost every evening, after a long day’s work, they would take bread and cheese, fruit and wine, and leave the villa. They would walk until they reached a suitable location, and eat and drink and enjoy the view, talk about their work and what they hoped to produce.

A favourite place, to which they returned again and again, was the amphitheatre on the western peninsula, a fan-shaped banking of marble-like tiers overlooking the performance area beside the sea. The amphitheatre pre-dated the Slarque, and was said to be the work of the aliens who had made Tartarus their home aeons ago.

The mystique of the place was emphasised by the fact, or so Aramantha had claimed, that it was haunted. On perhaps a dozen occasions during their forty years on the island they had heard strange sounds issue from the performance area of the amphitheatre - the occasional cry, of pain or joy they could not tell, a string of what might have been words in an unknown language, lofty and declarative, and once, briefly, the sound of someone or something weeping. At least, Aramantha had anthropomorphised them so. Although Fairman had heard them too, he had rationalised the sounds, ascribed them to freak effects of the wind, or the amplification of an animal noise by the excellent acoustics of the ruin. And anyway, the incidents had been so infrequent, and then so brief, that Fairman had tended to pay them little attention beside the all-consuming passion for his wife and his work.

Harder to explain away, however, were the visual manifestations witnessed by Aramantha and himself. On two occasions - and these twenty years apart - they had both become aware of a fleet, shifting form in the warm night air. The first time, while drinking wine in the upper tiers of the amphitheatre, they had turned as one, just in time to see a rapid blur vanish from sight down in the performance area. Fairman had managed to convince himself that what he had seen was nothing more than either the movement of a wild animal, or a dust-devil created by the warm night winds that came in off the sea.

The second incident had been more difficult to dismiss. They had approached the amphitheatre from the beach, a little drunk with wine, and stopped dead before they reached the performance area. To their right had appeared briefly - for perhaps five seconds, no more - a flickering, humanoid form, an arm raised in a gesture of valediction. Then it vanished, and Fairman and Aramantha had stared at each other as if to corroborate what each had seen.

‘The wine,’ he had muttered to himself.

And down the years, while Fairman had tended to minimise the import of the apparition - citing scientific rationalisations like hallucinations or sympathetic mental imagery - Aramantha convinced herself that the amphitheatre was indeed haunted. She had even produced a performance piece entitled, ‘The Phantom of the Isle’.

And now, if the Messenger was to be believed, she herself had returned as a phantom.

* * * *

They sped south, on a course parallel with the coast. The inland mountains gave way to broad plains, once green but burned ochre now by the ministrations of the sun. The gentle sea lapped at isolated coves and beaches, incessant activity that had gone on from time immemorial, and which few human eyes had seen - and which, in twenty years, would be no more. Such beauty, Fairman thought, such innocent beauty destroyed by unimaginably vast forces.

The sun was a great, nebulous orb balanced on the horizon. It was setting, though the process would take hours, and in its wake would not come night as such but a bloody and baleful twilight. Fairman felt himself nodding off, but fought the urge.

Hours later, the flier on automatic, he did finally doze, only to be awoken after what seemed like minutes by a frightful nightmare image. He thrust a dagger into Aramantha’s heart, and then stood back in horror, while all around him in the amphitheatre spectators denounced him as a traitor.

He sat upright with a small cry, and was rewarded by the sight of the archipelago ahead, a series of evenly spaced islands diminishing over the bow of the sea. The panorama, a duplication of the scene he had beheld many times over the years, brought tears to his eyes.

He lowered the flier so that it was wave-hopping, and one by one passed the uninhabited islands, dark against the broad disc of the setting sun. Two hours later he came upon the penultimate island of the archipelago. He decelerated, planed the flier in across a sheltered cove and settled it on the beach.

The Messenger frowned at the island. ‘But this is not Lyssia,’ she said.

‘No - there is . . . I have business to complete here, before . . .’ Reluctant to discuss his addiction, he quickly pulled two canisters from beneath the couch. He set off up the beach, towards the forest which covered the island.

The heat of the sun scorched his skin and seared his lungs with every breath. He recalled the long evenings he had spent with Aramantha on their island, the cooling sea breezes which had tempered the heat of the day.

It was quiet within the forest, and cooler; high overhead the foliage filtered the light into slanting columns, through which motes of sparkling dust eddied and swirled on their lazy descent from the silver trees to the forest floor. Fairman took a deep breath, and was aware almost instantly of the intoxicating effect of the unprocessed drug. The dust coated the mucous membranes of his nose and mouth with a sweet, perfumed taste, rich with the promise of dream-free sleep.

He and Aramantha had taken their boat to this island perhaps once a year, stayed for a day and night during which they had swum in the rock pools, made love on the moss-carpeted forest floor, and become blissfully high on the air-borne stimulant. Taken this way, so infrequently, it was neither addictive nor harmful.

He came upon a shallow dell in the forest, filled with a drift of the silver spores. He knelt and scooped handfuls into the canisters. The dust coruscated in his palm, reflecting the light of the setting sun like diamond filings. He filled the canisters and replaced their caps. He judged that he had sufficient silverdrift to last him five years. His only thought was that it would make his existence bearable again, his nights tolerable ... So what if in five, six years the cumulative effect of the substance would rot the synapses of his brain, scale the byways of his ganglia with its virulent chemical crud, and bring about motor neurone dysfunction and rapid death?

He returned to the beach and stowed away the canisters, the Messenger watching him with a neutral expression. He lifted the flier and headed across the sea towards Lyssia. Within minutes, emotion blocking his throat, he powered up the white beach and came to a halt outside the studio-villa he had shared with Aramantha.

He climbed out and stood in the fine sand, staring up at the two-tier edifice. The Messenger was beside him, yawning and stretching, luxuriating in the heat of the sun.

‘The ghost is—’

‘I know,’ Fairman snapped. ‘In the amphitheatre.’

The Messenger stared at him with wide eyes, then nodded silently.

‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘I’d rather be alone.’ Before she could reply, he set off up the sloping beach towards the villa, relieved that the Messenger made no move to follow him.

He walked through the rose garden, neglected and overgrown these past two years, and climbed the steps to the second level deck. The sliding door was not locked. He passed inside.

Unable to recall how he had left the villa, he had expected bare rooms made anonymous by the removal or storage of their possessions. He was shocked to find that the room was as he recalled it from when he had lived here. He looked about him, saw a few of Aramantha’s favourite pieces - a portrait of herself she had commissioned from a friend, a landscape of the mountainous southern continent they had both loved. The sight of these objects now brought back a flood of painful memories. He realised that all that was missing from the scene was Aramantha herself.

He hurried quickly through the lounge and into his old studio. This room was bare, empty. He had taken his own tools and materials with him to Earth; Aramantha had worked in another studio on the ground floor. He resolved not to revisit that room.

He took the spiral staircase to the garden behind the house - the sloping rockery in which Aramantha had lovingly reared her favourite blooms. He strolled up the zigzag path, and at the top of the garden sat down on the bench which overlooked the villa and, beyond it, the sea.

How many times had they sat side by side on this very bench, discussing life, their work, art in general? Now Aramantha’s absence was hard to bear, a physical pain within his chest. He could hear her voice, smell her scent, see her face radiant in the light of the setting sun. He was aware that his cheeks were wet with tears.

One of his final memories of Aramantha was of her returning from her physician in Baudelaire. For months previously she had complained of listlessness, frequent migraines, and eventually she had set aside her natural mistrust of the medical profession and, on Fairman’s behest, consulted a doctor.

The diagnosis was that she was suffering from a rare neurological disease - Fairman could not recall the precise nature of her illness, as he had had this edited from his memory - and had only months to live. It had been a vicious blow that came at them without warning; they had been looking forward to another fifty years in each other’s company. They had never even dreamed of one being parted from the other, still less parted by a fatal disease in this relatively disease-free age.

Two months after the diagnosis, Aramantha had died, though he retained memories only of the first month. It had been a limbo period of disbelief, of anger and grief. They had had to readjust themselves to the knowledge of her eventual end, redefine their relationship. Fairman had been solicitous of his sick wife and had cosseted her - which Aramantha had not wanted. In death, as in life, she demanded to be treated as an equal, with no sympathy, no special pleading or dispensation. Fairman recalled that she had worked hard on her final project, which she had kept secret from him with the promise that she would tell him what she was doing in due course. But if she had ever let him in on her secret, then he’d had that wiped from his consciousness too.

Not for the first time he wondered why he had undergone the memory erasure programme. He had loved Aramantha as he had loved no one else, and the knowledge of her illness had nearly destroyed him - but others had suffered the loss of loved ones without resorting to memory erasure. He had lived all his adult life with the philosophy that if he was to strive to create art from the reality around him, then all experience was worthwhile. Why had he not learned from the tragedy, transcended Aramantha’s death and grown in mental stature like the artist he claimed to be? What had been so terrible about his wife’s end that he should have had it excised from his mind?

He stood suddenly and walked from the garden, up the incline to the greensward that was the highest point on the island. It was a stroll of thirty minutes to the coast and the amphitheatre there, but Fairman made it in half that time. The combination of exertion and anticipation, and the heat, had him sweating as he came upon the amphitheatre, paused on the top tier and stared down into the performance area. He could almost make-believe that Aramantha was at his side, sharing the magnificence of the view.

He recalled the phenomena he and Aramantha had witnessed here all those years ago. More than anything he wanted to accept that somehow, in some way, his beloved had outlived death - but how could he forego the tenets of a life of rationalism because now, in extremis, some bereaved part of his psyche needed to believe in the impossible?

He walked down the tiered steps, taking the descent with care. The temperature had increased, as if the shape of the amphitheatre had captured and contained the heat, like a cauldron. Ahead, the upper hemisphere of the setting sun spanned the embrasure between the headlands.

He reached the performance area, then stood still, a lone actor on an empty stage awaiting the rise of the curtain. He looked about him, at the dizzying incline of the tiers on three sides. He felt as though he were being watched by a Thousand invisible spectators.

He realised then that he was weeping, and when he spoke his voice cracked with emotion. ‘Aramantha?’

He turned at the suggestion of some sound behind him, and tried to focus on the air between him and the banked tiers. The feeling that he was being watched intensified.

‘Jonathon . . .’ The sound reached his ears softly, the faintest breath.

He spun around, seeing nothing. ‘Aramantha!’ His heart was thudding.

He heard something, the merest whisper, what might have been: ‘You have come.’

He said her name again. He stared at a point in the air three metres before him, from where he imagined the voice had issued.

And there, before the rising tiers, Fairman made out a shimmering, insubstantial form - that, unmistakably, of a woman. Although the strata of the tiers could be seen through the phantom figure, he could make out the strong, handsome features, the piled dark hair, of Aramantha.

She shimmered before him, an arm outstretched.

‘Jonathon - you came. I wished to talk to you, to ensure that you were well, that I was happy.’ Her voice, exactly as he remembered it, echoed in the air around him, as if emanating from the stones of the amphitheatre.

Fairman regained control of his breathing. He found his voice. ‘What . . . what are you?’

The ghost laughed, the sound so familiar. ‘Jonathon, Jonathon . . . you were ever the rationalist. You could never bring yourself to believe in the ghosts that haunted the arena.’ Aramantha gestured, a quick spreading of her fingers he recalled so well.

‘What am I? Am I a ghost? Am I the Aramantha you loved and lost?’ Her expression, hovering before him like a faded super-imposition over the tiers, frowned as if in concentration.

‘Strictly speaking, I am not Aramantha - but a continuation of her. I have her memories, her personality and beliefs.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Then again,’ the phantom went on, seeming to ignore him, ‘perhaps I am Aramantha. How does one distinguish between an individual entity like your living wife, and something that is an exact copy which began where the original left off?’

‘You’re speaking in riddles!’ Fairman cried.

Aramantha - he could call the spectre by no other name - sighed. She gestured around her at the amphitheatre. ‘This place, and others like it across Tartarus, was built millions of years ago by the Tharseans. You recall the myths, the tales told by the Messengers of the proud star-faring race that rose to prominence and became extinct before Earth even came into existence. They built many wonders on many worlds, but perhaps none so great as this . . .’ She paused. ‘I suppose you could call it an eschatarium. This is a place where the dead come back to life, or at least where the identities of the dead are stored, living out their own abstract existences.’

‘Here?’

‘In the very fabric of the stones which constitute the arena is enmeshed a technology so miniature as to be undetectable by the clumsy sciences of humanity. This is where the dead of the Tharseans reside. You and I witnessed these phantoms, though much faded and atrophied by the passage of time. The aliens brought their loved ones here to die, and duly they were absorbed into the technology of the amphitheatre, granted an extended existence - depending, of course, upon one’s beliefs.’

Fairman was shaking his head. ‘I ... I find it all very hard to believe.’

Aramantha spread her arms wide, a shaft of dying sunlight falling through her torso. ‘Believe,’ she said. ‘Behold and believe.’

Fairman stared at her shimmering form. He said at last, ‘The Tharseans brought their loved ones here to die? Then how did you come to be ... ?’

‘I was lucky, Jonathon. The play - my final performance.’

He echoed her words.

She laughed. ‘Surely you cannot have forgotten? The event we enacted upon this stage? The last act of Julius and Hippolyte.’

‘Aramantha . . . when I returned to Earth, the grief ... it was obviously to much for me to bear.’ And he told her of how he had had his memory of the final weeks erased from his consciousness.

He shook his head, some detail beyond his understanding. ‘But if I agreed to enact the sequence with you . . .’ He recalled the scene in the Martian epic, in which Julius passed his dying lover the chalice of poison. Presumably, then, he had played this part in Aramantha’s ultimate performance. He could understand that he would have been duly grief-stricken - but to the extent where he would have had the memory wiped from his mind? ‘If I agreed to take the part of Julius, why did I have the memory wiped?’

Aramantha was shaking her head. ‘Jonathon, Jonathon . . . What torture you must have passed through before the memory erasure.’

‘But why? I don’t understand! Why could I not live with the memory, grieve and come to some reconciliation of what had happened? Surely to have you take the poison was preferable to seeing you waste away in pain?’

Aramantha was regarding him with dark, compassionate eyes. ‘Jonathon - I think that it was not what happened in this arena that you wished to forget, but what transpired later.’

His mouth was dry. ‘What?’ he managed at last.

Aramantha said, ‘What do you recall, Jonathon? What is your last memory of our time together?’

He shook his head to clear his thoughts. ‘You were ill - very ill. It was a month after the diagnosis. I was nursing you. On good days we’d sit in the garden and talk. You were planning some new project, but you wouldn’t tell me what.’ He could not go on without weeping. He let the silence lengthen, then said, ‘That’s my last recollection of our time together - sitting in the garden.’

Aramantha smiled at him. ‘I decided that I didn’t want to let the disease run its course. I didn’t want to waste away, physically and mentally. Julius and Hippolyte has always been one of my favourites, and its theme of love, illness and mortality seemed suited to my situation. I told you what I wanted - to enact the final scene, just the two of us in the amphitheatre, and you agreed. We prepared for a week. We decided not to record this particular performance, that it would be our own private affair. We chose a day, and that day came and we played out the scene. You passed me the chalice and I drank, and I died in your arms, and yet miraculously I did not die. I was . . . reborn, renewed, without the pain that had wracked me so. I was the first sentient being to take advantage - albeit unwittingly - of the eschatarium for millennia. I became part of a ... I suppose you could call it a memory bank, stocked with the identities of the Tharseans, alien but so similar to humans in many respects. By the time I learned to manifest myself, days later, I saw your flier leave the island. I was inconsolable. You had said you would stay on until the final evacuation, and I had hoped that you might revisit the amphitheatre so that we might be reunited. Only later did I find out why you left so soon . . .

‘We are in contact with the Messengers, and one of their guild told me what had occurred to make you flee the planet so precipitously.’

Fairman felt weak. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘Two days after my death, a Messenger arrived at the villa, from Baudelaire. A solar pulse had made radio communications impossible. The Messenger had a communiqué from my physician, regarding my diagnosis. My doctor had sent my case notes and biopsies off-planet, seeking a second opinion. A doctor on Avalon, a specialist in xeno-biological maladies, questioned my physician’s findings, suggested that I had a less severe form of the disease which might respond well to treatment. The Messenger had come to tell me to return immediately to Baudelaire, to begin the cure. Of course, by this time it was too late. When you heard what the Messenger had come to tell you . . .’

Aramantha reached out a hand to him. ‘Jonathon, my poor Jonathon. Is it any wonder you left Tartarus, had your memories erased?’

Fairman found his way to the nearest tier and sat down. He could not recall what the Messenger had told him, of course, could not recall the grief and pain he must have experienced then - but on hearing now what had happened, two years ago, he realised the anguish he must have suffered, understood now the terrible irony of their tragedy.

Aramantha reached out to him, her hand passing through his arm. Fairman told himself that he detected warmth.

‘Jonathon, do not grieve. See for yourself, look at me - can you deny that I am reborn? I live, Jonathon, I experience. Rejoice in that fact!’

He smiled. He tried to see past his own loss and apprehend Aramantha’s resurrection.

‘But when the sun blows—’ he began.

Aramantha was smiling. ‘Oh, no, Jonathon. We cannot be harmed by the supernova. The technology that gives us awareness is so small that it cannot be affected by the cataclysm. We will ride forever through the galaxy on a wondrous wave of light.’

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 with 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.