Meridian Days (5 page)

The girl was small, with long fair hair, dark eyebrows and a pale, oval face. Her lips were so full they seemed swollen, giving her face a martyred look. I could not help but notice the threadbare state of the primrose dress that covered her thin body: she had about her the same unkempt and unsophisticated appearance as those who have ceased to look after themselves, like psychiatric patients. To complete her aspect of destitution, she was barefoot.

"How the hell can you stand the woman?" I asked.

She pursed her lips in a twisted, off-centre expression of resignation, shrugged stoically.

I said, "I know, somebody has to to the dirty work..."

This time she smiled, then hesitated on the verge of saying something. "Are you Mr Benedict," she whispered at last, "the pilot?" She glanced nervously at Trevellion, but the fish-woman was absorbed in conversation with her surgeon. "... I heard you announced."

I was surprised that she had remembered. "Ex-pilot," I corrected her.

"You're the first pilot —
ex
-pilot — I've ever met," she said shyly, avoiding my eyes. "Were you on in-system runs?"

I nodded, wanting to steer the conversation away from this subject. "Earth-Mars, most of the time." I too had adopted a whisper, as if loath to interrupt Trevellion's monologue: she was now declaiming out loud the aesthetics of having a tamed lion on the island.

"But why did you leave? Why did you come here, of all places?"

I wondered, for a second, if I was being set up — but decided against it. The girl was too nervous, too shy, to be intentionally probing for the errors of my past.

"I'd had enough of piloting," I answered. "I wanted a quiet life. Meridian seemed just the planet."

She shrugged, smiled. "I know it's silly, but I've dreamed for years of escaping Meridian. I
hate
the place. I want nothing more than to get away."

I laughed. "Then why don't you?"

"Oh, that's impossible!" She said this with venom, then stopped suddenly as she became aware of the silence around us.

Tamara Trevellion had paused in her speech and was staring at the girl, who seemed to shrink into herself beside me. Never have I seen such a look of dismay on a face as I did then.

"You
know
," Trevellion said, with an iciness entirely in keeping with her appearance, "that I will not tolerate being interrupted. Perhaps you would like to enlighten us with your comment?"

"Ner-no," the girl stammered. "I... I'm sorry—"

"In that case, I assume that you have something better to do with yourself than make a public exhibition of your ill-manners?"

The girl looked stricken, hardly able to nod in cowed agreement. As she hurried away she glanced at me, and I saw the expression of wretchedness on her face. A tension had developed among the group, as if each one of us felt uneasy with ourselves for tolerating such arrogance.

I watched the girl run across the lawn and disappear into the dome.

"Well, Mr Cunningham," Trevellion was saying, "will you capture me a lion? I'll make sure that you are amply rewarded."

"No matter what the reward, the answer is no. Brightside holds unpleasant memories for me. I don't want to risk my life merely to satisfy a whim."

Trevellion gestured. "My offer is one hundred thousand credits. Please take your time and think it over."

Before Abe could reply, Trevellion glanced at her scaled wrist and announced that it was time for the commencement of the event. She turned and swept from our circle, her fins rippling in the warm night air as she hurried across the garden.

Abe and I hung back, then followed the rest of the guests down a paved incline between scented bougainvillaea and the massive trumpet blooms of a native shrub. We passed over a stone bridge and came to the saddle-shaped greensward. Cushions littered the grass and the guests made themselves comfortable. Trays loaded with drinks floated through the gathering, and euphor-fumes snaked through the air. I was feeling far from euphoric.

"What a bitch," I said, as we stretched out on foam-forms set into the bank of the hollow.

"Do you know something, Bob? I think she had absolutely no idea what she was asking me to do. She wanted a sand lion, and that's all she was thinking about."

I was actually referring to Trevellion's treatment of the girl, but said nothing.

~

As we waited for the performance to begin, I thought of the girl and wished now that I had gone after her and said something, rather than allow myself to be lured meekly to watch one of Tamara Trevellion's self-aggrandizing events. I was determined not to be impressed by what was to follow.

A hush settled over the audience. I looked around the hollow; I could not see Trevellion, but Wolfe Steiner was seated on the ground ten metres before us with a group of Augmenteds, staring up into the night sky. The lights, floating will-o'-the-wisps on the periphery of the hollow, dimmed one by one until absolute darkness descended.

The first floating screen, until now a dark oval the size of a flier blotting out the stars of Darkside, activated; its frame of separate neon strips ignited in sequence and created a flicker effect, bathing the audience in a wash of bright electric blue light. Then with a startling crash of chords from a hidden speaker the screen suddenly expanded to fill half the sky above the hollow, and the guests below cried out first in alarm and then appreciation, and stared up in wonder. On the convex membrane of the screen, so vast I had to lie back to take in all of it, the first image resolved itself.

The scene was Earth, the Saharan artists' colony of Sapphire Oasis, and the subject was the crystal artist Max Trevellion at a party thrown to celebrate his engagement to Tamara Christiansen. The film was stock vid-footage, but subtly altered, computer enhanced. An accompanying voice-over spoke Tamara's early love poems. I had seen sufficient news-vids of Max Trevellion to know that the image of him here, sun-bathing beside a pool, working on a crystal, was idealised; skilfully, Tamara had altered the planes of his face, brightened his eyes, increased his height and made his movements fluid and commanding. He seemed even to emanate a charismatic aura. Only when I heard the line: "We apprehend our loved ones/ With eyes of perfection..." did I realise that this image of him was not an improved version of Max Trevellion designed to make him something that he was not, but how Tamara Christiansen had actually seen her husband-to-be.

For the next thirty minutes we watched an historical account of the following twenty years: their wedding on Earth, their artistic collaborations, their move to Meridian. Tamara Trevellion appeared in all these as a tall, severe figure, handsome, perhaps striking — but not at all the Nordic Goddess she had been before her alterations. She had applied the same techniques of dissimulation to the portrayal of herself as she had to her husband, though in her case she presented her younger self in a cold, self-critical light.

Then the film concentrated on their individual artistic careers: Max went from strength to strength, attaining distinction with a series of crystals depicting life on Meridian, now exhibited in all the major galleries on Earth. For her part, Tamara seemed always to be in her husband's shadow. She seemed reluctant to exhibit her work, and the few pieces she did show gained only lukewarm response. Her poetry received popular acclaim, but Tamara despised this. It was as if the popularity of her verse served only to point up her lack of success in other artistic media.

The last scene of this first section of the event showed Max and Tamara working together on a crystal, with the voice-over: "In creation/ Our love combined, creating."

The giant screen dimmed, plunging the hollow into darkness. There was a polite scatter of applause. As a resumé of their time together, and of Trevellion's view of herself and her husband, it had been entertaining enough. It set the scene for the tragedy to come, but could not in itself be called art. Max Trevellion came over as a genuinely warm and talented artist, and I began to feel sympathetic towards the man, began to feel the tragedy of his loss. Trevellion, for her part, had characterised herself as a nervous, self-doubting paranoid. More than once she had shown herself dissatisfied with her creations: one scene had her smashing to pieces a crystal she considered second rate. I had always thought that there were two attitudes an artist can take to their work: they can egotistically assume that it is better than it actually is, or they can tell themselves that it could be better. Tamara Trevellion took the latter course to an extreme.

Then the second floating screen, redundant until now, activated its sequencing neon frame and expanded in a sudden, dizzying rush. Now the entirety of the heavens above us, the whole of our field of vision, was taken up by the over-reaching screens. A voice-over announced the date: a year ago today. The day, I realised, of the Telemass accident. An identical still image appeared on each screen; a photo-portrait of Max Trevellion, the two faces staring at each other from the convex hemispheres. Then the image to our left unfroze and the show resumed.

For the next hour, each screen played alternately. The first, for the next five minutes, presented a factual account of what had happened during a period of a few hours on that fateful day. Then that image froze and the facing screen  showed what I could only assume was an idealised version of the events, how Trevellion
wanted
the day to have progressed.

Fate is inevitable, she seemed to be saying, tragedy requires a victim: therefore, take
this
victim...

On the left screen, we watched Max Trevellion report that his daughter was ill: he would make the trip to Earth in her place. The audience watched, spellbound. I felt something catch in my throat with the realisation that, with these words, Trevellion had consigned himself to oblivion. Then, on the right screen, we watched a small, fair-haired girl ready herself excitedly for her trip to Earth.

At the sight of her I sat forward, my heart thumping.

"The girl..." I whispered to Abe.

He glanced at me. "Of course, didn't you know? She's Trevellion's daughter, Fire."

"She is? But I thought..."

I returned my attention to the right screen, appalled and fascinated. The girl going through the motions that would, in Tamara Trevellion's revisionist version of events, lead to her death was the same girl who, one hour earlier, Trevellion had treated with absolute contempt. The girl I had assumed was her maid or companion was in fact her daughter...

As I watched, I saw that Trevellion had employed the same technique to subtly alter her daughter's appearance as she had to enhance her husband's.

Fire Trevellion was, in reality, very attractive; in this version, her features had been taken and shifted slightly, skewed, so that while still recognisably Fire's, the face had lost all its appeal, its character. She was not quite ugly in her mother's revised scenario, but she was made somehow... peevish, mean-spirited. I felt a slow anger welling at Trevellion's deceit. I wondered how many of the guests were aware of what she had done.

Then the show switched to the left screen, the screen which showed what had really happened, and we watched Tamara kiss her husband farewell, to a rousing fanfare and the lines: "The tragedy of their parting/ Was that they knew not the tragedy." We watched Max Trevellion take his place on the Telemass pad beside the two other tachyon-passengers to Earth, watched him flash out of existence accompanied by a mighty crash of cymbals, then silence.

The right screen: Fire Trevellion said goodbye to her parents, who, arm in arm, very much in love, watched her take her place on the pad and disappear in a flash of white light. They turned, all smiles, and left the station. Voice-over: "Fate takes, and though the tragedy is great/ It can be overcome." But I knew the lines to be sanctimonious platitudes, lies. Had Fire taken her father's place that fateful day, the tragedy for Tamara would not have been so great.

But the show was not yet over.

Trevellion had one more victim to sacrifice.

As we watched, the two screens merged, became one all— encompassing membrane like the inner surface of a dome. A blurred image emerged. I was shocked to see Director Wolfe Steiner, enthroned in his command chair in the Telemass Control Centre — but not the Wolfe Steiner as we knew him. Trevellion's graphics had taken his aloofness, his coldness, his augmentation and emphasized all three, so that now he resembled nothing more than a caricature of his former self, a heartless, inhuman calculating machine. She had employed monotone graphics, hard angles to achieve the effect. As with Fire, she had remoulded his features; she had made him less human, more a sharp-featured adjunct of his augmentation.

We were swamped by the magnified image of Steiner, giving orders to his technicians as they attempted to retrieve the vector along which Max Trevellion and the others were lost. He was portrayed doing this with no display of emotion whatever, which, as Trevellion intended, had the effect of creating an atmosphere of hostility among the audience — but would passion on his part have done anything more to save the artist? Then we watched him break the news to the families, again with total impassivity. We watched him face the inquest, answer questions, accept the verdict of not guilty with all the emotion of an android. We were manipulated into feeling hatred towards Wolfe Steiner, and when the lines rolled out: "They found him free from blame/ But would
they
have found him guilty?" I think that the majority of the audience was on Trevellion's side in her detestation of the Director. I saw a tall figure hurry past where we were seated and leave the hollow, and when I looked to where I'd seen Wolfe Steiner earlier, his foam-form was empty.

I recalled Doug Foulds' opinion that their liaison was suspicious, and I knew now that he was right: Steiner had been set up. I thought I understood Trevellion's grief at her loss, but I could not begin to understand why, instead of trying to heal herself, perhaps learn from grief and create from it as artists should, she had vindictively hit out and unjustly slighted both Steiner and her daughter.