The Death of Cassandra Quebec

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© Eric
Brown 1990, 2011

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This
story was first published in
Zenith II
, edited by David
Garnett (1990).

The
moral right of Eric Brown to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The
Death of Cassandra Quebec
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I came to Sapphire
Oasis in search of experience, or so I thought at the time. I had
made my home on Nova Francais for almost two decades, the last few
years a repetition of cafe-life, parties and second-rate
exhibitions where even my best crystals failed to sell. I was
getting old and lonely and my work was suffering, and some vague
desperation drove me to Earth to experience that which I might
synthesize, through my skill, into art.

The famous crystal
The Death of Cassandra Quebec
was being exhibited for the
first time in ten years, and I made this my excuse to revisit the
planet of my birth. I took a bigship through the interstellar
telemass portal to Timbuktu and caught the mono-train north to
Sapphire Oasis.

I had seen many a
lavish illustration of the colony – had even admired Tyrone's
famous hologram of '37 – and as a result I was overcome with a
sense of
deja vu
at first sight. The oval oasis, perhaps a
kilometre from end to end, was surrounded by a great leaning series
of golden scimitars, their hilts planted in the sand of the desert,
their arching blades supporting the pendant globes that comprised
living quarters and spacious studios with views across the
artificial lake.

That first night I
dined alone in the revolving restaurant on the island at the centre
of the oasis. I ate synthetic gazelle and yam, with chutney and
Moroccan wine. The panorama was magnificent: beyond the illuminated
orbs of the individual domes, and the fringe of surrounding palm
trees, the desert extended in dark and sultry swathes the size of
Europe. Across the dunes to the south stood the telemass portal. As
tall as a mountain, its blank interface was braced in a glowing
frame like a hexagon of colossal fluorescents.

It was through this
portal that I and a thousand other tourists had journeyed today
from Nova Francais, and tomorrow it would be opened to the world of
Henderson's Fall, 61 Cygni B. The talk in the dining room was of
nothing else but Nathaniel Maltravers, and his arrival tomorrow
evening at Sapphire Oasis.

I ordered a second
bottle of wine.

As I drank I thought
about another famous artist, a woman this time. Cassandra Quebec
had inspired more women than just myself to seek expression through
the medium of fused crystal. She was the artist who had shown the
world her soul, who had taken the fledgling form and proved it as a
legitimate means of self-expression. At the height of her career
she was the world's most celebrated artist. Then she spoiled it all
by announcing her betrothal – I was young; I wept when I found out
– to the minor laser-sculptor Nathaniel Maltravers. A year later
she was dead.

I finished the second
bottle and contemplated a third. I had known when I booked the
bigship to Earth that Maltravers -  who was indirectly
responsible for his wife's death, after all – had decided to return
to Sapphire Oasis for the twentieth anniversary commemoration of
her passing, but I had not let it put me off the idea of making the
trip. Tomorrow, I would visit the Museum of Modern Art and request
a private viewing of the Maltravers/Quebec crystal.

I retired early and
lay on my bed, staring at the stars through the dome. A party was
in progress on the lawn beside the lake, one of the interminable
soirees
that gave the place more the air of a luxury resort
than that of an artists' retreat. Artists, their rich patrons and
guests, mixed with a social ease I found enviable; snatches of
cultured conversation drifted to me through an open vent in the
dome.

Unable to sleep, and
reluctant to join the gathering below, I took refuge in a
memory-tape. I placed the crown – more like a skull-cap – on my
head and selected a tape. As I shed my own identity and slipped
into the programmed persona, I could not help feeling a twinge of
guilt at my escape. Memory-tapes were a spin-off from a device
known as mem-erase, illegal on Earth for almost two decades.
Mem-erase – the process of self-selected amnesia to which I had
once been addicted – had been proven to have certain adverse
psychological side-effects. Not only had their private use been
proscribed, but even law enforcement agencies, who had used
mem-erase to access the minds of suspected criminals, had been
denied its advantages. As a result of the ban, the simulated
scenarios of memory-tapes were viewed in some circles with a
certain stigma.

I selected the ersatz
memories of a fictitious vid-star, lay back and for the next hour
lived a life of success, fame and love.

~

I awoke early the
following morning, booked some time alone with the crystal and
strolled along the palm-lined boulevard to the museum.

On the few occasions
when the crystal had been exhibited in the past, I had been loath
to experience it – the mere fact of Cassandra Quebec's death had
been painful enough, without subjecting myself to the emotional
reality of it. But twenty years had passed since the incident; I
was older and perhaps wiser now, and I considered myself ready to
have the experience.

Not that I was without
misgivings. I held, perhaps irrationally, a fierce dislike for the
man who had married Quebec and who was ultimately responsible for
the accident that killed her. Added to which, Maltravers'
production of the crystal had elevated him from the minor artisan
he was to the status of a world celebrity. Perhaps what had
prevented me from experiencing the crystal before now, quite apart
from the emotional trauma I would have to undergo, was the thought
that I would be participating in the metaphorical aggrandizement of
man at the expense of woman.

That morning at
breakfast in the revolving restaurant I had been invited to the
table of a group of Hoppers – rich artisans and their hangers-on,
who skipped the globe from one artists' colony to the next. They
were shrill and opinionated, and I sought the protection of
silence, offering nothing to the debate about Maltravers and the
reason for his return. I heard one claim that he was returning to
seek artistic rejuvenation from the locale of his wife's horrific
death; another, that he intended to end his life here, as befits
the artistic temperament.

The truth, I
suspected, was neither. It was my guess that Nathaniel Maltravers
was staging the spectacle of his return for no other reason than
that, in the years since Cassandra Quebec's death, his own artistic
and popular success had floundered. The dozen or so 'major' works
he had released upon the universe had flopped abysmally. His return
was probably nothing more than a cheap ruse to gain publicity.

The Death of
Cassandra Quebec
remained his first and last  great
work.

The museum, which
housed the crystal and a thousand other works of art, was an onyx
cathedral raised above the desert on flying cantilevers and
approached along a sweep of gently ascending steps. It was cool and
hushed within, and I took my time and strolled towards the crystal
wing. I paused at the arched entrance, showed my pass to the
security guard and stepped inside. The chamber was empty; I was
quite alone. Before me, in pride of place in the centre of the
room, was the crystal – in fact a thousand alien stones fused into
one faceted, centimetre-thick disc perhaps two metres across.
Visually, it was a mere swirl of colour, a coruscating vortex of
argent and indigo. Only to the touch would the crystal discharge
the stored emotions of its creators.

I must have heard a
hundred different reports about Cassandra Quebec's death, and
staged and re-staged the tragedy in the theatre of my mind. I was
on Nova Francais when I first read about the accident; the article
was in a journal almost two years old, and the shock of the news
was compounded by the fact that I had learned about it so late.

Her arrival at
Sapphire Oasis, with her husband and new-born baby, made world
news. It was her first public appearance since the birth of her
daughter; the film of their approach in an open-top vintage
Mercedes, smiling parents and babe-in-arms, is famous – a scene
imprinted on the collective consciousness by the tragedy of the
events that followed. The fact that the instrument of her death was
travelling with them makes the short clip all the more grotesque.
As a wedding present, Quebec had bought her husband a bird-like
alien known as a Pterosaur from a newly-discovered planet in the
Serendipity Cluster. It was an ugly, featherless creature, had a
beak like a scythe and was reputedly empathic - a suitably bizarre
pet for the world's most famous couple. It could be seen perched on
the back seat, maintaining its balance with edgy adjustments of its
vast, leathery wingspan as the automobile swept through the gates
of the colony.

Quebec and Maltravers
argued often during their first year of marriage. It was reported
that their differences of opinion, because they were artists, were
all the more vituperative. Maltravers, the rumour went, was jealous
of his wife's talent and success; Quebec, for her part, despaired
that her husband's constant envy would prevent him from ever
attaining greatness for himself.

The one known truth of
their relationship was that, however violent their arguments, their
rapprochements
were just as intense. They were hailed, in
media hyperbole, as the planet's greatest lovers – how jealous I
felt when I read this! – and as evidence the news-media offered up
the fact that, as well as sharing a bed, they also shared a
studio.

It was in this studio,
three days after her arrival at Sapphire Oasis, that Cassandra
Quebec met her end,

They had argued.
Quebec was part-way through a crystal that would stand as testimony
to their love, and as such it had to contain
everything
,
their imperfections and flaws of character as well as their
strengths. Maltravers was loath to subject himself to so public a
scrutiny, and his protestations which began their final argument
were overheard by their daughter's nurse.

They were in the
studio, facing each other across the sun-lit chamber. The volume of
their recriminations was noted by several other artists, who paid
no heed as this was nothing new between the husband and wife. The
nurse reported that she had glimpsed the alien pet, flapping in
agitation beside Maltravers, before she departed to attend the
crying child in another part of the living quarters.

According to
Maltravers, they had reached an impasse in their disagreement, a
temporary cease-fire, and Cassandra remained staring at him from
across the work-strewn room. Maltravers admitted to feelings of
anger, and it was this anger, experts testified at the inquest,
that the Pterosaur must have picked up.

Before Maltravers
could move to stop it, the Pterosaur left its perch, swooped across
the room and attacked his wife with claws like sickles. Maltravers
fought it off, but so savage was the attack that within seconds
Quebec was lacerated beyond recognition. He realised – he said
later in sworn testimony – that his wife was dying and that
nothing, not even the latest surgical techniques, could save
her.

The events that
followed were bizarre to say the least.

Beside Quebec was the
fused crystal, empty but for touches of her love for Maltravers.
What he did then, in his grief and regret and overwhelming sense of
loss, was to lift his wife and place her on the slab as if it were
a catafalque, and then lay his brow against its faceted surface and
impress upon it his turbulent emotions. She died in his arms
minutes later, and the crystal recorded the moment for
eternity.