Meridian Days by Eric Brown

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