Starship Fall (8 page)

It was a bravura cameo, and I felt like applauding. I even thought I detected the shimmer of a tear in the corner of those amazing eyes.

She sniffed, and sipped her drink, and then smiled at me in a strangely confiding way which said
don’t-mind-my-histrionics
without quite saying so.

“And while I’m being so honest, Conway, shall I tell you the real reason I came to Chalcedony?”

I blinked. “The real reason?”

“The
real
reason,” she repeated.

“I’d be... honoured,” I said, and meant it.

She looked around, as if suddenly realising where she was and not liking the venue.

“But not here, okay? How about we go back to my place, hm?”

I looked at her, and something within my gut flipped like a landed fish.

“Yes... yes, that’d be great.”

We finished our drinks, slipped from the verandah, and walked along the beach. She was more inebriated than I’d assumed, and I gripped her arm to assist her through the dunes that fronted her place. By the time we climbed the steps my arm was around her waist and she was leaning against me, her perfume filling my head.

The glass door slid open at her approach; low lighting came on and music began to play. I was glad to see, as we entered the low lounge, that we would not be joined by the holographic ghosts tonight.

Though in that I might have been mistaken; as she fixed me a beer and herself a gin sling, she asked, “Have you ever seen a holo-movie called Starship Fall, Conway?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I have.”

She swayed over to the wall console, handing me the beer
en passant
, and touched a dial. “We needn’t watch it, as such. It really is trite and sentimental, but it will help to explain something.”

I nodded, at a loss to comprehend this latest twist.

At the back of the lounge, evidently the area set apart for the projection of films, a small starship travelled slowly through the void of space. I recognised it from my childhood forays to Vancouver spaceport: a Class II Stryker exploration vessel.

Luna curled herself into a sofa and patted the cushion beside her. “Sit down, Conway, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

I obeyed, and she leaned against me, folding her legs beneath her bottom and sipping her gin. I was pleasantly drunk, and I recall feeling none of the trepidation of two nights ago. Luna was a beautiful woman, and I’d been alone for five years, and that was all that seemed to matter.

She said, “Just after my third marriage ended in disaster, Conway, I met a dashing man called Ed Grainger. He was a starship pilot. He’d worked for the Greatorex Line piloting exploration vessels, years before we met. And then along came Telemass and he was out of a job. When I met him he was making the most of the situation; he’d earned enough over the years to buy his own small ship…” She pointed with her glass, sloshing gin, towards the screen: the Class II Stryker was now orbiting an unidentified planet. “He ran a small exploration business, reconnoitring the out of the way planets the Telemass organisation were too busy to bother about. There wasn’t much work around, but it satisfied a craving.”

I nodded and watched the film. The ship swooped low over the alien world, roaring silently across miles and miles of empty grassland.

“I met him around the time my own career in holo-movies was crashing down around me. I think we felt a mutual empathy, though of course he could still practice his trade... I was reduced to appearing in third-rate plays in bug-fuck nowhere, Idaho.”

She sipped her drink and looked suddenly bitter.

I suppressed a belch and said, “What happened?”

“What happened?” Her eyes became distant. “We fell in love. I was ecstatically happy for a year. I thought I’d found it at last, the real thing, a man I could love and who genuinely loved me.”

I winced, waiting for the punchline, the betrayal, the acrimony...

“But Ed…” She fell silent, lips pursed and held off-centre as she considered something long gone.

“Luna,” I said, “if you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine.”

She looked at me and smiled. “No, I want to tell you. That’s why I dragged you here, Conway. So I could spill the beans.” She stopped and laughed suddenly at her use of the odd phrase.

“But Ed…?” I prompted.

“He’d kept something from me. I mean, everything was great. We shared everything. We had so much in common, could talk for days on end, and the sex was spectacular… But then Ed would go into these… these fugue states, not so much depression as... as periods of intense introspection, when he’d shut himself away for a day or so and wouldn’t talk to anyone, not even me.”

I nodded, wondering where all this was leading.

“What was his problem?”

She looked at me steadily. “He was taking a drug, and had been for years.”

I nodded again, feeling like a psychiatrist.

“The thing was, it wasn’t a physically debilitating drug. He was fit and healthy... but it did things to his mind, altered his moods.”

“What was it?”

She smiled wistfully. “Ed called it Cassandra.”

“It didn’t have a common name?”

“No. You see, Ed was the only human being taking the stuff.”

I pulled a face. “Then how on Earth did he come across it?”

“He was exploring a planet for the Greatorex Line when he discovered a race of aliens. He stayed with them over a year, and in that time he came to know the aliens and participated in their rites. There was one certain drug they used, and it intrigued him. He asked if he might try it, and he did… and, well, he never stopped. He made sure he had a stock of the stuff when he left the planet, and periodically over the next ten years he used it... resulting in these periods of bleak introspection.”

She stopped there and stared at the image playing out across the room; the starship spiralled down, coming to land with a quick curtsy of its ramrod stanchions in a green mountain meadow.

Much delayed, it came to me. I said, “And the planet was Chalcedony, right? And the drug...”

I stopped there. Cassandra…?

Had Ed Grainger participated in the Ashentay bone-smoking ceremony?

I said, “He smoked the bones, right? He saw... or he thought he saw... the future?”

Luna said nothing, but indicated the image with her glass.

I watched, as the aliens appeared around the ship, small, humanoid, blonde people. The Ashentay – or the director’s idea of them.

“Ed told me all about it after we’d been together for about three months. I like to think it was because we shared everything, had no secrets. But I think the truth was that he’d sold the rights of his story to a production company in order to subsidise his explorations, and they were going to make a movie of his time on

Chalcedony... and then everyone would know.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Is that why you two split–?”

“Of course not, Conway. I was in love, besotted. I could live with his taking the drug, his evasions. It was a relief at last when I found out the reason for his fugues.” She paused, then smiled at me, pain in her eyes. “It was when his supply of the drug was running out that the trouble started. He needed more of it to attain the same effect, and it had certain psychotic-inducing side-effects.”

I said, “But... when the Ashentay take the drug, they claim they can see into the future…?”

Luna nodded, and a strand of jet hair fell across her face. She eased it away with the back of her hand, the gesture beautiful, and suddenly I wanted to reach out and take her in my arms. I felt her pain, her sadness… Was it arrogant of me to think that I might in some way be able to help her?

“That’s right, Conway. They do, and do you know something, they’re right. Ed saw into the future – oh, it wasn’t as if everything was crystal clear and obvious. He had to…” She struggled to find the right word.

I thought of what Matt had said earlier, and supplied it, “Interpret?”

“Yes, he had to interpret the visions he was granted. You see, he was a deeply spiritual man, Conway. Not the all-action hero of common myth. He craved the ultimate religious experience.”

I frowned. “But this drug, if he was granted visions of the future… then what he’d see was one reality – how the future would be, unalterable.” I shook my head, my thoughts slowed by the alcohol. “I don’t understand how anyone could live with
knowing
the course of future events.”

Luna reached out, laid two long fingers on my forearm and said, “Ah, but Ed had a theory, Conway. He thought that the drug offered visions of not one set, determined future, but a range of
possible
futures – and, armed with the knowledge of these possible futures, he could steer a course towards those he saw as desirable, beneficial. He explained it all to me in terms of quantum physics, of a multitude of possibilities...”

I considered what I had witnessed in the sacred cavern. “But the danger… If Ed was taking this stuff over a period of years, then he was lucky it didn’t kill him.”

She nodded. “Ed was careful, David. He took small doses.”

I said, “And when the drug finally ran out?”

Tears, huge silver tears like globules of mercury, slid from her eyes and rolled over her high cheek bones. It could have been another performance, but something told me the emotion was genuine.

“Then Ed returned to Chalcedony. He came back for more of the blessed drug. I begged him not to go, to seek help, try to kick the habit. But by this time he was well and truly hooked on the idea of engineering his destiny. He couldn’t give it up, and the only answer was to return to Ashentay. Despite the danger.”

I said, “The danger that the drug would kill him?”

“Thanks to one of these visions of the future, he knew there was a possibility he’d never come back from Chalcedony.”

“He told you this?”

She smiled with bitterness. “Of course not.”

“Then how…?” I began.

She drew a long sigh. “When the drug was running out, and Ed first suggested returning to Chalcedony... of course I wanted to know what was happening, what would happen. I wanted to know that we had a future together.”

Things fell into place. “You took the drug?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Just a couple of times. And I saw… I saw a future in which I would be without Ed, a terrible period of loneliness. I took it again, considering what Ed had told me about the futures it showed being only
possible
futures... but again I saw myself alone. That’s when I begged Ed not to go. He ignored me, as I knew he would...”

The silence stretched. I wanted to know what happened, of course, but I was sober enough to know the question would be crass.

At last Luna said, “Ed set off for Chalcedony, and never came back.” She nodded towards the screen. “That’s what the movie is about, Ed’s first time on Chalcedony, and his fateful return.”

I said, after an interval, “And that’s why you’re here, Carlotta, to attempt to find out what happened to him?”

“I believe his ship is out there somewhere, in the central massifs. I think he crashed, so close to his goal. I want nothing more than to find the ship, say goodbye to Ed – to bring an closure to that part of my life.” She looked at me. “Does that sound foolish, Conway?”

I smiled. “No,” I said. “No, it sounds eminently sensible to me.”

Then I reached out and took her face in my hand, stroking her cheek with my thumb. She leaned into my hand, smiling.

“Will you tell me something, Carlotta?”

She nodded, silently.

I recalled the scent of her the other morning, and then the reek of the bone smoke in the Ashentay’s sacred site… and I said, “Are you still smoking the drug?”

She smiled, and shook her head, the movement restricted by my hand. “No, Conway. That time way back was more than enough.”

I smiled. Call me a fool, but I believed her.

Then she said, in almost a whisper. “Conway, let’s go to bed, okay?”

It had been a long five years, and a big part of me was like a fearful, first-time schoolboy all over again, but Carlotta was a beautiful woman, and I felt I’d come to know her in the short time we’d been together. And I trusted her.

She slipped from her dress, and I fumbled with her underwear while she removed my clothes. Then we stood, naked, and she took me in her hand, and I almost passed out with the sudden, exquisite thrill of her touch.

We saw each other, day and night, for the next few days. I showed Carlotta around Magenta, then drove her into the mountains to experience the rockpools which were continually filled by the crystal clear waterfalls that tipped from level to level. We swam in the cool water of the pools and made love as the sun set, before picnicking naked then driving back to the Bay and drinking in the Jackeral until the early hours.

I was deliriously happy, like some love-smitten teenager. Carlotta told me about her childhood, the supposedly privileged upbringing of a pampered child, which in reality was a soulless time of being looked after by hired nannies while her mother and father jetted around the world making their famous movies. She recounted her days as a holo-movie star, the paradox of believing in her art and yet despising most of the people in the industry.