Starship Summer (3 page)

“Familiarity,” Hawk said, “breeds not contempt but apathy.”

Maddie said, “I understand worshipping a God, but I fail to see why anyone should worship a golden column merely because it’s vast and enigmatic.”

“Perhaps,” I ventured, “that’s exactly why they worship it—in some way it’s a physical representation of the God they can’t see. It’s mysterious, numinous.”

She hesitated, her head on one side, and thought about that. “I wonder why some people need the physical?” she said enigmatically, and then changed the subject. “What did you do on Earth, Mr Conway?”

“I was an engineer. I had my own small business in Vancouver. Orbital elevators, mainly.”

“Was business good?”

I couldn’t help myself. “Up and down,” I said. Maddie laughed; Hawk covered his eyes and shook his head.

Maddie said, pointing to my starship, “Will you repair it? Get it flying again?”

I shook my head. “We think the ship might be alien. I might be an engineer, but I don’t understand the first thing about extraterrestrial mechanics.”

She looked across at Hawk. “You could help him, couldn’t you? Get the thing up and flying again. You could even pilot the ship.”

Hawk looked suddenly uneasy, as if Maddie had touched on a sore point. “Like Conway says,” he said tersely, “it’s alien. They do things differently. We wouldn’t understand the first principles, even.”

Maddie returned to her salad and ate abstractedly. I stretched and said, to fill the sudden silence, “I think I’ll get to like the way of life in Magenta.”

“It’s quiet,” Maddie said, “which is what I like about the place. The outside world hasn’t really reached us yet. The Bay hasn’t been flooded by the crass commercialism of the rest of the Expansion.”

Hawk said, “We know some good people here, don’t we, Maddie? We’ll introduce you, Conway.”

Maddie smiled. “Talking of good people, Hawk, have you seen anything of Matt lately?”

Hawk shook his head. “He’s busy finishing his latest project. He’s racing against time—the private showing is a couple of days away, and he’s still not finished.”

“Matt’s our very own famous artist,” Maddie explained. “Not Matt Sommers, the crystal sculptor?”

Maddie beamed. “The very same. You know his work?”

“My wife ran a gallery in Vancouver. Just reproductions, but I admire his stuff.”

“Is she with you on Chalcedony?” Maddie asked.

I shook my head. “We’re no longer together,” I explained, and left it at that.

Maddie opened her mouth in a silent ‘ah’, and covered her gaffe by rummaging in her home-made bag and producing a card. She pushed it across the table, withdrawing her hand quickly to avoid making contact with me.

“I have a spare ticket for the private viewing on Tuesday. Matt’s a good friend. He won’t mind my inviting you.”

I pocketed the ticket and thanked her. “I’ll look forward to that. You’ll be there, Hawk?”

He smiled. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world—not that I know much about art, but I like watching Maddie going all gooey-eyed when she’s in Matt’s company.” He winked across at Maddie, who gave him the evil eye, and I assumed Hawk had got even by touching her sore point.

“Matt’s a dear,” Maddie said, “but he’s made it perfectly obvious that he feels nothing for me. Not—” she hurried on, “—that I would be in any position to do anything about it even if he did.” And she smiled sweetly at Hawk.

He said, “Matt once told me that he has no place in his life for romance.” He shook his head, as if in wonder. “Which, coming from an artist—someone who should be open to all and every experience—I find baffling.”

Maddie leaned forward and whispered, mock conspiratorially, “Matt has a dark secret in his past. Just like you, Hawk.” And she licked her finger tip and chalked up another hit in the air between them.

At that second, as if to save Hawk, his com rang. He spoke briefly to the caller, cut the connection and said, “That was someone at the yard. A rare customer. I’d better get back before he escapes. I’ll see you both at the viewing, if not before.”

He paid the bill for all of us, despite my protests, and hurried from the veranda.

Maddie sipped her beer and asked, “How long have you known Hawk?”

“I bought the ship from him a couple of days ago. I’ve only met him twice.”

She eyed me over the horizon of her mug. “And what do you think of him?”

I shrugged. “He seems very friendly.”

“It’s strange, but you can know someone for years, and yet not really know them.”

“You’ve known him that long?” I asked.

“I met him soon after I arrived on Chalcedony, ten years ago. But, as I said, I don’t really know him. He’s one of the most private people I’ve ever met, which is strange as he’s also one of the most outgoing people you’re ever likely to happen across.”

“Still waters…” I quipped. I hesitated, then said, “He did let slip something along the lines that he’s never flown since something that happened at Nevada. And have you noticed the jacks on his wrists?”

She nodded. “They’re hard to miss.”

“Neural interfaces,” I said, “for achieving integration with a shipboard matrix during hyper-light flight.”

“So?”

“So,” I said, “his were fused, which leads me to believe he had some kind of accident. If so, then the fact he survived is some kind of miracle. It must have been traumatising, to say the least.”

She nodded, as if she knew more about the accident, but was reluctant to tell me.

I finished my drink. “My first full day in Magenta Bay and I find myself surrounded by mysterious strangers.” I resisted the urge to stare at her home-made mug and cutlery as I said this, and excused myself. “My ship awaits, and I’ve a lot to sort out before sundown.”

“See you at the viewing,” Maddie said.

I left the veranda and walked to the starship by way of the beach, admiring its sleek lines against the afternoon sky. I contemplated the days ahead, the work I had to do aboard the Mantis to get it into shape… and I wondered if I would be spared the nightmares that had visited me every night since my arrival on the planet.

THREE

Two things of note occurred the following evening. I had my worst nightmare to date, and I saw something aboard the ship. I’d spent the day decorating the lounge, what in earlier times had been the ship’s control room. I’d installed a couple of sofas and chairs, a locally woven rug and a few wall hangings and pot plants—native things that intrigued me with their alienness. I had managed to soften the hard, functional lines of the control room, make it comfortable, liveable. Then I turned my attention to the kitchen adjacent to the lounge. This I equipped with a few quickly bought utensils, a small oven and a microwave, and hung a poster I’d seen in a nearby store: it was a picture of the Column, a great golden bolt of ineffable light which rose, thick and mysterious, from the plain of the interior. In the bedroom, on the left flank of the ship with a view along the curve of the red sands, I positioned a bed and a small cabinet. I didn’t bother with decorations, as I wasn’t planning to spend that much time in there.

I made myself a meal around eight—I’d always enjoyed the process of cooking, finding something both creative and therapeutic about conjuring good food from raw ingredients. My wife Sally had hated anything to do with the kitchen, and I had taken pleasure in cooking for the three of us. Carrie, my daughter, had helped: an abiding memory is of our working side by side before the kitchen’s big picture window overlooking the straits.

I ate slowly in the lounge, with the viewscreens open to admit the cooling evening breeze, and drank a few local beers from the stock I’d laid in. I watched the ebb and flow of evening life; the locals promenading along the beach. I caught sight of Maddie, mooning along in the shallows, lost in a world of her own. She looked a small and lonely figure garbed incongruously in the ill-made clothing of her own design.

As I watched, a wave-hopper skipped into the bay and a tall, dark figure dismounted and strode up the beach towards the Fighting Jackeral. I recognised Matt Sommers from a holo-doc I’d seen about him on Earth, a big, composed African-American of few words. He had either failed to notice Maddie, or purposefully ignored her. She, however, had seen him, and hurried in his wake up the beach and onto the Jackeral’s veranda. I smiled to myself and wondered about her curious aversion to tactile contact with her fellow man.

As the sun set—Delta Pavonis is big, and Chalcedony orbits close to the swollen primary, making sunsets a blazing spectacle—I opened another beer and wondered what shape my days might take once I’d finished furnishing the ship. I would read, and take long walks, and drop into the Jackeral for an afternoon beer and a chat with whoever might be propping up the bar; I’d explore the northern continent, hire a crawler and take a look at the Falls area of the interior, the series of sinks on various levels perpetually filled by spectacular waterfalls. I might even, I thought, look out for a part-time job to fill the long hours. Another thing that made Chalcedony so different from Earth was the duration of its day: twenty-eight hours, divided at this latitude into eighteen hours of daylight and ten of night.

The sunset over—it lasted all of ten minutes, a fiery plummet and a resulting crimson blaze in the east—I took myself to bed, dosed up as ever with a couple of sleeping pills and something my doctor back on Earth had promised would help deal with the nightmares. He had lied.

I slept soundly until the early hours, and then they started.

I won’t describe them here—I always find other people’s dreams, and nightmares too, a bore to read about. Suffice it to say that the visions of swelling waves were preceded by intimations of death, and followed as ever by a young girl’s hopeless screams.

To them I added my own as I sat bolt upright, drenched in sweat, and stared out through the viewscreen at the Ring of Tharssos curving overhead like the silver blade of a scimitar.

I was on Chalcedony, I realised with a rush. Magenta Bay. Light years away from where it had all happened.

I worked to control my breathing, banish the visions, fill my mind with things other than the inevitability of oblivion.

Unable to sleep immediately after the nightmare, I got up and moved through to the lounge, helping myself to a beer on the way and finding that the sharp, clean cut of it helped to bring me fully awake. I sat before the viewscreen, staring out at the red sands, bloody now in the light of the Ring.

I wondered if it was something in my subconscious that had brought me to live so close to the fearful sea.

I was contemplating turning in, and had half risen in my seat, when I saw something from the corner of my eye. I was fully awake, and sober, and the sight shocked me. I dropped back into the chair, staring now along the length of the lounge towards the hatch which gave onto the ship’s access corridor.

I had not been mistaken. I had seen a flash of iridescent green, vaguely human in shape, flit quickly from the lounge and vanish along the corridor. Gathering myself, I gave chase—though chase is hardly the word to describe my circumspect progress along the corridor.

I checked every room off the corridor, then dropped a level and went through the cabins there, too. All were empty. The ship’s exit hatch was locked, and only I knew the entry code. I returned to the lounge, oddly enough not frightened but mystified. There were two options, I thought; either I had hallucinated the fleeing figure—some residual hypnagogic vision from the nightmare—or the Mantis was haunted.

As I made my way to bed, I wondered which of the two was the more preferable.

FOUR

The Matt Sommers private viewing was held in the low-slung dome of the community centre on the southern headland of the bay. The mounted works of art, the knots of well-dressed connoisseurs drifting from piece to piece amid a hum of polite conversation, brought back memories of the times I had attended similar events with my wife.

As happens on these occasions, my memories seemed to refer to another, long gone life, and I half doubted that they were real. Why is it that recollections of past happiness are so evanescent, while remembrance of tragedy is so stark and real?

The exhibition consisted of two separate sets of Matt Sommers’ work: the emotion crystals for which he was famous, and his more recent paintings. These latter were no mere graphic representations of visual subjects, but abstract pieces created from memory plastic, so that the picture within the frame changed constantly, consecutive scenes linked thematically to the last.

An increased buzz of chatter heralded the arrival of the artist. He stepped into the dome flanked by two officious-looking individuals: a suited silver-haired man in his sixties who was the mayor of Magenta, and a tall woman who carried her glamour with a distant, disdainful hauteur.

Between them, Sommers appeared reassuringly ordinary: he was an artist, and had nothing to prove by power-dressing or putting on a pose. He wore baggy trousers spattered with flecks of memory plastic, and an old shirt open at the chest to reveal a mat of unkempt grey hair.

Sommers was in his early seventies, a big, strong man with an open face and curly hair gone grey. He looked around the group and nodded to friends as the woman struck her champagne glass with a stylus.

When silence descended, she said, “Magenta has been privileged for many years now to be the home of the Expansion’s finest artist, who needs no introduction from me. The Arts Bureau of Chalcedony is proud to be staging this exhibition, Matt’s first in two years, the highlight of which is the series of graphics entitled Towards Infinity. I hope you will enjoy…”

Conversation resumed; people milled around the exhibits; Sommers was surrounded by admiring guests.

The crystals were arrayed on two long tables in the centre of the dome, while the graphics were displayed on free-standing dividers around the periphery.

I took a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and looked around for a familiar face, but saw neither Hawk nor Maddie. I moved around the tables in the middle of the dome, laying hands on the emotion crystals. I was familiar with them from Vancouver, but the examples of Sommers’ work I had experienced there had been copies only, pale imitations of the real thing. Now, as I caressed crystal after crystal, vicariously experiencing a slew of emotions as raw and real as my own, I came to see why Sommers was regarded as one of the very best artists in the Expansion.