Starship Summer (7 page)

I refrained from asking him how his spinal jacks had become unusable, and changed the subject. “Maddie called round yesterday.”

“How is she?”

I shrugged. “She seemed fine. Hard to tell. She always seems so buoyant, considering her condition.”

He looked across at me. “She told you?”

“We had a few beers and she told me all about it.” I shook my head. “What can you say? I can’t imagine the hell she must live through.”

“She’s a remarkable woman, Conway.” He paused, then said, “Did she tell you we had an affair a few years ago?”

“No, but she did say that you were close.”

He smiled. “Close? I loved the woman. Still do, if I’m honest with myself.”

I took a drink of beer. “What happened?”

I thought at first he wasn’t going to reply, but after a few seconds he said, “Maddie came to Chalcedony about ten years ago. She lived at the sanatorium just north of Magenta. At the time I had an apartment in the settlement, before I moved here.” He smiled to himself. “We both took walks along the beach, and I managed it so that I just happened to be out when Maddie passed by. She’s such an out-going person that it wasn’t long before we were meeting in the Jackeral.

“…I knew there was something unusual about her—her clothing, the mugs and utensils. I plucked up the courage and asked, and she told me about the operation. Anyway, one night we both got drunk and I took her back to my place and we tried to make love, with a piece of polymer sheeting between us. Just molecules thick… but it was an effective enough barrier, and when we ripped it off and held each other… ”

He trailed off, eyes distant, and shook his head. “Maddie screamed as if I’d slit her throat. We’ve never touched each other since.”

I wondered if Maddie had felt Hawk’s pain that day, sensed the reason for his jacks being sealed and puckered with scar tissue.

“We’ve had a strange relationship since then. We both feel a lot for each other, but without being able to consummate that feeling physically… Something’s missing, and I think Maddie hates herself for it, and as a result maybe hates me a little for making her hate herself. Does that make sense?”

I nodded. “We’re complex beings, Hawk.”

“And Kee doesn’t help. When I took her in, began living with her, Maddie was sarcastic, to say the least. I accused her of being jealous—I was drunk at the time, and Maddie’d been sniping—but she said she wasn’t jealous, just ashamed that someone she knew was exploiting an alien. It wasn’t at all like that, and I tried to explain, but Maddie wouldn’t listen. She’s mellowed since then, but we still spar from time to time.”

I smiled. “I’ve noticed.”

“But deep down we still feel a hell of a lot for each other.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah… I’m sorry, too. For Maddie. She’s one of the nicest women I’ve ever known.”

“And now she’s going through it all again with Matt,” I said.

Hawk nodded, but said nothing.

We had another beer and watched the sun plummet into the sea. As darkness fell and the Ring of Tharssos brightened overhead, I left Hawk, still drinking on the observation deck, and drove home to Magenta.

SEVEN

The following afternoon, before Hawk arrived to inspect the Mantis and the others came for dinner, I left the Fighting Jackeral with a beer and walked along the creaking, sun-warped timbers of the jetty. I came to the end and peered down at the silver, sequinned water of the bay as it sucked at the jetty’s barnacled columns. A young girl was sitting cross-legged nearby, a small blonde kid of about ten, fishing with a net. A part of me wanted to strike up a conversation with her—for the very same reasons, I supposed, that I had made myself confront the heaving waters below, and had come in the first place to live beside the sea. I needed to banish the fear, the fear of the element that had robbed me of Carrie. And I needed to get over the pain I felt every time I saw a girl who might have been an older version of my daughter. The hell of losing a child is that the future, the parental fantasy of the years that stretch ahead and the shared joys that will fill them, is suddenly ripped away, leaving you with nothing but fading memories of the past and an empty present. Self-pity is one refuge, but it’s way too easy and self-destructive. I know. I had gone down that road in the year after Carrie’s death, which was one of the reasons why my wife had left me. I could have gone two ways, after that: gone further down the futile road of self-pity, propelled by what I saw as Sally’s desertion, or faced the fool I had become and done something about it. I’d chosen the latter path, left Earth behind me and come to live beside the sea at Magenta.

Now the swell of the bay sickened me, and the child looked up and smiled hesitantly at my tears. Very quickly she jumped up and ran off clattering over the loose boards of the jetty.

I thought of Maddie and Hawk and Matt, my new friends who all carried the scars of the past, and I knew I had come to the right place.

A couple of hours later Hawk arrived with a carricase of tools and a diagnostic flatscreen.

I talked him through my investigations of the ship, the areas I’d examined and found nothing. I described the alien apparition, or projection, and Hawk asked me how many beers I’d been drinking.

As he moved around the lounge, examining sliding panels and concealed units, he said, “To think, I salvaged this tub, left it at the back of the yard and forgot about it for years. I admit it—I didn’t even examine the thing.”

I grunted a laugh. “Thought the golden goose was a turkey?”

“Go on—” his head was in a recess, his voice muffled “—rub it in.”

“Sorry, Hawk, but you know how it is when an amateur puts one over on an expert.”

He was peering into a recess in the bulkhead. “Strange,” he muttered, and he wasn’t talking about me or my childish quip.

“What?”

“I was expecting to find chips—or the alien equivalent. Fibre optics or something like.”

“And there’s nothing in there.” I knew that from my inspection of the previous day.

“Oh, there’s something in here okay, but it’s not what I was expecting.”

Intrigued, I tried to peer past his bulk. “What is it?”

“Inset into tubing which is moulded into the very skin of the ship—there’s a very thin strip of… well, it looks like crystal to me. Or something like crystal. Far as I can make out, the ship is cocooned in a matrix of the stuff. Never seen anything like it.”

“Alien,” I said.

“Too right.”

He looked at me, then moved along to the next inspection panel. He inserted his head and shoulders and attached the leads of his diagnostic com to whatever it was he had found, and was silent for a time.

I said, “Anything?”

“It’s connected to an energy source,” he reported back. “But I can’t tell what it is or where it’s located. I’m going to go through the rest of the ship, if that’s okay.”

“Be my guest. I’ll be in the galley if you need me. Dinner at eight.”

“Matt coming?”

“I contacted him last night. He said he’d be here just before eight—he was working on something. Maddie’s coming over at seven for a drink.”

Hawk picked up his carricase and paused on his way to the lateral corridor. “I wish Maddie could get over Matt.”

I looked at him. “You’re not jealous?”

He smiled. “I was, in the early days. Now I just don’t like to see Maddie hurt herself, wanting what she can’t have.”

I was about to say that she was adult, and could look after herself, but Hawk just shrugged and made his way along the corridor.

I retired to the galley and set about preparing dinner. I opened an imported red and drank liberally. An hour later the ship was suffused with the heady tang of oriental spices, and I was half cut.

I finished cooking and wandered up to the lounge. Hawk was still poking about in the bowels of the ship. I arranged the table, opened a few bottles of wine, and was about to go in search of Hawk to see if he wanted a drink when Maddie came up the ramp, waving a bottle and calling out, “David, what’s the incredible aroma?”

“Either Hawk’s frying the ship’s circuitry, or it’s the Thai curry.”

“Hawk’s here?”

I told her about the midnight alien visitor.

“Spooky. And he’s exorcising it?”

“Or something. Drink?”

“Wine will be great.”

She was dressed in a trim red trouser suit that, for once, didn’t look as though it had been run up by a blind seamstress. She noticed my glance and said, “I took extra care with this one. What do you think?”

“Suits you.”

“And the gloves. Silk. So if I do accidentally touch something…” She stopped as Hawk entered the lounge, mopping his face with a red bandanna. “The man himself. Found the ghosts?”

He slumped into a couch and accepted a beer. Only after a long drink did he reply, “No ghosts, but I did find a lot of incredible alien technology.” To me he said, “Like I mentioned, the crystal nexus cocoons the ship. My guess is that it’s this that’s projecting the images.”

“Any reason why?” Maddie asked.

“Search me. Something’s malfunctioning? A sub-routine that’s got into repetitive cycle mode? I can’t say. It’s alien. I’d be a fool to make a judgement.”

I gestured through the viewscreen to the bay. “Here’s Matt.”

He approached the headland on his wave-hopper, accelerated up the beach and came to a halt beneath the nose of the ship. He climbed off the hopper and locked the steering mechanism, his body-language tired.

A minute later he joined us, nodding to Hawk and Maddie and passing me a bottle of champagne. “To welcome you to Magenta.”

I thanked him and said, “I’ll save it until we have something jointly to celebrate. Wine?”

He sat down, tiredly, and took a long swallow from the glass I poured for him.

Maddie said, “David was just saying that his ship is haunted.” Matt looked at me, sceptical. “Haunted? I didn’t have you down as the type to see ghosts.”

“I don’t think whatever it is is a ghost,” I said. “But I’ve been having visitors.” And I told him about what I’d seen.

Hawk said, “I’ve checked it out. It’s nothing supernatural, as far as I can see. Something to do with the alien operating system.”

Matt shrugged. “There you are, then. Won’t the Qlax and the others have operating manuals that might tell you how to get rid of your visitors?”

Hawk was smiling. “If only it were that easy, Matt. But this little tub doesn’t belong to any of the alien races so far discovered.”

Matt stared at me. “No kidding?” He thought about it. “You mean the ship belonged to a race either now extinct, or yet to be discovered?”

“That’s about it,” Hawk said. “This galaxy alone is a big place. There’ll be many a race out there that we don’t know about.”

Matt said, more to himself, “Just think of it. All that alien art we’re in ignorance of…”

We thought about that for a time, and then Maddie said, “What about the art of the aliens we know about—the Qlax and the Mathan and those others?”

“The Zexu,” Matt said. “Well, the Mathan don’t produce anything we’d consider art. They look at the world in severely logical terms. They have no room for metaphor, and a race without the understanding of metaphor is unlikely to produce creative works of art. The Qlax are another matter. Everything to them is metaphor—which is fine, but we humans have great difficulty understanding their basic concepts, so we have no real appreciation of their creations.”

“And the Zexu?” Maddie asked.

Matt smiled. “The Zexu,” he said, “are the most creative race in existence. Every Zexu creates. It’s as if creation produces a drug in their heads, and they can’t help themselves. I’m particularly interested in a new development in Zexuan art at the moment—the art of recreating oneself.”

I stared at him. “How would that work?”

“The Zexuns consider the perfection of the self to be the highest achievement, spiritually. This has lately had an effect on their art. A school of Zexuan artists has been perfecting simulacra of themselves, in order, I suppose, to see themselves as others see them…”

The talk of art, which I listened to with fascination, and Maddie added to from time to time, continued as we moved to the table across the lounge and ate.

As the meal progressed, talk turned to life on Chalcedony, and then Matt dropped his bombshell. “I’ve been here over twenty years now, and lately I’ve been thinking of moving on.”

For a couple of awkward seconds no one knew quite what to say. Then Maddie spoke up, “Leaving Chalcedony?” She sounded stricken.

Matt shrugged. “I need new experiences. I’ve been looking at my work recently. I’m not happy with it.”

“And you think a move might help?” Hawk asked.

“Maybe. I am a bit isolated out here—which is strange for me to say, as the reason I came here in the first place was the desire for isolation.”

Maddie asked in a small voice, “Where will you go?”

“I’ve been thinking of returning to Earth. San Francisco, where I was born. If, that is, I can steel myself for the… how many Telemass relays is it now, David?”

“Four,” I said, “and each one seems to tear you apart and put you back together differently. I’d be loath to make the journey again.” Matt smiled. “I’d survive.”

“We’d miss you Matt,” Maddie said.

He laughed. “I won’t be going for a while yet. Six months, at least.”

“So you are definitely going?” Maddie asked.

“I’m seriously thinking about it,” Matt answered. “I suppose it all depends on the project I’m planning, and whether I consider it successful.”

“What’s that?” Maddie asked.

“Maddie, you should know better than to ask. You know I never talk about future projects.”

Maddie drew a histrionic hand across her brow. “Oh, the fragility of the creative process.”

Matt had the good grace to laugh. We finished the meal and I opened a sweet white wine. We moved to the couches ranged before the viewscreen and watched the sun set and the Ring of Tharssos brighten high above.

We chatted amiably about nothing in particular for a while, the comfortable banter of friends who have known each other for years. Oddly, even though I’d been on the planet for less than a week, I was made to feel part of the group, as if I too had known each of them for years.