Starship Summer (8 page)

At one point I mentioned I was looking for a part-time job—more, I joked, to keep me out of the Fighting Jackeral.

“I don’t see what’s wrong with spending half one’s life in the Jackeral,” Maddie said. “Look at me…”

This was open invitation for Hawk to say, “Yeah, just look. Fair warning, David—get that job or you’ll end up like Maddie.”

“We all have our foibles,” Maddie said primly. “Mine is the steady consumption of alcohol in pleasant company. Just because I don’t share your predilection for pre-pubescent alien girls.”

I looked at Hawk to see how he’d take this. He laughed. “Kee is an adult, Maddie. You know that. And anyway, we don’t have sex.”

Maddie stared at him. “You don’t? You never told me that.”

“I don’t tell you everything I don’t do, Maddie.” He shrugged. “Our relationship is platonic. It’s more like… I suppose like having a daughter.”

“But you told me you loved her?” Maddie said.

Hawk said, “So? You can love someone like a daughter, even if she isn’t technically your daughter.”

I looked at Maddie, wondering if her condition, her physical isolation, had over the years worked to deaden her empathy.

She said to me, “Do you understand that, David?”

I looked past her, to the holocube of the laughing blonde girl. I was overcome, suddenly, by the recollection of the love I had felt for my daughter. I nodded. “Of course. We can love anyone. If we can love someone, without physical intimacy, then isn’t that something to be cherished?”

In the quick ensuing silence I caught the bitter look on Maddie’s face as she stared across at Hawk, who was self-consciously gazing through the viewscreen at the Ring.

Matt broke the uneasy silence. “David, you said you were looking for work. What were you thinking of?”

I shrugged. “Something that’d keep me active for a couple of days a week. Nothing too stressful.”

“How about some courier work? The company I used went bust recently—they delivered my work materials once a week from MacIntyre and took my completed work back to the Telemass Station.”

So it’d be two days a week, a couple of trips down the coast to the capital. They charged me a couple of hundred a week. I’ll match that, if you’re interested.”

“That sounds perfect,” I said. The thought of getting down to the capital twice a week, and getting paid for the effort, appealed to me.

Hawk and Maddie were on speaking terms again. “Have you seen these apparitions?” Maddie was asking him.

Hawk shook his head. “Only David has.”

“What were they like?”

I told her. “Pretty archetypal aliens—before we met the Qlax and the Zexu, that is. Green, slim, amphibian-looking.”

“When did they appear?”

“I’m not sure. I’d been asleep a while. One, two-ish, maybe.”

She looked around the group. “It’s midnight now,” she said. “How about we dim the lights, keep quiet and wait for the alien spooks to show themselves?”

Matt laughed. “I feel twelve years old again, spending the night in the old Hooper place on the hill…”

“Why not?” Hawk shrugged. “It might help us work out where the projections come from.”

Maddie said to me, “You weren’t wanting to get rid of us and have an early night, David?”

“You kidding? And miss a ghost hunt with friends? I’ll get another bottle.”

I slipped into the galley, fumbled a bottle of wine from the rack—almost dropping it in the process—and staggered back to the lounge. Until I’d stood up, I didn’t know how drunk I was.

I opened the bottle and refilled glasses. I raised mine, “To the good ship Mantis and all who haunt her!”

We toasted the ship and I dimmed the lights. The only illumination in the lounge now was the light of the Ring that slanted in through the viewscreen, gilding everything silver.

We talked in whispers. Hawk said, “I wonder if there’s anywhere else on Chalcedony that’s haunted?” His voice was slurred.

Maddie murmured, “The Sanatorium.” In an aside to me, she explained, “That’s where I lived when I first came to Chalcedony. The day-room there is visited by the shade of an old resident.”

Matt laughed. “And I thought we were living in a rational age!”

An hour passed. We finished the bottle and I fetched another, moving very carefully this time as my body seemed in the grip of a mischievous agent which was trying to make me lie down. I made it to the galley, located the wine rack after a survey which seemed to last five minutes, and extracted a bottle. Holding it like a tolling bell, I reeled back towards the lounge, barging from wall to wall of the corridor and giving thanks that it was so narrow.

I heard a gasp from the lounge, and what I saw when I came to the entrance had the effect of sobering me.

I leaned against the frame and stared.

The green figure, as diaphanous as before, was standing beside the control pedestal, its fingers moving rapidly through the air.

Beyond, in the silver light, I made out the startled faces of my friends, transfixed. I returned my attention to the alien figure, attempting this time to see if it was indeed being projected, and if so from where.

But I saw no signs of beamed light from the walls of the lounge. I tried to work out how it might have appeared—other than by some occult agency—but my mind was too fuddled.

Then there was sudden movement from beyond the standing figure, and Hawk called out, “Maddie!”

I peered into the gloom. Maddie had stood, unsteadily, like me the worse for wine. She hesitated, staring at the alien apparition for a second. Then, quite deliberately, she pulled the silk glove from her right hand and stepped towards the alien.

I saw her face in the silver light. I saw her expression of mingled determination and fear as she approached the alien and reached out.

“No!” Hawk called, leaping to his feet.

Maddie’s hand entered the ghost, and instantly she gasped and collapsed. Hawk caught her before she hit the deck.

Then the green figure vanished, as if it had never been there, and I lurched towards the controls and upped the lighting.

Hawk was carrying Maddie back to the couch, ensuring that his flesh didn’t make contact with hers.

Matt and I were beside them, staring down at Maddie. She was coming to, staring up at us, eyes blinking quickly in the aftermath of the encounter.

I found her mug, wrapped it in a cloth to ensure that I didn’t touch it with my skin, and filled it with water.

Hawk held it to her lips and she drank.

A minute later she was sitting up. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I was foolish. I shouldn’t have… I’m okay. I’m fine now.”

I could see that Hawk wanted to touch her. His hand hovered close to her head, as if needing to stroke her blonde curls. “Maddie…” He hesitated, looking at me.

When he said, “Maddie, what did you sense?” I told myself that his curiosity was excusable, and in no way mitigated his concern for her.

She blinked, far away, then managed, “I felt… I felt the being, Hawk! I actually felt the alien!” Her eyes clouded. “Or I sensed its essence…” She was weeping now. “I don’t know. Felt or sensed? Anyway, I know…”

My heart, I realised then, was thumping wildly. Matt leaned forward, “Know what, Maddie?” he asked.

Her eyes flicked towards him, staring. “I know the aliens called themselves the Yall,” she said. “And I know they constructed the Golden Column.”

EIGHT

Early next morning I was sitting with Hawk and Matt on the veranda of the Fighting Jackeral, enjoying coffee and croissants as the sun climbed high above the interior mountains.

Maddie had said little after her pronouncement about the Yall last night, and a short while later Hawk had driven her home. She had agreed to meet us for breakfast in the morning.

Hawk demolished half a croissant in one bite and said around the mouthful, “You do realise what this means, David?”

I nodded. “I’ve been thinking about nothing else all night.”

“Specifically about the ship,” he said.

I shrugged. “It’s unique. The only surviving ship of the Yall.”

“And as such,” Hawk went on, “it’s priceless. Just think what the religious organisations would give for a ship that belonged to the race which constructed the Golden Column.”

Matt said, “That fact’s yet to be verified, Hawk.”

“Are you saying Maddie isn’t to be trusted?”

“Not at all. I’m saying that the various religious cults that worship the Column might need some convincing that the Yall had a hand in it. I mean, many of them think it the work of their own god.”

Hawk said, “So we hire a team of accredited telepaths from Earth to read Maddie. They’ll verify what she experienced.”

“Might be expensive,” I said.

Hawk laughed. “Listen to you! David, you don’t seem to realise what we’re sitting on here. This could be the biggest thing since humankind made first contact with the Qlax. That ship… Christ, it could be worth millions.”

“I’ll cut you all in on whatever I get,” I said.

“And to think it was sitting in my yard for years. Hell, I even thought of cutting it up for scrap last year.”

Matt said, injecting a note of realism, “There are other things to consider, beyond the mere value of the discovery.”

Hawk smiled. “You’re talking to a penniless businessman, here, Matt.”

I said to Matt, “Other things…?”

He nursed his coffee cup in both hands, regarding the liquid the same shade as his skin. “The first thing that strikes me is whether we should make the discovery public, or keep it to ourselves. If we do the former, then things will change around here. Magenta will be inundated with the media, scads of scientists, government suits from Earth…”

I said, “Do we have a duty to science to make it public?”

Matt shrugged. “Eventually, maybe. I think, before that, we should investigate it ourselves.”

Hawk looked at him. “And how do we do that?”

“First, we set up some recording equipment in the lounge, and maybe in other places around the ship. We go through it from top to bottom, try to find the Yall equivalent of a computer core. It’d help if we knew just why the apparition was occurring.”

“Maybe,” Hawk said with a shrug, “we might be able to communicate with it?”

I said, “My guess is that the apparition is some holographic image or icon, not sentient in itself. If we can access some kind of ship’s data base, however…”

Matt said, “We’re dealing with something alien here, remember. All our assumptions about what things might be are based on comparisons to what we know—which might not hold in this case.”

“So we set up some cameras and scour the ship for a com system,” I said. “Then what?”

“Then maybe we take a trip out to the Golden Column,” Matt said.

“That’d make sense,” I said. “I must admit that I haven’t seen it yet.”

Hawk grinned. “Know something? The closest I’ve come to the Column was when I salvaged the ship. I was about a hundred kays away then, and the Column dominated the horizon even at that distance.”

“I visited the column soon after I got here,” Matt said. “I was struck by two things. First, how amazing it was as an artefact—its size, its power and energy. It took my breath away and made my hair stand on end.” He smiled. “All the usual clichés.”

I said, “And the second?”

“How tacky the surrounding show of religious fervour was, the stalls selling souvenirs to the gullible, the quacks and charlatans who’d set up business in the area. It stank. I haven’t been back.”

I smiled. “They’ll be gutted when they find that it wasn’t their god who created the Column.”

Matt grunted. “And how long will it be before some cult starts worshipping the Yall?” he said, “and selling models of the aliens, and authentic Yall cures?”

I ordered another coffee and five minutes later Hawk pointed along the beach. “Here’s Maddie now.”

She was walking, as if in a daze, along the low tide-line, her home-made sandals leaving imprints in the wet sand. She was staring at the ground, miles away.

Hawk stood and waved. “Maddie, over here.”

She looked up, sketched a wave and wandered over to us, climbing the steps and casting an eye over the debris of our breakfast. “Ah, coffee and croissants. What better?”

I signalled the waiter and ordered for Maddie.

As she seated herself, first draping a hand-woven shawl over the seat, Hawk said, “You okay?”

She smiled at us. “I’m fine. I’m… I’m sorry about last night. I don’t know what came over me. It’s as if I was drawn, compelled. Anyway, it was silly and dangerous… I hope I didn’t worry you all unduly.”

I exchanged a glance with Hawk and Matt. I said, “Well, we were concerned, Maddie. But… look, we’ve been going over what happened last night, what you found out…”

Matt said, “It’s important, if you hadn’t already realised that.”

She seemed vague. “Well, in a way I know that it means something—but what? Another alien race, one we never even knew existed… I mean, what happened to them? Are they still around, did they die out?”

“More than that,” Hawk said, “is that they constructed the Column. The implications are staggering.”

She opened her eyes, wide, as if she had failed to consider that, and then nodded. “Why, yes. I suppose they are.”

Her coffee arrived and Matt poured it into her mug.

He said, “Can you tell us anything more about what you felt when you made contact with the alien… or its image?”

Maddie thought about that. “I felt a great feeling of peace, of well-being.”

“What did you feel?” I asked. “A being, something with substance?”

Maddie shook her head. “More a warmth,” she replied. “I somehow knew that the Yall were good. Don’t ask me how, I just knew. And then I suddenly knew what they called themselves, and that they built the Column.”

I said, “Do you know why they built it, Maddie?”

She frowned. “It’s what they did, David. It was their… duty. It’s hard to explain.” She looked around the table at us. “I’m sorry. It’s like when you try to recall the details of a dream the day after, you know? You get impressions, vague notions, but everything is so abstract.”

“Did you get the impression that the building of the Column was a religious duty?” Matt asked.