Starship Summer ss-1

by Eric Brown

  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.

  Maddie thought about that. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. It might have been. I received the impression that it was their duty, and that it was supremely important to them, for some reason.”

  Hawk said, “And the image, do you know what it is, why it was showing itself?”

  “I couldn’t tell, but I did get the impression they were pleased we’d made contact. Don’t ask me how—or how they communicated with me. I just felt these things. There was no dialogue between us.”

  Hawk considered his coffee, then said, “How would you feel about making contact with the Yall again, Maddie?”

  She looked at us, nodded. “That would be fine.” She smiled. “The funny thing was, the experience wasn’t painful, like touching a human would be…”

  We sat around for another couple of hours, progressing to late morning beers, and going over and over what we had experienced the night before. By lunchtime we’d agreed to make a pilgrimage to the Golden Column the following day, and that I should go down to MacIntyre that afternoon and pick up some surveillance and recording devices—as well as a package for Matt at the Telemass Station. We’d set up the apparatus tonight and see what we came up with.

  We also decided, as it was lunchtime, to order a meal and another round of beers. It was too early to celebrate our discovery, but the mood on the veranda was one of anticipation mixed with barely subdued elation.

  After lunch I took my ground-effect vehicle and made the leisurely drive down the coast to MacIntyre. As capital cities go, it’s small and aesthetically pleasing. There is no industry to speak of and the architecture is low-level and modernistic—chalets and A-frames and low-slung domes predominate, all set amid lush greenswards and dominated by the towering, scimitar-legged
Telemass Station.

  I bought a hundred credits worth of cameras and sound monitoring equipment, with money from the kitty we had all contributed to, and then drove on to the Station.

  Matt was waiting for a package of artist’s materials from Mintaka II, due in at four. I sat in the coffee bar overlooking the reception pad, nursed a cappuccino and watched a couple of arrivals beam in from Capella. I felt like a kid again, marvelling at the wonder of the starships landing and blasting-off from Vancouver spaceport.

  Of course, there was nothing so romantic about star travel these days, but the process of Telemass transfer was a wonder all the same.

  On the stroke of four, the loud-speaker system echoed around the Station. “Translation from Carmody, Mintaka II, due in one minute. Service personnel to their posts. Engineers, fifty-eight seconds and counting. Will all non-station personnel remain in designated areas.”

  I felt a sudden thrill as the bored litany droned out; what was for station workers just another routing translation was, for me, the harbinger of a miracle.

  I still could not comprehend the science behind Telemass travel. How was it that human beings, quite apart from non-living cargo, could be stripped down to their constituent molecules, processed and fired on tachyon vectors light years through space, and then, perhaps even more miraculously, be reformed at their destination, whole and perfect? The traveller experienced a second of disorientation, a sudden blankness, before finding himself elsewhere, not even the flow of his thoughts interrupted. Of course, the translation had an effect: you felt as though you’d been shot through the head with a laser and brought back to life.

  It didn’t help that you could travel to most colony worlds only by a series of relays. The majority of travellers rested up between translation. I’d taken the fast option, with just an hour between each jump. There was some talk that, in another ten, twenty years, Telemass technology would have progressed to the point where a single jump would link Earth to even the most far-flung colony world, but as yet this was still a dream.

  I turned my attention to the translation pad and the imminent arrival of the tachyon beam. The first I was aware of the process beginning was when a certain subtle charge filled the air, an atmosphere of electric tension. Seconds later a blinding bolt of light, dimmed by the filters on the observation viewscreen, dropped en bloc through the air and landed on the translation pad with a crack like thunder. The pad glowed incandescent for a second and then returned to normal—with the difference that whereas before it had been empty, now a dozen men and women, beside stacked cargo containers, stood on the metal plating of the deck.

  The travellers were very still for a second, as if at the mental shock of translation, and then remembered themselves and made their way towards the terminal building. Medics moved among them, scanning with diagnostic devices. Those too weak to walk were stretchered to the Station’s recuperation clinic. I noticed a dozen travellers garbed in golden robes, marking them as pilgrims to the Column. When the pad was clear of travellers, engineers scurried across the deck, lifting inspection panels and calibrating the pad for the next arrival, while cargo handlers hauled the containers towards the distribution centre.

  I waited thirty minutes, watching another beam bring a party of a hundred pilgrims to their Holy Land. I wondered what they would make of their destination, the revered Golden Column. I was looking forward to my own visit the following day, and pondered on what these pilgrims might say if they knew that the object of their veneration was not the work of God, but of an alien race.

  I finished my coffee and took an elevator down to the collection point, handed over Matt’s paperwork and received a long silver envelope. I was surprised: I had expected a rather bulkier package than this. The envelope seemed empty but for a small object, perhaps the size of a lighter. I was intrigued as to what these artists’ materials might be.

  I left the station and drove slowly north, enjoying the view of the coastline on the way. It was sufficiently reminiscent of certain stretches of the British Columbia coast as to provoke nostalgia, but at the same time, with its odd, angular trees, and the ever-present arc of the Ring in the sky, sufficiently alien to remind me that I was no longer on Earth.

  Once, far inland, I thought I caught a fleeting glimpse of a golden glow in the sky above the central mountains when the distant mist lifted, but it was so quick, a mere glint of gold, that it was probably a trick of the eye—my imagination playing tricks after the events of the previous night.

  An hour later I halted the ground-effect vehicle outside the Fighting Jackeral, where I had arranged to meet Matt, and hurried in with his package.

  He was at the same table on the veranda. “You’ve been here all day?” I said.

  “I’ve been home, put a shift of work in, and then came back for dinner. How about a beer?”

  “I wouldn’t say no.”

  I handed him the envelope when he returned with my drink. “What is it? I mean, when you said artist’s materials, I was expecting something a bit bigger.”

  “Like an easel and an old-fashioned box of paints?”

  He raised the envelope before folding it neatly and slipping it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I don’t talk about work in progress, David. I’m superstitious like that.”

  “You can’t even tell me what it’ll produce?”

  He shook his head. “That’s part of the magical process. If I told you that, I’d feel less inclined to actually create the piece.”

  I smiled. “Sounds nuts to me, Matt.”

  “Tell you what… we go to see the Column tomorrow, don’t we? The following morning I’ll be working on this—” he tapped his jacket “—so how about coming over that afternoon and viewing what I’ve made?”

  “You won’t mind?”

  “I’ll be needing someone to give an objective opinion. I’ll be interested to see what you think.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  He finished his beer and asked about the surveillance equipment.

  “In the car. Shall we go set it up?”

  We spent the next couple of hours, as the sun went down and the Ring of Tharssos brightened, setting up the cameras and infra-red sensors around the lounge of the Mantis, programmed to start recording at midnight. With luck, we would get some hard evidence—other than the evidence of our senses—that the ship was indeed the locale of strange alien phenomena. It would be ideal if we could work out some kind of pattern to the visitations, and then Maddie could drop by and try to re-establish contact. Hawk said he’d come over after we’d visited the Column and go over the ship from top to bottom.

  We stood in the entrance to the lounge and inspected our handiwork. “All set,” Matt said. “There’s nothing we can do now but wait.” He looked at his watch. “The Jackeral’s open for another hour. You owe me a beer.” We sat on the veranda, watching the bay shatter the light of the Ring, and mulled over what we’d found. We said nothing that we hadn’t mentioned earlier, but there was a curious kind of pleasure in going over old ground, and speculating on what might lie ahead, that recalled schoolboy day-dreams about the many wonders that the future had in store.

  I liked Matt Sommers. He was slow and gentle, quietly spoken, and his easy manner inspired trust. He smiled a lot and laughed at himself, and asked just the right questions, which suggested genuine interest rather than prurient curiosity: after a few beers I let slip that my wife and I had separated after the death of our daughter, but he didn’t follow this up with prying questions, for which I was grateful.

  Perhaps this was because Matt had secrets in his own past that he was loath to speak about. Despite his humour, his easy conversational manner, there was a certain sadness that seemed to permeate his being, almost a weariness. I recalled what Maddie had said about his past, but I liked Matt too much to alienate him with questions.

  It was after midnight when I stepped carefully from the Fighting Jackeral and made my way along the beach to the Mantis. I stood in the
entrance to the lounge for a while, willing the alien to appear, but the apparition deigned not to show itself and a wave of tiredness dragged me to bed.

  Seconds before I fell asleep, I realised that, for the past few nights, I had been spared nightmares of Carrie. I wondered at the reason for this… and then wondered no more as sleep took me.

  Something odd occurred in the middle of the night. At the time I was sure I woke up to see a ghostly alien figure standing over me—and I felt not the slightest fear, only a sense of trust.

  It communicated, not so much verbally, but by some kind of telepathy, that it wished me no harm; it emanated a sublime sense of peace, and made me aware that it wanted to help me. For this help, it said, it required in return help from myself…

  I woke late next morning, to a cascade of sunlight pouring in through the viewscreen, and immediately recalled the encounter with the alien.

  I knew I had been dreaming, for the details of the dialogue were fading even as I recalled them, tantalisingly elusive.

  It must have been a dream, I told myself, the drunken dream of a maudlin, still grieving man, for the alien had told me that, in return for my help, it would ensure that my nightmares of Carrie were no more.

  NINE

  The first thing the crew of the exploration vessel saw on the surface of Chalcedony fifty years ago, when the planet was still an undesignated potential colony world, was the Golden Column. From orbit it appeared as a truncated golden glow, five kilometres in diameter and thirty kilometres tall. It had been, according to the memoirs of the ship’s Captain, a staggering enough feature viewed during spiral-down. At close quarters, however, it had taken the exploration team’s collective breath away with its strange aura of otherness and permanence. It glowed with power and dominated the landscape for a hundred kilometres, something obviously not naturally occurring but constructed—to what purpose could only be guessed at.

  And fifty years of scientific investigation had failed to come up with any answers. Team after team, prestigious foundation after foundation, had probed the light of the Column, attempted to enter it, tried to assess its age and composition, to no avail. Scientific teams still set up camp around the base of the Column, minutely examining it with their sophisticated instruments, but they were outnumbered by the hundreds of religious cults which offered more mystical solutions to the Column’s provenance and purpose.