Starship Summer ss-1

by Eric Brown

  A couple of hours later we arrived home and, as if by tacit consent, returned to the Mantis and checked the monitoring equipment. It was blank; the ship had not been visited in our absence.

  I opened a bottle of wine and we sat in the lounge, discussing the events of the day. We agreed that we were on the brink of something vast—too vast, Matt said, for us to fully apprehend, and I was visited once again by the feeling I had experienced when touching the Column, of the smallness and at the same time of the wonder of my humanity, and I felt hope.

  We discussed what we had experienced, compared our feelings, and came to the conclusion that we must be patient; that the Yall had contacted us for a reason, and that we must wait for them to make that reason apparent.

  Matt laughed.

  Hawk turned to him. “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Matt said. “It’s almost as if we’ve been chosen—chosen by the Yall. But what if we’re as deluded as all the crackpot cults back there?”

  I said, “You mean, we’re just another bunch of cranks?”

  Maddie was shaking her head. “I know what I felt,” she said with conviction.

  For the next hour or so we drank and chatted. Matt told us about the planets he’d visited, and Hawk matched this with stories of his piloting days, though he said nothing about the Nevada run. Maddie told us about her childhood in England, and I waxed drunkenly about the beauty of British Columbia. To their credit, none of my friends asked about Carrie.

  At one point Hawk said, “I’ll drop by tomorrow afternoon, go over the crate again.”

  “And if the apparition visits you again tonight,” Matt said, censure in his eyes, “ask how you can help it, okay?”

  I smiled. “Yes, sir.”

  In the early hours, with no evidence of apparitions that night, I left them drinking and dragged myself off to bed.

  In the event I spent a restful, dream-free night.

  TEN

  The storm season came swiftly to Magenta Bay.

  On the morning after our pilgrimage to the Golden Column, I woke late and dragged myself through to the lounge. I expected to find my friends sprawled out on the couches, the worse for drink. But the lounge was empty, the debris of the night before cleared away. I made breakfast and ate it staring through the viewscreen at the dark clouds piled a mile high out over the bay. The rains had already started, pocking the sands and reducing visibility to around ten metres, and the waters of the bay heaved and churned sickeningly. An hour later the wind picked up, became a gale that howled around the contours of the Mantis.

  By noon, however, the cloud had dissipated and the rains stopped; the sun was out, drying up the rainwater and giving Magenta a sparkling, pristine aspect. This would set the pattern for the next month, morning storms followed by brilliant afternoons, until the hot season of high summer set in for six months.

  I checked the monitors, but found nothing. I wondered how I might fill the afternoon ahead, then recalled Matt’s invitation to view his latest creation.

  Matt lived in a secluded, wooded area beyond the Community Centre dome, at the end of the opposite headland. He always took the short route into Magenta, diagonally bisecting the bay on his wave-hopper. But the thought of taking the ground-effect vehicle over the water, even though now it was as calm as a mill pond, filled me with dread. I left the ship and drove the long way around the bay instead, passed the Community Centre and cut through the pineanalogues to the beach and Matt’s split-level dome.

  It was an impressive sight, sparkling like a dewdrop in the light of the sun, backed by verdant woodland and fronted by the rouge sweep of the beach. I came to a halt before the timber steps that led up to the big veranda, with views of both the open sea and the circle of the bay.

  I climbed out and walked up the steps, the sun hot on my face. I thought back to the tiny package I had delivered to Matt a couple of days ago, the artist’s materials from Mintaka, and I wondered what he had managed to create in the interim.

  Matt was sitting at a small table, shaded by an awning. A pot of coffee stood before him.

  He smiled as I crossed the deck and he raised a hand in a lazy wave. “David, glad you could make it.” I looked at him. His voice sounded gravelly, off-key—and it was not the wisdom of hindsight that made me notice this.

  “Help yourself to a coffee,” he said, gesturing to the pot.

  I sat and poured myself a small cup, glancing at him as I did so. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something wrong.

  “What time did you leave the ship this morning?” I asked. “Around three. Nothing to report, sadly.”

  “I’ve checked the monitors,” I said. “I wasn’t visited by the apparition.”

  “Maybe tonight.”

  I glanced at my friend. His responses were oddly delayed, as if he had to think extra hard about what I said. Also, his gaze seemed to focus on something beyond me.

  “Matt,” I said, “is everything okay?” He smiled. “Fine,” he said.

  Then another voice came from the entrance of the dome beyond the awning. “David, did you see through my little show?” Startled, I looked up.

  Matt Sommers, smiling at my confusion, stood before the dome. I looked back at the Matt seated across the table from me. They were, as far as I could tell, identical.

  The second Matt stepped from the dome and took a seat at the table, and the sight of him, sitting next to his double, was disconcerting to say the least.

  “Matt,” I managed at last, “What the hell’s going on?”

  “You said you wanted to see my latest work,” the second Matt said, gesturing to Matt number one. “Remember the package you brought from the Station the other day?”

  Before I could reply, he reached out, across the table, and I watched with incredulity as his hand entered the head of his doppelganger and clenched. Instantly, Matt number one disappeared.

  He squeezed the thing in his hand, turning it off, then held it out on his open palm for my inspection. “The latest in Mintakan technology.”

  It looked like a silver insect, perhaps two centimetres long. “What the hell is it?”

  “Put simply, a holographic projector, loaded with a program of my image and a data-base of stock responses and a limited memory bank.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Hell of a thing to program, David. It took me hours.” “To see yourself as others see you,” I began.

  Matt looked at me. “But it didn’t fool you?”

  “That’s the thing. It did. Completely. I was expecting to see you, and I saw you.” I shrugged. “I just thought… I don’t know, that you were a bit off. I think I put it down to the wine last night.”

  “Good. I’m glad it passed muster.”

  I took a sip of my coffee and asked, “So this is the latest Matt Sommers creation—Matt Sommers himself. What do you plan to do with it?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. I wanted to see if I could pull it off convincingly.”

  “You could always get it to attend those functions you hate so much.”

  He laughed. “I’m not sure the program’s that advanced.”

  He touched something on the slim flank of the holo-projector, and it lifted into the air beside the table. A split second later, the holographic Matt sprang into existence, smiling down at us.

  Matt said, “It’s just a projection. It isn’t solid. It can’t touch or lift anything. It couldn’t shake hands. But at a distance, if it were to make a speech, say, then it might convince a few people.”

  I stared at Matt’s double, unable to tell them apart. I glanced at Matt, “What’s it like—to see yourself?”

  He considered the question. “We think we’re accustomed to seeing ourselves every day in the mirror, but the image we see then is reversed, and often only partial. This—” he gestured to his standing alter ego “—this is entirely more lifelike. At first I was surprised at certain aspects of… me.” He laughed. “I thought I was taller than I was, and
for some reason I thought I looked younger. Vanity!”

  “Maybe we all think that about ourselves.”

  “It made me realise that one’s perception of oneself is far more complex than mere apprehension of image, which of course is all that other people can apprehend, at least until they come to know you better. This is what most people see when they look at Matt Sommers—the image of the man. So, in that respect, the projection will do what I want it to do.”

  “Are there many of these things about?” I asked.

  “They’re relatively new, and expensive. This one cost me a hundred thousand credits.”

  I whistled. “I hope it’s a sound investment.”

  Matt shrugged. “I should be able to sell it on for quite a bit, once it’s served its purpose.”

  He gestured at his double. “Sit down and tell us about yourself, Matt.”

  The projection did as commanded, smiling modestly, and I was amazed by its impersonation of the Matt I knew. “Where to begin?” it said. “I’m from Earth, ‘Frisco. Born in ‘21, the good old halcyon days. I got into art young. I was always creating things.”

  I asked it, “When did you leave Earth?”

  “For the first time, in ‘42—toured around the Canopus system, finding myself—”

  The real Matt raised a hand. “Enough. I don’t like the sound of my voice at the best of times!”

  He reached out, grabbed the projector and stilled it.

  We sat in the sun, going over the trip to the Golden Column the day before, and what the apparition had said to me in my dream.

  Matt said, “We seem to be at an impasse, at least until the monitors come up with something, or you’re contacted again.”

  “Hawk’s coming over this afternoon and going over the Mantis from top to bottom. Drop by later if you’re doing nothing.”

  I left Matt around two and drove back through the trees and into Magenta. The sun was bright, and it was hard to credit that storm clouds had darkened the settlement just hours before.

  Hawk hailed me from the veranda of the Jackeral as I swept along the beach. “Thought I’d refuel myself before starting work.” He limped across the sand and ducked aboard, beer bottle in hand.

  For the rest of the afternoon Hawk took the ship apart bit by bit. He’d brought his salvage truck, and an array of impressive tools, and these he employed in inspecting the vessel’s every nut and bolt—except there were no nuts and bolts holding this thing together. Hawk revealed panels and units I’d been unaware of, areas of the ship I’d assumed were inaccessible behind bulkheads.

  While Hawk worked, I pored over the monitors. They were set to signal any movement or visual anomaly recorded, but to my disappointment nothing untoward had occurred in the lounge while I’d been away.

  I kept Hawk supplied with cold beer, occasionally watching him as he wrestled with sliding panels and overhead inspection hatches.

  At one point he called out, and I found him in a tiny recessed unit adjacent to the lounge.

  I stared. “Didn’t even know this was here,” I muttered.

  We stood side by side and looked at the recess. Set into the back of the unit, impressed into the fabric of the surface, was an unmistakable humanoid shape. I told myself that it approximated the outline of the apparition.

  “Watch,” Hawk said.

  He reached out and slipped his hand into the chest area of the outline. I heard a faint hiss; Hawk’s hand glistened and he withdrew it for my inspection.

  It was covered with what looked like a filmy coating of oil. He rubbed his fingers together. “The odd thing is, David, I can see the stuff but I can’t feel it. The really odd thing is that it deadens all sensation when I touch anything.” He reached out and grabbed the flange of the hatch, then shook his head. “Weird. I know I’m holding it, but it’s as if my brain hasn’t picked up on the fact. It’s like my tactile sense has been anaesthetised.”

  I looked back at the outline. “And the Yall presumably coated themselves in the stuff from head to foot.”

  Hawk nodded. “Strange isn’t the word.”

  He made a few other discoveries that afternoon. The first was that, despite the ship’s age—the Ashentay had known about if for at least five hundred years—it was in a remarkable state of repair: an unknown source still powered sliding doors and lighting, and controlled the thermostat. The integrity of the vessel’s structure was in no way compromised by the centuries, and for all that it had crashlanded, it bore no real structural damage other than a few exterior dents and scrapes.

  Hawk’s major discovery was that the main engines, for atmospheric flight, were still serviceable.

  I found him sitting on the edge of an inspection pit in the belly of the ship, staring down at an arcane mass of silver metal and scratching his head.

  He pointed. “That,” he said, “is the main drive. Don’t ask me how it works. The technology’s beyond me. But… like the rest of the ship, David, it looks like it last worked yesterday.”

  “You think you could get it running?”

  He grinned. “If I knew the first principles of Yall technology, then yes, I’m sure I could.”

  Matt called round not long after that, and as we were opening beers and Hawk was telling Matt about the ship’s state of preservation, Maddie gate-crashed the party. We decided to retire to the Jackeral for a meal and a late night.

  It was quiet in the main bar, and the veranda was deserted. We ordered the chef ‘s speciality, poached jackeral with a local potatoanalogue, and watched the majestic sight of Delta Pavonis lowering itself, degree by slow degree, into the silver waters of the bay.

  Towards the end of the night, Matt said to me, “There’s another run to MacIntyre tomorrow if you’re interested.”

  “I’ve nothing planned, Matt.”

  “Would you pick up a visitor from the Station at one o’clock? She doesn’t know I know she’s coming. I’ve booked her into an Aframe a couple down from the Jackeral. Don’t mention that I sent you—make up some story about a mysterious stranger, okay?”

  Maddie was leaning forward, intrigued and not a little jealous, I thought. “Who’s the woman, Matt? An old flame?”

  He smiled. “An old acquaintance,” he said. “I knew her briefly years ago on Charybdis.”

  “What does she want on Chalcedony?” Maddie asked, not to be deflected.

  Matt shook his head. “That I don’t know. A mutual friend told me she was coming. I want to surprise her.”

  Maddie nodded and tried not to look put out.

  Towards midnight the meeting broke up. I returned to the Mantis, checked that the monitors were working, and turned in.

  I think I dreamed again, but not of Carrie.

  I was visited. The alien loomed over me and said—though I could not make out the spoken words, merely the sense of its communication in my head, “Will you help us, David Conway?”

  And I found myself responding, “If you will spare me the nightmares…”

  I felt the creature’s gratitude. “You will never again be plagued by visions of the tragedy.”

  I sat up, fully awake, sure that I had not dreamed the encounter—but the alien was gone and the room was empty. I spent a sleepless few hours until dawn, wondering how I might conceivably help the spectral representative of the Yall.

  ELEVEN

  A little after noon on the following day I was making myself comfortable in the café above the translation pad of the Telemass Station when my com chimed. I checked the caller—Matt Sommers’ name appeared on the screen—and accepted.

  “Matt,” I said. “Checking up?”

  He smiled. “I just remembered—did I tell you last night not to mention that you know where I live?”

  “No, just that I wasn’t to say that you’d sent me.”

  “Well, I’d be grateful if you said nothing about me, David, okay?”

  “Fine by me,” I said.

  “It’s just that I… well, I want to be in control of our
first meeting. Catch you later,” he said, and cut the connection.

  I stared at the blank screen of my com, wondering at Matt’s sudden secrecy. Coming from someone usually so open, even transparent, his diffidence now was all the more puzzling.

  I drank a coffee and watched an arrival from Yannis. The travellers looked wrecked as they peered around them, dazed, and I was glad that I had no plans to travel by Telemass ever again.

  Just before one, I hired a softscreen from the store and tapped out the name of Matt’s mysterious visitor: Marrissa Tallan-Xanagua.

  I stood by the barrier of the arrival lounge as the bolt lit up the translation pad. Minutes later the travellers drifted out, followed by a couple of stretcher cases.

  I held up the softscreen and scanned the travellers as they emerged through the sliding doors.

  I spotted a couple of women I thought might be the one, but each passed by with a quick glance at the screen. Then a small, darkskinned woman stepped through the sliding door, and something told me that this had to be her.

  She had a slight, knife-edged face and huge brown eyes, and the front of her cheesecloth blouse was slit to reveal a double row of small, black nipples. I wondered to which alien race she belonged.

  She saw her name on the screen and stopped in her tracks, staring. Her expression was human enough for me to recognise her surprise.

  She approached and halted beyond the barrier.

  “You were expecting me?” Her English was perfect, if oddly accented. She seemed none the worse for her Telemass ordeal.

  I had a story ready. “I represent a Mr Jones. He has a chalet booked for you in the resort of Magenta Bay.”

  Her huge, alien eyes regarded me. “This is most strange. I was not aware that anyone knew of my arrival.”

  I shrugged. “I was merely hired to fetch you from the Station,” I said.

  She nodded. “As it happens, I was going to Magenta Bay.” Her eyes drilled me. “I might warn you that I am armed, and trained in combat. And you are?”

  “David Conway,” I said, extending a hand in what was meant as a friendly gesture. “Welcome to Chalcedony.”