by Eric Brown
I was aware of a slight vibration that conducted itself through the Mantis, an almost subliminal hum at first, but mounting. Seconds later the ship shook, rattling us in our couches. I looked through the viewscreen and saw the scene of sea and foreshore yaw alarmingly. It see-sawed as the ship lifted with a groan of engines; the beach vanished beneath us, to be replaced with a view of the open sea.
Then the Mantis turned, pointing inland.
Hawk said, “Hold on—!”
And we accelerated.
An invisible force punched us back into the couches, almost robbing us of breath. I gripped the side of the couch as the ship underwent a high-pitched vibration; panels squealed as they took the strain, anything which I hadn’t removed in preparation fell to the floor and rolled across the deck.
Through the viewscreen I saw the magnificent interior, the plains of green and in the distance the rearing central mountains. We accelerated towards them so fast that they seemed to magnify alarmingly, like an image in a suddenly refocused telescope.
Maddie, beside me, her teeth chattering, managed, “Why on earth did I agree to this torture?”
I said, “Relax. Don’t fight it. Ride with it.”
“Mach one and climbing,” Hawk reported. “Mach two… three…”
Matt said, “Where are you taking us, Hawk?”
A muted laugh from the suspension cradle. “I’m taking you nowhere, Matt. This thing’s pre-programmed. I’m just easing it along, stroking it when it needs stroking, equalising the energy levels…”
I glanced across at him. The fear was gone from his eyes, to be replaced with something close to joy.
We gained altitude. Through a sidescreen I could see the land passing beneath us, made impossibly miniature by our elevation. Islands of cloud drifted by far below, and between them I made out beetling cars, tractors in fields, citizens going about their daily business oblivious of our history-making flight.
“Mach five and rising…”
I stared ahead through the main viewscreen. The central mountains were looming, and seconds later we were flying over their peaks. I stared down at the high fissures and folds, where snow still lay in long sweeps and curves like Arabic script. I made out the winding pass which we had taken the other day.
We sped over the mountain range and lost height, hugging the sweep of the foothills. Ahead was the central plain, stretching out to the hazy, curling horizon.
And in the centre of the plain, standing like some vast essential pinion or spindle, was the Golden Column.
We exchanged silent glances as we raced towards the Column.
I asked the presence in my head, which I knew was there despite its silence, if our destination was indeed the Golden Column. But of course there was no reply.
We lost altitude, skimming along the surface of the plain at a height of metres. Down below, I saw vehicles veer off the road and their passengers climb out to observe our passage.
It would be, I thought, the first time that many of them had set eyes on a real live, honest-to-goodness starship.
Maddie said, “Good God…” Matt smiled to himself as he stared ahead.
Hawk said, “This is it.”
We raced towards the Golden Column; it expanded to fill the screen, radiating illumination like a gold ingot in a spotlight. Below, thousands of pilgrims looked up as one, the phasing sweep of their suddenly upturning faces like the wind ruffling a field of wheat. Then another wave passed through their ranks as they fell to the ground—whether in some base obeisance or stark fear, I was unable to tell.
Just as I thought we were about to crash straight into the Golden
Column, we slowed.
Matt said, “Did you do that, Hawk?”
Our pilot shook his head. “Not me, pal.”
All we could see now through the screen was the effulgent light of the Column, and we had come to a stop before it and were hovering.
Maddie whispered, “What now?”
Everyone looked at me, and I said, “I don’t know.”
“We wait,” Hawk said. “Maybe the Column will communicate with us.”
“Offer up some universal truth,” Matt continued. Maddie said, “Change, reveal to us its purpose.”
A deep thrum sounded, and I felt myself connected to the ship, energy flowing through me in an exultant wave.
It was evidently happening to the others, too. Maddie cried out in surprise and Matt said, “Hawk?”
Hawk laughed, a little hysterically. “It’s called latent energising,” he shouted back at us through the mounting whine of the engine. “The piles are accumulating.”
“What does it mean?” Maddie yelled. I looked across at Hawk. Tears were leaking from his eyes. “I never told you about what happened on the Nevada run, did I, David?”
Maddie shouted, “But what’s happening now, for chrissake!”
“I miscalculated a jump,” Hawk told me, ignoring her. “I was solo, with a hundred passengers. The accumulator was out of kilter, but like a fool I thought I could compensate. I made the jump, and we came out of void space on the other side with half the ship breached, the other half compacted. Only five of us survived.”
“Hawk,” I said, and I wondered if I was commiserating with him, or attempting to refocus his attention on what was happening now.
The thrust increased. We were plastered to the couches. I couldn’t move a muscle. Even words, now, were beyond me. Every breath was a gargantuan labour.
Maddie cried out. I saw her concern: the light which hung above us, penetrating our frontal lobes, intensified, brightened, became painful.
I wondered, then, what trap I had lured my friends into. Hawk yelled, “This is it!”
It was as if the pent up pressure in the Mantis, which had been building for minutes, was suddenly released and we sprang forward at terrible speed—forward into the blinding intensity of the Golden Column.
I cried out, instinctively trying to raise my arms to protect myself from the impact I knew was about to happen.
But the impact never came.
When I opened my eyes, I saw only gold, and my body, my very being, was suffused by such a warmth and sense of well-being that I found it hard to fight back the tears.
“What happened?” Maddie said in a tremulous voice.
Matt responded, hushed with awe. “We’re inside the Golden Column…”
I looked though the sidescreens, the rear screen. All around us was gold.
That lasted for approximately ten seconds.
Then we emerged from the light, and the warmth and well-being dropped from us—as if we had been banished from Heaven—and I strained to peer into the sunlight flooding through the screen.
Of one thing I was certain. We were no longer on the green and mountainous world of Chalcedony.
“Where the hell…?” Matt said.
A desert stretched out before us, barren and rocky and seemingly lifeless. In the distance, stark against the deep blue sky, I made out oddly familiar mountains. I had seen them somewhere before, in my childhood.
Beside me, Hawk’s suspension cradle was shaking. Our pilot was laughing.
“Hawk?” I said.
“Do you know where we are?” he cried.
“God knows,” Matt said. “Looks like some alien world to me…” “Alien?” Hawk responded. “And where were you born, Matt?
‘Frisco? Well, we’re not a thousand kilometres away.”
I looked at him. “The Nevada desert?” I whispered. Hawk looked at me through eyes filmed with tears. “Not a stone’s throw from the old Nevada spaceport,” he said, “where thirty years ago I killed ninety-five innocent tourists.” Maddie said, “But how?”
In the silence that followed her question, Hawk took us down and eased the ship down near the desert floor. As we were hovering, he turned the ship on its axis and said, “Just as I thought…”
We stared at him, and then through the viewscreen at what was revealed.
Stand
ing before us, rising for kilometres into the clear blue Nevada sky, was an exact replica of the Golden Column we had left behind.
The voice in my head whispered something, and I relayed the information to my friends. “The Gift of the Yall,” I said.
The ship hovered, turned until it was facing the Column. I reached out to Matt and gripped his hand. Beyond him, I saw Maddie reach out too…
“Maddie!” I said.
Tears filled her eyes, streaming down her cheeks.
As Hawk powered up the ship and we accelerated towards the miraculous light of the Golden Column, Maddie’s hand made contact with Matt’s.
CODA
Three months later I’m sitting in the shadow of the Mantis, enjoying a beer and staring out over the silver waters of the bay. I’ve had a hundred or more offers to buy the ship, but I’ve refused them all. The Mantis is more valuable to me than anything money can buy—not so much for what it represents, but for the life it allows a certain person to lead, which I’ll come to later. I’ve given the Mantis another coat of paint, in a vain attempt to disguise it from the ship which made Expansion-wide news three months ago. Visitors still come to Magenta Bay, hoping to see the fabled starship and talk to David Conway, the Opener of the Way, about his discovery of the Yall ship and the subsequent flight into the Golden Column—but I tell them that Conway no longer lives around here, and recently the stream of sightseers has slowed to a trickle.
I spend my time contemplating the past, enjoying the occasional drink in the fighting Jackeral with my friends. Every day I make it a habit to go for a long swim across the bay—weather permitting, of course.
I’m a happy man, these days—and these nights too. The Yall ghost was as good as its word. For the past three months I’ve been spared the nightmares.
Hawk comes to visit us about once a month. He sub-let his scrapyard, bought a ship with the money he made from selling his story, and started a tour company with Kee, taking tourists through the Golden Column on a reprise of the famous Nevada run. From time to time he takes his crate further afield, and when he comes back to Magenta he regales us with tales of his exploratory flights to far, uncharted stars.
The scientists are still trying to work out how the Golden Columns work. Quite simply, any space vessel can enter a column and emerge at the destination entered into its computer core, whether that destination is within the same solar system, or thousands of light years distant. By some mysterious method—the scientists say that it is not unrelated to the physics behind the Telemass process—the ship is flung through space and brings with it the essence of the Column through which it passed, effectively establishing a gateway at its destination through which other ships can access the universe…
Some call it a miracle.
I call it the gift of the Yall.
I see Matt and Maddie almost every day.
They live in Matt’s studio on the far headland, and Matt has recently started producing work which, by his own high standards, he considers worthy of him.
This morning, as the sun climbed and the heat of the day rose with it, I was thinking of retiring to the veranda of the Fighting Jackeral for lunch, when Matt and Maddie strolled into sight along the red sands of the beach.
I sometimes wonder which is the most valuable gift of the Yall—the Golden Column, or the dermal barrier that allows Maddie a blessed week of being able to touch her fellow human beings, before she visits me at the Mantis to have the miracle renewed.
I know the answer, of course. You need only look at Maddie’s expression as she and Matt walk towards me along the beach, hand in hand.
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Eric Brown
Introduction Copyright © 2011 by Peter F. Hamilton
The right of Eric Brown to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd in July 2010. This electronic version published in December 2011 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.
FIRST EBOOK EDITION
ISBN 978-1-848632-47-9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PS Publishing Ltd
Grosvenor House
1 New Road
Hornsea / HU18 1PG
East Yorkshire / England
www.pspublishing.co.uk
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