STARSHIP SUMMER

by Eric Brown

INTRODUCTION

So we’re now well into the “new millennium,” that evocative date beyond which used to be purely the realm of science fiction. So when our clocks finally flipped over that fateful Y2K point, did all us SF authors suddenly become “contemporary” authors? Not according to the marketing strategists and helpful genre-labelled shelves in bookshops—normally at the back of bookshops away from daylight and public sight. Nope; we’re still apparently churning out stories about spaceships, robots, and ray guns (well, I am, anyway). That distinctive summary of all things SF. Take a bow, marketing department and the popular press.

Actually, on one level, I have to admit, it’s a fair cop. Us SF authors write the literature of ideas, pushed forward by advancing technology whose chrome-plated gadgets gleam brightly and enticingly in the strange light of alien suns. Who can resist all that shiny new gadgetry? The way it affects our lives, the options it provides, all those myriad neat possibilities for a twist in the tale as you reverse the polarity, decouple the tachyon spin, and escape with a mighty bound. It’s useful stuff. Back in the alleged golden age of SF, which I think is the late forties/early fifties depending on who you ask, engineering and science were the defining parameters for SF: that’s what it was all about. People in these stories were mere tour guides to steer you through the possibilities of new worlds full of wonderful ideas. They didn’t count, they weren’t characters with feelings or personalities.

I’m generalizing monstrously of course. Some tech-driven stories did have great characters, and not every story was about technology. I’ll just mention A Canticle for Leibowitz and Way Station as my prime examples of non-techie novels from this era, and leave you to nominate your own favourites—it’s a fun game.

However, the point of all this is that the SF genre from the forties onward was largely perceived as cowboys in space, adventure for teenagers; then, as we moved into the computer age: for geeks. A perception reinforced by most SF films and TV series.

It was certainly what I tended to read in my teens.

Then I tried to write the stuff—that was in the mid-eighties. There were a lot of us starting out back then. And yes, we wrote a lot of hard SF as it’s called now, but there was a big shift in focus. The stories were about societies and the effects of technology on individuals. Almost a shift back, if you like, to the ideas-based narratives of Wells and Verne but with a modern edge. That’s when I started buying Interzone, and when, of course, I discovered Eric Brown.

Eric was then and remains to this day a thoroughly modern writer. The issues and concepts he deals in are those of today. In that respect he is a contemporary writer. It’s the settings which are SF, but he’s successfully thrown off the convention of science permeating every page. Yes, there are spaceships, and sometimes robots, and even aliens, but they are not the central pillar of the story. Especially not in the case of Starship Summer. Eric’s skill lies in the way in which he deals with futuristic technology, incorporating it into the narrative in the same easy way as we treat our own technology today; it’s an interesting peripheral and nothing more. It helps us do certain things, it hinders us in others, and it throws up interesting possibilities. No matter its form, Eric puts his characters firmly centre stage, and that sets him well above the horrific pigeonholing which SF is still forced to endure.

I read Eric’s stories because I want to find out what happens to the people involved. He’s good at crafting them, and he’s very good in creating their predicaments, almost all of which are self-inflicted, the outcome of human nature in all its stubbornness and sorrow. With Starship Summer we’re introduced to Conway, our narrator, a man with a tragic past seeking the escape of solitude on a distant, apparently insignificant planet. Hawksworth, a man with an equally veiled past. Old spaceships with an unknown pedigree. An artist past his prime. Mysterious lady with an even more mysterious ailment. Alien religion—that isn’t quite. All fascinating stuff. But Eric’s artistry is the way in which he combines these traits in an intricate dance of emotion and feeling. There are the Big Events of SF going on there, but only in the background, secondary to the people we quickly grow to care about. To say anything more about them would be a plot-spoiler, and I’m not doing that. All I knew when I picked up the manuscript was that I’d be drawn into the story and enjoy the outcome, and that’s what I can reassure you that you’ve got with this book in your hands.

As always, Eric has blended the very best facets of futuristic fiction, giving us an elaborate, gentle vision of a desirable future populated by characters that inspire both sympathy and poignancy.

Eric’s output, certainly when it comes to novels, isn’t as frequent or as sizable as I for one would like to see; which makes novellas like this all the more important to those of us who wait impatiently for what he releases. Once again I enjoyed what he produced, and once again I’m left waiting anxiously for the next one.

Peter F. Hamilton Rutland, February 2007 Dedicated to the Memory of Michael G. Coney

ONE

Last year I left Earth and Telemassed twenty light years through space to the colony world of Chalcedony, Delta Pavonis IV. I was looking for peace, for a retreat from the nightmares that plagued me. I was looking for contentment after a period of pain. I should have known, of course, that you cannot outrun your nightmares: they are with you until you find the strength to look deep within yourself and banish them with courage.

I took the Telemass relay via the four stations between Earth and Chalcedony and arrived feeling as if I’d died four times and been brought back to life—which, in effect, is exactly what had happened. Dazed, nauseous, I booked into an expensive hotel overlooking the ocean and slept for twenty-four hours. The following day I enquired at a couple of real estate agents. I was looking for a quiet, out of the way place, far from the tourists and the religious pilgrims who flocked to the planet in their droves.

That afternoon I hired a ground-effect vehicle and drove a hundred kilometres up the coast to the small beachside settlement of Magenta Bay. There, an overweight local in his sixties, all tan and smile, showed me around a few A-frames and then, sensing they were not what I was looking for, suggested I might like to view a plot of land with the idea of having my own place built.

I liked the area. Magenta Bay consisted of a dozen beachfront dwellings—A-frames and villas—and a few stores set back from the water. The sand was as fine and red as Hungarian paprika, and the rainforest that backed the settlement a startling, alien green. The purple mountains of the interior were sufficiently different to remind you that you were no longer on Earth.

I selected a plot on the northern headland of the bay, close enough to the centre of town to provide a short walk for the necessities, but far enough away from the nearest villa so as not be bothered by inquisitive neighbours.

I signed the paperwork, paid a deposit, then began the long drive back to MacIntyre to look for a dwelling that might suit the land I had bought.

In the event I didn’t get that far.

I was three kilometres out of Magenta when I saw the scrapyard. My first impression was that this was an incongruous, not to say ugly, business to set up in paradise. My second impression, when I made out the nature of the scrap, was tinged with a romanticism that recalled my youth and my fascination with the exploration of space, and I knew I had to stop and take a look around.

I drove under a rickety metal-worked archway bearing the legend: HAWKSWORTH & CO., constructed from old stanchion rods and microwave antennae. From one paradise I passed into another.

I braked and climbed out and stared about me in wonder. I was ten again, a kid awed at the sublime majesty and latent power of the craft arrayed around me. The sight was not without the kick of poignancy, however—and not just the poignancy of lost youth, but the sadness that these magnificent vessels should end up here, some whole, but most nobbled and spavined, stripped and stacked and sorted into utilitarian piles: here a rickety mound of radiation baffles, there a ziggurat of nose cones, and over there a pile of tail-fins layered like pancakes.

Not all the craft had been cannibalised and sectioned, however;there were a dozen vessels intact, looking much as they had thirty years ago, poised on the aprons of starports across the Expansion,ready to bravely explore the infinite.

I wandered around a ten-man exploration vessel squatting on its ramrod haunches, a bulging bullfrog of a thing with swelling engine nacelles and a prognathous nose-cone. I slapped its flank, old paint flaking beneath my palm. The silver and lightning blue livery of the Canterbury Line was still visible in places, excoriated by the void.

The next ship in line took my breath away, for I had possessed a model of this very starship in my early teens. It was a Jansen Mk III deep space exploration probe, still proudly bearing the blue and yellow carapace of the Stockholm Line. I walked its long, streamlined length, trying to imagine the sights it had witnessed, the events of history in which it had played a part—the exploration of planets across the Expansion now settled by colonists ignorant of the deeds and daring of the crews of vessels such as this.

I turned, taking in the entirety of the yard, my eye catching a kaleidoscopic display of familiar sigils and decals.

“Can I help you?”

The question, in the warm afternoon air, startled me.

The owner of the voice was just as remarkable as the vessels which surrounded us.

He was garbed in a grease-stained black onepiece and walked with a lurching limp, his right shoulder ducking with every step. His hair was long, black, and the skin of his face tanned by the fierce heat of Delta Pavonis to the shade of an overdone beefsteak.

The material of his onepiece bulged here and there—along the length of his arms and across his chest—but this I noticed only later.

He advanced, left hand outstretched. “Hawksworth. I run the place.” His right arm hung useless at his side.

“Conway,” I replied. “I’ll shortly be moving to Magenta.” I looked around at the towering examples of a long-gone era. “Some museum you have here.”

He looked at me, assessing my age. “Brings back memories?”

I smiled. “Just a few. It’s as if… as if my past has been pulled out of my head, made metal and lined up for my inspection.”

Hawksworth laughed. “Care for a drink?”

I was surprised by his hospitality, then realised that he probably didn’t get much passing trade this far north.

He led the way across the yard towards a small scoutship which, I realised with amusement, he had turned into an office. We climbed a spiral staircase welded to the hull of the ship and stepped onto an observation platform. Acceleration couches, in lieu of chairs, dotted the deck. He gestured for me to sit down and ducked into the bridge of the craft, a dark hole filled with glowing com-screens.

He emerged a few seconds later with two ice-cold cans of local beer.

He leaned against the rail, surveying his domain, and he reminded me, in that piratical pose, of a superannuated buccaneer scanning the salvage of a long and eventful life.

Only then did I notice the ridge of bolt-like protuberances that lined his arms, his chest and spine.

Before I could think of a way of framing a question, Hawksworth said, looking at me, “I don’t have you down as a pilgrim.”

I smiled. “Thanks. I’ll take that as a compliment. No, I’ve come to Chalcedony to retire. The quiet life…” I finished lamely.

I took a long swallow of beer. It was good, with taste and bite. I could see myself enjoying the occasional drink on the veranda of my villa, overlooking the bay.

“From Earth?” he asked.

I nodded. “Vancouver.”

“Why Chalcedony, and why Magenta Bay?” He smiled, gesturing with his can. “Forgive the third degree. I don’t get many visitors.”

“It’s okay,” I said. I don’t know why, but I liked Hawksworth. There was something big and slow and inspiring in the man, a gentleness of spirit belied by his gargantuan frame. “I saw a holo-doc about the planet. It looked peaceful. Unspoilt. I picked up a brochure and read about Magenta Bay. It seemed my kind of place.”

He looked at me closely. “You weren’t drawn by the Column?”

“Not at all. I’m not religious.” He shrugged. “Only, we get lots of visitors hereabouts. They say they’ve come for the views, the peace—but in reality they’re looking for something. And that something is often, though they don’t know it, the Column.”

I drank, then said, “Not me.”

He gave me a penetrating look. “But you’re running from something, Conway?”

I wondered, for a second, if he were an accredited telepath—but there was no connected minds symbol tattooed on his face to signify the fact.

I glanced at the spars and braces that enclosed his frame, and the white scars that showed at his wrist and jugular, and I looked out over the landscape of derelict dreams and wondered why he had fetched up here, in this place.

“We’re all running from something, Hawksworth,” I said.

He smiled, the grin transforming his rugged face. “Friends call me Hawk.”

Perhaps encouraged, I said, “You flew these things, years ago?” He looked at me quickly, then glanced down at his exposed wrist,and the sealed jack interface that was now just an ugly pucker of scar tissue. He nodded and took a long swallow of beer. “Years ago,” he said, “before the Nevada run.”

I let a suitable interval elapse, then said, “What happened?”

He shook his head. “Later,” he said, and effectively closed that line of conversation.

We sat and drank and enjoyed the view, and he said at last, “So, you’ve found a place in Magenta?”

I told Hawk that I had paid a deposit on a plot of land.

As I said this, an absurd idea hit me. I looked back at the ship on which we sat, made out its interior. “You live on this?” I asked.

“The Avocet is my home,” he said, “and you couldn’t wish for better.”

I looked around the yard, picking out the smaller, complete craft dotted here and there among the wreckage.

“I might be mad,” I said, “but show me around this place. I might be in the market for a starship.”

So we finished our beers and Hawk gave me a conducted tour of his scrapyard.

He talked me through the various intact ships he had in stock, from tiny three man escape craft to big, ungainly asteroid wreckers, and everything in between. As well as giving me their specifications, he was a walking encyclopaedia of their varied histories, their missions, mishaps and mysteries.

“It was a wondrous age,” he said. “Space was an enigma. Exploration was fraught with danger. How many crews lost their lives opening up the way?”

And then Telemass technology came along, and almost overnight these beautiful starships were put out to pasture. A few exploration companies threw in their lot with the Telemass people—they still needed crews to map the worlds they found—but a hundred Lines went to the wall.

“And you found yourself out of work?” I said.

“The end for me came well before Telemass,” he said quickly, and moved on. “Now this one,” he said, standing in the shadow of a Norfolk Line scoutship, “this little pearl has aesthetics and comfort. Come on, I’ll show you around.”

His description was meant as a superlative, but the vessel did remind me of a pearl: oval and lambent, with a pale polymer re-entry carapace that almost glowed.

Inside it was slick and soulless. It lacked character. Evidently it was one of the last ships designed before Telemass came along, and featured what thirty years ago would have been state-of-the-art technology. But something about it was without the appeal of the other, older ships.

I wanted an old, battered tub that had soaked up the light of a hundred distant stars.

I think Hawk sensed this as we emerged once more into the glaring light of Delta Pavonis.

“Not for you?”

“Too new. Do you have anything more… more romantic?” I stopped there, because, across the yard, my eye had caught sight of just what I was looking for.

It was hard to describe why I fell in love with the horizontal hulk that squatted on its landing stanchions like a giant insect. It combined a graceful line with obvious age, was proud and at the same time defeated. Perhaps it called to me to be… if not loved, then cared for.

“Tell me about this one,” I said, striding across the yard.

It was small, perhaps fifteen metres from the stubby nose-cone to its flaring twin exhaust vents. Many missions had blasted the livery from its hull and flanks, and alien ivy had made progress up its stanchions.

Hawk smiled and shook his head. “Trust you to pick the one crate I know nothing about. Or next to nothing,” he added.

“Can we go inside?”

He gestured for me to mount the ramp, then keyed in a code and the hatch slid open.

It was surprisingly spacious within: a wide command deck looked out through a wraparound viewscreen. It would make a marvellous lounge, with views across the bay. Smaller rooms gave off the main corridor, along the length of the ship; these would make bedrooms and a bathroom. A spray of paint, a few furnishings, and it would provide a comfortable retreat from the cares of the world.

“I’ve never been able to trace the history of this ship,” Hawk was saying, “and believe me I’ve tried. I don’t know where it came from, which world of the Expansion, nor its Line.”

“But it is human-built?”

He smiled and said, “I can’t be certain even of that.”

The possibility that the crate might be of alien manufacture added to the allure. There were three known space-faring alien races, and they kept themselves pretty much to themselves. I had seen them only on holo-docs, and never in the flesh. The thought of living in an alien starship…

“Where did you get it?” I asked.

“Not from my usual sources,” he admitted. “Someone found it.”

“Found?”

He thumbed over his shoulder to indicate the jungle of the interior. “A farmer came across it ten years ago, a hundred kays north of the Column. He approached me and I took a look, found it overgrown with vines and moss and salvaged the thing.”

“And you don’t know anything about it?”

“Nothing. Its control system doesn’t make sense. Even its propulsion is odd.”

“How so?”

“It has a couple of atmosphere jets, but no planetary drive. Which might suggest that it wasn’t an interplanetary. But—” he laughed and shook his head “—it’s equipped with a subdermal re-entry skin.”

“So maybe it is alien?”

“Maybe,” he said.

I looked around inside a little more, then left the ship and made a slow circuit. I shielded my eyes from the swollen sun and stared up at the vessel’s arching lines.

“And it’s for sale?”

“I’ll tell you what… It’s taking up space, I can’t cannibalise it, and you obviously like the look of the thing. It’s yours for five thousand.” I was open-mouthed at his generosity. I had expected to spend at least twenty thousand on a villa, perhaps a little more for a starship that took my fancy.

We shook hands and sealed the deal.

He agreed to deliver it to my plot of land in the next few days, and gave me the addresses of contractors who would connect it to the water and electricity supplies. He even promised to give it a paint job—the colours of any line I chose.

I paid Hawk half of the five thousand up front; the other half would follow on delivery.

As we parted company beneath the metal-work archway of his premises, he told me that he’d meet me in Magenta at the weekend and introduce me to a few people who made the local watering hole, the Fighting Jackeral, their spiritual home.

As I climbed into the ground-effect vehicle, I took one last look back at the rearing shape of the mysterious starship. I had the feeling then—and this is not stated with the wisdom of hindsight—that a new phase in my life was under way.

TWO

I rented a small villa and filled the next few days with the minutiae of day to day living—the trivial, mindless pursuits that helped keep the nightmares at bay. I set up accounts at various Magenta stores, bought furnishings for my new home, and pottered along the foreshore admiring the alien wildlife, the oddly armoured crabs and darting sea birds. Once, I even caught sight of the Ashentay, Chalcedony’s nomadic natives. I was out walking at sunset when a group of slim bipeds, resembling Nordic Japanese, flitted quickly through the wooded headland beyond my villa, gone in an instant.

Thus I filled my days, but it was much harder to occupy my nights, the lonely, empty small hours when macabre visions woke me and continued as I lay awake.

As good as his word, Hawk delivered the ship on the back of a gargantuan low-loader and settled it into position on my plot. I’d arranged engineers to be on hand to connect energy and water, and four hours later it was sitting proudly on the headland, staring out across the bay.

Hawk had even sprayed it in the resplendent green and yellow livery of the Persephone Line.

We retired for lunch at the Fighting Jackeral, a single storey timber building on the sea front, consisting of one large lounge, a bar area and a long veranda where most of the customers gathered on the long, hot evenings of summer. I’d dropped in once or twice for a drink, but the locals, perhaps assuming I was either a tourist or a pilgrim, had been polite but reserved.

At the bar Hawk introduced me to a few friendly men and women who ran small businesses in the area, the manager of the nearby marina, a woman who skippered a tourist boat on excursions upriver to the Column. They were the affable, perhaps cliquish, barflies you find the Expansion over—conservative types drawn together by the common interest of making money.

As Hawk led me towards the veranda, clutching ice-cold beers, he whispered, “I prefer the artists and bohemians who make Magenta their home. A little more open-minded,” he added with a smile.

We ordered locally caught spearfish and salad and watched the silvery water of the bay lap the bright red sand that sloped from the Jackeral. The Ring of Tharssos, which at one time had been a dozen moons, but which millennia ago had collided and shattered into a million shards and fragments, arched overhead, colossal and breathtaking in the perfection of its parabola. I pinched myself. I was no longer on Earth, on the Vancouver sea front. I was twenty light years distant on an alien planet.

We kept the conversation superficial. I told Hawk nothing about the reasons I left Earth, and he said not a word about his past. The sealed augmentations that scarred his body spoke volumes, and I recalled his mention of not having flown since the Nevada run—his own annus horribilis—but respected his reticence enough not to pry. I told him of my work on Earth, stripped of anything personal.

We had finished our meals when Hawk leaned forward, staring along the beach. I saw a small, lone figure striding barefoot through the lapping waves, a blonde woman I judged to be in her thirties.

“Maddie,” Hawk said to me. “I must introduce you.”

He stood and called her name, waving. She looked up, as if from a reverie, then smiled and waved vaguely.

“Won’t you join us?” Hawk called.

She seemed to hesitate, then moved slowly from the sea and trod the sand towards the veranda steps. Over the weeks I came to know Maddie, I recognised this hesitation in her manner as something characteristic—the signifier of her unique condition. At the time I merely thought that she wanted to be left to herself.

She seemed to drift up the steps, smiling from Hawk to myself. She was thin, undernourished, the arrangement of her bones angular. She was attractive in a faded, beach-bum kind of way, the combination of too much sun and salt water. I saw that my estimation of her age had been a little kind: parenthetical wrinkles around her mouth suggested she was in her forties.

“Maddie, this is David Conway, just in from Earth. Conway, Maddie Chamberlain.”

I held out my hand, but Maddie smiled apologetically and whispered, “I don’t shake hands, Mr Conway.”

I smiled uneasily at her touch taboo, and Hawk covered the awkwardness by saying, “Conway’s just bought a ship from me,” and he pointed along the coast to the sleek shape of the starship silhouetted on the headland.

I told her that I preferred it to all the more traditional homes I’d been shown.

“How novel,” Maddie said, smiling with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm. “What a lovely idea.” She spoke with a gentle English accent. “Does it have a name?”

“I haven’t got that far yet.”

She stared at the ship. “Mmm, how about… the Mantis?” she suggested.

I looked along the foreshore at the starship and nodded. Silhouetted against the sky, it did have the aspect of a praying mantis. I nodded. “I like it,” I said. “The Mantis it is.”

From a cheesecloth bag she produced a container fashioned from some kind of local coconut equivalent, and seconds later a waiter appeared with a beer and poured it, without being told, into the container.

She ordered a salad, and ate it with cutlery she took from her bag.

Only then did I notice her clothes. They were evidently home-made, and not very well at that. The seams were uneven, the stitching haphazard.

“Conway’s fled Earth for the quiet life,” Hawk said.

“So you’re not a pilgrim?” Maddie said. It was the question I was asked again and again during my first few weeks in the area.

I smiled and explained that I’d come to Magenta to retire, to relax in the sun; I allowed that I might one day take a look at the Column, but that I was no religious fanatic.

“Do you know something, Mr Conway? I’ve lived on Chalcedony almost ten years now and I’ve never seen the Column at close quarters.” And the sudden smile, on her normally wistful face, made her look years younger.

“Familiarity,” Hawk said, “breeds not contempt but apathy.”

Maddie said, “I understand worshipping a God, but I fail to see why anyone should worship a golden column merely because it’s vast and enigmatic.”

“Perhaps,” I ventured, “that’s exactly why they worship it—in some way it’s a physical representation of the God they can’t see. It’s mysterious, numinous.”

She hesitated, her head on one side, and thought about that. “I wonder why some people need the physical?” she said enigmatically, and then changed the subject. “What did you do on Earth, Mr Conway?”

“I was an engineer. I had my own small business in Vancouver. Orbital elevators, mainly.”

“Was business good?”

I couldn’t help myself. “Up and down,” I said. Maddie laughed; Hawk covered his eyes and shook his head.

Maddie said, pointing to my starship, “Will you repair it? Get it flying again?”

I shook my head. “We think the ship might be alien. I might be an engineer, but I don’t understand the first thing about extraterrestrial mechanics.”

She looked across at Hawk. “You could help him, couldn’t you? Get the thing up and flying again. You could even pilot the ship.”

Hawk looked suddenly uneasy, as if Maddie had touched on a sore point. “Like Conway says,” he said tersely, “it’s alien. They do things differently. We wouldn’t understand the first principles, even.”

Maddie returned to her salad and ate abstractedly. I stretched and said, to fill the sudden silence, “I think I’ll get to like the way of life in Magenta.”

“It’s quiet,” Maddie said, “which is what I like about the place. The outside world hasn’t really reached us yet. The Bay hasn’t been flooded by the crass commercialism of the rest of the Expansion.”

Hawk said, “We know some good people here, don’t we, Maddie? We’ll introduce you, Conway.”

Maddie smiled. “Talking of good people, Hawk, have you seen anything of Matt lately?”

Hawk shook his head. “He’s busy finishing his latest project. He’s racing against time—the private showing is a couple of days away, and he’s still not finished.”

“Matt’s our very own famous artist,” Maddie explained. “Not Matt Sommers, the crystal sculptor?”

Maddie beamed. “The very same. You know his work?”

“My wife ran a gallery in Vancouver. Just reproductions, but I admire his stuff.”

“Is she with you on Chalcedony?” Maddie asked.

I shook my head. “We’re no longer together,” I explained, and left it at that.

Maddie opened her mouth in a silent ‘ah’, and covered her gaffe by rummaging in her home-made bag and producing a card. She pushed it across the table, withdrawing her hand quickly to avoid making contact with me.

“I have a spare ticket for the private viewing on Tuesday. Matt’s a good friend. He won’t mind my inviting you.”

I pocketed the ticket and thanked her. “I’ll look forward to that. You’ll be there, Hawk?”

He smiled. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world—not that I know much about art, but I like watching Maddie going all gooey-eyed when she’s in Matt’s company.” He winked across at Maddie, who gave him the evil eye, and I assumed Hawk had got even by touching her sore point.

“Matt’s a dear,” Maddie said, “but he’s made it perfectly obvious that he feels nothing for me. Not—” she hurried on, “—that I would be in any position to do anything about it even if he did.” And she smiled sweetly at Hawk.

He said, “Matt once told me that he has no place in his life for romance.” He shook his head, as if in wonder. “Which, coming from an artist—someone who should be open to all and every experience—I find baffling.”

Maddie leaned forward and whispered, mock conspiratorially, “Matt has a dark secret in his past. Just like you, Hawk.” And she licked her finger tip and chalked up another hit in the air between them.

At that second, as if to save Hawk, his com rang. He spoke briefly to the caller, cut the connection and said, “That was someone at the yard. A rare customer. I’d better get back before he escapes. I’ll see you both at the viewing, if not before.”

He paid the bill for all of us, despite my protests, and hurried from the veranda.

Maddie sipped her beer and asked, “How long have you known Hawk?”

“I bought the ship from him a couple of days ago. I’ve only met him twice.”

She eyed me over the horizon of her mug. “And what do you think of him?”

I shrugged. “He seems very friendly.”

“It’s strange, but you can know someone for years, and yet not really know them.”

“You’ve known him that long?” I asked.

“I met him soon after I arrived on Chalcedony, ten years ago. But, as I said, I don’t really know him. He’s one of the most private people I’ve ever met, which is strange as he’s also one of the most outgoing people you’re ever likely to happen across.”

“Still waters…” I quipped. I hesitated, then said, “He did let slip something along the lines that he’s never flown since something that happened at Nevada. And have you noticed the jacks on his wrists?”

She nodded. “They’re hard to miss.”

“Neural interfaces,” I said, “for achieving integration with a shipboard matrix during hyper-light flight.”

“So?”

“So,” I said, “his were fused, which leads me to believe he had some kind of accident. If so, then the fact he survived is some kind of miracle. It must have been traumatising, to say the least.”

She nodded, as if she knew more about the accident, but was reluctant to tell me.

I finished my drink. “My first full day in Magenta Bay and I find myself surrounded by mysterious strangers.” I resisted the urge to stare at her home-made mug and cutlery as I said this, and excused myself. “My ship awaits, and I’ve a lot to sort out before sundown.”

“See you at the viewing,” Maddie said.

I left the veranda and walked to the starship by way of the beach, admiring its sleek lines against the afternoon sky. I contemplated the days ahead, the work I had to do aboard the Mantis to get it into shape… and I wondered if I would be spared the nightmares that had visited me every night since my arrival on the planet.

THREE

Two things of note occurred the following evening. I had my worst nightmare to date, and I saw something aboard the ship. I’d spent the day decorating the lounge, what in earlier times had been the ship’s control room. I’d installed a couple of sofas and chairs, a locally woven rug and a few wall hangings and pot plants—native things that intrigued me with their alienness. I had managed to soften the hard, functional lines of the control room, make it comfortable, liveable. Then I turned my attention to the kitchen adjacent to the lounge. This I equipped with a few quickly bought utensils, a small oven and a microwave, and hung a poster I’d seen in a nearby store: it was a picture of the Column, a great golden bolt of ineffable light which rose, thick and mysterious, from the plain of the interior. In the bedroom, on the left flank of the ship with a view along the curve of the red sands, I positioned a bed and a small cabinet. I didn’t bother with decorations, as I wasn’t planning to spend that much time in there.

I made myself a meal around eight—I’d always enjoyed the process of cooking, finding something both creative and therapeutic about conjuring good food from raw ingredients. My wife Sally had hated anything to do with the kitchen, and I had taken pleasure in cooking for the three of us. Carrie, my daughter, had helped: an abiding memory is of our working side by side before the kitchen’s big picture window overlooking the straits.

I ate slowly in the lounge, with the viewscreens open to admit the cooling evening breeze, and drank a few local beers from the stock I’d laid in. I watched the ebb and flow of evening life; the locals promenading along the beach. I caught sight of Maddie, mooning along in the shallows, lost in a world of her own. She looked a small and lonely figure garbed incongruously in the ill-made clothing of her own design.

As I watched, a wave-hopper skipped into the bay and a tall, dark figure dismounted and strode up the beach towards the Fighting Jackeral. I recognised Matt Sommers from a holo-doc I’d seen about him on Earth, a big, composed African-American of few words. He had either failed to notice Maddie, or purposefully ignored her. She, however, had seen him, and hurried in his wake up the beach and onto the Jackeral’s veranda. I smiled to myself and wondered about her curious aversion to tactile contact with her fellow man.

As the sun set—Delta Pavonis is big, and Chalcedony orbits close to the swollen primary, making sunsets a blazing spectacle—I opened another beer and wondered what shape my days might take once I’d finished furnishing the ship. I would read, and take long walks, and drop into the Jackeral for an afternoon beer and a chat with whoever might be propping up the bar; I’d explore the northern continent, hire a crawler and take a look at the Falls area of the interior, the series of sinks on various levels perpetually filled by spectacular waterfalls. I might even, I thought, look out for a part-time job to fill the long hours. Another thing that made Chalcedony so different from Earth was the duration of its day: twenty-eight hours, divided at this latitude into eighteen hours of daylight and ten of night.

The sunset over—it lasted all of ten minutes, a fiery plummet and a resulting crimson blaze in the east—I took myself to bed, dosed up as ever with a couple of sleeping pills and something my doctor back on Earth had promised would help deal with the nightmares. He had lied.

I slept soundly until the early hours, and then they started.

I won’t describe them here—I always find other people’s dreams, and nightmares too, a bore to read about. Suffice it to say that the visions of swelling waves were preceded by intimations of death, and followed as ever by a young girl’s hopeless screams.

To them I added my own as I sat bolt upright, drenched in sweat, and stared out through the viewscreen at the Ring of Tharssos curving overhead like the silver blade of a scimitar.

I was on Chalcedony, I realised with a rush. Magenta Bay. Light years away from where it had all happened.

I worked to control my breathing, banish the visions, fill my mind with things other than the inevitability of oblivion.

Unable to sleep immediately after the nightmare, I got up and moved through to the lounge, helping myself to a beer on the way and finding that the sharp, clean cut of it helped to bring me fully awake. I sat before the viewscreen, staring out at the red sands, bloody now in the light of the Ring.

I wondered if it was something in my subconscious that had brought me to live so close to the fearful sea.

I was contemplating turning in, and had half risen in my seat, when I saw something from the corner of my eye. I was fully awake, and sober, and the sight shocked me. I dropped back into the chair, staring now along the length of the lounge towards the hatch which gave onto the ship’s access corridor.

I had not been mistaken. I had seen a flash of iridescent green, vaguely human in shape, flit quickly from the lounge and vanish along the corridor. Gathering myself, I gave chase—though chase is hardly the word to describe my circumspect progress along the corridor.

I checked every room off the corridor, then dropped a level and went through the cabins there, too. All were empty. The ship’s exit hatch was locked, and only I knew the entry code. I returned to the lounge, oddly enough not frightened but mystified. There were two options, I thought; either I had hallucinated the fleeing figure—some residual hypnagogic vision from the nightmare—or the Mantis was haunted.

As I made my way to bed, I wondered which of the two was the more preferable.

FOUR

The Matt Sommers private viewing was held in the low-slung dome of the community centre on the southern headland of the bay. The mounted works of art, the knots of well-dressed connoisseurs drifting from piece to piece amid a hum of polite conversation, brought back memories of the times I had attended similar events with my wife.

As happens on these occasions, my memories seemed to refer to another, long gone life, and I half doubted that they were real. Why is it that recollections of past happiness are so evanescent, while remembrance of tragedy is so stark and real?

The exhibition consisted of two separate sets of Matt Sommers’ work: the emotion crystals for which he was famous, and his more recent paintings. These latter were no mere graphic representations of visual subjects, but abstract pieces created from memory plastic, so that the picture within the frame changed constantly, consecutive scenes linked thematically to the last.

An increased buzz of chatter heralded the arrival of the artist. He stepped into the dome flanked by two officious-looking individuals: a suited silver-haired man in his sixties who was the mayor of Magenta, and a tall woman who carried her glamour with a distant, disdainful hauteur.

Between them, Sommers appeared reassuringly ordinary: he was an artist, and had nothing to prove by power-dressing or putting on a pose. He wore baggy trousers spattered with flecks of memory plastic, and an old shirt open at the chest to reveal a mat of unkempt grey hair.

Sommers was in his early seventies, a big, strong man with an open face and curly hair gone grey. He looked around the group and nodded to friends as the woman struck her champagne glass with a stylus.

When silence descended, she said, “Magenta has been privileged for many years now to be the home of the Expansion’s finest artist, who needs no introduction from me. The Arts Bureau of Chalcedony is proud to be staging this exhibition, Matt’s first in two years, the highlight of which is the series of graphics entitled Towards Infinity. I hope you will enjoy…”

Conversation resumed; people milled around the exhibits; Sommers was surrounded by admiring guests.

The crystals were arrayed on two long tables in the centre of the dome, while the graphics were displayed on free-standing dividers around the periphery.

I took a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and looked around for a familiar face, but saw neither Hawk nor Maddie. I moved around the tables in the middle of the dome, laying hands on the emotion crystals. I was familiar with them from Vancouver, but the examples of Sommers’ work I had experienced there had been copies only, pale imitations of the real thing. Now, as I caressed crystal after crystal, vicariously experiencing a slew of emotions as raw and real as my own, I came to see why Sommers was regarded as one of the very best artists in the Expansion.

Not only did the emotions invested in each crystal hit me with a clarity that was almost shocking, but the integrity of these emotions spoke to something deep inside me. I had experienced other artists’ crystals in the past, but those had been meretricious gee-gaws, done quickly and cynically to communicate emotions as universal as love and hate, happiness and joy.

With Sommers it was different.

He had created the crystals sparingly, releasing items only when he felt he had something relevant to impart. Now I experienced the emotion of love in its true ambiguity, the consuming passion that is often tinged with anger and frustration; I felt Sommers’ anger too, but an anger that acknowledged its origin in the artist’s own self-doubt and uncertainty—the ambivalence that is at the core of all of us.

I came away from the display deeply moved; it felt as though, briefly, I had been made privy to emotions I recognised but which, until now, I’d never had the insight to acknowledge.

The visuals were another matter. They were his latest work, the centre-piece of the exhibition, and were therefore attracting much attention. However much I tried to appreciate the vast rectangular designs, I was unable to comprehend what they were attempting to communicate. After the crystals they seemed shallow, mere abstract designs with little or no emotional content—pretty patterns that most of us, with technical coaching, would have been able to produce. Which, I told myself, was the reaction of the philistine: the fault was my own, an inability to appreciate the language of the form.

Then I saw Maddie, and my pleasure at glimpsing a familiar face was soon replaced by puzzlement. She was moving along the display of crystals, pausing before each one and touching it, but only briefly. This in itself was not unusual, but what made the scene so bizarre was that she was wearing on her right hand what looked like an oven glove.

“Maddie?” I said, coming up beside her.

She beamed at me. “Mr Conway,” she said, slipping the glove into her shoulder bag.

“Less of the formality,” I said, pretending I hadn’t noticed her sleight of hand. “I’ll answer to nothing but David. What do you think of the exhibition?”

“The crystals are so… powerful, don’t you think? They put you in touch with what it is to be human.”

Someone appeared at our side. “Which is what art is all about.” It was Hawk, smiling at the catalogue he was holding up before him. “Or so it states in here. According to our illustrious Arts governor, Hermione Venus, ‘Sommers communicates his vital essence in a powerful range of unsurpassed works of genius’.”

Maddie tut-tutted. To me she said, “Hawk had a fling with Hermione last year. He’s yet to get over the experience.”

Hawk grunted. “Venus swanned into the yard looking for scrap which she wanted to turn into art. She was everything I disliked in a person: vanity, pretension and a breathtaking egotism.”

“So Hawk tried to cure her in the only way he knows.”

“That’s unfair, and you know it,” he remonstrated. “Venus threw herself at me, and I was stupid enough to respond. Which, I think, is understandable. I mean, look at her, Conway. Admit it, she’s beautiful.”

Venus stood before a nearby graphic, a contemplative finger to her lips. Six feet tall, slim as a ballerina, she had elegance and poise and—Hawk was right—an undeniable Latin beauty.

I nodded. “And she knows it.”

Maddie said, “Would you be smitten, David?”

I shook my head. “Not my type.”

Hawk defended himself. “I was low, hadn’t had an affair for months, and then Venus decides she wants to slum it with a barbarian. I mean, who am I to refuse?”

“You’re so gallant, darling,” Maddie mocked.

“What is it with you two?” I said, glancing from Hawk to Maddie.

Hawk laughed. “We love each other, really.” He stopped and looked across the dome to the bar. Hermione Venus had moved from the exhibition and had cornered Matt Sommers who was gripping a bottle of beer and trying to appear politely interested in what Venus had to say.

“Come on,” Hawk said. “Matt looks like he needs rescuing.”

As we moved to the bar, I hung back to observe the reaction of Venus to Hawk’s sudden appearance. She was laying a hand on Sommers’ sleeve with cloying familiarity, and stopped talking suddenly when she saw Hawk.

“Oh, Hawksworth. This is an awkward time—Matt and I were just discussing the possibility of an exhibition in MacIntyre.”

Sommers smiled diplomatically, but I sensed his relief at Hawk’s arrival. “It’ll do some other time, Hermione. Look, why don’t you come over to my place next week, and we’ll discuss it then?”

“Why, that’s so kind of you, Matthew. I’ll hold you to that.” And she swept away, giving Hawk an icy smile en passant.

“Just in time,” Sommers said. “I could have been here for hours. What are you drinking?”

Sommers bought a round of beers and Maddie introduced me. “A friend of ours, just moved to Magenta. David Conway.”

“Welcome to Magenta, David,” Sommers said, taking my hand in a strong grip. He spoke with a slow, confiding Alabama drawl, his every word accompanied by a smile.

I mentioned that I was from Vancouver, and that my wife had stocked some of his reproductions.

Sommers shook his head, as if in wonder. “Know something, David? I still find it hard to appreciate that people across the Expansion buy my work.” The sentiment was, I thought, genuine, and not false modesty.

“I like the crystals,” I said.

“But the graphics do nothing for you?”

I hesitated. “Well… To be honest, compared to the crystals—” He saved me further embarrassment. “I know. They’re weak. They don’t work.”

“Matt,” Maddie said, “I don’t know about that. They have something…”

“But not what I wanted to say,” Sommers went on. “They’re third rate. I wasn’t trying. I turned them out because I mistakenly thought that producing something was better than producing nothing. I should have scrapped the lot.”

“You’re too harsh on yourself,” Maddie said. Behind her, Hawk winked at me.

Sommers said, “Not harsh. Honest. I’ll ceremonially burn the graphics when the exhibition’s over. Why don’t you all come along? We’ll have a party.”

I thought I caught something in his tone, a bitterness at odds with his easy-going manner.

We chatted amongst ourselves for fifteen minutes; when Sommers asked what had brought me to Chalcedony, I made something up along the lines that I’d always wanted to visit the planet, that it had seemed a suitably quiet place to retire to.

Sommers looked up. Someone was signalling to him from the exhibition area: the Mayor, gesturing with a microphone.

“Christ,” Sommers said. “They want me to say a few words.

What’s the fascination with artists’ words, for godsake? Don’t the pieces say all there is to say?”

“The price of fame,” Hawk quipped.

“Yeah, you can keep it,” Sommers said. “Look, this place closes in an hour, but the bar upstairs is open till midnight. I’ll sneak off and meet you there at ten, okay?”

“Lovely!” Maddie said.

“Catch you later,” Sommers said, and strode off towards the gesticulating mayor.

While Matt Sommers murmured platitudes into the microphone, Hawk bought a round. Maddie was looking unhappy. “What is it?” I asked.

“Matt,” she said. “He isn’t himself lately. For as long as I’ve known him he’s been optimistic. Now he’s… I don’t know. He seems increasingly bitter these days.”

“You know artists,” Hawk said. “They go through these phases. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I know Matt,” Maddie replied tersely. “And I know there’s something wrong.”

She hurried from the bar and stood at the front of the gathering in the main dome, listening to what the artist was saying.

Hawk shrugged. “She lets things get to her, Conway. And there’s absolutely nothing she can do about it.”

I looked at him, expecting an explanation. He fell silent, so I said, “I’ve noticed… well, what she wears, and she never touches things with her bare hands. She even wore something like oven mitts when she touched the crystals.”

Hawk looked at me, as if assessing whether or not to tell me something. “Maddie’s special, Conway. Look, it isn’t my place to tell you about her. She once made me promise that I wouldn’t try to explain to anyone about her condition. She’ll tell you about it in her own time, believe me.”

I nodded, more than a little intrigued. “You’re close to Maddie, despite all the sparring.”

He just nodded, his eyes far away as he regarded his drink. “Very close,” he said in little more than a whisper.

Sommers wound up his speech and the guests slowly made their way from the dome. Hawk gestured over to Maddie and mimed that we should make our way upstairs. Minutes later we were ensconced in a quiet bar in the apex of the dome, with a three hundred and sixty degree view of the star-filled sky and the Ring of Tharssos streaking overhead.

Minutes later we were joined by the artist, who pantomimed wiping sweat from his brow as if in relief at a near escape.

“That damned woman grabbed me again,” he said as he sat down. “She’s insisting on staging an exhibition down at MacIntyre. I told her I’ve nothing to show.”

“What about taking this one along?” Maddie asked.

Sommers sighed. “Maddie… Look, this exhibition is a mixture of old work and crap. To be brutally frank.”

“Old work? You mean the crystals aren’t…?”

He was shaking his head. “I did them years ago—and the irony is, I rejected them then. I judged they weren’t good enough for the Paris show. I was right. They might pass muster on a backwater colony planet, but not on Earth.”

“I thought they were pretty damned powerful,” I said.

Sommers smiled. He could have said something cruel then, but merely murmured, “Thanks. But only I know when I’ve produced good work.”

Maddie insisted, “But surely it’s up to other people to judge; your public, critics…”

The artist looked frustrated. “Maddie, what do you know about the creative process?” It could have been said with rancour, but Sommers’ gentle demeanour softened the implicit criticism.

“Not much, I admit.”

Sommers took a quick swallow of whisky. I could tell by the unsteadiness of his hand that he’d had a few. “When I create,” he said, “I put everything into the process. It’s what I am. It’s the only thing that makes existence meaningful. I dig deep into myself, what I feel and think, and out it comes—and the catharsis, the sense of accomplishment, is blissful… just so long as I know in my heart that I’ve been true to myself.”

“Are you trying to say—”

“Of course I am,” he said with infinite weariness. “I’ve been turning out lies for a couple of years now. If I quantify personal satisfaction by the quality of the work I produce, then I honestly don’t know why I go on.”

Maddie shook her head, shocked. “Go on creating your art?”

He stared at her, and I was suddenly uncomfortable. “Go on living,” he said.

A silence sealed over his words, a lengthening awkwardness not one of us knew how to break.

Then Sommers said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to get all maudlin.” “But Matt,” Maddie said, “your work is far, far better than most artists working today.”

“That doesn’t make it good. I can do far better.”

Maddie reached out, her pale hand hovering over his. But she remembered herself, and quickly withdrew. “I think you’re being needlessly harsh—” she began.

“If you think I’m lying to you, Maddie, then go on—touch me. Go on, take my hand. You’ll see then, won’t you?” There was bitterness in his voice, a challenge in his eyes.

Maddie winced and looked away.

I just stared at them both, mystified. I wondered if the alcohol had affected me, and I had missed something vital that would have made the exchange comprehensible.

Sommers whispered, “I’m sorry.”

Maddie stood up quickly and strode to the curving cover of the dome, staring up at the Ring.

“Dammit!” Sommers swore under his breath.

He banged down his empty glass and lurched from his seat. For a second I thought he was about to cross to Maddie, apologise. Instead he headed for the spiral staircase and stumbled down, gripping the central rail and almost sliding down and around.

When he was gone, I said to Hawk, “What the hell was all that about?”

Hawk shrugged. “You know artists…”

“No, I mean about Maddie touching him?”

“Ask Maddie when she’s in a better mood, David.” To Maddie he called, “Okay, Mad? Look, come and finish your drink. Matt’ll get over it. He’s going through a lean period. Next time you see him, he’ll be all smiles and optimism.”

Maddie turned and stared at us bleakly. “You really think so?”

“Sure,” Hawk said, far from convincingly.

Maddie returned to the table and took up her mug. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen him this low. You heard what he said about going on living.”

“He was exaggerating for effect. He was drunk, for chrissake.”

She looked at Hawk. “But you don’t know him as well as I do.You don’t know what happened before he came to Chalcedony.” She stopped there, as if she had said too much.

Hawk said, “What was that, Maddie?”

She shook her head, but ignored the question. She took a long swallow of gin. “Christ, I’m drunk. What a mess, what a bloody awful mess it all is! I’m going home!” And she stood unsteadily and weaved her way between the tables.

We hurried after her, down the stairs and out into the clement, scented night.

We walked along the sea-front, around the bay.

“I’ll give you a lift, Maddie,” Hawk said.

She murmured a thank you.

I said, “I’m having a house-warming in a few days. Or should that be a ship-warming? Why don’t you both come along for dinner?”

Maddie looked at me. “Would you invite Matt, too?”

“Of course, if you think he’d accept.”

“I’m sure he would.”

I watched Maddie climb into Hawk’s battered roadster: she made sure that no part of her flesh touched the seat.

The car lifted and wafted off into the night, and I hurried around the bay towards the waiting Mantis.

I was a little drunk, but not sufficiently to ward off the nightmares. When I reached home I sat in the lounge with a bottle of imported scotch and stared out across the silvered waters of the bay, admiring the view and going over the events of the evening.

FIVE

I was spared the nightmares, but the following night I was visited by even stranger visions.

I’d spent the day making small repairs around the ship and setting out my few belongings, the books I’d brought from Earth, the few pictures I’d not discarded in the general clear out and minimisation of my life when I decided to emigrate.

I cooked myself a Thai curry—practising what I would give to my new friends when they came later in the week—and finished off with a few double scotches while watching the sun set and the water of the bay turn silver in the light of the Ring.

It was midnight by the time I staggered to bed, fearing as always the return of the nightmare. Thanks to the alcohol I was asleep instantly.

I came awake in the early hours. I sat up, surprised that it was not the visions that had forced me from sleep, and then curious as to what had awoken me. Not a noise—the ship was silent around me—but a glow emanating from beyond the open door of my room.

I pulled on my trousers and cautiously, aware of my heartbeat, slipped from the room and trod along the corridor towards the lounge.

I stopped on the threshold, staring.

An insubstantial figure stood with its back to me, before the pedestal which, when the ship had been in working order, had housed the control matrix. The figure glowed green, giving off the only light in the room, and through it I could make out the lines of the far side of the chamber, as if it were a ghost or a projected image.

Even stranger than the fact of its presence was what the figure was doing. Lines of some bizarre script hung in the air before it, scrolling columns I was unable to make out. As I watched, the figure reached up and swiftly, with quick taps of its long index finger, touched certain characters and thus effected their disappearance.

I say ‘it’ for the figure was not human.

With its back to me, I was unable to determine just what race the alien belonged to: it was tall, attenuated, appearing more amphibian than mammal, scaled and fluked, with a very thin skull. I fancied that, should it turn towards me, I would have seen the narrow, puckered face of a fish. I recalled the fleeting vision I had had on my first night aboard the ship: it had been one and the same.

I was in no way alarmed. I knew I was not being visited by intruders, or haunted by spectres. There was a rational explanation behind the figure’s appearance. It was a projection, I thought, an alien light show.

I took a step forward, about to say something—some inane greeting or question—when instantly the vision vanished, and along with it the scrolling script.

I looked around the lounge, trying to find the source of the projection. I wondered how much of the ship’s original circuitry and software Hawk had left intact when he salvaged the vessel from the jungle. No doubt some malfunctioning holographic sub-routine was responsible for the alien apparition.

I returned to bed, slept soundly for the rest of the night, and awoke just after dawn. A gaggle of spearbills, which had taken to perching on the back of the starship, set up a melodic morning chorus. I recalled the exhibition of the previous evening, and then, belatedly, remembered my silent alien visitor.

I spent the rest of the morning crawling through the ship’s inspection vents, checking circuitry and relays. I learned a lot about how the thing was put together—and was surprised at how much of it was still intact—but was none the wiser as to how the spectral extraterrestrial might have manifested itself.

In the afternoon I sat before my com-terminal and accessed Chalcedony’s information nexus. I called up facts about all the space-faring alien races known to humankind, their history and space-going exploits.

There were three races whose level of technological progress had reached that of humankind—or almost: humanity was the first race to discover and develop the teleportation process, rendering spaceflight obsolete. Two alien races, the Zexu and the Qlax, had abandoned their space industry and paid humanity to use the Telemass relay stations. The third, the Mathan, were isolationist and maintained their space-fleet for use within their own three planet home system, and rarely ventured beyond.

I called up visuals of the races, though I vaguely recalled their appearances from holo-docs and magazines on Earth: the Zexu were humanoid, not dissimilar to Homo sapiens, if you discounted their fur and the fact that they were twice as tall as the tallest human; the Qlax were octopoid, and the Mathan tiny—creatures a metre tall which resembled bush babies.

I then called up the visuals of every non-space-faring alien race discovered, thinking that whoever had maintained the ship might have employed crew of lower technological status than themselves. But of the two dozen alien races extant, not one matched the apparition I had seen the night before.

I wondered if the answer was that the figure had never been the true representation of an extraterrestrial type, but merely a holographic image conjured by the ship’s owners—the alien equivalent of a cartoon character.

I took a break at lunch and, instead of repairing to the Fighting Jackeral for my customary beer and salad, had a quick sandwich and got back to work.

Something about the dimensions of the ship, which I had noticed while pulling myself through its innards, had made me wonder.

I made a series of measurements: the height of consoles, acceleration slings, and control pedestals; the width of inspection crawl-spaces, corridors and access tubes, and tried to work out from these which race might have manufactured and flown the ship.

I estimated that they must have been taller than humans, the Qlax and the Mathan, but not as tall as the Zexu… Which begged the question: had the ship belonged to none of the known races, but to one so far undiscovered? The thought filled me with a quickening excitement. I had visions of fame at being the first person to discover an unknown alien race; but I came back to earth when I considered the improbability of this scenario. The obvious answer was that my calculations were way out.

Tomorrow I’d go and see Hawk at his scrapyard, tell him about the haunted ship he’d sold me and go through the figures with him. I was sure his practical mind would come up with a more prosaic answer.

I was about to take a shower, then slip out for a beer at the Jackeral, when I heard a familiar and welcome voice call out from the foot of the ramp.

“David, are you in there?”

I hurried out, wiping my greasy hands on a rag.

Maddie stood with her feet planted in the sand, squinting up at me. She was wearing shorts and a poncho, which was a bizarre enough combination anyway, but these garments were clearly homemade. She gave the impression of a blonde doll dressed in clothes inexpertly stitched together by a five year-old.

“David, I hope I’m not interrupting—”

“Come on in. I’ll give you a guided tour.”

She climbed the ramp and stepped into what had been the airlock, peering around her in fascination.

“This is the very first time I’ve ever been in a spaceship,” she said.

I gave her a quick tour and finished in the lounge. “And this is where I spend most of the time.”

She looked around. “You’ve got it looking very homely, David. I like the wall hangings.”

“Imported all the way from the colony world of Iachimo. They depict moonset over Landfall canyon.”

“You lived there?”

“I spent a couple of weeks on Iachimo, years ago. The Telemass trip almost killed me.”

“But it didn’t put you off ‘massing to Chalcedony?”

I shrugged. “I’d heard a lot about the planet,” I said. And my need to get away from Earth had outweighed the fear of the Telemass process.

She pointed to the sofas ranged before the long viewscreen. “I like the effect of domestic things like the sofas and bookcases on the bridge of a starship. It works.”

“Thanks. Beer?”

“Love one.”

I slipped to the galley and came back with two beers. I poured Maddie’s into her own mug, which she pulled from her shoulder bag. She had seated herself, taking the precaution of spreading a piece of cloth to ensure that her bare legs didn’t come into contact with the cushion of the sofa.

Her eyes caught on the holocube of a young blonde girl, staring out and laughing at something, that stood on top of the bookcase. “Who is she?” Maddie asked.

I hesitated, then said, “Carrie, my daughter.”

“She looks a lovely kid.” There was something wistful, almost longing, in her tone. “She’s back on Earth?”

I nodded, trying to think of something to say in order to change the subject.

Relentlessly, she went on, “Will she visit you, David?”

I found myself lying without thinking about it. “I doubt it. My wife is fearful of the Telemass process. She thinks it’d be bad enough if you could make the transition in one jump, but not the four relays it takes to get here from Earth.” I shrugged. “I tried to point out that fatalities were one in a couple of million, but she wouldn’t listen to me.” The bit about Sally’s fears, at least, was true enough.

“Are you and your wife…?”

“Divorced. We parted last year.”

“Were you together long?”

“Ten years. It seems longer. It was such a sizeable and important part of my life.”

“Why did you come to Chalcedony, David? To get away from her?”

“To get away from Earth,” I said, and all the associations that planet held for me. Everything I knew on Earth reminded me of what I’d lost.

I went on, “What about you? Ever married?”

She smiled and shook her head. “No, never.”

“Never met the right person?”

“It’s more than just that,” she began, and stopped.

Into the silence, I said, “What happened?” and immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry. That’s rude. I shouldn’t have—”

“What happened?” She looked up. “You mean, why do I wear these strange clothes, and carry my own mug and cutlery around? Why am I some kind of freak?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that I’m curious. We’re friends, I like to think, and I’d like to know what happened.”

Maddie nodded slowly, staring into her drink. She looked up and said, “This happened way back, on Earth. I was at Cambridge, studying archaeology. This was a few years after the neuro-surgeon Callonezzi discovered the receptor sites in the hypothalamus. Apparently they’d lain dormant in humanity for millennia. At one time they probably played a vital part in our ability to survive… Anyway, he found that this area of the brain, if stimulated, gave the subject a… let’s call it a feeling for the history of things, objects, people, whatever. Only a mild feeling, a kind of vague empathy, an intuition. Obviously this had great potential in many fields—criminal investigations, personnel recruitment, art history—”

“And archaeology?” I said.

She smiled at me. “And archaeology. Just imagine having the ability to actually hold an ancient object and feel something of its history, its life: who owned it, what it had been used for. And skulls, David; the Callonezzi Process would allow archaeologists to touch the bones of the dead and reconstruct their lives… It was just too great an opportunity for a high-flying research graduate to miss.”

She fell silent, staring through the viewscreen at the bay but seeing what had happened all those years ago.

“So you went for it?”

“How could I refuse? I met others who had had the operation and they said it was like being suddenly granted another sense, one which they found impossible to believe they’d lived without for all their lives. I was young and ambitious—I wanted to learn everything. I wanted to know the secrets of history which until now had been beyond our reach. So I had the cut.”

“What went wrong?”

Her pale blue eyes seemed to die for a moment. “It was too successful. The operation gave me the ability, but something in the order of a thousand times more powerful than any previous subject. It opened me up to everything. Imagine that, David—imagine if everything around you, everything with human associations, gave off a jolt like an electric shock. When I accidentally touch something, I can feel the emotions of everyone who touched it before me, a dizzying emotional kaleidoscope that very nearly drives me insane.”

I gestured feebly. “Couldn’t they… I don’t know, reverse the operation, do something to damp down the effect?”

She smiled. “They did, and it worked. That was the terrible thing. I woke up after the first operation, and it was as if the world were on fire. Everything I touched screamed its history at me. The pain was unbearable. So Callonezzi and his team operated again, and damped down the effect. And this is the result. If I were to reach out and touch you, I’d feel your pain…” She looked at me, intuitively. “Your loss. The same if I were to touch something you’d touched. We imprint our emotional signature on everything around us, David, but thankfully most people can’t pick up these signals.”

I shrugged. “Isn’t it a bit like what Matt does, imprinting his emotions on those crystals?”

Maddie smiled at me. “I guess we’re all mood artists, David, in our own way. For me, it’s as if everything ever touched by human hands is as powerful as one of Matt’s crystals.”

“I can’t begin to understand what it must be like for you,” I began. “I’ve got used to it, over the years. Nearly twenty now. It’s okay if I’m careful, take precautions. But the worst thing…” She stopped.

“People,” I whispered. “You can’t touch people.”

“Can you imagine what that’s like, to crave physical contact with those you love, skin to skin, and to be denied the experience?”

I shook my head and murmured some platitude.

“Isn’t it ironical? The process that should have made me more receptive to the world, to the people around me, has had the opposite effect. It’s isolated me from everything.” She took a long swallow of beer and laughed. “Listen to me. Here I am, unloading all this rubbish on you.”

“I did ask, Maddie. I wanted to know.”

She sighed. “I’m fine most of the time. I have some great friends. Matt and Hawk. They’re good people. I just wish…”

“Maddie, I understand.”

She looked up at me. “What I wish is that I could help them, David. I’ve come into physical contact with them, accidentally, and experienced a little of their pain, and more than anything I want to help them.”

Lamely, I said, “I can tell that they think very highly of you, Maddie. Your friendship helps them.”

She smiled. “Thank you, David. You’re a good person, you know that? I’m glad you decided to move to Magenta Bay.”

I smiled. “I’m glad, too.” I gestured to our empty beers. “Another one?”

“That’d be great.”

I fetched two more bottles and changed the subject. “Dinner Friday evening, is there anything you can’t eat? And do you know what Matt and Hawk like?”

“They’ll eat anything. I like spicy food, myself.”

“Great. I was thinking I’d cook Thai. What about friends of Hawk and Matt—I remember Hawk saying that Matt wasn’t with anyone at the moment. What about Hawk himself?”

“He has someone. She lives with him at the scrapyard.” Her tone struck me as odd, censorious. I knew that Maddie had felt a lot for Hawk at one time, and I took this as jealousy.

I said awkwardly, “Perhaps I should invite her?”

“It would be a mistake, David. She… well, it wouldn’t work. She wouldn’t know how to take part.”

“She’s young?” I asked, thinking that could be the only explanation.

Maddie looked up at me and nodded. “She’s young,” she said, and left it at that.

SIX

The following morning I drove under the arch bearing the legend Hawksworth and Co, braked and climbed out, staring about me with a renewal of the wonder I had first experienced on seeing this place a week ago. The sight of so many derelict ships, and dismembered sections of them, silhouetted against the bright blue sky and the mountains, gave me a jolt of joy and sadness. I wonder if every example of a supplanted technology is regarded with the same nostalgia, as the mnemonic of an earlier time when everything was better, much simpler—if only because we recall the innocent children we were back then.

I remembered the reason for my visit and called Hawk’s name. My voice echoed around the stark metal canyons but was not answered.

I tried to find the ship that Hawk used as his office-cum-home, but I was confused by so many vessels that looked alike. Then I saw movement on the observation deck of an old scoutship across the yard—the quick appearance of someone in the hatch—and I recognised the ship from my first visit.

The figure ducked back inside as I approached, and I recalled what Maddie had told me about the girl who lived with Hawk.

I climbed the steps to the platform and said, “Hello? Is Hawk around?”

Silence from within the ship. “Hello? Is anyone—?”

A figure emerged, and I received the first shock of the day.

For an instant, a fleeting second, she reminded me of my daughter.

She was small and slight and fair and ineffably beautiful, but she wasn’t human.

The Ashentay were humanoid, and might conceivably have passed for human—but a faerie strain of humanity, slim-limbed, fey, with small, broad faces that, while almost human, were also undeniably other.

The more I looked at her, the less she resembled Carrie, for which I was grateful.

Timorous, she peered out at me from around the frame of the hatch, one small hand to her mouth, the other fingering the perished rubber seal of the doorway. She was dressed in a simple brown smock and was barefoot.

“Hello?” The sound was barely audible, a faint breath.

I smiled, reassuringly. “Hi. I’m a friend of Hawk’s. Is he around?”

“A friend of Hawk’s. Is he around?” She seemed to contemplate the meaning of my words as she repeated them.

She stared at me with large blue eyes and said, “He is around, yes.”

“Right. Good. In that case can I see him?”

“See him?” she repeated. She thought about this, then said, “No, you cannot see him.”

I smiled. I realised, then, that this was my very first encounter with an alien being. Sometimes, on Earth, my dealings with different races had been difficult, fraught with misunderstandings due to language and cultural differences. How much harder might it be to successfully communicate with true aliens?

I tried again. “Will you tell Hawk that David is here? I’d like to talk to him.”

“David is here… Like to talk to him.” She stared at me, and I found her inscrutable gaze disconcerting. She went on, “No, I cannot tell Hawk. You will have to wait.”

I nodded. “But he’s here?” I persisted.

She gave a slight nod, as if the gesture had been learned and she was still unsure how to use it. “He is here.”

I smiled, trying not to laugh. “Then… look, will you take me to him?”

“Take you to him…”

Quickly, with a swiftness and grace that surprised me, she hurried from the hatch, slipped past me and danced down the steps. “Please come with me,” she said, turning at the foot of the steps and pointing to her chest.

I hurried after her. We crossed the scrapyard. She took long, barefoot strides, a strange gait that was almost a run—yet another alien aspect of this strange extraterrestrial child.

We came to a range of sectioned engine cowls, and before them stood a blue pod perhaps three metres square. Set flush into its facing flank was a sealed hatch. The alien squatted in the dust and pointed at the pod. “Hawk, he is in here.”

I looked from the girl to the pod, then stepped forward and knocked on the hatch. “Hawk? You in there?”

“Hawk, he cannot hear you,” said the girl. He can’t?”

She blinked up at me from where she was squatting.

Why can’t he hear me?”

She stood quickly and skipped around the pod. A second later her blonde head reappeared and she said, “You follow me.”

I stepped around the side of the pod and found the girl standing on tip-toe, peering through a small observation panel in the flank, her face pressed comically to the glass.

She turned to look at me. “Hawk, there he is.”

Unsure what to expect, I joined her and ducked to look through the panel. The interior of the pod was dim, but I could see Hawk stretched out on a flight couch, leads snaking from his upper-arm and neck. He wore a flight visor and was twisting this way and that on the couch, as if in the throes of a bad dream.

Hawk was in a flight simulator, reliving his past…

I didn’t know whether to be gladdened that he had recourse to this recreation, or saddened by his need.

The girl was beside me, peering in and smiling.

I said, “How often does Hawk use this?”

“How often?” She thought about it and nodded. “Every day he comes here.”

“Do you know how long he might be in there?”

She looked up, at the sun, and said, “Nearly over. Out soon.”

I nodded and moved from the window, the girl following me. I sat on the projecting fin of an old tug. The girl leaned against the flank, watching me silently.

I found her alien gaze discomforting. “How long have you known Hawk?” I asked to break the silence.

“Known Hawk?” She considered this. “Two years.”

“You’ve lived with him that long?” I think I sounded surprised, the prude in me shocked.

She repeated my question and nodded.

“How did you meet?”

“Meet?” She smiled suddenly, as if at the recollection, then said, “Hawk, he found me.”

“Found you?” I couldn’t help laughing.

She nodded. “My hive mother, she leave me in jungle for koah tree. Three days later Hawk, he finds me, brings me here, feeds me.”

I tried to make sense of her first sentence. “And your mother, she doesn’t come back for you?”

“Come back for me? Of course not. She left me for koah tree.” I nodded, feigning comprehension. “And you like it here, living with Hawk?”

“Hawk, he is a kind, good man.”

“He looks after you well?”

She stared at me, then said, “No. I look after him. I make his life worth living. He tells me this.”

“You don’t miss your people?”

“Miss my people?” she repeated, then shook her head. “My hive mother,” she explained with what might have been infinite patience, “she give me to koah tree.”

“Right,” I said. “I see.”

She looked at me, and then asked her first question. “You are David Conway, yes? Hawk’s new friend?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Hawk says you are a good man.”

I smiled. “I’m pleased he thinks so. I think Hawk’s a good man, too.”

As if on cue, to put an end to the vicarious compliment session, the hatch cracked with a pressurised sigh and Hawk ducked from the simulator and straightened in the sunlight, stretching as if to ease aches from his tall frame.

Then he saw me and smiled—a little uncomfortably, I thought. The girl pushed herself from the flank of the tug and danced across to Hawk, standing on tip-toe and whispering something in his ear. He smiled, then limped across to where I sat, the girl beside him.

“She wants me to tell you her name,” he said. “You see, it’s impolite for the Ashentay to tell a stranger their name, until the stranger asks. Only then can they become friends.” He shrugged and smiled. “When in Rome… David, this is Kee. Kee, David Conway.”

She smiled and inclined her head.

Hawk pulled her to him, kissed her forehead and said, “We’d love a couple of beers.”

She hurried off and Hawk hitched himself onto the fin beside me. I watched her go. “Strange child,” I said.

“She’s alien,” he said. “What do you expect? And don’t be deceived by appearances. Kee’s no child.”

I glanced at him. “No? I had her down as around twelve.”

“She’s thirty Earth years old,” Hawk said. “A mature Ashentay adult. What do you think I am, Conway?” he laughed.

“Kee said you found her. Something about her hive mother giving her away to a koah tree?”

“Many humans would call the Ashentay primitive.” He shook his head. “I’d rather say they’re just very different. Alien. They live in hive tribes, with a single mother spawning as many as twenty children in a litter. They have a ritual—the twentieth child of every birthing, when they reach maturity, is left with the koah tree. A kind of gift to the gods of the jungle.”

“But they die?”

“Well, that depends what you believe. The Ashentay believe the spirit of the twentieth child is special, and blessed. It’s an honour to be left with the koah tree. Their spirit is absorbed into the tree, and they enjoy extended life.”

“So your finding her and bringing her back here…?”

Hawk smiled. “The koah tree was dying. I effectively saved her life.”

“She wouldn’t have left the dying tree, sought her people?”

“Her destiny was with the tree. I had to show her that it was dying. Only then would she come with me—she couldn’t return to her people, according to ritual. Her destiny is with me, now.”

“Some responsibility, Hawk,” I said.

He shrugged. “I love her, Conway.”

Kee came back a minute later, carrying three beers. She passed two to Hawk, then climbed onto the fin and stretched herself out behind us, the bottle resting on her chest. She closed her eyes and basked in the sun.

Hawk passed me a beer. “Social visit?”

“The ship you sold me,” I said. “It’s haunted.”

He gave me a look. “Haunted?”

I told him about the apparitions. “I went through the ship yesterday, looking for what might be causing it. I found nothing, no projectors, nothing like that.”

“It’s an alien ship. They might have had different systems we don’t recognise.”

“That’s another thing,” I said. “As far as I could tell, the ship didn’t belong to any of the known space-faring races.”

“That’s impossible.”

I shrugged. “So maybe I’m wrong. But the projection didn’t resemble any of the known races, and the dimensions of the ship don’t correspond with the sizes of the space-faring aliens, as far as I could tell.”

Hawk thought about this. “Let’s go over to the office. I have a com system there, records that might tell us something.”

We slipped from the fin and left Kee sleeping in the sun, the beer still standing on her chest. As I glanced back at her, I was reminded, fleetingly and with a sudden pang, of my daughter sun-bathing on the beach at Vancouver.

It was cool in the dim interior of the scoutship where Hawk had his office. The room was big, but he had managed to stuff it full of com-terminals and unidentifiable chunks of machinery, and the walls were hung with plasma graphics of starscapes and alien vistas.

We sat in comfortable swivel chairs before a big screen and Hawk tapped a series of commands into the touchpad.

“These are the specs of all the types of alien ships in existence,” he said, “belonging to the Qlax, the Mathan and the Zexu.”

The screen filled with glowing columns. “I did wonder if it might have been a Zexu exploration vessel,” he said.

I handed Hawk a sheet of paper scribbled with measurements I’d made yesterday. “It’s not Zexu,” I said. “They’re way too tall for the ship.”

“And the Mathan and Qlax are too small,” he said.

“So… maybe it belonged to a race so far undiscovered?”

He stared at me. “And I gave it away for five grand!” he laughed, shutting down the screen.

“Hey, I wouldn’t claim all the glory. We’ll split everything fiftyfifty.”

Hawk finished his beer and said, “Look, the best thing would be for me to come over to the ship and go through it inch by inch. If it’s projecting alien images, then there’s some mechanism doing that, maybe some data system we can access.”

“Come over tomorrow afternoon, before dinner with Matt and Maddie.”

“How about another beer?” He fetched two ice-cold bottles from a cooler and we moved out onto the observation deck and sat on the command couches.

I stared across the yard, towards the blue flight simulation pod. Nearby, Kee was still flat out on the fin, soaking up the light of Delta Pavonis.

“Kee said you used the pod every day.”

Hawk smiled. “We all have our vices, David.”

“I thought your jacks were sealed?”

He looked uncomfortable. “My spinal ports are well and truly,” he said. “But the left bicep and occipitals are fine. I use these and go spinning round the Expansion.” He smiled like a schoolboy. “Got to get my kicks someplace.”

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.

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.

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.

I was driving. Hawk sat beside me, while Maddie and Matt sat in the back.

We had passed through the series of low hills that backed Magenta Bay, with their silver waterfalls filling natural sinks and lagoons on a hundred levels, and were now heading across the central plain. Ahead were the interior mountains, a long enfilade of jagged purple peaks; our way was through them, to the flat upland beyond, where the Column stood.

“Look,” Maddie said, pointing between the front seats. She was indicating the cloud cover above the mountains, which had broken momentarily to reveal the upper stretches of the Column. Even at this distance, and seen through rapidly closing clouds, the glow was dazzling, like sunlight made suddenly solid.

Then the cloud cover closed again, and all that could be seen of the Column was its diffuse glow through the banked cumuli. I accelerated along the straight, high road that ran through the chequered fields of farmland on either side.

Hawk was saying, “The Ashentay have revered the Column as far back as their history goes. They have a series of legends about the Column.”

“I thought the Ashentay couldn’t read or write?” Matt said. “

They can’t. Their history is oral, passed down from designated story-tellers to story-tellers of each generation.”

“Has your little girlfriend told you this?” Maddie asked.

Hawk grinned. “Who else? We settlers don’t have much interest in the Ashentay. We’re more interested in the Column, or the alien races who possess technology equivalent to or in advance of our own. A bunch of hunter-gatherers, even though their history is rich and fascinating, don’t get a look in.”

I said, “What do the Ashentay say about the Column?”

“They claim it was planted by a race of gods who came here ten thousand years ago. The gods said nothing to the Ashentay to explain what they were doing; they simply drove the Column into the earth and then left. The Ashentay thought it a test. When they’ve worked out the purpose of the Column, then they’ll join the Makers in their equivalent of Heaven.”

“And have they worked out the purpose of the Column?” I asked.

Hawk said, “They have plenty of theories.”

Matt was leaning forward, his head emerging through the front seats, interested. “Such as?”

“Well… the one that Kee subscribes to says that the Column is heaven itself. Once entered, it will prove to be of infinite dimensions, with room enough for all the races of the galaxy. Life everlasting awaits those who enter.”

“Except,” Maddie put in, “no one has ever entered it.”

“Right,” Hawk said. “Kee says that only the virtuous and supremely good can even attempt to step through the light of the Column. In death, the good pass through immediately.”

“That’s just one theory,” Matt said. “But they have others?”

“Scads of them,” Hawk laughed. “One says that the Column was placed there to watch over the Ashentay, to ensure they didn’t go down the path of technology, or else it would destroy them all. Another has it that the Makers did communicate with the Ashentay—they told them that they would return in twenty thousand years, and if the Column was still standing and in good repair, that’d be an indication of the Ashentays’ virtue. Then they’d be allowed into the light and experience eternal life. Another theory is that the column is a bridge to the stars. Of course they didn’t know that the Column is only thirty kays high—they think it goes all the way up, without stopping.” He paused, then said, “Take your pick.”

“I’m not sure that any of them appeal,” Maddie said, “but then what have our scientists come up with?”

Matt said, “Only that it’s constructed from some material unknown to humankind, that it’s porous but unbreachable, emits a powerful light but, and this is interesting, the light is cold. You can walk right up to the Column and touch it without burning yourself.”

Hawk said, “Don’t the various religious cults charge you to approach their section of the Column?”

Surprised, I said, “They do?”

Matt explained, “The circumference of the Column is sectioned off, with each cult having a small slice. Some claim that miracles—cures and vanishings and visions—have occurred at their sections, and so make an appropriate charge.”

Maddie said, “Typical…”

“If what Maddie experienced the other night is true,” Hawk said, “then we know who made the Column. The question remains: why was it made? There was obviously some—I don’t know—technological reason for it.”

“Is there, Hawk?” Matt said. “What if it’s, say, a work of art, or a religious symbol, or something so alien we have no hope of ever understanding its significance?”

Hawk nodded. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. It’s just that I have the kind of brain that demands rational, scientific explanations.”

“Most of us do,” I said. “We live in that kind of age. Centuries ago it would have been ascribed to the glory of a Creator, and left at that.”

Maddie said, “But even if what I felt was correct, then are we any closer to understanding what the Column is all about?”

“Well, we can’t be much farther away than we were,” Matt grunted.

I said, “It has a maker, and we’re in some kind of contact with that maker. Isn’t it only a matter of time before we make a breakthrough?”

We sat and thought about that for a while as we climbed from the central plain, leaving behind the neat, parcelled farmland and following the twisting road into the foothills. The vegetation changed too; gone were the rows of cash crops regimented by settlers, to be replaced by alien trees and shrubs, green but bearing strange multicoloured fruits and flowers. I saw many examples I had not seen before on my drive to and from MacIntyre, shocking silver blooms and dazzling red fruits: it was like travelling through some crazed artist’s impression of an alien world, and the Ring of Tharssos, scintillating through the heavens above us, only heightened the effect.

As we climbed it became cooler, but not uncomfortably so. We had set off just after midday and it was now three. We had another two hours to drive before we reached the Column.

The road switch-backed up through the mountains, becoming narrower as we progressed, and I hoped we wouldn’t meet a vehicle heading in the opposite direction. I slowed to a crawl, not bothering to look to my right at the precipitous drop that began half a metre from my shoulder.

At last we came to a cutting between two rearing peaks and passed into its shadow.

Seconds later we emerged again into sunlight and began to descend. Then we rounded a bend, and the sight that greeted us compelled me to brake suddenly and stare ahead, and up, in amazement.

I’ve heard that the first sight of great mountains has a similar effect on people: the first Westerners to behold Mount Everest were stopped in their tracks, rendered breathless by something so huge emerging from the earth before them.

I just gaped, open mouthed, as I took in the enormity of the Golden Column.

We were still ten kilometres from the Column, but it dominated everything about it, the plain on which it stood and the surrounding mountain ranges. It emerged en bloc from the flat, green plain, a vast rounded pillar that rose and rose and didn’t stop. Collectively we craned our necks, but still we were unable to make out where the Column terminated: its upper reaches were wreathed in cloud.

But, perhaps more striking even than its vast dimensions, was the glow that it emanated. It was a gold I had never imagined could exist, a bright, almost pulsating effulgence. It filled me with wonder and a strange, tearful emotion I could not place.

We were silent as we stared.

Finally Matt said, “Worth the trip?”

Hawk said, “You kidding? Look at the thing.”

“I’ve never seen anything so…” Maddie began.

“What makes it all the more amazing,” I said at last, “is the fact that we know who made it.”

A silence greeted my words as we all took this in.

I gathered myself and restarted the engine, and slowly we descended the mountain road towards the plain.

Still in the foothills, we looked down and saw, spread around from the base of the Column, what looked at this distance like a refugee transit camp. The area was crowded with thousands of people, their vehicles, tents and portable domes. At this elevation the roughly circular spread of pilgrims resembled a vast pie chart, each segment a different wedge of colour, great triangles of saffron and mauve, white and red, conforming to the uniforms of that section’s devotees.

I considered the explorers who had first discovered the Column, and how wonderful it must have been to view the marvel in its pristine state, unadulterated by the meretricious infection of human beliefs and prejudices. It struck me as arrogant that these people had claimed the Column in the name of their own belief systems, and the sight of the massed pilgrims sickened me.

Evidently Matt felt the same. “Why can’t we just leave things alone?” he said, almost under his breath. “Look at it, the sublime and the ridiculous.”

A great ring road had been constructed, to take arriving traffic to the section of their choice. We came to the road along with a jam of other vehicles and headed anti-clockwise around the Column. To our left we passed shanty towns of tents and domes, and pilgrims going about their various rites of obeisance.

Maddie read from a signboard posted at the side of the road. “This way to the Enlightenment of Krishna, four miles; the Church of the Ultimate, six miles; The One True Way, eight miles…”

“Isn’t there a place for agnostics?” Hawk wanted to know. “When I came a few years ago,” Matt said, “I found a government run area that allowed tourists and visiting scientists a close view. But back then it was never this busy.”

Maddie said, “Perhaps that’s it.” She pointed to a signpost: Chalcedony Research Centre welcomes visitors, two miles. “We could try it,” I said.

We passed a mass of saffron-robed neo-Buddhists and came to a relatively quiet area, cordoned off from its neighbours by a high chain link fence. A gate gave access, and beside it a uniformed woman sat at a kiosk, selling tickets.

At ten credits per head, it seemed a small price to pay to get closer to the Column.

We paid and drove on through, together with a dozen other vehicles.

I ignored the press of humanity to either side—distant to begin with but, with the gradual narrowing of the section, becoming closer all the time—and concentrated on the sight ahead. The pillar of light sprang from the earth and rose, perpendicular and solid, into the heavens, and it seemed odd that something so massive should be so silent.

At one point I stopped the car and listened.

“What?” Hawk said.

“Hear it? The silence?” We listened.

“Strange,” Matt said.

For all the trundling vehicles, the massed humanity, an odd quietude filled the air, as if the wall of the Column a mile ahead of us were sucking the polluting noise from the air and replacing it with soothing silence.

I started the engine and we continued. Perhaps five minutes later we were forced by the crowds to park up and walk the rest of the way.

The point of this section was taken up with buildings, on the top of which was an array of monitoring equipment, dishes and antennae and probes.

The closest we could get to the golden light was perhaps a hundred metres, but my disappointment was tempered by the sight of the Column. Its glow seemed to pull at you, draw you in, promise some ineffable fulfilment if only you could approach and become one with the light.

I looked up, and up; I craned my neck, and high above the Column seemed to curve, describe a great parabola, as it shot into the stratosphere.

I was standing beside the chain-link fence that separated this section from the next, and only after a few minutes did I notice that someone was watching us.

I turned. A young girl was staring at me through the diamond mesh of the fence, her fingers hooked around the wire. The way her mouth hung open suggested either disbelief or awe. She looked barely in her teens, fifteen at the oldest. Blonde curls and blue eyes brought an ache to my chest.

At last she said, “You know…”

I stared at her. The others joined me.

I said, in barely a whisper, “Know what?” Only then did I see the symbol, tattooed high on the girl’s left cheek: >=<, the connected minds sigil of an accredited telepath.

I felt suddenly uneasy in her scrutiny.

“You know the truth,” she said in a whisper.

Matt looked at me. “Best if we get out of here,” he said, “before the crowds find out.”

The girl raised a hand, as if to forestall our departure. She said, “Don’t fear. I won’t tell anyone. Your secret is safe with me.”

She wore a silver one-piece, and I noticed that the other devotees in her section were similarly garbed. “We are the Upholders of the Ultimate,” she said. “We can apprehend the truth. Come, follow me, if you would like to lay hands upon the Ultimate.” I hesitated and she smiled. “Your friends can come too.”

Quickly she did something to a post supporting the mesh fencing, then pulled aside the wire. We stepped through, watched by the silver-suited acolytes who milled beyond the girl. A murmur passed through their ranks as she led us forward, towards the glow of the Column, past staring devotees to a laser cordon ten metres before the Column.

She spoke with a silver-haired man, who had the air and bearing of a high priest, and he nodded his consent and touched a control on the pedestal which projected the light barrier. Instantly it died and the girl gestured us through.

I glanced at Maddie. She was staring, transfixed, at the Column. Hawk caught my glance and smiled. Matt said, “I never thought we’d get this close.”

We stepped towards the Golden Column. At close quarters, the curve of the great shaft was not discernible: it appeared as a vast, flat wall, extending to either side of us and soaring as if to infinity.

We paused a couple of metres from the glow. The girl stood beside us, smiling at our wonder.

She said, “Go on, approach. Touch. Join with the Ultimate.”

Maddie said, “I don’t think I dare.”

I stared at the light. Its glow blurred my vision. It was pulling at me, drawing me towards it. I felt an ache in my chest, a longing.

Matt stepped forward first, reaching out, followed by Hawk. Not to be left out, I joined them. My heart was beating fast and I realised that I was shaking.

I reached out, slowly bringing my flattened palm to the light as if in some bizarre form of greeting. Beside me, Matt and Hawk matched my gesture. Together, we laid our hands upon the Column.

I was not sure what to expect: my senses told me to anticipate warmth, even though I knew that reports indicated the light was cold. Beyond the physical, I think I expected to commune with some higher power, be granted the Secret, or at least be flooded with sensations of joy and peace.

None of these things happened.

What did happen was that I felt a sudden, freezing cold shoot through my body, and I was filled with the strangest sensation. It was an alien feeling, a feeling so other that it had no analogue in the human realm. I knew, suddenly, that I knew nothing, that I was minuscule in the vastness of the expanding cosmos—that existence was a mystery I had no hope of fathoming.

And the odd thing was that, instead of being filled with existential despair at the futility of our collective plight, I brimmed with joy at the fact of my humanity, my ability to experience the day to day wonder of being alive, my friendship for the three people at my side.

For Maddie had joined us now, and had touched the Column with her bare hand.

She smiled at me. “I’m touching it,” she whispered, as I stepped back from the light with Hawk and Matt and watched her.

She remained there for a full minute, hand raised, beatific smile on her face. Then she closed her eyes and backed away.

I looked at the others. Matt said, “Not what I was expecting, but…”

“It’s given us something,” Hawk said. “Not sure quite what…” Maddie said softly, “Our humanity?” She smiled at us. “I felt, I really felt it, our smallness, the vastness, and it didn’t hurt.” She fell silent.

The girl was at our side again. She gestured back towards the rent in the fence and we followed her.

As we were about to step through, she touched my arm and said,

“Well, will you help the Yall?”

I stared at her. “What?”

The others had stopped and were watching us.

The girl smiled. “Last night,” she said, “they requested your help, and in return they would soothe your dreams. Well, will you accede to their request?”

I shook my head. “I… I don’t know what they want,” I stammered, and hurried through the fence and back to the car.

As we were driving back through the sector, Matt broke the silence, “What was all that about?”

Hawk turned and regarded me. I sensed Maddie’s gaze on me, too.

I said, “I thought it was a dream. That’s why I didn’t say anything. I dreamed… thought I dreamed… that I was visited by the apparition. It asked for my help, and said it would stop my nightmares in return.”

“Nightmares?” Hawk asked.

I gripped the steering wheel. “Nightmares about my daughter,” I said. “She died three years ago.”

Hawk reached out and touched my arm. Matt said, “But the apparition didn’t tell you what it wanted?”

I shook my head. “No. Nothing. It just asked for my help.”

We made the journey back to Magenta in relative silence, stopping once at a small settlement for a meal. I could sense my friends’ curiosity. I wondered if they felt I might be holding back still more from them. The atmosphere was uneasy, camouflaged by forced small talk.

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.”

She stared at my hand as if it were a noxious insect that had come between us, and I got the message. Even if she understood the concept of a handshake, she had no desire to carry out the act.

“This way,” I said. “Would you like me to take your bag?”

“I can carry it myself,” she said frostily, and I escorted her from the station to the parking lot.

We completed the drive up the coast to Magenta in almost total silence. After fifteen minutes, unnerved by my passenger’s lack of conversation, I tried to tell her something about the continent, the seasons, and the morning storm that had washed the coast clean and sparkling.

She flashed me a quick, cold smile and said, “Thank you, but I really do need to concentrate.” And so saying she closed her eyes and rested her small, pointed chin on her chest.

I kept quiet for the rest of the journey, glancing at her from time to time. Even if it were not for the strange arrangement of nipples puckering her slim torso, something would have alerted me to the fact of her alienness. While her facial features seemed human at first glance, closer inspection revealed something odd about them, a disproportion between eyes, nose and mouth that was disconcertingly animal-like: large eyes, small nose and small, thin mouth, like some kind of bi-pedal, sentient bush baby. Not for the first time I wondered at the nature of her acquaintance with Matt.

An hour later we crested the rise above Magenta Bay, and the settlement was spread out below us, a sweep of red sand, the scintillant silver bay, and the neat collection of chalets, villas and A-frames arranged along the foreshore.

I showed the alien to the chalet Matt had booked for her.

Again she refused my offer to carry her case, and climbed the steps to the lounge with a quick, sprightly step which again struck me as un-human.

She looked around the room and pronounced, “This will suit my purposes.” She turned to me. “Will you tell your Mr Jones that I will pay for the rental of this dwelling. I will be staying for one night only.”

I nodded. “I’ll do that,” I said.

As I was turning to go, she said, “One other thing, Mr Conway.”

“Yes?”

She was watching me, and I wondered if she possessed some alien propensity for detecting untruths as she said, “Do you by any chance know of the artist, Matthew Sommers?”

“Well… I know of him, certainly. He’s famous, after all.”

“Could you tell me where he lives?”

“To be honest, I’m not too sure…” Even to my ears, the lie sounded far from convincing.

She reached into a shoulder bag and withdrew a long white envelope. She smiled at me as she held out the envelope. “I’m sure you can ask around and find his address, Mr Conway. When you do, would you be kind enough to give this to Matthew?”

I nodded. “I’ll do my best,” I said, and escaped.

I returned to the Mantis and checked the monitors which I had left running on the off chance of a daytime visitation, but I was out of luck. I considered lunch at the Jackeral, but decided first to deliver the alien woman’s letter to Matt.

As I drove around the bay, turning off onto the road along the southern headland, I wondered at something Hawk had mentioned weeks ago: Matt had once told him he had no need for romance in his life. The romantic in me wondered if the alien, Marrissa TallanXanagua, was an old lover—perhaps even the woman who had extinguished the flame of passion in the heart of the ageing artist. I smiled at this flight of fancy and told myself that she was probably no more than an admirer of his work.

I found Matt sitting on his veranda, nursing a cup of coffee and staring out to sea.

I crossed the decking and clapped him on the shoulder, melodramatically.

“What?” he laughed.

“Just checking that you’re the real McCoy,” I said. “Sit down and I’ll get another cup.”

A minute later I poured myself a coffee and said, “Well, I delivered your alien, Matt.”

“Everything go okay?”

“I think she saw through me,” I admitted. I handed him the envelope. “She gave me this to deliver, if I could find your address…”

“That’s Marrissa,” he said, taking the envelope and turning it over in his big hands. “You can’t put a thing past her.”

I hesitated, then said, “She’s alien, but I don’t recognise…” “You wouldn’t, David. Her people rarely travel. She’s a Fharr,from Charybdis, the only habitable planet in the Vega system. They’re pre-industrial, but very artistic.”

I recalled the name of the planet from the conversation the night before. “You lived there, right? How did you come to know Marrissa?”

He nodded, as if he didn’t mind my clumsy probe. “I lived on Charybdis twelve years ago, before I came to Chalcedony. It’s a breathtakingly beautiful place. I lived on an island in a tropical archipelago. I did some of my best work there.”

“And Marrissa?” I prompted.

He smiled. “We had an affair. It was… let’s just say it was intense, all the more so because it was frowned on in her community. I loved the woman, David. But she was alien.” He stopped, staring down at his blunt fingers.

I echoed, “Alien?” hoping to find out exactly how alien.

He looked up. “You know, you think you know a lover, how they think, how they feel… It’s hard enough with a human being, but imagine how hard it might be if your lover is alien, her mind formed and fashioned by inexplicable genes and millennia of customs an outsider has no way of comprehending.”

“What happened?”

I think he would have told me then, had we not been interrupted. He looked past me, out across the bay. I heard the regular smacking sound of a wave-hopper.

Seconds later the hopper skimmed up the beach, spewing red sand in its wake, and the rider dismounted. With a sudden jolt I recognised the subject of our conversation.

Beside me, Matt murmured her sonorous name.

She walked up the beach, then stood at the foot of the steps and squinted up at us. She saw me. “So you have found Matthew, Mr Conway. Perhaps,” she said archly, “you asked the same people as I did?” Her gaze shifted to my friend. “Matthew, it has been a long time.”

I looked at Matt. He was staring down at the woman as if dumbstruck.

“I think I’d better leave you two alone,” I said.

“No—” Matt said, and laid a restraining hand on my arm. “I’d rather you remained.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” There was no emotion on his face as he watched the ghost from his past walk up the steps and pause before us. She wore the same cheesecloth blouse as earlier, and the front hung loose to reveal those strange alien nipples.

She smiled. “We have a lot to talk about, Matthew.”

“So… you’ve finally found me.”

“It wasn’t easy. I followed your trail from planet to planet.” She smiled. “You knew I was coming.”

“I thought you might, one day… Gunter, on Corinth, said you were looking.” He stared at her and said, “So… what now, Marrissa?” I could tell that he was shocked, hardly in control of his words. The romantic in me could not help thinking what a fairytale reunion this was.

“I want to talk to you about… me and you, about what happened.” Marrissa glanced at me.

“I was just leaving,” I said.

“This is something of a surprise,” Matt said to Marrissa, stopping me with his gaze. “I mean, even though I knew you were coming, seeing you in the flesh again after so long…”

Her smile, I thought, held something other than the pleasure of an old lover. Was I misinterpreting her alien features, or did I recognise malice in her thin, stretched lips?

Matt said, “I wonder if I could see you later, in private? Perhaps in the morning? I could come over to the chalet around ten.”

She smiled. “Very well. Tomorrow will be fine, Matthew. I’ll look forward to seeing you.” She stood looking at him for a few seconds, then nodded and left the deck, very upright and taking long, animal strides through the sand.

Matt watched her wave-hopper bounce across the bay. He seemed stunned.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine. It’s just that… it isn’t every day that your past catches up with you.”

“You were about to tell me what happened,” I said, “but look—I’ll understand if you don’t want to talk about it.”

“No, it’s fine.” He gestured at the seats by the table. “Sit down and I’ll fetch a couple of beers.”

Two minutes later we were sitting in the sun, sipping ice-cold beers. Matt said, “I’d been on Charybdis almost a Terran year when I met Marrissa. She was an artist, working with local fabrics, weaving scenes of Charybdian life from a seaweed equivalent, would you believe. But her visions were beautiful. They spoke to me. It was a long courtship before we eventually began living together. And intense! David, I’d never experienced anything like it. I put it down to her being alien, exerting some strange influence on me…” He stopped there and looked at me.

I smiled in encouragement.

“Well… a year or two passed. I was mindlessly happy. I was in love with an amazing woman and turning out some of my best work.” He paused, staring into his glass, and continued in a softer tone, “Then one day I attended a religious ceremony with Marrissa and her tribe. It took place on a pontoon afloat on the ocean, and was conducted by a high priest who gave thanks to the god of the seas for the plentiful harvest of fish that season. As providence would have it, a storm blew up, whipped the ocean and wrecked the section of the pontoon we were standing on.”

He paused again, and I wondered where his narrative was leading. “What happened?” I asked.

“The High Priest and Marrissa were pitched into the ocean. Before they were swept away, I dived in and managed to drag her back to the wreckage of the raft. I went in again but the priest was lost, his body never discovered…

“I was shunned by the natives, for saving Marrissa instead of the priest. They banished me from the island. I had allowed a servant of one of their gods to die in preference to a mere peasant—a crime almost as heinous as killing him intentionally—and in my absence a trial was held. But what hurt more than my banishment was the fact that Marrissa hated me for saving her life, and would gladly have died in place of the holy man. Like I said, she was alien…”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He shrugged. “The Terran officials on Charybdis feared for my safety and managed to smuggle me off the planet. That was around twelve years ago.”

“And now Marrissa’s found you,” I said. “Perhaps, I don’t know… perhaps she can find it in her heart to forgive you.”

He smiled. “I’ll find that out tomorrow, David, won’t I?”

Not long after that I left Matt sitting on the veranda, staring out across the bay, and made my way home.

I considered a beer at the Jackeral, but I was tired after the long drive to MacIntyre and back, and decided to take a nap. In the event I was glad that I did so.

That afternoon, in the darkened room I used as my bedroom, I had the dream that changed my life, that explained nothing at the time but set in motion the chain of events that in due course explained everything.

TWELVE

I fell asleep instantly and was soon visited by the alien again. As on the last occasion, I was convinced I was awake: the clarity of the vision was not at all dream-like.

The alien hovered over me, peering down. I stared up at its thin, axe-blade face, curious but not in the least apprehensive. The being—or whatever it was—emanated a sense of calm and goodwill.

It told me, again not verbally, but by some kind of telepathic process, that I had been chosen by the Yall. What they wanted me to do would change things for ever, the alien claimed, and in the process transform my life. I would need the help of my friends—Matt and Maddie and Hawk—and together we would bring about a new Golden Age for humankind.

And then it told me what I had to do.

It filled my head with information and I absorbed it all in wonder. It told me everything but the reason for what it had asked me to do.

That, it said, would become evident in time.

“But the Yall,” I recall saying, “why can’t they…?”

The Yall no longer inhabited this galaxy, I was told. They had done their work here, left behind them their gift to other emerging sentient races, and left for the next galaxy.

“Their gift?” I echoed. “You mean, the Golden Column?” My alien visitor assented.

“But… what is it? What does it mean?”

“That is a secret only a race advanced enough can find out.”

“And we—humans—have reached that stage?”

Affirmation filled my head.

I wanted to ask more—determine precisely what would happen when my friends and I carried out the alien’s bidding—but the apparition faded, and I slipped further into a deep, dreamless sleep.

I came awake suddenly, disoriented. I recalled the dream—the vision that had all the fidelity of a waking encounter—and what the alien had requested.

I stumbled from bed. I had fallen asleep in the afternoon, but it was dark now. How long had I slept?

The bedside clock told me that it was seven in the morning. I had slept through the evening and the night. I stood up, realising that I felt refreshed, invigorated.

I showered quickly and ate an even quicker breakfast, my head full of what I should do next.

At eight—a suitable time, I judged, to rouse my friends—I called first Matt, then Hawk and Maddie.

Matt answered instantly. He stared from the com screen, peering at me. “David? What’s wrong?”

“I need to see you. I was visited last night. By the alien. And I know now what it wants.”

“David?”

“How soon can you get over here?”

“I’m on my way.”

I cut the connection and got though to Hawk and Maddie, with the same results.

I sat before the viewscreen, staring out at the sweep of the bay. The curving red sands and the beach-side chalets were quiet now, not a soul in sight. Storm clouds piled on the horizon over the sea, and a wind was blowing up. Soon the bay would be whipped into a frenzy, and winds would lash the foreshore for an hour or two. I hoped my friends would make it before the storm set in.

I sat and thought about what the alien had told me…

Matt arrived first, riding his wave-hopper around the far headland and along the beach rather than risk crossing the choppy waters. Seconds later a battered roadster drew up beneath the nose of the starship, and Hawk climbed out and limped up the ramp and into the ship after Matt.

“In the lounge,” I called out, just as Maddie came into sight along the beach, a small doll-like figure, her home-made cape pestered by the rising wind.

Minutes later all three were sitting in the lounge, pouring coffee and looking at me expectantly.

“Well?” Matt said.

I stared at my friends and wondered where to begin.

“I had another dream,” I said, “only it wasn’t a dream. It happened. The alien came to me and explained what it wanted.” Matt sipped his coffee. The others watched me expectantly. I looked at Hawk.

“Do you think you can pilot the Mantis?” I asked.

He stared at me, puzzlement lending his experienced, battered face a sudden look of innocence. “Pilot the ship?” “Get it running, get it up and flying?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know… In principle, yes.”

“I know the codes,” I said. “I know the override commands that will start the engines. They were given to me by the creature.”

“Then… in that case it can be done. But not by me.”

I stared at him. “Hawk?” Disappointment flooded the word.

He looked pained. “David, I haven’t flown for thirty years. For that long I’ve tried to forget what happened…” He shook his head. “I couldn’t bring myself to even think about flying again.”

“Not even one last time?”

Hawk stared at me, wrestling with demons.

Matt leaned forward and said,“Why?” watching me closely.

I shook my head. “That I don’t know. The alien said it wanted us to fly the ship. It gave me the co-ordinates for the flight. All we need to do is get the ship running.”

Maddie said, “It wanted us to fly the ship, David?”

I nodded, dredging the dream for the alien’s explanation. “The ship needs more than the pilot to get it up and moving. Don’t ask me for the technical details. We’d be… plugged into the systems matrix, in some way powering the vessel. Our presence is vital for its operation.”

“And where would the ship be bound?” Matt asked. “And why?” Again I shook my head, spreading my hands in mute appeal. “I don’t know that. The alien told me that what we’d do would change things—it said that the Yall had given the galaxy a gift, and that we humans were now advanced enough to accept it.”

We stared at each other.

Maddie said, “I’m up for it. How can we refuse?”

Matt inclined his noble head. “I agree with Maddie. We’ve got to do it. Imagine not taking up the challenge, and looking back at our failure, and forever wondering…”

I looked across at Hawk. He was staring down at his big hands. He looked up, staring past me through the viewscreen.

The storm had started. They sky had darkened. Wind howled around the contours of the ship, whistled through aerials and antennae, and the rain came down in torrents.

“Hawk?” I said.

“I don’t know…”

I said, and I wasn’t proud of myself for what might be considered a blackmail tactic, “If we do it, Hawk, then the alien said it’d banish my nightmares. I know, there’s a greater thing we need to do it for, something we can’t even guess at as yet. But one of the results would be that I’d no longer be haunted by the nightmares of what happened.”

Maddie said in a small voice, “What did happen, David?”

I nodded, and gathered myself, my thoughts, the memory of that day, and I told them what I had not told anyone before.

“Three years ago I was involved in an accident which killed my daughter,” I began.

I’d taken Carrie across the straits to the fun-fair as a birthday treat. It had been a great day, one of those special times together that live in the memory. On the way back we’d chatted about the various rides; I’d bought a couple of hot dogs and we’d chomped them on the deck, leaning against the rail and watching the waters churning away far below us.

I saw the ship that hit the ferry, seconds before the impact. It was a tanker, and it seemed to appear from nowhere. As the great mountain of metal bore down on us, I experienced that strange frozen clarity of knowledge when the eye sees impending disaster, and the brain is aware of exactly what will happen but the body fails to respond.

I just stared, a cry silent on my lips.

Carrie had not seen the looming hull of the tanker, and the impact, when it sliced the ferry almost in two, brought an expression of cartoon startlement to her pretty face.

A second later she was pitched over the rail and into the sea. The ferry tipped and I dived in after her, thrashing through the turbulent water in search of the most precious thing in my life. I caught sight of her, once, twice, as she was dragged under the waves and tossed around like something inanimate. I heard her cries and I fought through the water to reach her…

That was the last I recalled. When I regained consciousness, my head swaddled in a compression band, I was in hospital and my wife was at my bedside. She was weeping uncontrollably, and I knew that her tears were not for me.

Now I told my friends what had happened, and how a thousand times over the years I had berated myself for not having had the strength to save my daughter’s life.

“In the dreams,” I said, “Carrie screams and stares at me as she’s carried away, her eyes accusing. I want to be rid of those dreams.” I tried to smile. “That’s why I came to Magenta,” I went on, “partly to get away from Earth… partly to confront myself with the sea. To try to banish my fear.”

I stared out at the thrashing bay, and I knew it hadn’t worked. Hawk said, “When would we be lifting the crate, David?”

I shrugged. “There was no set time.”

He stood, staring down at us. “In that case I’ll think about it, okay? I’ll…” He looked at his wrists, at the scars that puckered his flesh. “I’ll think about it,” he whispered, turned and hurried from the Mantis.

Matt glanced at his watch. “Dammit. It’s almost ten…” He glanced at me, his eyes tacitly telling me not to tell Maddie about his meeting with Marrissa. “I’ll be back in an hour. We need to talk this over.”

Maddie watched him leave the ship without further explanation. “It’s not like Matt to hurry anywhere.” Something in her face told me she suspected I knew more than I was saying.

I shrugged, avoiding her eyes.

She went on, “Did you pick up that woman he knew, David?”

I nodded. “An old friend from way back.”

“I saw her last night,” Maddie said. “An alien. She’s staying at one of the beachfront villas.”

I looked through the viewscreen. Matt had climbed aboard his hopper and steered away from the ship, heading not directly for Marrissa’s chalet, but taking a circuitous route. I guessed he wanted to spare Maddie’s feelings, had she been watching.

I tried to change the subject. “Do you think Hawk will come round, pilot the ship?”

She shrugged. “Hawk’s not an easy soul to judge…” She shook her head. “Who knows?” She stopped suddenly, stood and moved to the viewscreen.

“There’s Matt,” she said, like a schoolgirl with a crush.

I got up and joined her. Matt had left his hopper somewhere and was walking towards Marrissa’s chalet along the beach, leaning against the raging wind. I hoped he’d get what he wanted from the meeting—an absolution from the one he’d loved, all those years ago.

Maddie said, “Isn’t that the alien woman’s place?”

Matt had paused at the foot of the stairs to the chalet, looking up at the lighted rectangle of the window. The door opened quickly. I saw the woman’s figure as she stepped aside to allow Matt’s entry.

I glanced at Maddie. She was holding onto the ledge of the viewscreen, something in her eyes telling me that she was dreaming of how things might have been between her and Matt, in a perfect world.

I was about to tell her that it had been over between Matt and Marrissa for a long, long time—but then I saw Maddie’s expression. She was leaning forward, gripping the rail, and staring horrified at the chalet. I followed her gaze and saw the quick blue illumination—the second, presumably—from within the building. Before I could work out what was happening, Marrissa appeared, hurrying through the door, hastily concealing a laser pistol inside her shirt. She ran down the steps and jumped into a hire car, started the engine and roared off at speed. I felt a cold dread grip my throat, choking me.

The next thing I saw through the viewscreen was Maddie. She had left my side, quit the ship and was struggling through the wind and the wet sand. I called her name and gave chase.

The strength of the wind surprised me. It battered me back as I attempted to run down the ramp after her. I leaned into its force, fighting for every step. The rain was a deluge that soaked me in seconds. Piled clouds obscured the sun, bringing premature night to Magenta. I slogged through the sand, peering through the gloom to where Maddie was a tiny, wind-harried figure, her cape flapping like a broken wing. As I watched she finally reached the chalet and pulled herself up the steps.

I was close behind her. I ran up the steps in time to hear her anguished moan turn into a scream. I held my arms out to her as she turned, meaning to hold her, in some small way try to console her in her grief.

Maddie just stared at me, her expression ravaged, then pushed past me and fled into the night.

I stood on the threshold and stared into the lounge.

Matt lay on the floor, face down, unmoving. I stared at the body in disbelief, going over the events that had led to this… And then it hit me, and it was too much of a hope to harbour.

I stepped forward, towards the body, reached out, sick lest my hand should encounter real, solid flesh.

I should have known. I should have known that Matt was too wise to let himself be killed by an aggrieved alien lover, too intelligent not to know how to stage the tableau of revenge—and save himself in the process.

My hand reached out and passed through the body’s chest as if it were a ghost.

A voice spoke from the door. “I had to do it like this, David.”

I turned. It was Matt, standing in the entrance and staring at me. I thought that he would have been triumphant, or at least relieved, but his expression was defeated, deadened. After all, how often is it that we are chased to the ends of the galaxy by an ex-lover, and to all intents and purposes assassinated?

Now I knew why Matt had claimed to Hawk that there was no room in his life for romance…

“Maddie!” I cried, leaping to my feet. I pushed past a startled Matt, out into the storm. Visibility had decreased, Delta Pavonis totally blotted by storm clouds. I looked right, along the beach to the Mantis, but there was no sign of Maddie. I set off in the opposite direction, towards the Fighting Jackeral, thinking that she might have sought refuge there.

I was halfway towards the Jackeral when I saw her. She was a miniature figure in the distance, mounting the steps to the jetty and running along its length.

I called her name again and gave chase.

The wind was an inimical physical force, and in the frenzied minutes that followed it came to me, like the improbable notion of a nightmare, that the wind was indeed hostile to me and my attempts to save Maddie. It was no longer a mindless force of nature but a force possessed of evil intent. I reached the jetty and ran up the steps, slipping on the slick, wave-washed boards.

Maddie was a wind-blown shape approaching the end of the jetty. I sprinted, screaming at her in desperation, but the wind snatched at my words and flung them in the opposite direction.

She had come to a halt at the very end of the sodden stretch of lumber, teetering on the edge as she stared oblivion in the face.

I cried out, “Maddie! Matt’s okay! He’s alive! Maddie—please listen!”

She didn’t hear a word. As if in slow motion she pitched herself into the raging maelstrom of the bay—and seconds later I reached the edge and peered over.

She was a storm-tossed doll, battered by the waves, temporarily kept afloat by the chance inflation of her cape. But even as I watched, the swollen garment withered and Maddie was dragged under.

Seconds later she emerged again, further out, a panic-stricken whirl of arms and sodden hair.

Fear stopped me diving in, fear and the nightmare in my head. I was on the ferry again, and it tipped, and took from me everything I loved, and—despite everything I had told my friends—I had been too weak, too ineffectual, to do anything about it. Now I could act, but something stopped me—a fear that gripped like a fever—until a voice in my head soothed my nightmares and told me that I could do it, I could atone by saving Maddie, or attempting to save her.

I hesitated, but the voice insisted. And I dived.

The muscled might of the salt water was a shock. It grabbed me, tumbled me over and over. I was dragged under, spluttering, and then resurfaced far out. I attempted to orient myself, work out in which direction was the shore, and from there guess where Maddie might be. I caught a glimpse of the looming jetty, and turned—and there was Maddie, perhaps ten metres from me.

I fought my way through the waves, my progress a frustrating process of two metres forward and one back as the waves dragged and flung me. But I was gaining, even though Maddie was dragged under again and again. She disappeared, then bobbed up again, screaming.

I reached where she had been, but she was gone, and in a terrible second it came to me that my efforts had been futile. Not only would Maddie die, but in attempting to save her I would suffer the same fate.

At that moment I saw her, two arms’ lengths away. Gagging, I lunged and made a frantic grab for the cape, caught it and dragged Maddie towards me—and she struggled and screamed at the thought of the hell to which salvation would commit her.

Shouting at her in frustration, I snagged her around the neck in a desperate embrace, and the contact of flesh on flesh—the surge of my fear, anger, and sudden joy—hit her and she ceased to struggle.

Then, as if ordained by some miracle, the storm abated and the Ring of Tharssos appeared between the darkened clouds and illuminated the bay, and I kicked out through the waves towards the safety of the shore.

Matt was on the beach and helped me carry Maddie back to the ship. We hauled her into the lounge. She was spluttering salt water and crying, and she saw Matt and reached out for him, touched his hand and cried out as if burned and pulled away. Matt, tears in his eyes, gripped her shoulder through the cape as I fetched towels to dry her, and a bottle of brandy.

“I thought you were dead!” she wailed at Matt.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Matt will explain everything later, okay?”

Not longer after that, with Maddie wrapped in towels and shivering before a heater, Hawk appeared in the doorway and limped across to us. He seemed not to notice the tousle-haired Maddie, was unaware of the drama recently enacted—too occupied, no doubt, with his own conflicting emotions.

“I’ve been giving it a lot of thought,” he said at last, staring at each of us in turn, “and I’ll do it. I’ll fly the ship.”

Maddie was the last to leave the Mantis that night. Hawk and Matt said goodbye around midnight, solicitous for Maddie’s welfare, but she assured them she was fine now.

Maddie huddled on a lounger, holding a big brandy glass in both hands—the glass swaddled in the protective cuffs of her blouse.

I must admit that I wondered when she might leave. I had the feeling she wanted to be alone with me, maybe to thank me for saving her life, and the thought made me uncomfortable.

Now she looked up from her glass and stared at me. “Back then…” she said, sounding as uncomfortable as I felt. “In the water—”

I waved her words away. “Maddie… Let’s not talk about it, okay? You were drowning. I had to do it—”

She was shaking her head. “I don’t mean that,” she said. “I mean… Look, when you grabbed me, I felt everything, your pain, your grief…”

I nodded. “Of course, I realise that.”

“David, I also experienced the truth. What really happened on that ferry.”

I stared at her, my mouth open.

She hurried on. “I’m not here to point the finger, David. There’s no blame involved. What you did, or didn’t do… who knows how anyone else might have reacted in the circumstances? You’ve suffered enough grief and guilt over the years.” She smiled at me. “I just wanted to tell you that I understand, okay?”

Unable to find the words to respond, I merely nodded.

I had told my friends what had happened that fateful day aboard the ferry, but it had been an edited version of events, a scenario tailored to avert blame and castigation.

For when the tanker had sliced into the ferry and pitched Carrie into the sea, I had remained on the listing deck, paralysed by terror, watching my daughter being swept away—and only the accidental spilling of the deck and its contents into the water had thrown me into the sea after her. I had tried frantically to reach Carrie, but by then it had been too late. The churning waves had carried her under, and unconsciousness came to me like blessed oblivion.

I had been truthful about the nightmares, however. In them, Carrie did appear and accuse me… and rightly so.

Now Maddie stood and held her arms out to me. “David, you can’t undo what you did, but you shouldn’t hate yourself for what happened.”

And she reached out and took me and accepted my pain, and I went to her.

THIRTEEN

The following day we reconvened at the Mantis.

Hawk lay in the suspension cradle which hung from the ceiling of the control room. Leads snaked up from his wrists, spine and head—not jacked into his ports, but fastened to his skin by adhesive pads. These would interface with his neural pathways and allow him to fly the ship.

A screen hung before his eyes, scrolling figures only he could understand.

He glanced at us as we stood around him. “Just like the old days,”he said. “Well, almost.”

I noticed the beads of sweat gathered on his forehead, and the fear in his eyes.

“Are you sure you can fly this thing?” Matt said.

Hawk nodded, reading from the screen. “In principle it’s the same as every other crate I’ve flown. It’s just that some of the ways of doing things are a little different.” He smiled at us. “Hey, have faith. I’ll get us to where we’re going, and back.”

Maddie looked at me. “But you don’t know where we’re heading,”she said.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry.”

“Is that voice in your head to be trusted?”

“I trusted it when it told me to dive in and save you,” I said,

“when it said that I had nothing to fear, and had to atone for past failings. Don’t worry, whatever it is… it’s humane.” I smiled at using such a term to describe something so alien.

Matt said, “So… what now?”

I indicated the four recesses, two on either side of the viewscreen, which Hawk had discovered the other day. Now, thanks to the guiding voice in my head, I knew what they were for.

“We stand in these for a minute, fully dressed. We’re coated with a… a protective barrier, I suppose you could call it.”

Matt asked, “Protective from what?”

I was forced to admit my ignorance. “I don’t know. It’s a vital part of the process.”

I took the lead and stepped into the alien-shaped recess, which accommodated my form with room to spare. After a brief hesitation, Matt and Maddie stepped into their own recesses. I heard a hiss all around me, felt a sebaceous tickle run over my skin. Within seconds the fluid had impregnated my clothing and I felt the oily layer coating me from head to foot.

I stepped back into the room. Matt quit his recess and touched the film between his fingers. He looked at me. “Strange. And you’ve no idea what it’s for?”

“I think we’ll soon find out,” I said. Maddie said, “And now?”

I pointed to the couches which, when Hawk had laid himself out in the suspension cradle, had ejected themselves from the floor. “We strap ourselves in. The ship does the rest.”

Again I took the lead, to show my friends that they had nothing to fear. I stretched out on the couch next to Hawk’s cradle, fastening the straps around my legs and torso. Seconds later something dropped from the ceiling, startling me. I stared up at the tiny glass bulb at the end of the sectioned, multi-jointed arm that bobbed inches from my forehead. I received the impression that it was examining me.

A beam of light lanced out, and I gasped. I was aware of Matt and

Maddie, watching with something like shock pasted onto their faces.

The light felt… soothing. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m fine.”

I felt something energise within me, as if some latent force within my head had been unlocked. The beam persisted, connecting me to something in the ship that would draw power from my being.

Matt and Maddie lay down on their couches, and seconds later they too were connected.

Then the couches tipped as one, inclining forward so that we were sitting up and staring through the viewscreen.

I thought of the alien space-farers who had lain here before us, of the stars they had beheld on their voyages through the galaxy.

Where are we going, I asked the thing in my head, for perhaps the hundredth time. The alien deigned not to reply, but I knew it was there. “We’re powering up,” Hawk reported from his cradle. “Take-off in three minutes and counting…”

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.

Standing 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.

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