Starship Fall (7 page)

And beside me Hawk gave a sob and collapsed again Matt, and I stared into the serene features of the girl as she was carried past us.

It was not Kee.

* * *

Minutes later the survivors appeared. Kee was the third person down the ramp. She and Hawk came together into each other’s arms with a sudden rush, as if magnetised. They held on to each other, rocking back and forth, for a long time.

I glanced across at Matt and Maddie, who were crying unashamedly, and I realised that I too was weeping with relief.

Kee disengaged and came first to Maddie and embraced her quickly, and then to Matt. She hurried over to me and smiled, and I thought I saw something in her eyes, a desire to say something, perhaps explain herself. She gave me a swift hug and returned to Hawk, who back-handed tears from his cheeks and said, “Okay, let’s get the hell out of here.”

He paused then and looked back at the long-house, at the tall figure of the Ashentay priest, who appeared to be staring down at us. I thought, for a second, that Hawk intended to approach the priest, or at least say something to him, but if so the moment passed and he turned and joined us.

We left the sacred cavern and climbed the tunnel to the surface of the planet. Sunlight dazzled us as we emerged behind the curtain of the waterfall and crossed to our encampment. We stowed our belongings, shouldered our packs, and began the long walk through the jungle to where we had left the bison.

Qah led the way, followed by Hawk and Kee who walked hand in hand through the undergrowth.

We reached the bison towards midday, and Matt volunteered to drive. He turned the bison from the felled trunks and manoeuvred it in the direction of the alien village. We set off, the vehicle rocking.

After a period of silence, Hawk said, “You don’t know what torture you put me through, girl.”

It was a few seconds before Kee replied. “It had to be done. It was ritual, the way my people do things. If we do not have ritual, then what do we have?”

We did not respond; it was one of those impossible, alien statements to which there are no correct answers.

Hawk asked, “But was it worth it? I mean, was it worth the risk to your life?”

Again Kee was contemplative, before saying, “Risk? What is risk? I knew what I was doing. If I died, then that would have been my destiny. It would have been a fact that had to be accepted, the way of things.” I had heard her say this before, and thought it almost Buddhistic.
The way of things...

“And did you see the future?” Hawk asked at last. I felt that he was straining to keep the sarcasm from his voice.

“I beheld many images,” Kee replied quietly.

“But specifically?” Hawk asked, obviously frustrated.

“Specifically?” she returned.

“I mean, did you see... me and you, how things might go between us?”

She inclined her head. “Me and you. Yes. I saw the future, me and you.” She paused, then went on, in a whisper, “We were together until the very end.”

I looked at Hawk; he had his mouth open to ask the obvious question, but decided otherwise. Perhaps now, in company, was not the right time.

We came to the Ashentay village, and here Hawk and Kee elected to return together in the bison, while Maddie, Matt and I drove back in Matt’s ground-effect vehicle.

“Well,” Maddie said as we were under way, “I suppose you’d call that a happy ending.”

“Christ, but I thought she was dead,” I said.

“Me too,” Matt agreed. “God knows how Hawk would have coped.”

I thought about the ritual. “I wonder what it must be like, to be granted visions of supposed future happenings? I mean, what must reality be like for a people who believe this?”

Matt said, “They’re alien, David. We’ll probably have no idea how they perceive reality.”

Maddie said, “How do our fellow human’s perceive reality, Matt? That’s a hard enough question to answer, without trying to fathom the psychology of aliens.”

We arrived in Magenta Bay towards late afternoon and parked before the Jackeral to say our goodbyes: Hawk and Kee were heading off down the coast.

As we were about to go our separate ways, Kee left Hawk’s side and embraced first Matt, then Maddie, and then me. She raised herself on her toes and, hugging me, whispered in my ear, “David, I must see you. I must tell you something, okay? I will be in touch.”

She withdrew, and the look in her eyes counselled me to remain silent. I merely smiled like an idiot and watched them drive off.

I said goodbye to Matt and Maddie and made my way home, lost in thought.

The following evening I met Matt and Maddie in the Jackeral.

It was late; we’d finished our meals and were enjoying a drink on the verandah. Hawk, not surprisingly, had called Maddie and explained that he wouldn’t be joining us tonight: he was spending the evening with Kee, who was exhausted after the ritual.

“You’re pensive, David.”

“I was thinking, Maddie – what it must be like to live with someone who’s glimpsed the future.”

Maddie pursed her lips. “Well, I wouldn’t say Kee so much glimpsed the future, as… What did she say? That she’s seen images of the future. I don’t know, but perhaps those images are like the ones in a dream: elusive, fragmentary. Hard to make much sense of.”

Matt pushed a hand through his greying curls and smiled. “Perhaps, like dreams, they need interpreting.”

“I just hope that it doesn’t come between Hawk and Kee,” I said. “You know Hawk, Mr Practical. There are no shades of grey with our space pilot.”

Maddie said, “They’ve been through worse than this and they’re still together. They’ll be fine.”

We watched Delta Pavonis lower itself into the sea; the fiery globe was so vast and molten that I expected to hear the sizzle as it touched the horizon. I was forever reminded, at sunset on Chalcedony, of that passage in Wells where the Time Traveller visits the far future and beholds the bloated sun straddling the horizon.

I suggested another drink, but Matt and Maddie made their excuses and departed. I watched them step down from the verandah and walk hand in hand through sands as red as cayenne pepper, and around the bay towards Matt’s place.

I thought of Hawk and Kee, cosy down in the junkyard, and I suppose a maudlin introspection came over me, a reflective mood taking in the past and my failed marriage, and the fact that I was alone now. At least, I am stating this with the benefit of hindsight: perhaps I overstate my self-pity in order to excuse – or explain – what happened later that evening.

I regarded my glass, which was almost empty. Being someone who finds it hard not to indulge, I have always considered an almost empty glass to be a wonderful thing, with its promise of more to come. It was only my third beer that evening, so I made my way to the bar and ordered a fourth.

I returned to the verandah; I would watch the sun ease itself into the sea, and as its apex vanished then I would meander home. I judged that event to be at least another beer away.

“You look, Conway, both drunk and miserable.”

Surprised, I looked up. Carlotta Chakravorti-Luna was peering down at me from the advantage of her considerable height.

I hoisted my glass. “Only my second,” I lied. “And I’m far from miserable. In fact I’ve never been happier.”

“Would you mind terribly if I joined you?”

I indicated a chair beside mine, and Luna not so much sat down but allowed the seat to receive her – to appropriate another image from Wells. She held a long glass containing something virulently crimson, took a tiny sip and placed it on the table before us.

I was glad to see that she was more modestly attired tonight. She was wearing a black sleeveless dress, cut short, with a neckline that stopped just this side of decency.

“I saw you by yourself on the verandah, and thought I’d better come over and apologise.”

I smiled, wondering which of our two meetings her apology might cover.

“I was a little drunk,” she went on, “and I was going through a blue period – hence the holo of the bastard quartet. I sometimes get like that, when I wonder about the past, wonder how I ended up like this...”

“Like this?”

She considered me, her generous lips twisted into a rosebud moue. “How I ended up, at my age, living alone on some backwater colony world twenty light years from Earth.”

“There are worse places,” I began.

“Oh, God, Conway, of course there are. But I was being metaphorical.”

I found it hard to think metaphorically after four pints of strong beer, but I nodded anyway.

“Metaphorical.” I repeated. “You’re unhappy?”

She tipped her glass, and the scarlet poison slipped down her long, graceful neck. “Of course I’m bloody unhappy, Conway. But then I always have been unhappy. Isn’t unhappiness the default state of being human?”

I considered saying something along the lines of it all depended on one’s perspective, but realised that that would have sounded sanctimonious.

“Anyway, are you going to buy me another drink?”

I looked at her, and realised for the first time that evening how incredibly beautiful she was. “It will be my pleasure,” I said, inclining my head like a bar-room gallant. “But what is it?”

“Something called a Magenta Special. Vodka and that strange fruit that grows around here.”

I finished my drink and navigated my way to the bar, aware of the stares from a few of the locals.

When I returned, Luna was gazing out at the disappearing sun, her expression wistful. She nodded and took her drink without meeting my eyes.

“So... what brought you to Magenta?” I asked.

She turned her head and stared at me. “Do you really want to know, Conway, or are you merely being polite?”

“No, I’m intrigued. I mean, I presume you could have had your pick of exotic locations around the Expansion.”

She shook her head. “I wanted somewhere quiet, beautiful, away from the rat-race.”

“More or less why I came here,” I said.

“That was after the death of your daughter, right? Or did the film misrepresent that, too?”

“No, it got that bit right. I wanted a fresh start. To think,” I said, shaking my head, “that if I’d picked somewhere else...” I often frightened myself with the thought that my life could have been very different, were it not for my decision to come to Chalcedony.

“Then humanity would still be telemassing at great expense around the universe,” Luna finished for me – except that that wasn’t quite how I would have completed the sentence.

“Actually,” I said, “to be honest I wasn’t thinking about the golden column. I mean, it’s great that we can now travel wherever at a fraction of the expense...” And the discovery had brought back the wonderful starships of my youth. “But I was thinking more about the fact that what happened five years ago helped me get over losing my daughter, and I also met a few great people.”

“Loss,” she said, with a kind of drunken, dreamy, reflective air. “We try to get over it in our own very different ways...”

I thought of the holo-projections of her ex-husbands, and the young girl she had been, and it came to me that she was not making a very good job of overcoming her particular loss.

Uncannily, she regarded me and said, “And if you think I’m referring to my bastard husbands, you’re dead wrong, Conway.”

I riposted with, “I was thinking of the holo of your younger self,” and immediately regretted it.

Anger flared in her vast brown eyes. “She represents everything I was, Conway, and everything I lost.”

I waved my glass. “For godsake, Carlotta. Have you looked in a mirror lately? You’re probably the most beautiful women on the planet, for chrissake.”

She sniffed. “Thank you for that, Conway. But beauty is only skin deep, to employ a cliché. Beauty, to someone who has lived with it all their life, doesn’t matter as much as you might think.”

I blinked. “Then the loss you were referring to…?”

She sighed. “Conway, for twenty years I was the highest paid holo star on Earth. I starred in some of the finest productions ever made. I loved acting; God, you can’t imagine how much I
loved
to act.” She fell silent.

“And?”

“And then it stopped.”

“The parts stopped coming?”

She regarded me as if I were an insect. “Where have you been for fifteen years, Conway?”

“I lived a quiet life in British Columbia,” I began in my defence.

“The industry collapsed,” she went on. “No one wanted to make holo-movies any more, when for a fraction of the cost a small team could use the images of real life people and make, construct, holo-movies on computers.”

“Ah,” I said, comprehension dawning; I’ve never been the fastest.

“I did a bit of acting here and there, a little stage work. But never enough. I sold my image, just to keep my persona out there – in the vain hope that holo-movies would make a comeback and I’d still be bankable.” She shook her head. “I’ve seen some of the computer-generated films ‘starring’ Carlotta Chakravorti-Luna, and they’re appalling. They have no heart, no emotion, no humanity… They’re dead, and that’s because they don’t use human beings any more. They’re
dead
. And for a long time I thought I was dead, too.”