Starship Summer (2 page)

“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.