Starship Fall

Three

The next day, I strolled around the bay to Matt and Maddie’s place. They lived on the southern headland opposite mine, in a two-storey beachfront dome backed by pines. Last night, before last orders, Matt had invited me over to take a look at what he was working on. It was mid-afternoon and hot when I arrived. Maddie was sitting on the verandah overlooking the bay, reading a novel I had loaned her.

She looked up and shaded her eyes when I climbed the steps. “And might the footsore traveller be in need of a beer, by any chance?”

“You’re a mind-reader, Maddie.”

She fetched me an ice cold bottle from the cooler and escorted me through the dome to Matt’s studio.

“Isn’t it tonight you have the assignation with Magenta’s biggest celebrity?” Maddie asked with a sly smile.

“Hardly an assignation, Maddie.”

“I’m not so sure. If you want my opinion, I think she has the hots for you.”

I laughed. “Come on! Is that likely?” I think I coloured as she grinned at me.

“I don’t know. You’re quite a catch, David. Lean, fit, personable. And famous, in your own right.”

I snorted. “And you know what I think about fame,” I said.

We came to the studio, a light-filled space on the dome’s ground-floor. Matt was wearing only a pair of baggy shorts, his preferred attire when working. He stood over a computer keypad and played it like a musician.

He looked up when we entered and nodded at my beer. “Good idea, sir.” He moved to a cooler in the corner of the room. “Maddie?”

“I don’t want to feel left out,” she said. “How’s it coming on?”

Matt passed her a beer and we sat on folding chairs in the middle of the studio. I looked around. Other than stacked crystal boards, old canvases and the odd unfinished sculpture, there was nothing on show to indicate his latest project.

“Almost finished, and I think it’s okay. Should be ready in a few days.” He looked at me. “I’m having a private viewing here in a couple of weeks, if you’d like to come along.”

“Try keeping me away,” I said. “What are you working on?” He was notoriously reticent about work-in-progress, as if to talk about his work might dissipate the creative impetus.

“Seeing as how it’s almost done…” He leaned over and tapped a few keys on the com-pad. “I wanted to get away from what I’ve doing lately◦– the emotion crystals. I felt I’d done enough in that medium for the time being. I was getting stale–”

“That’s not what that New York critic said about your last exhibition,” Maddie put in.

Matt snorted. “What do critics know? Anyway, I thought I’d try something completely different.”

In the air at the far end of the dome, I saw two figures materialise. They were naked, though abstract; that is, it was impossible to identify the man and woman: they stood as representative, perhaps, of the human race.

“We live in a cynical age, David. Perhaps we always have. In the past, my art has been an attempt to counter that cynicism. After all, nihilism’s an easy get out◦– it’s far harder to be constructively positive about the human condition, but I try.”

As I watched, the figures reached out towards each other, came together and merged; they became one, and then something odd happened. They seemed to explode into a million shards of light, which hung in a nimbus and slowly expanded to fill the far end of the dome in a scintillating sphere.

“I wanted to say something about what I have with Maddie,” Matt explained. “I wanted somehow to capture and encapsulate the feeling we call love.”

“It’s… beautiful,” I said.

“It’s not just visual.” Matt smiled and gestured. “Go ahead, walk into it.”

I looked at him questioningly, but he just urged me on. Beside him, Maddie nursed her beer and smiled.

I did as instructed, left my seat and strode towards the radiant globe. I paused before it, wondering what species of art this might be, and what I might experience when I stepped into the light.

I took a breath and advanced.

How to describe the sensations that overtook me then? I was bombarded with emotions◦– the experience was akin to Matt’s crystals, though much more powerful. It was as if I had taken a drug which allowed me to access all the euphoria, all the love, I had ever felt for everyone throughout my life. I moved around in the light like a sleepwalker, my head filled with the joyous wonder of life and love…

Then I passed through the other side of the globe, and instead of coming crashing back down to mundane reality, the upbeat feelings of unity and positivism remained with me.

I walked around the sphere, marvelling, and returned to where Matt and Maddie were sitting, watching me closely.

“Well?” Matt said.

I shook my head, still in a daze. “How the hell did you do it, Matt?”

He smiled. “Trade secret, David. It’s not too different in principle to my crystals, though I employ nano-tech instead of alien stones.”

“It’s remarkable. It’ll be a hit.” I smiled at my friends, as they sat side by side and held hands, and I think a part of me envied them the love that had gone into Matt’s creating this, his latest masterpiece.

“There’ll be about a dozen spheres when I’ve finished,” he went on, “all representative of different kinds of love. I’m still tweaking two or three of them.”

“I can’t wait for the private viewing,” I said.

Maddie’s com bleeped, and she stood and moved away to answer the call.

“Well,” Matt said, “I’m delighted you liked it.”

“Liked?” I said. “I loved it!”

Matt laughed, and looked across at Maddie. He frowned. Maddie was speaking hurriedly into her com, looking worried.

She cut the connection and hurried over to us. She looked from Matt to me, her face white.

“That was Hawk,” she said.

My heart jumped. “What?” I said.

“He asked if we could come over. It’s Kee. He said she’s disappeared, and he fears for her safety.”

We climbed aboard Matt’s ground-effect vehicle and tore off down the coast to Hawk’s starship junkyard three kays out of Magenta.

“What do you mean, Kee’s vanished and he fears for her safety?” I asked, leaning forward between the front seats as I tried to make sense of Hawk’s communiqué.

Maddie bit her lip. “That was all he said. Kee’s gone. And he was afraid something might have happened to her. He said come over, then cut the connection.”

She looked at her wrist-com, stabbed Hawk’s code, and shook her head. “He’s not answering, damn it.”

Five minutes later we turned and hovered through the archway bearing the legend: HAWKSWORTH & CO. constructed from scrap metal. Hawk’s place never failed to stir in me a heady rush of emotion. I was transported back in time to my youth in Canada, when I spent long weekends staring through the perimeter fence at the starships landing and taking off from Vancouver spaceport.

Hawk’s yard was filled with reminders of my childhood, star-faring vessels from the dozen Lines that went out of business thirty years ago with the advent of the Telemass process, ships as small as two-person exploration vessels right up to bulky, lumbering cargo vessels; they bore the livery of their respective owners, faded now with the years.

Hawk was waiting for us on the balcony of the starship which doubled as his office and living quarters. He was leaning against the rail, looking down, a beer gripped in his right fist.

We jumped from the car and hurried up the steps.

Hawk is a big man, six-five, and broad across the shoulders. His pilot’s augmentations add to his stature: the cerebral implant spans his shoulders like a yoke, and the spinal jacks he had fitted a few years ago give him a severe, ramrod posture.

I would have said that he was the happiest person I knew, leaving aside the love-birds Matt and Maddie. He had a wonderful if odd woman in Kee, a member of the native alien Ashentay race, and a couple of times a year he took a starship full of tourists through the portal of the Yall’s golden column on a jaunt across the galaxy.

But he was not the world’s happiest man today.

“What the hell’s going on, Hawk?” I said as we reached the balcony.

He glared at his beer, and something in his eyes indicated that it was not his first of the day.

Maddie embraced him. “Kee…?” she whispered.

He gestured with his bottle to the ship’s entrance behind him. “Help yourself to beers,” he said.

Matt said, “This is hardly the time to drink◦– what’s happening?”

Hawk pushed himself away from the rail and strode into the ship. “Come in.”

We followed him through the cramped coms-room he used as an office and into the lounge, an amphitheatre that had once been the ship’s bridge. The sunken sofas were strewn with clothing◦– Kee’s flimsy wraps and leggings.

Hawk strode around the lounge to the sliding doors and walked onto the long balcony which overlooked the yard. He indicated a table on the balcony.

There was a note on the table, covered with large, childish hand-writing. Maddie picked it up, looking to Hawk for permission to read it. He nodded.

“I’m sorry, Hawk,” she read aloud. “Time, now. Inland for rites. Couldn’t tell you. Secret. I hope I will see you again. Kee.”

At this last sentence, Hawk turned a stricken gaze on us. “She’s been acting oddly for weeks, quiet, uncommunicative. I shrugged it off as Kee, as alien. She gets like that from time to time. Christ knows, it’s hard enough having a relationship with a human woman–”

“Tell me about it,” Matt quipped, earning an elbow in the ribs from Maddie.

“But Kee’s alien, and they do things differently.”

“Hawk,” I said gently. “You said you feared for her safety…?”

He took a deep breath and nodded. “In the early days, when we first got together… I wanted to know more about her, her people. I reckoned if I knew more about the Ashentay, then… I don’t know… then maybe it’d be easier to understand Kee, to work out how best to respond to her. I knew I was in love, whatever that means, and I wanted to keep her, so I quizzed her about her people, their rites and customs.”

He stopped there. Matt prompted, “And?”

“And I remember she once told me about a certain rite that each Ashentay has to undergo around the age of thirty. It’s one of the many they take part in throughout their lives.”

Maddie said in a small voice, “And how old is Kee, Hawk?”

He said, “Thirty.”

“And this rite?” Matt asked.

Hawk nodded. “It’s called smoking the bones.”

“Sounds… exactly like something the Ashentay would cook up,” I said. They were a strange race, with beliefs that made little sense to human observers.

“What does it consist of?” Maddie asked.

“The Ashentay are a hunter-gatherer people,” Hawk said. “They have been for hundreds of thousands of years. They hunt a certain animal… I forget what they call it. Anyway, they don’t hunt this beast for meat◦– it’s inedible, apparently◦– but for its bones.”

Matt echoed, “For its bones?”

“They kill the animal, strip it to its skeleton, dry its bones and smoke them. I don’t know whether they grind the bones to dust, or actually smoke the bones like pipes, but anyway, they smoke its bones and go into a trance. While in this trance, this altered state, Kee told me they’re granted a foretaste of the future, of their individual destinies.”

I said, “And Kee’s gone to take part in this ceremony?”

“I put two and two together: the Ashentay smoke the bones in their thirtieth year, at a sacred location inland of here: and in the note Kee said… she said she hoped she would see me again.”

Maddie shook her head. “But why shouldn’t she?”

Hawk hesitated, then said, “The effect of smoking its bones is sometimes lethal. Kee said that the fatality rate is often thirty per cent. And this is accepted by the fatalistic Ashentay as their destiny…”

I almost said something bigoted about primitive belief systems, but restrained myself.

Maddie reached out and took Hawk’s hand. Matt said, “Then there’s only one thing for it, Hawk, we’ve got to either try to stop her before she smokes the stuff… or be on hand afterwards to help her.”

Hawk looked bleak. He nodded. “I’ve been away almost a week, down past MacIntyre delivering a starship habitat to a rich industrialist. I don’t know when Kee set off.”

“Do you know where the sacred site is, Hawk?”

He nodded. “She’s mentioned it in the past. It’s in the central massifs, high up beyond a native village called Dar, about a hundred kilometres from here.”

“And was she on foot?” Maddie asked.

“That’s just it, I don’t know. She can drive, but rarely does. I checked, and she hasn’t hired a car locally. But she might have gone into MacIntyre and hired one there.”

Matt nodded and looked out across the junkyard. On the horizon, the bloated, blood-red orb of Delta Pavonis was lowering itself slowly into the ocean.

“It’ll be dark in an hour,” he said. “We’d never make it through the mountain pass. How about we get some provisions together, camping gear and food, and set off first thing in the morning?”

Hawk said, “I don’t know how Kee might take what she’d see as our interference… but we’ve got to try to find her.”

That’s settled, then,” Maddie said. “Right, we’re going back to the Jackeral for a meal, Hawk. Come with us, and I won’t take no for an answer.”

Hawk smiled, knowing better than to argue with Maddie. “That sounds like a civilised idea.”

As we climbed down from the ship and approached Matt’s ground-effect vehicle, Maddie said, “But David won’t be joining us, will you David?” She looked at me archly.

Hawk glanced my way. I’d forgotten all about my invitation for drinks from the one-time famous holo star, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be reminded.

Maddie went on, “He has an assignation, don’t you, David? With a beautiful holo star.”

She regaled Hawk with the story as we drove back to Magenta Bay.

Hawk said, “That’s odd. I once knew her lover, the pilot Ed Grainger… I wonder what brought her here?”

“Maybe the same as what brought all of us here,” I said. “Maybe she’s fleeing the demons of her past.”

Maddie laughed. “Well, we’ll be relying on you to find out, David.”