Starship Fall

Seven

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.”

It was a bravura cameo, and I felt like applauding. I even thought I detected the shimmer of a tear in the corner of those amazing eyes.

She sniffed, and sipped her drink, and then smiled at me in a strangely confiding way which said don’t-mind-my-histrionics without quite saying so.

“And while I’m being so honest, Conway, shall I tell you the real reason I came to Chalcedony?”

I blinked. “The real reason?”

“The real reason,” she repeated.

“I’d be… honoured,” I said, and meant it.

She looked around, as if suddenly realising where she was and not liking the venue.

“But not here, okay? How about we go back to my place, hm?”

I looked at her, and something within my gut flipped like a landed fish.

“Yes… yes, that’d be great.”

We finished our drinks, slipped from the verandah, and walked along the beach. She was more inebriated than I’d assumed, and I gripped her arm to assist her through the dunes that fronted her place. By the time we climbed the steps my arm was around her waist and she was leaning against me, her perfume filling my head.

The glass door slid open at her approach; low lighting came on and music began to play. I was glad to see, as we entered the low lounge, that we would not be joined by the holographic ghosts tonight.

Though in that I might have been mistaken; as she fixed me a beer and herself a gin sling, she asked, “Have you ever seen a holo-movie called Starship Fall, Conway?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I have.”

She swayed over to the wall console, handing me the beer en passant, and touched a dial. “We needn’t watch it, as such. It really is trite and sentimental, but it will help to explain something.”

I nodded, at a loss to comprehend this latest twist.

At the back of the lounge, evidently the area set apart for the projection of films, a small starship travelled slowly through the void of space. I recognised it from my childhood forays to Vancouver spaceport: a Class II Stryker exploration vessel.

Luna curled herself into a sofa and patted the cushion beside her. “Sit down, Conway, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

I obeyed, and she leaned against me, folding her legs beneath her bottom and sipping her gin. I was pleasantly drunk, and I recall feeling none of the trepidation of two nights ago. Luna was a beautiful woman, and I’d been alone for five years, and that was all that seemed to matter.

She said, “Just after my third marriage ended in disaster, Conway, I met a dashing man called Ed Grainger. He was a starship pilot. He’d worked for the Greatorex Line piloting exploration vessels, years before we met. And then along came Telemass and he was out of a job. When I met him he was making the most of the situation; he’d earned enough over the years to buy his own small ship…” She pointed with her glass, sloshing gin, towards the screen: the Class II Stryker was now orbiting an unidentified planet. “He ran a small exploration business, reconnoitring the out of the way planets the Telemass organisation were too busy to bother about. There wasn’t much work around, but it satisfied a craving.”

I nodded and watched the film. The ship swooped low over the alien world, roaring silently across miles and miles of empty grassland.

“I met him around the time my own career in holo-movies was crashing down around me. I think we felt a mutual empathy, though of course he could still practice his trade… I was reduced to appearing in third-rate plays in bug-fuck nowhere, Idaho.”

She sipped her drink and looked suddenly bitter.

I suppressed a belch and said, “What happened?”

“What happened?” Her eyes became distant. “We fell in love. I was ecstatically happy for a year. I thought I’d found it at last, the real thing, a man I could love and who genuinely loved me.”

I winced, waiting for the punchline, the betrayal, the acrimony…

“But Ed…” She fell silent, lips pursed and held off-centre as she considered something long gone.

“Luna,” I said, “if you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine.”

She looked at me and smiled. “No, I want to tell you. That’s why I dragged you here, Conway. So I could spill the beans.” She stopped and laughed suddenly at her use of the odd phrase.

“But Ed…?” I prompted.

“He’d kept something from me. I mean, everything was great. We shared everything. We had so much in common, could talk for days on end, and the sex was spectacular… But then Ed would go into these… these fugue states, not so much depression as… as periods of intense introspection, when he’d shut himself away for a day or so and wouldn’t talk to anyone, not even me.”

I nodded, wondering where all this was leading.

“What was his problem?”

She looked at me steadily. “He was taking a drug, and had been for years.”

I nodded again, feeling like a psychiatrist.

“The thing was, it wasn’t a physically debilitating drug. He was fit and healthy… but it did things to his mind, altered his moods.”

“What was it?”

She smiled wistfully. “Ed called it Cassandra.”

“It didn’t have a common name?”

“No. You see, Ed was the only human being taking the stuff.”

I pulled a face. “Then how on Earth did he come across it?”

“He was exploring a planet for the Greatorex Line when he discovered a race of aliens. He stayed with them over a year, and in that time he came to know the aliens and participated in their rites. There was one certain drug they used, and it intrigued him. He asked if he might try it, and he did… and, well, he never stopped. He made sure he had a stock of the stuff when he left the planet, and periodically over the next ten years he used it… resulting in these periods of bleak introspection.”

She stopped there and stared at the image playing out across the room; the starship spiralled down, coming to land with a quick curtsy of its ramrod stanchions in a green mountain meadow.

Much delayed, it came to me. I said, “And the planet was Chalcedony, right? And the drug…”

I stopped there. Cassandra…?

Had Ed Grainger participated in the Ashentay bone-smoking ceremony?

I said, “He smoked the bones, right? He saw… or he thought he saw… the future?”

Luna said nothing, but indicated the image with her glass.

I watched, as the aliens appeared around the ship, small, humanoid, blonde people. The Ashentay◦– or the director’s idea of them.

“Ed told me all about it after we’d been together for about three months. I like to think it was because we shared everything, had no secrets. But I think the truth was that he’d sold the rights of his story to a production company in order to subsidise his explorations, and they were going to make a movie of his time on

Chalcedony… and then everyone would know.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Is that why you two split–?”

“Of course not, Conway. I was in love, besotted. I could live with his taking the drug, his evasions. It was a relief at last when I found out the reason for his fugues.” She paused, then smiled at me, pain in her eyes. “It was when his supply of the drug was running out that the trouble started. He needed more of it to attain the same effect, and it had certain psychotic-inducing side-effects.”

I said, “But… when the Ashentay take the drug, they claim they can see into the future…?”

Luna nodded, and a strand of jet hair fell across her face. She eased it away with the back of her hand, the gesture beautiful, and suddenly I wanted to reach out and take her in my arms. I felt her pain, her sadness… Was it arrogant of me to think that I might in some way be able to help her?

“That’s right, Conway. They do, and do you know something, they’re right. Ed saw into the future◦– oh, it wasn’t as if everything was crystal clear and obvious. He had to…” She struggled to find the right word.

I thought of what Matt had said earlier, and supplied it, “Interpret?”

“Yes, he had to interpret the visions he was granted. You see, he was a deeply spiritual man, Conway. Not the all-action hero of common myth. He craved the ultimate religious experience.”

I frowned. “But this drug, if he was granted visions of the future… then what he’d see was one reality◦– how the future would be, unalterable.” I shook my head, my thoughts slowed by the alcohol. “I don’t understand how anyone could live with knowing the course of future events.”

Luna reached out, laid two long fingers on my forearm and said, “Ah, but Ed had a theory, Conway. He thought that the drug offered visions of not one set, determined future, but a range of possible futures◦– and, armed with the knowledge of these possible futures, he could steer a course towards those he saw as desirable, beneficial. He explained it all to me in terms of quantum physics, of a multitude of possibilities…”

I considered what I had witnessed in the sacred cavern. “But the danger… If Ed was taking this stuff over a period of years, then he was lucky it didn’t kill him.”

She nodded. “Ed was careful, David. He took small doses.”

I said, “And when the drug finally ran out?”

Tears, huge silver tears like globules of mercury, slid from her eyes and rolled over her high cheek bones. It could have been another performance, but something told me the emotion was genuine.

“Then Ed returned to Chalcedony. He came back for more of the blessed drug. I begged him not to go, to seek help, try to kick the habit. But by this time he was well and truly hooked on the idea of engineering his destiny. He couldn’t give it up, and the only answer was to return to Ashentay. Despite the danger.”

I said, “The danger that the drug would kill him?”

“Thanks to one of these visions of the future, he knew there was a possibility he’d never come back from Chalcedony.”

“He told you this?”

She smiled with bitterness. “Of course not.”

“Then how…?” I began.

She drew a long sigh. “When the drug was running out, and Ed first suggested returning to Chalcedony… of course I wanted to know what was happening, what would happen. I wanted to know that we had a future together.”

Things fell into place. “You took the drug?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Just a couple of times. And I saw… I saw a future in which I would be without Ed, a terrible period of loneliness. I took it again, considering what Ed had told me about the futures it showed being only possible futures… but again I saw myself alone. That’s when I begged Ed not to go. He ignored me, as I knew he would…”

The silence stretched. I wanted to know what happened, of course, but I was sober enough to know the question would be crass.

At last Luna said, “Ed set off for Chalcedony, and never came back.” She nodded towards the screen. “That’s what the movie is about, Ed’s first time on Chalcedony, and his fateful return.”

I said, after an interval, “And that’s why you’re here, Carlotta, to attempt to find out what happened to him?”

“I believe his ship is out there somewhere, in the central massifs. I think he crashed, so close to his goal. I want nothing more than to find the ship, say goodbye to Ed◦– to bring an closure to that part of my life.” She looked at me. “Does that sound foolish, Conway?”

I smiled. “No,” I said. “No, it sounds eminently sensible to me.”

Then I reached out and took her face in my hand, stroking her cheek with my thumb. She leaned into my hand, smiling.

“Will you tell me something, Carlotta?”

She nodded, silently.

I recalled the scent of her the other morning, and then the reek of the bone smoke in the Ashentay’s sacred site… and I said, “Are you still smoking the drug?”

She smiled, and shook her head, the movement restricted by my hand. “No, Conway. That time way back was more than enough.”

I smiled. Call me a fool, but I believed her.

Then she said, in almost a whisper. “Conway, let’s go to bed, okay?”

It had been a long five years, and a big part of me was like a fearful, first-time schoolboy all over again, but Carlotta was a beautiful woman, and I felt I’d come to know her in the short time we’d been together. And I trusted her.

She slipped from her dress, and I fumbled with her underwear while she removed my clothes. Then we stood, naked, and she took me in her hand, and I almost passed out with the sudden, exquisite thrill of her touch.