Starship Summer

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.