Eric Brown - Starship Summer

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.”