Eric Brown: Starship Summer

“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.

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.