Eric Brown: Starship Summer

“You’ve known him that long?” I asked.

“I met him soon after I arrived on Chalcedony, ten years ago. But, as I said, I don’t really know him. He’s one of the most private people I’ve ever met, which is strange as he’s also one of the most outgoing people you’re ever likely to happen across.”

“Still waters…” I quipped. I hesitated, then said, “He did let slip something along the lines that he’s never flown since something that happened at Nevada. And have you noticed the jacks on his wrists?”

She nodded. “They’re hard to miss.”

“Neural interfaces,” I said, “for achieving integration with a shipboard matrix during hyper-light flight.”

“So?”

“So,” I said, “his were fused, which leads me to believe he had some kind of accident. If so, then the fact he survived is some kind of miracle. It must have been traumatising, to say the least.”

She nodded, as if she knew more about the accident, but was reluctant to tell me.

I finished my drink. “My first full day in Magenta Bay and I find myself surrounded by mysterious strangers.” I resisted the urge to stare at her home-made mug and cutlery as I said this, and excused myself. “My ship awaits, and I’ve a lot to sort out before sundown.”

“See you at the viewing,” Maddie said.

I left the veranda and walked to the starship by way of the beach, admiring its sleek lines against the afternoon sky. I contemplated the days ahead, the work I had to do aboard the Mantis to get it into shape… and I wondered if I would be spared the nightmares that had visited me every night since my arrival on the planet.

Two things of note occurred the following evening. I had my worst nightmare to date, and I saw something aboard the ship. I’d spent the day decorating the lounge, what in earlier times had been the ship’s control room. I’d installed a couple of sofas and chairs, a locally woven rug and a few wall hangings and pot plants—native things that intrigued me with their alienness. I had managed to soften the hard, functional lines of the control room, make it comfortable, liveable. Then I turned my attention to the kitchen adjacent to the lounge. This I equipped with a few quickly bought utensils, a small oven and a microwave, and hung a poster I’d seen in a nearby store: it was a picture of the Column, a great golden bolt of ineffable light which rose, thick and mysterious, from the plain of the interior. In the bedroom, on the left flank of the ship with a view along the curve of the red sands, I positioned a bed and a small cabinet. I didn’t bother with decorations, as I wasn’t planning to spend that much time in there.

I made myself a meal around eight—I’d always enjoyed the process of cooking, finding something both creative and therapeutic about conjuring good food from raw ingredients. My wife Sally had hated anything to do with the kitchen, and I had taken pleasure in cooking for the three of us. Carrie, my daughter, had helped: an abiding memory is of our working side by side before the kitchen’s big picture window overlooking the straits.

I ate slowly in the lounge, with the viewscreens open to admit the cooling evening breeze, and drank a few local beers from the stock I’d laid in. I watched the ebb and flow of evening life; the locals promenading along the beach. I caught sight of Maddie, mooning along in the shallows, lost in a world of her own. She looked a small and lonely figure garbed incongruously in the ill-made clothing of her own design.

As I watched, a wave-hopper skipped into the bay and a tall, dark figure dismounted and strode up the beach towards the Fighting Jackeral. I recognised Matt Sommers from a holo-doc I’d seen about him on Earth, a big, composed African-American of few words. He had either failed to notice Maddie, or purposefully ignored her. She, however, had seen him, and hurried in his wake up the beach and onto the Jackeral’s veranda. I smiled to myself and wondered about her curious aversion to tactile contact with her fellow man.

As the sun set—Delta Pavonis is big, and Chalcedony orbits close to the swollen primary, making sunsets a blazing spectacle—I opened another beer and wondered what shape my days might take once I’d finished furnishing the ship. I would read, and take long walks, and drop into the Jackeral for an afternoon beer and a chat with whoever might be propping up the bar; I’d explore the northern continent, hire a crawler and take a look at the Falls area of the interior, the series of sinks on various levels perpetually filled by spectacular waterfalls. I might even, I thought, look out for a part-time job to fill the long hours. Another thing that made Chalcedony so different from Earth was the duration of its day: twenty-eight hours, divided at this latitude into eighteen hours of daylight and ten of night.

The sunset over—it lasted all of ten minutes, a fiery plummet and a resulting crimson blaze in the east—I took myself to bed, dosed up as ever with a couple of sleeping pills and something my doctor back on Earth had promised would help deal with the nightmares. He had lied.

I slept soundly until the early hours, and then they started.

I won’t describe them here—I always find other people’s dreams, and nightmares too, a bore to read about. Suffice it to say that the visions of swelling waves were preceded by intimations of death, and followed as ever by a young girl’s hopeless screams.

To them I added my own as I sat bolt upright, drenched in sweat, and stared out through the viewscreen at the Ring of Tharssos curving overhead like the silver blade of a scimitar.

I was on Chalcedony, I realised with a rush. Magenta Bay. Light years away from where it had all happened.

I worked to control my breathing, banish the visions, fill my mind with things other than the inevitability of oblivion.

Unable to sleep immediately after the nightmare, I got up and moved through to the lounge, helping myself to a beer on the way and finding that the sharp, clean cut of it helped to bring me fully awake. I sat before the viewscreen, staring out at the red sands, bloody now in the light of the Ring.

I wondered if it was something in my subconscious that had brought me to live so close to the fearful sea.

I was contemplating turning in, and had half risen in my seat, when I saw something from the corner of my eye. I was fully awake, and sober, and the sight shocked me. I dropped back into the chair, staring now along the length of the lounge towards the hatch which gave onto the ship’s access corridor.

I had not been mistaken. I had seen a flash of iridescent green, vaguely human in shape, flit quickly from the lounge and vanish along the corridor. Gathering myself, I gave chase—though chase is hardly the word to describe my circumspect progress along the corridor.

I checked every room off the corridor, then dropped a level and went through the cabins there, too. All were empty. The ship’s exit hatch was locked, and only I knew the entry code. I returned to the lounge, oddly enough not frightened but mystified. There were two options, I thought; either I had hallucinated the fleeing figure—some residual hypnagogic vision from the nightmare—or the Mantis was haunted.

As I made my way to bed, I wondered which of the two was the more preferable.

The Matt Sommers private viewing was held in the low-slung dome of the community centre on the southern headland of the bay. The mounted works of art, the knots of well-dressed connoisseurs drifting from piece to piece amid a hum of polite conversation, brought back memories of the times I had attended similar events with my wife.

As happens on these occasions, my memories seemed to refer to another, long gone life, and I half doubted that they were real. Why is it that recollections of past happiness are so evanescent, while remembrance of tragedy is so stark and real?