Эрик Браун - Starship Fall

“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.

We saw each other, day and night, for the next few days. I showed Carlotta around Magenta, then drove her into the mountains to experience the rockpools which were continually filled by the crystal clear waterfalls that tipped from level to level. We swam in the cool water of the pools and made love as the sun set, before picnicking naked then driving back to the Bay and drinking in the Jackeral until the early hours.