Starship Fall (Starship Seasons, #2)(16)

“You look, Conway, both drunk and miserable.”

Surprised, I looked up. Carlotta Chakravorti-Luna was peering down at me from the advantage of her considerable height.

I hoisted my glass. “Only my second,” I lied. “And I’m far from miserable. In fact I’ve never been happier.”

“Would you mind terribly if I joined you?”

I indicated a chair beside mine, and Luna not so much sat down but allowed the seat to receive her – to appropriate another image from Wells. She held a long glass containing something virulently crimson, took a tiny sip and placed it on the table before us.

I was glad to see that she was more modestly attired tonight. She was wearing a black sleeveless dress, cut short, with a neckline that stopped just this side of decency.

“I saw you by yourself on the verandah, and thought I’d better come over and apologise.”

I smiled, wondering which of our two meetings her apology might cover.

“I was a little drunk,” she went on, “and I was going through a blue period – hence the holo of the bastard quartet. I sometimes get like that, when I wonder about the past, wonder how I ended up like this...”

“Like this?”

She considered me, her generous lips twisted into a rosebud moue. “How I ended up, at my age, living alone on some backwater colony world twenty light years from Earth.”

“There are worse places,” I began.

“Oh, God, Conway, of course there are. But I was being metaphorical.”

I found it hard to think metaphorically after four pints of strong beer, but I nodded anyway.

“Metaphorical.” I repeated. “You’re unhappy?”

She tipped her glass, and the scarlet poison slipped down her long, graceful neck. “Of course I’m bloody unhappy, Conway. But then I always have been unhappy. Isn’t unhappiness the default state of being human?”

I considered saying something along the lines of it all depended on one’s perspective, but realised that that would have sounded sanctimonious.

“Anyway, are you going to buy me another drink?”

I looked at her, and realised for the first time that evening how incredibly beautiful she was. “It will be my pleasure,” I said, inclining my head like a bar-room gallant. “But what is it?”

“Something called a Magenta Special. Vodka and that strange fruit that grows around here.”

I finished my drink and navigated my way to the bar, aware of the stares from a few of the locals.

When I returned, Luna was gazing out at the disappearing sun, her expression wistful. She nodded and took her drink without meeting my eyes.

“So... what brought you to Magenta?” I asked.

She turned her head and stared at me. “Do you really want to know, Conway, or are you merely being polite?”

“No, I’m intrigued. I mean, I presume you could have had your pick of exotic locations around the Expansion.”

She shook her head. “I wanted somewhere quiet, beautiful, away from the rat-race.”

“More or less why I came here,” I said.

“That was after the death of your daughter, right? Or did the film misrepresent that, too?”

“No, it got that bit right. I wanted a fresh start. To think,” I said, shaking my head, “that if I’d picked somewhere else...” I often frightened myself with the thought that my life could have been very different, were it not for my decision to come to Chalcedony.

“Then humanity would still be telemassing at great expense around the universe,” Luna finished for me – except that that wasn’t quite how I would have completed the sentence.

“Actually,” I said, “to be honest I wasn’t thinking about the golden column. I mean, it’s great that we can now travel wherever at a fraction of the expense...” And the discovery had brought back the wonderful starships of my youth. “But I was thinking more about the fact that what happened five years ago helped me get over losing my daughter, and I also met a few great people.”

“Loss,” she said, with a kind of drunken, dreamy, reflective air. “We try to get over it in our own very different ways...”

I thought of the holo-projections of her ex-husbands, and the young girl she had been, and it came to me that she was not making a very good job of overcoming her particular loss.

Uncannily, she regarded me and said, “And if you think I’m referring to my bastard husbands, you’re dead wrong, Conway.”

I riposted with, “I was thinking of the holo of your younger self,” and immediately regretted it.

Anger flared in her vast brown eyes. “She represents everything I was, Conway, and everything I lost.”

I waved my glass. “For godsake, Carlotta. Have you looked in a mirror lately? You’re probably the most beautiful women on the planet, for chrissake.”

She sniffed. “Thank you for that, Conway. But beauty is only skin deep, to employ a cliché. Beauty, to someone who has lived with it all their life, doesn’t matter as much as you might think.”

I blinked. “Then the loss you were referring to…?”

She sighed. “Conway, for twenty years I was the highest paid holo star on Earth. I starred in some of the finest productions ever made. I loved acting; God, you can’t imagine how much I loved to act.” She fell silent.