Starship Summer (Starship Seasons, #1)(22)
She smiled at us. “I’m fine. I’m… I’m sorry about last night. I don’t know what came over me. It’s as if I was drawn, compelled. Anyway, it was silly and dangerous… I hope I didn’t worry you all unduly.”
I exchanged a glance with Hawk and Matt. I said, “Well, we were concerned, Maddie. But… look, we’ve been going over what happened last night, what you found out…”
Matt said, “It’s important, if you hadn’t already realised that.”
She seemed vague. “Well, in a way I know that it means something—but what? Another alien race, one we never even knew existed… I mean, what happened to them? Are they still around, did they die out?”
“More than that,” Hawk said, “is that they constructed the Column. The implications are staggering.”
She opened her eyes, wide, as if she had failed to consider that, and then nodded. “Why, yes. I suppose they are.”
Her coffee arrived and Matt poured it into her mug.
He said, “Can you tell us anything more about what you felt when you made contact with the alien… or its image?”
Maddie thought about that. “I felt a great feeling of peace, of well-being.”
“What did you feel?” I asked. “A being, something with substance?”
Maddie shook her head. “More a warmth,” she replied. “I somehow knew that the Yall were good. Don’t ask me how, I just knew. And then I suddenly knew what they called themselves, and that they built the Column.”
I said, “Do you know why they built it, Maddie?”
She frowned. “It’s what they did, David. It was their… duty. It’s hard to explain.” She looked around the table at us. “I’m sorry. It’s like when you try to recall the details of a dream the day after, you know? You get impressions, vague notions, but everything is so abstract.”
“Did you get the impression that the building of the Column was a religious duty?” Matt asked.
Maddie thought about that. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. It might have been. I received the impression that it was their duty, and that it was supremely important to them, for some reason.”
Hawk said, “And the image, do you know what it is, why it was showing itself?”
“I couldn’t tell, but I did get the impression they were pleased we’d made contact. Don’t ask me how—or how they communicated with me. I just felt these things. There was no dialogue between us.”
Hawk considered his coffee, then said, “How would you feel about making contact with the Yall again, Maddie?”
She looked at us, nodded. “That would be fine.” She smiled. “The funny thing was, the experience wasn’t painful, like touching a human would be…”
We sat around for another couple of hours, progressing to late morning beers, and going over and over what we had experienced the night before. By lunchtime we’d agreed to make a pilgrimage to the Golden Column the following day, and that I should go down to MacIntyre that afternoon and pick up some surveillance and recording devices—as well as a package for Matt at the Telemass Station. We’d set up the apparatus tonight and see what we came up with.
We also decided, as it was lunchtime, to order a meal and another round of beers. It was too early to celebrate our discovery, but the mood on the veranda was one of anticipation mixed with barely subdued elation.
After lunch I took my ground-effect vehicle and made the leisurely drive down the coast to MacIntyre. As capital cities go, it’s small and aesthetically pleasing. There is no industry to speak of and the architecture is low-level and modernistic—chalets and A-frames and low-slung domes predominate, all set amid lush greenswards and dominated by the towering, scimitar-legged Telemass Station.
I bought a hundred credits worth of cameras and sound monitoring equipment, with money from the kitty we had all contributed to, and then drove on to the Station.
Matt was waiting for a package of artist’s materials from Mintaka II, due in at four. I sat in the coffee bar overlooking the reception pad, nursed a cappuccino and watched a couple of arrivals beam in from Capella. I felt like a kid again, marvelling at the wonder of the starships landing and blasting-off from Vancouver spaceport.
Of course, there was nothing so romantic about star travel these days, but the process of Telemass transfer was a wonder all the same.
On the stroke of four, the loud-speaker system echoed around the Station. “Translation from Carmody, Mintaka II, due in one minute. Service personnel to their posts. Engineers, fifty-eight seconds and counting. Will all non-station personnel remain in designated areas.”
I felt a sudden thrill as the bored litany droned out; what was for station workers just another routing translation was, for me, the harbinger of a miracle.
I still could not comprehend the science behind Telemass travel. How was it that human beings, quite apart from non-living cargo, could be stripped down to their constituent molecules, processed and fired on tachyon vectors light years through space, and then, perhaps even more miraculously, be reformed at their destination, whole and perfect? The traveller experienced a second of disorientation, a sudden blankness, before finding himself elsewhere, not even the flow of his thoughts interrupted. Of course, the translation had an effect: you felt as though you’d been shot through the head with a laser and brought back to life.