Starship Summer (Starship Seasons, #1)(24)

I liked Matt Sommers. He was slow and gentle, quietly spoken, and his easy manner inspired trust. He smiled a lot and laughed at himself, and asked just the right questions, which suggested genuine interest rather than prurient curiosity: after a few beers I let slip that my wife and I had separated after the death of our daughter, but he didn’t follow this up with prying questions, for which I was grateful.

Perhaps this was because Matt had secrets in his own past that he was loath to speak about. Despite his humour, his easy conversational manner, there was a certain sadness that seemed to permeate his being, almost a weariness. I recalled what Maddie had said about his past, but I liked Matt too much to alienate him with questions.

It was after midnight when I stepped carefully from the Fighting Jackeral and made my way along the beach to the Mantis. I stood in the entrance to the lounge for a while, willing the alien to appear, but the apparition deigned not to show itself and a wave of tiredness dragged me to bed.

Seconds before I fell asleep, I realised that, for the past few nights, I had been spared nightmares of Carrie. I wondered at the reason for this… and then wondered no more as sleep took me.

Something odd occurred in the middle of the night. At the time I was sure I woke up to see a ghostly alien figure standing over me—and I felt not the slightest fear, only a sense of trust.

It communicated, not so much verbally, but by some kind of telepathy, that it wished me no harm; it emanated a sublime sense of peace, and made me aware that it wanted to help me. For this help, it said, it required in return help from myself…

I woke late next morning, to a cascade of sunlight pouring in through the viewscreen, and immediately recalled the encounter with the alien.

I knew I had been dreaming, for the details of the dialogue were fading even as I recalled them, tantalisingly elusive.

It must have been a dream, I told myself, the drunken dream of a maudlin, still grieving man, for the alien had told me that, in return for my help, it would ensure that my nightmares of Carrie were no more.





NINE



The first thing the crew of the exploration vessel saw on the surface of Chalcedony fifty years ago, when the planet was still an undesignated potential colony world, was the Golden Column. From orbit it appeared as a truncated golden glow, five kilometres in diameter and thirty kilometres tall. It had been, according to the memoirs of the ship’s Captain, a staggering enough feature viewed during spiral-down. At close quarters, however, it had taken the exploration team’s collective breath away with its strange aura of otherness and permanence. It glowed with power and dominated the landscape for a hundred kilometres, something obviously not naturally occurring but constructed—to what purpose could only be guessed at.

And fifty years of scientific investigation had failed to come up with any answers. Team after team, prestigious foundation after foundation, had probed the light of the Column, attempted to enter it, tried to assess its age and composition, to no avail. Scientific teams still set up camp around the base of the Column, minutely examining it with their sophisticated instruments, but they were outnumbered by the hundreds of religious cults which offered more mystical solutions to the Column’s provenance and purpose.

I was driving. Hawk sat beside me, while Maddie and Matt sat in the back.

We had passed through the series of low hills that backed Magenta Bay, with their silver waterfalls filling natural sinks and lagoons on a hundred levels, and were now heading across the central plain. Ahead were the interior mountains, a long enfilade of jagged purple peaks; our way was through them, to the flat upland beyond, where the Column stood.

“Look,” Maddie said, pointing between the front seats. She was indicating the cloud cover above the mountains, which had broken momentarily to reveal the upper stretches of the Column. Even at this distance, and seen through rapidly closing clouds, the glow was dazzling, like sunlight made suddenly solid.

Then the cloud cover closed again, and all that could be seen of the Column was its diffuse glow through the banked cumuli. I accelerated along the straight, high road that ran through the chequered fields of farmland on either side.

Hawk was saying, “The Ashentay have revered the Column as far back as their history goes. They have a series of legends about the Column.”

“I thought the Ashentay couldn’t read or write?” Matt said. “

They can’t. Their history is oral, passed down from designated story-tellers to story-tellers of each generation.”

“Has your little girlfriend told you this?” Maddie asked.

Hawk grinned. “Who else? We settlers don’t have much interest in the Ashentay. We’re more interested in the Column, or the alien races who possess technology equivalent to or in advance of our own. A bunch of hunter-gatherers, even though their history is rich and fascinating, don’t get a look in.”

I said, “What do the Ashentay say about the Column?”

“They claim it was planted by a race of gods who came here ten thousand years ago. The gods said nothing to the Ashentay to explain what they were doing; they simply drove the Column into the earth and then left. The Ashentay thought it a test. When they’ve worked out the purpose of the Column, then they’ll join the Makers in their equivalent of Heaven.”

“And have they worked out the purpose of the Column?” I asked.

Hawk said, “They have plenty of theories.”