Starship Summer (Starship Seasons, #1)(32)

A minute later I poured myself a coffee and said, “Well, I delivered your alien, Matt.”

“Everything go okay?”

“I think she saw through me,” I admitted. I handed him the envelope. “She gave me this to deliver, if I could find your address…”

“That’s Marrissa,” he said, taking the envelope and turning it over in his big hands. “You can’t put a thing past her.”

I hesitated, then said, “She’s alien, but I don’t recognise…” “You wouldn’t, David. Her people rarely travel. She’s a Fharr,from Charybdis, the only habitable planet in the Vega system. They’re pre-industrial, but very artistic.”

I recalled the name of the planet from the conversation the night before. “You lived there, right? How did you come to know Marrissa?”

He nodded, as if he didn’t mind my clumsy probe. “I lived on Charybdis twelve years ago, before I came to Chalcedony. It’s a breathtakingly beautiful place. I lived on an island in a tropical archipelago. I did some of my best work there.”

“And Marrissa?” I prompted.

He smiled. “We had an affair. It was… let’s just say it was intense, all the more so because it was frowned on in her community. I loved the woman, David. But she was alien.” He stopped, staring down at his blunt fingers.

I echoed, “Alien?” hoping to find out exactly how alien.

He looked up. “You know, you think you know a lover, how they think, how they feel… It’s hard enough with a human being, but imagine how hard it might be if your lover is alien, her mind formed and fashioned by inexplicable genes and millennia of customs an outsider has no way of comprehending.”

“What happened?”

I think he would have told me then, had we not been interrupted. He looked past me, out across the bay. I heard the regular smacking sound of a wave-hopper.

Seconds later the hopper skimmed up the beach, spewing red sand in its wake, and the rider dismounted. With a sudden jolt I recognised the subject of our conversation.

Beside me, Matt murmured her sonorous name.

She walked up the beach, then stood at the foot of the steps and squinted up at us. She saw me. “So you have found Matthew, Mr Conway. Perhaps,” she said archly, “you asked the same people as I did?” Her gaze shifted to my friend. “Matthew, it has been a long time.”

I looked at Matt. He was staring down at the woman as if dumbstruck.

“I think I’d better leave you two alone,” I said.

“No—” Matt said, and laid a restraining hand on my arm. “I’d rather you remained.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” There was no emotion on his face as he watched the ghost from his past walk up the steps and pause before us. She wore the same cheesecloth blouse as earlier, and the front hung loose to reveal those strange alien nipples.

She smiled. “We have a lot to talk about, Matthew.”

“So… you’ve finally found me.”

“It wasn’t easy. I followed your trail from planet to planet.” She smiled. “You knew I was coming.”

“I thought you might, one day… Gunter, on Corinth, said you were looking.” He stared at her and said, “So… what now, Marrissa?” I could tell that he was shocked, hardly in control of his words. The romantic in me could not help thinking what a fairytale reunion this was.

“I want to talk to you about… me and you, about what happened.” Marrissa glanced at me.

“I was just leaving,” I said.

“This is something of a surprise,” Matt said to Marrissa, stopping me with his gaze. “I mean, even though I knew you were coming, seeing you in the flesh again after so long…”

Her smile, I thought, held something other than the pleasure of an old lover. Was I misinterpreting her alien features, or did I recognise malice in her thin, stretched lips?

Matt said, “I wonder if I could see you later, in private? Perhaps in the morning? I could come over to the chalet around ten.”

She smiled. “Very well. Tomorrow will be fine, Matthew. I’ll look forward to seeing you.” She stood looking at him for a few seconds, then nodded and left the deck, very upright and taking long, animal strides through the sand.

Matt watched her wave-hopper bounce across the bay. He seemed stunned.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine. It’s just that… it isn’t every day that your past catches up with you.”

“You were about to tell me what happened,” I said, “but look—I’ll understand if you don’t want to talk about it.”

“No, it’s fine.” He gestured at the seats by the table. “Sit down and I’ll fetch a couple of beers.”

Two minutes later we were sitting in the sun, sipping ice-cold beers. Matt said, “I’d been on Charybdis almost a Terran year when I met Marrissa. She was an artist, working with local fabrics, weaving scenes of Charybdian life from a seaweed equivalent, would you believe. But her visions were beautiful. They spoke to me. It was a long courtship before we eventually began living together. And intense! David, I’d never experienced anything like it. I put it down to her being alien, exerting some strange influence on me…” He stopped there and looked at me.