Starship Summer (Starship Seasons, #1)(5)

As Hawk led me towards the veranda, clutching ice-cold beers, he whispered, “I prefer the artists and bohemians who make Magenta their home. A little more open-minded,” he added with a smile.

We ordered locally caught spearfish and salad and watched the silvery water of the bay lap the bright red sand that sloped from the Jackeral. The Ring of Tharssos, which at one time had been a dozen moons, but which millennia ago had collided and shattered into a million shards and fragments, arched overhead, colossal and breathtaking in the perfection of its parabola. I pinched myself. I was no longer on Earth, on the Vancouver sea front. I was twenty light years distant on an alien planet.

We kept the conversation superficial. I told Hawk nothing about the reasons I left Earth, and he said not a word about his past. The sealed augmentations that scarred his body spoke volumes, and I recalled his mention of not having flown since the Nevada run—his own annus horribilis—but respected his reticence enough not to pry. I told him of my work on Earth, stripped of anything personal.

We had finished our meals when Hawk leaned forward, staring along the beach. I saw a small, lone figure striding barefoot through the lapping waves, a blonde woman I judged to be in her thirties.

“Maddie,” Hawk said to me. “I must introduce you.”

He stood and called her name, waving. She looked up, as if from a reverie, then smiled and waved vaguely.

“Won’t you join us?” Hawk called.

She seemed to hesitate, then moved slowly from the sea and trod the sand towards the veranda steps. Over the weeks I came to know Maddie, I recognised this hesitation in her manner as something characteristic—the signifier of her unique condition. At the time I merely thought that she wanted to be left to herself.

She seemed to drift up the steps, smiling from Hawk to myself. She was thin, undernourished, the arrangement of her bones angular. She was attractive in a faded, beach-bum kind of way, the combination of too much sun and salt water. I saw that my estimation of her age had been a little kind: parenthetical wrinkles around her mouth suggested she was in her forties.

“Maddie, this is David Conway, just in from Earth. Conway, Maddie Chamberlain.”

I held out my hand, but Maddie smiled apologetically and whispered, “I don’t shake hands, Mr Conway.”

I smiled uneasily at her touch taboo, and Hawk covered the awkwardness by saying, “Conway’s just bought a ship from me,” and he pointed along the coast to the sleek shape of the starship silhouetted on the headland.

I told her that I preferred it to all the more traditional homes I’d been shown.

“How novel,” Maddie said, smiling with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm. “What a lovely idea.” She spoke with a gentle English accent. “Does it have a name?”

“I haven’t got that far yet.”

She stared at the ship. “Mmm, how about… the Mantis?” she suggested.

I looked along the foreshore at the starship and nodded. Silhouetted against the sky, it did have the aspect of a praying mantis. I nodded. “I like it,” I said. “The Mantis it is.”

From a cheesecloth bag she produced a container fashioned from some kind of local coconut equivalent, and seconds later a waiter appeared with a beer and poured it, without being told, into the container.

She ordered a salad, and ate it with cutlery she took from her bag.

Only then did I notice her clothes. They were evidently home-made, and not very well at that. The seams were uneven, the stitching haphazard.

“Conway’s fled Earth for the quiet life,” Hawk said.

“So you’re not a pilgrim?” Maddie said. It was the question I was asked again and again during my first few weeks in the area.

I smiled and explained that I’d come to Magenta to retire, to relax in the sun; I allowed that I might one day take a look at the Column, but that I was no religious fanatic.

“Do you know something, Mr Conway? I’ve lived on Chalcedony almost ten years now and I’ve never seen the Column at close quarters.” And the sudden smile, on her normally wistful face, made her look years younger.

“Familiarity,” Hawk said, “breeds not contempt but apathy.”

Maddie said, “I understand worshipping a God, but I fail to see why anyone should worship a golden column merely because it’s vast and enigmatic.”

“Perhaps,” I ventured, “that’s exactly why they worship it—in some way it’s a physical representation of the God they can’t see. It’s mysterious, numinous.”

She hesitated, her head on one side, and thought about that. “I wonder why some people need the physical?” she said enigmatically, and then changed the subject. “What did you do on Earth, Mr Conway?”

“I was an engineer. I had my own small business in Vancouver. Orbital elevators, mainly.”

“Was business good?”

I couldn’t help myself. “Up and down,” I said. Maddie laughed; Hawk covered his eyes and shook his head.

Maddie said, pointing to my starship, “Will you repair it? Get it flying again?”

I shook my head. “We think the ship might be alien. I might be an engineer, but I don’t understand the first thing about extraterrestrial mechanics.”

She looked across at Hawk. “You could help him, couldn’t you? Get the thing up and flying again. You could even pilot the ship.”