Starship Spring (6 page)

Ella squealed in delight and pointed to a host of dare-devil swordbills plunging into the water on the very edge of the waterfall and emerging, with laboured flapping of wings, from the wave-front seconds later bearing struggling fish.

“I’ve been doing some calculations!” Maddie shouted. “To give you some idea of how big the river is: the content of Magenta Bay tips over the edge every five seconds.”

I stared at the spume-wreathed falls in wonder.

Maddie consulted a folding plastic map and pointed away from the Falls. “There’s a marked path leading into the rainforest. It loops to take us back to the villa. I reckon the round trip should take a couple of hours. At mid-point,” she indicated a grassy knoll rising above the trees, “we could stop for lunch.”

We set off, Maddie leading the way.

I brought up the rear, Hannah in front of me with Ella. As we walked, I watched Kee next to Hawk, diminutive by comparison. She seemed quiet, subdued; but then, I told myself, that was her default state. I had never known her to be lively or loquacious.

I tried to forget the incident of the night before, and the many other odd events of late, and enjoy the walk.

Not only was Chalcedony blessed with a marvellously temperate climate at this latitude, but no predatory or poisonous animals existed to spoil the touristic wonderland. The planet had little industry—all necessary manufactured goods were telemassed in—and its main revenue was from tourism. It was a big world, thankfully, so the many millions of visitors a year were spread thinly across its six vast continents. We saw not one other visitor that day, but plenty of native wildlife.

A little over an hour after setting off, we came to the nub of land butting through the tree canopy. Hawk made it to the top ahead of everyone else, and stood with his arms braced on one knee like a triumphant mountaineer of old. “Would you look at the view!” he said as we joined him.

Maddie gasped, and Hannah laughed in uninhibited delight. She gripped my hand. “David, I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s… it’s beautiful!”

We could see for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. Behind us, the rainforest extended to the horizon, an uninterrupted, undulating carpet of variegated greens. To our left was the blue gash of the river, crossed with a margin of white spume, like a horizontal cloud seen from this vantage point, where it plunged over the escarpment. Ahead of us was the central mountain range.

Before it, geometrically perfect in its ramrod-straight, three-kilometre length, was the Golden Column. As we watched, the tiny shapes of starcraft approached the light and disappeared into it. I thought I could sit here for hours, watching the distant activity.

We broke out the picnic and ate.

Ella sat in the bowl of my crossed legs, chomping on a sandwich and passing me the crust with the hauteur of royalty dispensing largesse. When I dutifully hoovered it up, she prodded my belly and said to Hannah, “Mummy, Daddy’s getting fat!”

“No wonder, the way you feed him scraps.”

Ella was thoughtful for a while, then said, “Hawk?”

Hawk was stretched out full length, head propped on a hand. “Mmm?”

“Do you know those alien spaceships under the waterfall? Well, how did they get there? You know all about spaceships.”

“That’s a very good question, Ella. I was wondering the same thing myself.” He sat up, popped a beer and gestured with it. “Two solutions, as far as I can make out. The guide said the chamber might have been a million years old—well, perhaps that long ago the chamber wasn’t underground, but at ground level. Perhaps it was open-ended, like a hangar. That’s one possibility.” He looked around the group to see if we agreed; no one objected. “Now the other possibility is that the aliens, whoever they were, had a form of teleportation, either like our own, or the Yall’s Golden Column. That would explain how they could secrete their ships in a sealed chamber—if it
was
underground all those millennia ago.” He shrugged. “Well that’s my guess, anyway.”

“Or perhaps,” Ella said, “the silver ships aren’t spaceships at all. Maybe they’re digging machines and they dug all the way down there!”

“Well,” Hawk said with judicious appreciation of his half-full bottle, “there’s always that possibility.”

Ella grinned up at me, proud of her deductive powers.

We finished eating and lazed around for a while in the spring sunlight. Ella found another insect nest to inspect, and Maddie and Hannah chatted about something, their voices a pleasant drone on the edge of my consciousness. Matt sat off to one side, staring out towards the Golden Column, a beer cradled in his lap.

I moved across to him. “You okay, Matt?”

He glanced at me, smiled. “I’m fine, David. Tired, that’s all. Dog tired. The trip took it out of me. I thought it’d be easy, physically, if not mentally.”

“And it wasn’t?”

He shook his head and took a swallow of beer. “Mentally it was the same as ever: the same routine, receptions, a million meetings with eager individuals I’d never meet again, a thousand interviews… But
physically
… it left me feeling shattered, to be honest, drained.”

“Well,” I said, “you can take a few months off, presumably?”

He laughed. “That’s just what I intend to do, David—until the guilt at my lack of productivity starts gnawing again, and I get another idea, and start work. But I shouldn’t complain—I have the best job and lifestyle in the Expansion.”

I liked Matt Sommers more than words could express. I liked his gentleness, his quietly-spoken humanity, his humility. He was one of the most feted artists in the Expansion, a very rich man who, without telling anyone other than his close friends (and only then because Maddie let it slip in a drunken moment last year) gave hundreds of thousands to various charities on Earth and the colonies. He shunned publicity and was loyal to those he considered close.

I wondered if tiredness at the recently completed tour was the sole reason for his silence, his withdrawn state of late.

Maddie stood and, like a roistering Sergeant Major, gave the order to break camp and continue the hike.

We packed our backpacks and set off down from the summit of the grassy hilltop, passing from direct sunlight into the dappled cover of the rainforest. Strange, plangent birdsong sounded, a gulping double note that sounded both loud and yet far away.

Kee looked up, smiling at us. “The zandikine bird,” she announced. “It’s very rarely heard. My people say that hearing it brings good fortune.”

As we walked, Ella pointed out a host of iridescent insects swimming through the humid air, catching the rays of the sun as they went. I was alert for the attention of the Ashentay, but for all my vigilance I caught neither sight nor sound of the forest-dwellers.

Thirty minutes later Maddie paused and pointed down the incline. Through a gap in the trees we could see the villa, perhaps half a kilometre away, the free-form, Dali-esque blobs of its multiple rooms seeming to inhabit the rainforest like some natural, sap-like substance.

Ahead, the path forked. Maddie consulted the map and pointed to the left fork. “This will take us to the standing stone I mentioned the other day. The right-hand path is the quicker way back to the villa.”

I said, “I wouldn’t mind taking a look at the stone.” I looked at Kee; she gave no reaction to my preference.

The others agreed and we set off down the left-hand path.

Ten minutes later we entered the clearing where last night Kee and her fellow Ashentay had performed the enigmatic alien ritual.

We crossed to the standing stone, phallic in the intermittent light of the sun.

I paused before it, examining the carved relief on its flank. “Are they figures?” Hannah said. She pointed to what might have been a bi-pedal form, almost too faint to be seen, perhaps as tall as my little finger. Around it, swirling patterns had been etched into the rock,

I looked up at Kee, who was standing, watching us, some metres away. “What do you think this might be?” I asked her.

She turned a hand, her people’s substitution for a shrug, and said, “I don’t know, David.”

“Did you come here with Maddie the other day?”

She shook her head. “No.” She was silent for a few seconds, then, “I have never been here before…” But I could see, from something in her eyes, that she was doubting the veracity of the statement. I wondered if she truly could not recall the events of the previous night.

Maddie said excitedly, “David! Here!”

She was on the other side of the stone, tracing the upper half of a second figure. She looked up. “Am I seeing things, or is that…” She tapped a fingernail against the figure’s torso.

I knelt, but the light was so bad that I could hardly make out the carving, never mind its decoration. “Hawk,” I said, “could you just move that damned a tree a little to the left.”

Obligingly, he mimed pushing it. “That any better?”

Maddie laughed. “Would you believe it, it is!”

A shaft of accidental sunlight pierced the canopy then and illuminated the standing stone.

I examined the figure. “There,” Maddie said. “Am I seeing things, or is the figure wearing a necklace like Ella’s?”

Around the figure’s neck I could just make out a faint line, and hanging from it what might have been—with a little imagination—the alien cone. I wasn’t convinced, however.

I glanced at Hannah, whose eyesight was better than mine. “What do you think?”

She peered. “Well, it could be…”

Everyone stepped up to take a look, and opinion was split. “You’re imagining things, Maddie,” Matt said.

Hawk disagreed, “I don’t know, I think it does look like
a
cone…”

“It is!” Ella said. “It’s my necklace, Mummy!”

I glanced at Kee. “What do you think?”

She came forward, almost reluctantly, and peered at the figure. “I think it’s a shola cone,” she pronounced, matter-of-factly.

Hawk laughed. “Well, that would be a more likely explanation.”

Five minutes later we left the clearing and made our way back to the villa.

* * *

That night we elected to dine at a different restaurant down the hillside, this one a glass extrusion that bled over the side of the falls. We occupied a private bubble off the main bar and, disconcertingly, we could look down through the floor and view the boiling river far below.

Whether it was because of the off-putting view, the fact that I’d eaten a lot on the picnic, or the cuisine—an odd Martian–Terran fusion—I had little appetite and picked at my food. Towards the end of the meal Hawk suggested we take our beers out onto the projecting balcony. Matt seconded the notion and the three of us left Hannah, Maddie and Kee—with Ella curled fast asleep on a lounger—discussing politics in the private bubble.

The balcony was a wide ledge a metre from the surging spray, silenced by aural baffles. Other diners were taking in the view. Further along the balcony I noticed Maria Da Souza, drink in hand, chatting to a uniformed colleague.

Hawk said, apropos of nothing, “I think we need to talk.”

I glanced at Matt, who nodded. “I’m not sure I know what’s going on here,” I began.

Hawk said, “But something is ‘going on’, isn’t it?”

Matt looked at Hawk. “Have you told David about what you saw—or dreamed—while you were away?”

“I know about it,” I said. “And… just a day before we came here, I was visited again by a Yall. In my ship.” I recounted my encounter with the apparition, and told Matt and Hawk what the avatar had told me.

“‘Be prepared,’” Matt repeated. “‘Do not fear. All will be well.’ Christ, what the hell’s going on?”

Hawk said, “And the cone… Da Souza’s reaction to it. And if it
was
depicted on that standing stone…”

I looked at him. “I thought you doubted it
was
the cone, Hawk?”

“To be honest, I’m not so sure.”

Matt took a long drink of beer and looked at us. “There’s something else. Another odd fact to add to all the others. I’ve told you both about Dr Petronious, the Syrian art patron, his staggering offer to buy my exhibition and tour it around the Expansion…”

Hawk said, “What about it?”

Matt looked grimly from Hawk to me. “There was a catch,” he said. “Petronious said that the deal could only go ahead if I agreed to one thing—I had to come here, to Tamara Falls, and invite the rest of you for a week, this specific week.”

“And he didn’t say why, right?”

“Right, he didn’t say why.” Matt paused. “At the time I thought it an odd request, but I couldn’t see why I should let it stand in the way of an amazing offer. So I agreed… But since coming here, and talking to Hawk… and learning about your encounter with the Yall, David… now I’m not so sure.”

I said, “‘Be prepared. Do not fear. All will be well’… I trust the Yall. We are prepared, as well as we can prepare ourselves.”

“But for what?” Hawk asked.

I looked around the balcony. Further along the rail, Da Souza was saying goodbye to her colleague. They hugged and parted, and as the woman left, Da Souza looked down at her almost empty glass as if debating whether to have another.

Something occurred to me. “One second,” I told my friends. “I just want to ask our guide something.”

I crossed to Da Souza. She had drained her glass and was starting towards the bar when I said, “I hope you don’t mind…”

“Oh, Mr Conway.”

I indicated her drink. “If you’d like another…?”

She thought about it, then said, “No, let me get this one. I insist. And your friends?” She signalled across to Hawk and Matt with a raised glass. They raised their own in acknowledgment.

Da Souza made her way to the bar and I rejoined Matt and Hawk. “What did you want to ask her? Hawk asked.

“About the necklace,” I said.

Da Souza crossed the transparent floor of the balcony bearing a tray with three beers and a gin and tonic. She raised her glass and said, “I hope you’re enjoying your break, gentlemen.”

“It’s a quite remarkable place,” I said.

She beamed. I got the impression that the gin wasn’t her second, or even her third. She swayed a little as she smiled, eyeing Hawk’s muscular chest with ill-concealed attraction. Hawk had this effect on women, and he returned her smile and said, “David was just telling us about his daughter’s necklace. The alien cone.”