Starship Fall by Eric Brown Page A

he was spending the evening with Kee, who was exhausted after the ritual.
    “You’re pensive, David.”
    “I was thinking, Maddie – what it must be like to live with someone who’s glimpsed the future.”
    Maddie pursed her lips. “Well, I wouldn’t say Kee so much glimpsed the future, as… What did she say? That she’s seen images of the future. I don’t know, but perhaps those images are like the ones in a dream: elusive, fragmentary. Hard to make much sense of.”
    Matt pushed a hand through his greying curls and smiled. “Perhaps, like dreams, they need interpreting.”
    “I just hope that it doesn’t come between Hawk and Kee,” I said. “You know Hawk, Mr Practical. There are no shades of grey with our space pilot.”
    Maddie said, “They’ve been through worse than this and they’re still together. They’ll be fine.”
    We watched Delta Pavonis lower itself into the sea; the fiery globe was so vast and molten that I expected to hear the sizzle as it touched the horizon. I was forever reminded, at sunset on Chalcedony, of that passage in Wells where the Time Traveller visits the far future and beholds the bloated sun straddling the horizon.
    I suggested another drink, but Matt and Maddie made their excuses and departed. I watched them step down from the verandah and walk hand in hand through sands as red as cayenne pepper, and around the bay towards Matt’s place.
    I thought of Hawk and Kee, cosy down in the junkyard, and I suppose a maudlin introspection came over me, a reflective mood taking in the past and my failed marriage, and the fact that I was alone now. At least, I am stating this with the benefit of hindsight: perhaps I overstate my self-pity in order to excuse – or explain – what happened later that evening.
    I regarded my glass, which was almost empty. Being someone who finds it hard not to indulge, I have always considered an almost empty glass to be a wonderful thing, with its promise of more to come. It was only my third beer that evening, so I made my way to the bar and ordered a fourth.
    I returned to the verandah; I would watch the sun ease itself into the sea, and as its apex vanished then I would meander home. I judged that event to be at least another beer away.
    “You look, Conway, both drunk and miserable.”
    Surprised, I looked up. Carlotta Chakravorti-Luna was peering down at me from the advantage of her considerable height.
    I hoisted my glass. “Only my second,” I lied. “And I’m far from miserable. In fact I’ve never been happier.”
    “Would you mind terribly if I joined you?”
    I indicated a chair beside mine, and Luna not so much sat down but allowed the seat to receive her – to appropriate another image from Wells. She held a long glass containing something virulently crimson, took a tiny sip and placed it on the table before us.
    I was glad to see that she was more modestly attired tonight. She was wearing a black sleeveless dress, cut short, with a neckline that stopped just this side of decency.
    “I saw you by yourself on the verandah, and thought I’d better come over and apologise.”
    I smiled, wondering which of our two meetings her apology might cover.
    “I was a little drunk,” she went on, “and I was going through a blue period – hence the holo of the bastard quartet. I sometimes get like that, when I wonder about the past, wonder how I ended up like this...”
    “Like this?”
    She considered me, her generous lips twisted into a rosebud moue. “How I ended up, at my age, living alone on some backwater colony world twenty light years from Earth.”
    “There are worse places,” I began.
    “Oh, God, Conway, of course there are. But I was being metaphorical.”
    I found it hard to think metaphorically after four pints of strong beer, but I nodded anyway.
    “Metaphorical.” I repeated. “You’re unhappy?”
    She tipped her glass, and the scarlet poison slipped down her long, graceful neck. “Of course I’m bloody unhappy,