Starship Coda (2 page)

He gestured, his head tilted to one side. “I call it the music of the soul,” he said.

The sound began as a low hum on the very threshold of audibility, then gained in volume; then it became more than just a monotone hum but a series of notes, a swelling harmony quite unlike anything I’d heard before. It was not quite music—not melodically organised enough to be described as such—but a natural sound, rich and deep, a counterpoint of bassoon and oboe, with a constant bass rumble. It was, I thought, a tonal representation of my friend Hawksworth.

Beside me, Kee stood with her eyes closed, swaying. She murmured her lover’s name, and smiled.

Matt had keyed the tesserae to pulse in sympathetic colouration, too: the mobile was a gentle vortex of autumnal gold and brown.

He murmured, “While we experience
this
, an audio-visual simulacrum of the subject, Hawk himself will be experiencing something a little different.

Hannah looked at him. “In what way?”

Matt smiled. “Why not experience it yourself? You can go next, Hannah,” he went on, as the music faded and the mobile lost its august lustre and returned to its original shimmering silver.

Hawk returned to us, smiling and shaking his head. “That was… incredible.”

The artist smiled. “Delighted you liked it.”

Hannah squeezed my hand excitedly, stepped forward and positioned herself under the mobile. Matt lowered it over her head as we stood and watched.

What, I wondered, might the audio-visual representation of my wife be like?

Seconds later the tesserae responded, hummed; if Hawk was oboe and bassoon, Hannah was piccolo and violin. Her music danced, liberated, light and ecstatic—and the light of the mobile was correspondingly effervescent, shooting out lapis lazuli and silver sparks.

I laughed, elated, that Matt’s creation should so accurately catch the essence of the wonderful spirit of my wife.

She returned to me, beaming, minutes later. I clutched her hands. “Well?”

She shook her head. “I…I was aware of the music, but only peripherally. I felt only an incredible sense of peace…I’m not putting it well. But I felt
whole
, at one with myself. It was like the sense of peace that one achieves from meditation, only even more profound.” She shook her head. “I can’t really describe it—you’ll have to wait your turn.”

Matt said, “Would you care to go next, David?”

“Very well.”

I crossed to the mobile, waited until Matt adjusted its height, then ducked under it. I stood, staring at the hypnotically swirling play of light all around me.

Then, gradually, something happened. I felt a certain lassitude, a heaviness of body and limb; it was as if I were drifting off to sleep. I heard music, but far away, uneven, abstract tones without the beauty of Hannah’s mood music. As I stared at the bright, actinic pulses, I felt not the sense of peaceful meditation described by Hannah but…and I don’t think I am reporting this with the benefit of hindsight… agitation. I felt a jarring sense that all was not right, and at the same time an annoyance with myself as I knew that I should not be feeling this. I felt, then, an odd sense of guilt that I had spoilt Matt’s private viewing.

The lights faded, and with it the humming, and I stepped out from under the mobile and rejoined my friends.

I smiled unsurely at Hannah, who said, “That was…odd, David. Not quite what I would describe as…
you
.”

It was Kee’s turn next, and her music was an exuberant, joyous reel, at the same time threaded with sparky notes that perhaps denoted her alienness. The tesserae danced correspondingly, a series of firework reds and oranges.

She almost skipped from the mobile as it lifted above her, and came into Hawk’s arms, laughing.

Then Maddie took her place beneath the emotion mobile, and her music was a symphony of her humanity, a swelling ocean of rhapsodic, sweeping notes, accompanied by a lightshow of mauves and violets, pulsing slowly in time to the mood music.

Matt, when his time arrived, evinced a singular response from his own creation. The music was incredibly slow, almost a drone, stretched out, undulating, and the lights pulsed tan and umber. I half-closed my eyes, and it was as if Matt Sommers’ soul had been laid bare before me.

Later, as we sat on the balcony, Matt murmured to me, “Don’t be downhearted, David. The mobile responds to what it reads at that specific time. Try it again next week…You have a lot on your mind at the moment.”

Later still, as the sun went down and the Ring of Tharssos scintillated overhead, Hannah and I sat on the balcony of the
Mantis
and stared across the straits.

I asked, “What did my music sound like, Hannah?”

She smiled at me, took my hand and said, “It wasn’t you, David. At any rate, not the David I know and love. But, as Matt said, you have a lot on your mind.”

I swore. “I wish the bitch wasn’t coming tomorrow!”

She stared at me. “I didn’t think you were so bothered.”

“I mean, what right has she to intrude, dig up the past? Everything was fine…”

Hannah squeezed my hand. “Everything
is
fine, David.”

We sat in silence for a time, staring out at the placid ocean. At last I said, “Hannah, I don’t want to meet her alone. Will you come with me?”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I want you with me, okay? You’ll come, won’t you?”

She leaned across and kissed my cheek. “Of course I will.”

* * *

We had just finished breakfast the following morning when the com chimed. It was the call I’d been dreading and my stomach turned.

I crossed the lounge to the window which overlooked the ocean, sat down and accessed the call. The screen flared, bearing the text: The caller requests a non-visual link.

I was aware of Hannah at my shoulder. I exchanged a glance with her, then pressed
accept
.

“Hello?” I said, my heart thudding.

“David…I do hope this isn’t inconvenient.” As in the holo-cube, Sally sounded younger, her voice almost husky.

I found myself asking, “You’re in Magenta?”

“We’re staying in a little place in the hills overlooking the bay. It’s…it’s so good to hear your voice again, David.”

She paused, as if hoping to hear me reciprocate those sentiments. I said, “What do you want?”

“To see you. To catch up. To talk…” She hesitated. “We have so much to discuss.”

“Do we?”

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Hannah squeezed. I looked up at her. She compressed her lips and shook her head in censure, I thought, at my tone.

Sally said, “It’s been so long. I’ve been thinking about…what happened. Everything. I wanted to see you…”

“Look, Sally,” I began.

“I’m free this morning. Perhaps we could meet at eleven, say? We’re staying at the Laurels, three kilometres along the road to the interior. I do hope you can make it.”

“Sally!” I said—but she had cut the connection.

Hannah kissed the top of my head. “You should go, David. If only to exorcise…”

“You said you’d come along,” I said, almost in panic.

“I’ll come, David. But you need to do this, okay?”

I took a long breath. “Yes. You’re right. I need to get it out of the way. Say hello, and goodbye…” and good riddance, I thought.

* * *

As we drove from the Mantis in my roadster, with the top down and the sunlight warming us, Hannah said, “Did you notice that she said ‘we’?”

I nodded. “That might make things a little easier. She’ll be less likely to rake up the past if she’s with her latest lover.”

“You make it sounds as if she goes through them at a rate of knots,” she laughed.

“As I think I told you, Sally found someone just after we split up… so soon, in fact, that I suspected she was seeing him before we parted.”

It was hard to recall exactly what I had felt at the time, when I suspected Sally of betrayal. I felt that I should have tried harder to save our relationship, but, after all the recriminations, all I wanted was to be free of her. That she had been seeing someone back then had made my running away all the easier.

We left Magenta Bay and took the winding road into the hills. We passed a few farms as we climbed, and then the big exclusive villas owned by retired business people, the ex-holo stars and millionaires, who made the planet their winter home.

Sally had said she was staying at a ‘little place’ in the hills, but the Laurels turned out to be a sprawling manse on three levels, with a long back garden that extended up the hillside. The timber of the manse had been weathered by some accelerated method, and the ornate spires and towers looked about a thousand years old.

I steered up the driveway and parked on the gravel before a flight of timber steps leading up to a long veranda.

I took a breath. “Here goes,” I said.

We climbed the steps and I paused before a massive timber door, looking for the bell. Finding none, I lifted and dropped a heavy iron knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. The resulting clangour echoed through the house.

I braced myself. I wondered if the years would have worked to curb my ex-wife’s rancour, her bitterness. We had parted on bad terms, all those years ago—acrimonious terms, actually. I would never forget the screaming match we’d indulged in at our final meeting, the burning, murderous, all-consuming rage I had felt at the time.

The door opened suddenly and I stepped back with surprise.

A tall, slim man in a white suit smiled at us. He was dark, impeccably coiffed, and Italian-looking. I judged him to be in his early forties, certainly no older.

“David Conway,” he said, smiling, and extending a hand which I shook.

“And you must be Hannah,” he went on, shaking her hand. “Delighted to meet you. I’m Gideon Antrobus.”

“Sally…?” I began.

He smiled. He had one of those easy, ready-to-hand smiles that some people store in their armoury to win over the opposition. He stepped back and spread his arms wide. “Please, come in. Sally will be joining us presently.”

Antrobus led us up a couple of levels, through lounges and libraries filled with polished timber, old rugs and antique fittings, to a deck at the rear of the house. “It’s such a wonderful day that I thought we might take drinks outside. Now, what can I get you?”

I asked for a beer, Hannah a sava juice. He excused himself and returned inside.

We sat on timber chairs on the elevated deck high above the garden. A long lawn rose towards the hills, edged with brilliant flower beds.

I heard a rhythmic squeak, on the edge of my perception, but paid it no heed at the time.

Hannah leaned towards me and whispered, “Who do you think…?” She gestured to the house.

“Sally’s Latin lover,” I said.

“Isn’t that a bit of a cliché? How old is she?”

“Almost seventy,” I said, hard though that was to believe.

A minute later Antrobus returned with a tray of drinks, sat down and poured.

I sipped my drink uneasily, wondering what the hell to say next. Antrobus leaned back in his chair with a long cocktail, smiled at us both and said, “I think Sally is fearing this…encounter more than you, David.”

I stared at him. “Is it that obvious that I’m…?”

He gestured with his drink. “It’s only to be expected, after all.”

I interrupted, “She’s dreading meeting me again? But it was Sally who came here, after all.”

He looked at me seriously, nodding. “It’s something she
had
to do, David. For herself. To gain some measure of…dare I say closure?”

I’m afraid I sneered then. “You sound like her shrink,” I said.

He smiled, ever reasonable. “Well, David,” he said, “I am her doctor.”

“Her doctor…?” I echoed. I glanced at Hannah. She smiled at me, then looked up the garden towards the source of the rhythmic squeaking sound.

I peered past Antrobus and saw what I had missed earlier. High up, at the very end of the garden, a child on a swing appeared from behind the branches of a tree, vanished as she swung back, and then appeared again.

She was small, and blonde, and appeared to be about thirteen years old.

Something clutched my heart as I thought back to Carrie…and I wondered if the little girl was the daughter of Sally and Antrobus. Fertilisation procedures could work miracles these days…

Apropos of absolutely nothing, Antrobus stared at me and said, “Sally went through hell when you left Earth, David.”

Beside me, Hannah stiffened.

“We both did,” I said.

He inclined his head as if acceding the fact. “I can imagine,” he said reasonably. “But I think Sally suffered particularly badly. She…she almost didn’t recover. Did you know that she made three attempts to take her life?”

I stared at him, my heart thumping. “No, I didn’t know.”

He nodded, smiling that damnably easy smile. “Imagine what it was like, for her. One day she had everything. A husband and a beautiful child she loved—and then…nothing. The child she worshipped taken away from her, and her husband gone.”

I gripped my beer and managed to say, “And what the hell do you think it was like for me, Antrobus? Don’t you think I suffered, too?”

He smiled like an old friend. “I imagine you did, terribly, David. I often think that suffering is the default state of being human, don’t you?”

I was enraged, and confused, and I didn’t argue the point at the time—though I thought nothing of the sort. I felt Hannah’s hand on my arm, calming me.

He went on, “But you achieved some kind of catharsis, no, some… one could almost say…atonement for what happened?”

“What do you mean?”

He smiled. “I’ve read all the books, seen the films.” He held up a hand, quickly, to forestall my protests. “And I know, I know…you have claimed that they misrepresented you, and what you went through.”

I said, “They were shoddy, sensationalist treatments. They didn’t show anything approximating the truth.”

He smiled at me. “Haven’t you felt the need, over the years, to redress the balance, give your version of the ‘truth’ to the world? You’ve kept a resolute silence down the years which, frankly, has amazed me.”