Starship Summer Read Online Free Page B

the series of sinks on various levels perpetually filled by spectacular waterfalls. I might even, I thought, look out for a part-time job to fill the long hours. Another thing that made Chalcedony so different from Earth was the duration of its day: twenty-eight hours, divided at this latitude into eighteen hours of daylight and ten of night.
    The sunset over—it lasted all of ten minutes, a fiery plummet and a resulting crimson blaze in the east—I took myself to bed, dosed up as ever with a couple of sleeping pills and something my doctor back on Earth had promised would help deal with the nightmares. He had lied.
    I slept soundly until the early hours, and then they started.
    I won’t describe them here—I always find other people’s dreams, and nightmares too, a bore to read about. Suffice it to say that the visions of swelling waves were preceded by intimations of death, and followed as ever by a young girl’s hopeless screams.
    To them I added my own as I sat bolt upright, drenched in sweat, and stared out through the viewscreen at the Ring of Tharssos curving overhead like the silver blade of a scimitar.
    I was on Chalcedony, I realised with a rush. Magenta Bay. Light years away from where it had all happened.
    I worked to control my breathing, banish the visions, fill my mind with things other than the inevitability of oblivion.
    Unable to sleep immediately after the nightmare, I got up and moved through to the lounge, helping myself to a beer on the way and finding that the sharp, clean cut of it helped to bring me fully awake. I sat before the viewscreen, staring out at the red sands, bloody now in the light of the Ring.
    I wondered if it was something in my subconscious that had brought me to live so close to the fearful sea.
    I was contemplating turning in, and had half risen in my seat, when I saw something from the corner of my eye. I was fully awake, and sober, and the sight shocked me. I dropped back into the chair, staring now along the length of the lounge towards the hatch which gave onto the ship’s access corridor.
    I had not been mistaken. I had seen a flash of iridescent green, vaguely human in shape, flit quickly from the lounge and vanish along the corridor. Gathering myself, I gave chase—though chase is hardly the word to describe my circumspect progress along the corridor.
    I checked every room off the corridor, then dropped a level and went through the cabins there, too. All were empty. The ship’s exit hatch was locked, and only I knew the entry code. I returned to the lounge, oddly enough not frightened but mystified. There were two options, I thought; either I had hallucinated the fleeing figure—some residual hypnagogic vision from the nightmare—or the Mantis was haunted.
    As I made my way to bed, I wondered which of the two was the more preferable.

FOUR
     
    The Matt Sommers private viewing was held in the low-slung dome of the community centre on the southern headland of the bay. The mounted works of art, the knots of well-dressed connoisseurs drifting from piece to piece amid a hum of polite conversation, brought back memories of the times I had attended similar events with my wife.
    As happens on these occasions, my memories seemed to refer to another, long gone life, and I half doubted that they were real. Why is it that recollections of past happiness are so evanescent, while remembrance of tragedy is so stark and real?
    The exhibition consisted of two separate sets of Matt Sommers’ work: the emotion crystals for which he was famous, and his more recent paintings. These latter were no mere graphic representations of visual subjects, but abstract pieces created from memory plastic, so that the picture within the frame changed constantly, consecutive scenes linked thematically to the last.
    An increased buzz of chatter heralded the arrival of the artist. He stepped into the dome flanked by two officious-looking individuals: a suited silver-haired man in his sixties who was