I said, “And when the drug finally ran out?”
Tears, huge silver tears like globules of mercury, slid from her eyes and rolled over her high cheek bones. It could have been another performance, but something told me the emotion was genuine.
“Then Ed returned to Chalcedony. He came back for more of the blessed drug. I begged him not to go, to seek help, try to kick the habit. But by this time he was well and truly hooked on the idea of engineering his destiny. He couldn’t give it up, and the only answer was to return to Ashentay. Despite the danger.”
I said, “The danger that the drug would kill him?”
“Thanks to one of these visions of the future, he knew there was a possibility he’d never come back from Chalcedony.”
“He told you this?”
She smiled with bitterness. “Of course not.”
“Then how…?” I began.
She drew a long sigh. “When the drug was running out, and Ed first suggested returning to Chalcedony... of course I wanted to know what was happening, what would happen. I wanted to know that we had a future together.”
Things fell into place. “You took the drug?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Just a couple of times. And I saw… I saw a future in which I would be without Ed, a terrible period of loneliness. I took it again, considering what Ed had told me about the futures it showed being only possible futures... but again I saw myself alone. That’s when I begged Ed not to go. He ignored me, as I knew he would...”
The silence stretched. I wanted to know what happened, of course, but I was sober enough to know the question would be crass.
At last Luna said, “Ed set off for Chalcedony, and never came back.” She nodded towards the screen. “That’s what the movie is about, Ed’s first time on Chalcedony, and his fateful return.”
I said, after an interval, “And that’s why you’re here, Carlotta, to attempt to find out what happened to him?”
“I believe his ship is out there somewhere, in the central massifs. I think he crashed, so close to his goal. I want nothing more than to find the ship, say goodbye to Ed – to bring an closure to that part of my life.” She looked at me. “Does that sound foolish, Conway?”
I smiled. “No,” I said. “No, it sounds eminently sensible to me.”
Then I reached out and took her face in my hand, stroking her cheek with my thumb. She leaned into my hand, smiling.
“Will you tell me something, Carlotta?”
She nodded, silently.
I recalled the scent of her the other morning, and then the reek of the bone smoke in the Ashentay’s sacred site… and I said, “Are you still smoking the drug?”
She smiled, and shook her head, the movement restricted by my hand. “No, Conway. That time way back was more than enough.”
I smiled. Call me a fool, but I believed her.
Then she said, in almost a whisper. “Conway, let’s go to bed, okay?”
It had been a long five years, and a big part of me was like a fearful, first-time schoolboy all over again, but Carlotta was a beautiful woman, and I felt I’d come to know her in the short time we’d been together. And I trusted her.
She slipped from her dress, and I fumbled with her underwear while she removed my clothes. Then we stood, naked, and she took me in her hand, and I almost passed out with the sudden, exquisite thrill of her touch.