EIGHT
Early next morning I was sitting with Hawk and Matt on the veranda of the Fighting Jackeral, enjoying coffee and croissants as the sun climbed high above the interior mountains.
Maddie had said little after her pronouncement about the Yall last night, and a short while later Hawk had driven her home. She had agreed to meet us for breakfast in the morning.
Hawk demolished half a croissant in one bite and said around the mouthful, “You do realise what this means, David?”
I nodded. “I’ve been thinking about nothing else all night.”
“Specifically about the ship,” he said.
I shrugged. “It’s unique. The only surviving ship of the Yall.”
“And as such,” Hawk went on, “it’s priceless. Just think what the religious organisations would give for a ship that belonged to the race which constructed the Golden Column.”
Matt said, “That fact’s yet to be verified, Hawk.”
“Are you saying Maddie isn’t to be trusted?”
“Not at all. I’m saying that the various religious cults that worship the Column might need some convincing that the Yall had a hand in it. I mean, many of them think it the work of their own god.”
Hawk said, “So we hire a team of accredited telepaths from Earth to read Maddie. They’ll verify what she experienced.”
“Might be expensive,” I said.
Hawk laughed. “Listen to you! David, you don’t seem to realise what we’re sitting on here. This could be the biggest thing since humankind made first contact with the Qlax. That ship… Christ, it could be worth millions.”
“I’ll cut you all in on whatever I get,” I said.
“And to think it was sitting in my yard for years. Hell, I even thought of cutting it up for scrap last year.”
Matt said, injecting a note of realism, “There are other things to consider, beyond the mere value of the discovery.”
Hawk smiled. “You’re talking to a penniless businessman, here, Matt.”
I said to Matt, “Other things…?”
He nursed his coffee cup in both hands, regarding the liquid the same shade as his skin. “The first thing that strikes me is whether we should make the discovery public, or keep it to ourselves. If we do the former, then things will change around here. Magenta will be inundated with the media, scads of scientists, government suits from Earth…”
I said, “Do we have a duty to science to make it public?”
Matt shrugged. “Eventually, maybe. I think, before that, we should investigate it ourselves.”
Hawk looked at him. “And how do we do that?”
“First, we set up some recording equipment in the lounge, and maybe in other places around the ship. We go through it from top to bottom, try to find the Yall equivalent of a computer core. It’d help if we knew just why the apparition was occurring.”
“Maybe,” Hawk said with a shrug, “we might be able to communicate with it?”
I said, “My guess is that the apparition is some holographic image or icon, not sentient in itself. If we can access some kind of ship’s data base, however…”
Matt said, “We’re dealing with something alien here, remember. All our assumptions about what things might be are based on comparisons to what we know—which might not hold in this case.”
“So we set up some cameras and scour the ship for a com system,” I said. “Then what?”
“Then maybe we take a trip out to the Golden Column,” Matt said.
“That’d make sense,” I said. “I must admit that I haven’t seen it yet.”
Hawk grinned. “Know something? The closest I’ve come to the Column was when I salvaged the ship. I was about a hundred kays away then, and the Column dominated the horizon even at that distance.”
“I visited the column soon after I got here,” Matt said. “I was struck by two things. First, how amazing it was as an artefact—its size, its power and energy. It took my breath away and made my hair stand on end.” He smiled. “All the usual clichés.”
I said, “And the second?”
“How tacky the surrounding show of religious fervour was, the stalls selling souvenirs to the gullible, the quacks and charlatans who’d set up business in the area. It stank. I haven’t been back.”
I smiled. “They’ll be gutted when they find that it wasn’t their god who created the Column.”
Matt grunted. “And how long will it be before some cult starts worshipping the Yall?” he said, “and selling models of the aliens, and authentic Yall cures?”
I ordered another coffee and five minutes later Hawk pointed along the beach. “Here’s Maddie now.”
She was walking, as if in a daze, along the low tide-line, her home-made sandals leaving imprints in the wet sand. She was staring at the ground, miles away.
Hawk stood and waved. “Maddie, over here.”
She looked up, sketched a wave and wandered over to us, climbing the steps and casting an eye over the debris of our breakfast. “Ah, coffee and croissants. What better?”
I signalled the waiter and ordered for Maddie.
As she seated herself, first draping a hand-woven shawl over the seat, Hawk said, “You okay?”
She smiled at us. “I’m fine. I’m… I’m sorry about last night. I don’t know what came over me. It’s as if I was drawn, compelled. Anyway, it was silly and dangerous… I hope I didn’t worry you all unduly.”
I exchanged a glance with Hawk and Matt. I said, “Well, we were concerned, Maddie. But… look, we’ve been going over what happened last night, what you found out…”
Matt said, “It’s important, if you hadn’t already realised that.”
She seemed vague. “Well, in a way I know that it means something—but what? Another alien race, one we never even knew existed… I mean, what happened to them? Are they still around, did they die out?”
“More than that,” Hawk said, “is that they constructed the Column. The implications are staggering.”
She opened her eyes, wide, as if she had failed to consider that, and then nodded. “Why, yes. I suppose they are.”
Her coffee arrived and Matt poured it into her mug.
He said, “Can you tell us anything more about what you felt when you made contact with the alien… or its image?”
Maddie thought about that. “I felt a great feeling of peace, of well-being.”
“What did you feel?” I asked. “A being, something with substance?”
Maddie shook her head. “More a warmth,” she replied. “I somehow knew that the Yall were good. Don’t ask me how, I just knew. And then I suddenly knew what they called themselves, and that they built the Column.”
I said, “Do you know why they built it, Maddie?”
She frowned. “It’s what they did, David. It was their… duty. It’s hard to explain.” She looked around the table at us. “I’m sorry. It’s like when you try to recall the details of a dream the day after, you know? You get impressions, vague notions, but everything is so abstract.”
“Did you get the impression that the building of the Column was a religious duty?” Matt asked.
Maddie thought about that. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. It might have been. I received the impression that it was their duty, and that it was supremely important to them, for some reason.”
Hawk said, “And the image, do you know what it is, why it was showing itself?”
“I couldn’t tell, but I did get the impression they were pleased we’d made contact. Don’t ask me how—or how they communicated with me. I just felt these things. There was no dialogue between us.”
Hawk considered his coffee, then said, “How would you feel about making contact with the Yall again, Maddie?”
She looked at us, nodded. “That would be fine.” She smiled. “The funny thing was, the experience wasn’t painful, like touching a human would be…”
We sat around for another couple of hours, progressing to late morning beers, and going over and over what we had experienced the night before. By lunchtime we’d agreed to make a pilgrimage to the Golden Column the following day, and that I should go down to MacIntyre that afternoon and pick up some surveillance and recording devices—as well as a package for Matt at the Telemass Station. We’d set up the apparatus tonight and see what we came up with.
We also decided, as it was lunchtime, to order a meal and another round of beers. It was too early to celebrate our discovery, but the mood on the veranda was one of anticipation mixed with barely subdued elation.