Free Starship Fall by Eric Brown

“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.

We saw each other, day and night, for the next few days. I showed Carlotta around Magenta, then drove her into the mountains to experience the rockpools which were continually filled by the crystal clear waterfalls that tipped from level to level. We swam in the cool water of the pools and made love as the sun set, before picnicking naked then driving back to the Bay and drinking in the Jackeral until the early hours.
    I was deliriously happy, like some love-smitten teenager. Carlotta told me about her childhood, the supposedly privileged upbringing of a pampered child, which in reality was a soulless time of being looked after by hired nannies while her mother and father jetted around the world making their famous movies. She recounted her days as a holo-movie star, the paradox of believing in her art and yet despising most of the people in the industry.
    In turn, I told Carlotta about my childhood in Vancouver, my obsession with space and the starships that crossed the void.
    Those few days were a happy period, and the intimacy, the trust of another human being, made me realise what I’d been missing for years.
    * * *
    A few days later, around eight in the morning, Carlotta jumped out of bed, cursed the clock and told me she had to be in MacIntyre by nine to pick up a delivery from the Telemass station. I offered to drive her, but she said she didn’t want to impose on me. She suggested we meet for drinks and dinner at the Jackeral around six, kissed me and hurried from the villa.
    I dressed and made my way home, showered then sat on the balcony of the Mantis and ate a leisurely breakfast. I was, to tell the truth, still in a daze, and looked back over recent events as if they were a dream.
    I went for a long walk after breakfast, anticipating six o’clock when we would be together again. I could not stop thinking about the woman, and wondered what the future might hold. I found myself considering the film about her ex-lover, Ed Grainger, and I wondered how Carlotta had been portrayed in Starship Fall. On impulse I downloaded the movie from the Net and sat back on the chesterfield with a beer.
    The trailer promised an enthralling story of alien adventure, love and tragedy, which was pretty much the tale Carlota had told last night.
    The first third of the film was an adventure story set on the movie-maker’s impression of Chalcedony, an exoticised vision of alien fauna and purple mountains I would never have recognised as the real thing. Grainger was portrayed as a monomaniacal adventurer who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted. Carlotta was referred to in the first part of the film through the device of Grainger sending voice-messages to her while in space, and gazing longingly at a moving cube image of his dusky-skinned lover, played by an Indian