Starsound Part Two

Seen at sunset, Pamela's was the kind of house that needed a flight of bats entering the attic via a broken skylight, just to add the finishing touch. Closing the jet black, wrought-iron gates behind him, he frowned. “Not a light in sight. What if she's out?” Wishing he hadn't forgotten to ask for her phone-number, so he could have called before going up there, he drove slowly up and parked. Rummaging in the glove compartment, he found a moth-eaten pad and a pen. “I've gotta be in on this. Now how do I word it...”
         And the door burst open, a wheelchair bouncing down the single shallow step onto the drive. “Steve! It's you! You've done it? You mean, you've actually done it?”
         Grinning, Steve gestured to the barrels.  “You mean you doubted me?”
         “Never for one moment.  Well...” She caught herself and coughed. 
         “Oh, ye of little faith. Might just patent these, you know. Put them on the market. Sure there has to be a market for high-pressure containers out there. I mean, what would one small brunette want with so many if they weren't the latest thing?”
         “Steve, you can't ask me that. Not yet.” She held up her hand. “I know you're full of questions. But... I can't answer them.”
         “Pamela, I've got to know.”
         “I know you have.”
         This was the closest she'd come to admitting that she knew anything about what he'd seen and he leapt on it.  “You'll admit that you didn't just come down to see me fly. You'll say that much, at least.”
         She gave him a smile that sparkled with mischief. “Let's just say you might not have been the only attraction in the sky that night. Now, come. Show me how these things work.”

         He returned home slowly, mind brimming over with questions to which he had no answer.  The main one being the house, itself. It was large yet, as far as he could see, she only used the ground floor. And only the inner rooms.  There had to be another layer of rooms between the kitchen and the garden, that was obvious. The kitchen had an inner, heavily curtained window. But that and the living room, which doubled as a bedroom, were the only rooms that had felt occupied. She couldn't be using the upstairs rooms, there wasn't a stairlift. And agile as she was on her spiral crutches, he couldn't imagine her readily tackling that steep staircase.
         Yet the banister was glossy, which told him that hands had polished it as they'd held onto it, going up and downstairs. And there was another inner window, just as the stairwell turned a corner, equally as heavily curtained as the one in the kitchen had been. 
         Then there'd been the tallboys.  In the living room there'd been two of them. One filled with exquisitely fashioned teddies, of all things, some with hearts and rainbows on their tummies, others in obviously handmade clothes . The other had been behind a screen, only its top telling him it was there at all. 
         Why hide a tallboy? What could it hold? A cascade of possible answers filled his mind and Steve laughed, dismissing them all. He'd been promised payment in full in a week's time.
         And he'd extracted a promise from her to see him in four days, when she came into town with the rest of her group. The thought elated him and he found himself repeating “Four more days!” over and over as he ran down the path to the observatory workshop. 
         There were 30 E-mails waiting for him. 27 were adverts, which he immediately discarded. The other three were from his astronomical societies, and these he read with growing apprehension Clicking on the link that took him to the Palomar and Hubble live-feed websites, he zoomed in again on the flare-star he'd seen reaching out to its worlds. 
         The flare had spread. The caption said it was about to reach the asteroids on the outskirts of its system, but the consensus of opinion on the astronomy sites was that those, too, were planets. Or planetoids, at least.  The sites were full of math proving this, but Steve had gone through that many times and believed the calculations were right. 
         He was witnessing a system in meltdown.  Out there, more millions of miles from Earth than he cared to calculate, an entire system was being burned alive in what, for its sun, was no more than a brief flicker of power. He gazed at it until he couldn't bear to watch it any more then, turning to his workbench, he took the orrery and began recalibrating it.
         Of all the repairs he had, this now seemed the most apt. 

         “Steve, it's official. You're a genius!” 
         A week had passed. Steve was standing in the doorway of the indoor market, trying to look as nonchalant as though he spent part of every day standing in markets in ice-cream suits. Hearing Pamela's voice he span, suddenly didn't want to seem too eager and slowed the spin to a stumbling stop.
         The others, lowered one-by-one on the minibus' whining hydraulic lift, gave eachother nudges and knowing looks that Steve did his best to ignore.  He looked at Pamela and smiled.  Customer, or enigma, there was no doubting she looked beautiful.
         She was wearing a straw hat that remained fixed to her untameable curls only by the determined effort of a multitude of pins.  Her light blue dress accentuated the fragility of her figure and she was filled with a triumph of laughter and life that made her smile, radiant though it was, inadequate. She seemed as much under pressure as the double-canisters he'd made for her, except with her it was an exuberance of life shaking through her.  Steve felt her joy fill him, too, though he had no idea what it was about.  All he knew was the chambers were a part of it.  “They worked, then?”
         “Worked? They were a triumph! They couldn't have been better.”
         “Pamela, please! What the heck were they for?”
         She shook her head, eyes brimming with mischief.  “You men, no patience. None of you.” She fingered a shawl, fragile as cobweb, on a nearby stand in the indoor market. A little way away, two more of the wheelchair party looked at Steve and Pamela and one gave a conspiratorial wink. Pamela threw back her head and gave a shout of laughter.  “Sue, you're about as subtle as... as a tapdancing elephant. Steve's a designer.  He's helping me make a few things, that's all.”
         “Course it is! Nice suit, Steve!”
         “He wears that to put his prices up, that's right, isn't it?” called a voice from behind another stand.
         Steve looked around the market, at the eyes, some mischievous, others deadpan, watching him from stands and stalls and pulled his white handkerchief from his pocket, waving it in mock surrender. “Besieged from all sides! Retreat, I say. Retreat!”
         “Penguin bar?”
         “Sounds good to me.”
         Entering the bar, Steve had a brief, nervous look for Albert and saw, to his relief, he wasn't there. Once seated, drinks before them,  he looked Pamela in the eyes. “So what's all this about?”
         “What if I was to tell you the answer's part of the payment?”
         “What if I wanted a downpayment, just to show a bit of faith?”
         “Hum.” She looked thoughtfully ceilingwards, chin poised on steepled fingers. “Well...”
         “Even if just a couple of answers.” 
         “Oh, Steve, Steve.” She gave him a smile that made him grip the table, just so he didn't reach out to her.  “You're coming over in four days...”
         “Three.”
         “Four would be better. Please.  But I promise you one thing. Before then, your questions will begin to be answered.” 
         Steve looked at her, saw the warning in her eyes and changed his mind. Battening the hatches on the questions boiling in his brain, he joined in the flood of feminine inconsequentialities and gentle, sunlit laughter that buoyed him through the meal. 

He sat in the Starseat attached to the telescope in his observatory that evening, not looking at any particular part of the sky, just scanning the starfields and wondering at all that was out there. And thinking of all the races who must so effortlessly be traversing their depths, while one small bunch of pointless protoplasms beat their chest about reaching their own moon on overgrown fireworks. He'd glanced at the website.  The flare had retreated.  Everything looked as though it had never happened. But he couldn't help wondering what chaos that flare had left in its wake.
         Burying himself in mind-filling repairwork, he began clearing the piles filling the benches. Two days later, he found to his astonishment he'd actually recouped over two-thirds of the £400 the compression chambers had cost. And, in the process, he'd cost a large amount of woodlice their homes. Benches clear, he painted himself a couple of large signs: “To Do” and “Done” and pinned them up so the DONE sign had  by far the larger area.  “There.” he said, standing back to look at them. “And if THAT don't give you the incentive to actually work for a living, Steve m'lad...”
         Before he went to bed that night, he gave the starfields a last, cursory scan, but the only movement was a stray asteroid, and no sounds touched him.  Sighing, he closed down the computer and padlocked the door behind him.
         The third day dawned with the sky clear as an inverted sea. Wavetop cloudlets scudded past, the sun refracting its own image from crisp ice-crystals.  No music. No signs. “And yet she said I'd be getting answers... Steve, hold your horses. If she says there'll be answers, the answers will come.” But as the day unwound, he found it harder and harder not to just go up to her house to see what was happening there. 
         At four o'clock, the winter sun already low in the sky, he felt a surreal stirring in the backwaters of his brain.  It wasn't the Music. But neither was it a thought. He analysed it, and shivered.  “If my mind was earth, that would be a worm passing through it. What the heck...” Completely unbidden, a picture of the Hill rose to fill his thoughts. “Steve, she said there'd be answers. Could this be the start?” He felt a second shiver, one of mixed expectation and disbelief.  Filling the van with that day's repairwork, he closed an hour early and returned home to ready his wings. 

         Hang-glider prepared but not yet worn, he stood at the hill's top and watched the gulls. A pilot had told him to do this while he'd still been learning, and it was sage advice. Seeing them bank, soar, rise and spill wind to fall told him more about how the thermals and aircurrents around the hill were behaving than any of the computerised monitors he'd seen other glider pilots use. He was convinced birds could physically see thermals and, as he was as blind as any human to wind, he'd learned to follow their lead. 
         He shrugged his glider straps on, checked all were in place. Then, disdaining as always to use wheels, he raced lightly down the hill and stepped out into space. 
         The exhilaration of flight spilled Earth thoughts from him, leaving his mind open to fluctuations of wind, to the gulls soaring around him, their calls briefly acknowledging him as one of their own. Laughing and mimicking their calls as best he could, he rose on thermals with them, looking down at the stickmen on the distant hill who'd gathered to watch him rise. 
         He gasped as he saw Pamela's house was fully lit, both upstairs and down. Remembering the lack of a stairlift, he could think of only two reasons for all the lights: a home-help or another visitor. Home-helps were, he knew, notorious for leaving everything on until the moment of their departure. And why would a visitor want to turn on all the lights? Unless...
         Could this be one of the answers? If so, what was it trying to tell him? Spiralling higher still, he began current-skipping.  Like a stone skimmed across water, he spiralled towrds Pamela's house.
         The sky was darkening rapidly. The brief crowd had dispersed, the chill air sending them home. Sunset was a threadbare redness scarring the horizon's edge. The moon was a prisoner in a storm's eye cell of clouds, many miles overhead.
         And the Sounds hit him, all nerves screaming.  As though struck, he tumbled earthwards. Training and discipline cut in and he slowly re-ascended, but the Sounds were overpowering, shaking him, so bright that when he blinked they left after-images on the inside of his brain. He watched the stars, new-birthing through the clouds, and knew with utter certainty what he was about to see. 
         The first Sphere appeared, passing before the moon as the day's last dregs died. Before him, on the edge of the steering bar, he'd rigged a stand that held a pair of the strongest binoculars he could buy.  Looking through these, he watched the Sphere's  colours change from golden to amber to the red of a nova's embers. And as always, behind the colours, the faint, faint outlines he was certain were those of the travellers, within. 
         As it approached, so its music became an individual magnificence, though its tune was only one of several...
         Of many. For the second time in less than half an hour, Steve nearly lost control of his hang-glider. Sphere after sphere flared, each bringing its own music. Some were brash and confident, some more wistful and one there was whose cry was so lonely Steve spiralled up as close as he could towards it, to give it company on the last moments of its flight.  For he really felt he was part of their group, even though he knew they were many hundreds of miles above him still.  But the glory of their songs lifted him to heights he'd never have dared in saner moments, and he truly felt one with them as they drifted inland.
         And poised themselves over Pamela's house.
         And winked out, one by one, like crushed candleflames.
         The last note brusquely silenced, he was left with the rush of the wind, the call of the gulls and the questions hammering through his mind. 

         Parking outside his gate, he tucked his folded glider under his arm and wandered slowly indoors. Pamela had known all about them. Was part of them, whatever they were. Memories of every bug-eyed-monster spectacular he'd ever seen welled up inside him and he firmly pushed them aside.  He couldn't make himself believe that Pamela's body was the home of a hermit-crab alien. The idea was ludicrous. 
         But those from the spheres? What were they? And why was she mixed up with them? And where the heck had the craft gone to, over her house? These and other questions plagued sleep from him. Whenever sleep refused to come, there was only one sure cure. 
         Placing the hang-glider in its hall cupboard, he went to the observatory and spent the night just trawling the starfields for anything that moved.  Asteroids, meteors and comets he identified on computer charts and ignored.  But every so often there was a distant, purposeful speck he couldn't find on any of the charts.  These he placed and labelled on a set of charts of his own.  Some would return, one day. Others never did.  All kept him looking at the skies, and wondering. 

         The morning found Steve slumped over his charts, sleeping. A gull, more daring than its brethren outside, hovered through the door, up to the plate that had contained his supper, pecked at the remnants and flew out cawing in fear as it fell and crashed.
         “What the...” Steve jerked awake and looked around, expecting to see the walls of his bedroom, disorientated when he realised they wern't there.  Catching sight of the telescope, he remembered where he was, and why.  “There must have been twelve of them. Fourteen, maybe. So many. So beautiful.”  And all disappearing over Pamela's house.  He ran his fingers through his hair, furious with curiosity.  What was happening up there? She owed him money. He could go up there for it, have a look around.  What was stopping him? He glanced at his watch.  “Half past eight. That's what's stopping you, Twitfeatures! Heck, her help won't even have got her up yet.” And having a wheelchair bounced, quite rightfully, off his head would do nothing for interpersonal relationships. “Get that load of repairs to the shop. Stay open till lunch. Then go up there.  How does that sound, Steve?”
         Like four and a half years between then and 1pm, not four and a half hours.  That's how it sounded.  Filling his arms with completed repairs, he frogmarched himself towards the van.
         Time passed so slowly he nearly took a circuit tester to his shopclock's battery, just to make certain it was working. Customers, most on zimmer frames, shuffled in, passed the time with pointless fatuosities and shuffled out, carrier bags clutched like Christmas presents in birdclaw grips. As the last one left, he shook his head. “Just GOTTA get myself a younger client base. The rate this lot are going they'll get terminal heart-failure if I dare raise my prices by two red cents!” He glanced, not for the first time, at the clock. Twelve fifteen.  Cursing it roundly for a lazy heap of rusting cogs, he mooched back down behind his counter. 
         And left the shop with jack-in-the-box alacrity, the moment one o'clock struck. 
         He saw Pamela sitting outside the house as he parked, almost as though she'd known he'd be coming then. As he walked up the drive, he noticed something about the windows on the left side of the house. They were opaque. Even though you could see the light on in the rooms behind them, you couldn't see through them.
         Pamela followed his gaze and smiled a maddeningly mysterious smile. “Don't worry, Steve, the answers are coming.  The thing is, are you going to like them?”
         “Pam...” But she'd flicked her wheelchair up the small step and into the hallway.  Shaking his head in frustration, he followed her. 
         The hall seemed different to him, but it took a few moments thinking to realise why. Then he remembered the last time he'd seen it, the hooks on the wall had been filled with coats. Now, they were bare.  The door to the living room was half open. Glancing inside he saw that this, too, was bare, the tallboys gone, the only furniture the makeshift bed.  He turned and looked at Pamela who's face was completely deadpan, save for the mischief in her eyes.  “Gone. The furniture... the coats... You moving out, then?”
         “Oh, Steve.  You don't mean to say you need customers so much you want me to stay?”
         “Well... er...”
         “I mean, that's all I am, isn't it? Just another customer who owes you money. Though quite a good one, judging from the others I've seen in your shop.”
         What was she? The source of the answers he'd been chasing for more than a decade? A mystery in an old house, waiting to be solved? Were that, and the money she owed him, the only reasons he'd been watching the clock until the moment came to see her? Were they the only reasons he'd been seeing her?
         Something outside of him made him lift her from the wheelchair and gather her to him. She snuggled in his arms as though she'd belonged there always. Their lips touched and, as though on cue, the sounds of the Spheres echoed around them. But this time there was no sadness, just a triumphant jubilation of sound. As he kissed her, Steve felt the sounds rise through them, joining them. And for a moment, he truly felt he could stride the stars.
         “Mmm... Put me down, now, Steve.”  He lowered her back into her wheelchair and she pulled a comically wry face.
         “Sack of potatoes?” Steve asked, sadly.
         “Sack of porcelain. I s'pose you're learning!” She gave him a smile of pure openness and he swore, to himself, he'd never do anything to betray the trust that smile showed.  “You've given me one of my answers.  Now, I'm going to give you yours.”
         “Hokay! Let's start with...”
         “Steve, I want you to go up the stairs. Pull back the curtain covering the window on the half-landing. And try not to scream!”
         “Try not to...?”
         “Go on.”
         Slowly, he climbed the stairs. Taking the drawstring, he pulled the curtains aside.  The first thing he noticed in the room behind the massively thick window were his double-barrels, neatly stacked against the side wall.  But the rest of the room...
         A deep, central indentation in the floor glowed red.  Above it, hovering in the upcurrents' heat, were sheets of... netting? But they moved, gathering the warmth. Living netting? A tendril tapped the glass and Steve leaped back, looking for whatever it belonged to.  But it was covered with leaves and could almost have been ivy, except ivy didn't crawl towards red-hot craters. Or lower itself into them, transmitting the heat through the veins of its leaves until they glowed like burnished rubies. 
         A spill of phosphorescence caught the corner of his eye.  A wave of tiny shapes that had to be insects, fragmented neon glows  that swept across the room.  The nets swooped from the thermals above the fire-crater to feast on them, but so thick was the wave that the mass was barely dented. In the shadows, in the room's corner, Something scuttled, only to be grabbed by a wide, flat paw that broke it neatly in half before drawing it back into the hidden corners, leaving only a thick, green stain that, Steve supposed, was the first creature's blood. 
         Steve's own face leered out at him through the window, distorting and silently gibbering. 
         This was the final straw. With a scream that would have given a banshee respectful pause, he span and headed down the stairs. 
         “I thought you promised not to scream.”
         Steve buried his face in his hands and sank down on the third-from-last stair, taking breath after deep, restorative breath.  When he felt he could face the world - the real world? - he rubbed his eyes and looked up. “That last bit got to me.”
         “That was a mirrorsnake. It's actually totally harmless, unless you're something marked Lunch. It relies on the fact most predators are scared of their own kind and just reflects their own faces back at them.”
         “I know where they come from.”
         Pamela's smile widened. “You know, Steve, of all the people I've seen here you're the only one I'd believe who said that. Tell me.”
         “From a world orbiting a star a few thousand lightyears away. A flare star, that decided to scratch its own planets with a finger of flame.”
         “That's a lovely way of putting it, Steve. And you're right.  That's exactly where they're from.”
         “And you knew that was going to happen. Didn't you. That's why you needed...”
         “An old, secluded house, to store as many of the creatures from that world as we could, as quickly as we could.”
         “And my pressure chambers helped bring them here, because their world has a stronger gravity than mine?”
         “Yes, Steve. They did. Many, many trips.  You've seen just a fraction of all that's behind that window.  And talking about windows...” Wheeling herself into the kitchen, she pulled the drawstring that opened the curtains on the window in the far wall. 
         Steve saw a lagoon. Which was impossible, for not only were they on a hillside but this part of the hill was directly over the town.  But this didn't occur to him.  His mind, his sight, were filled with the seven golden spheres that floated on a lagoon that couldn't be there, under a sun that was far more distant, and far fiercer, than the one outside the front door. 
         “But... I'm not pretending to understand all this, but.... are you human?”
         Pamela threw back her head and laughed.  “Oh, no.  Behind this rubber mask is a metal face, bent on destroying the Earth.”
         And Steve joined in with her laughter, warm and rich. Everything, the lagoon outside, even the creatures upstairs, somehow felt right. It was the world beyond the front door that felt strange, and alien. “How did you get mixed up with... all this?”
         Pamela opened the side door.  The different sun's heat invigorated him, and the strange cries had him looking for the creatures making them. “Because, as you've always known, I can hear the spheres, too.” She gestured. In the golden spheres, portals were opening. And coming through the portals...
         “Don't worry, Steve. They're friends.”
         “And I'm a part of... all this, now?”
         “Do you want to be?”
         He nodded, suddenly certain. “More than anything. More than everything!”
         “I knew it, Steve. I knew I was right about you.” Eagerly, she rolled down the deep, rich grassland. “I know you can fly. Let's see if you can sail the stars.”
         Steve caught up with her and held the wheelchair's handles, guiding her to where the Others were waiting.