Maddie stood with her feet planted in the sand, squinting up at me. She was wearing shorts and a poncho, which was a bizarre enough combination anyway, but these garments were clearly homemade. She gave the impression of a blonde doll dressed in clothes inexpertly stitched together by a five year-old.
“David, I hope I’m not interrupting—”
“Come on in. I’ll give you a guided tour.”
She climbed the ramp and stepped into what had been the airlock, peering around her in fascination.
“This is the very first time I’ve ever been in a spaceship,” she said.
I gave her a quick tour and finished in the lounge. “And this is where I spend most of the time.”
She looked around. “You’ve got it looking very homely, David. I like the wall hangings.”
“Imported all the way from the colony world of Iachimo. They depict moonset over Landfall canyon.”
“You lived there?”
“I spent a couple of weeks on Iachimo, years ago. The Telemass trip almost killed me.”
“But it didn’t put you off ‘massing to Chalcedony?”
I shrugged. “I’d heard a lot about the planet,” I said. And my need to get away from Earth had outweighed the fear of the Telemass process.
She pointed to the sofas ranged before the long viewscreen. “I like the effect of domestic things like the sofas and bookcases on the bridge of a starship. It works.”
“Thanks. Beer?”
“Love one.”
I slipped to the galley and came back with two beers. I poured Maddie’s into her own mug, which she pulled from her shoulder bag. She had seated herself, taking the precaution of spreading a piece of cloth to ensure that her bare legs didn’t come into contact with the cushion of the sofa.
Her eyes caught on the holocube of a young blonde girl, staring out and laughing at something, that stood on top of the bookcase. “Who is she?” Maddie asked.
I hesitated, then said, “Carrie, my daughter.”
“She looks a lovely kid.” There was something wistful, almost longing, in her tone. “She’s back on Earth?”
I nodded, trying to think of something to say in order to change the subject.
Relentlessly, she went on, “Will she visit you, David?”
I found myself lying without thinking about it. “I doubt it. My wife is fearful of the Telemass process. She thinks it’d be bad enough if you could make the transition in one jump, but not the four relays it takes to get here from Earth.” I shrugged. “I tried to point out that fatalities were one in a couple of million, but she wouldn’t listen to me.” The bit about Sally’s fears, at least, was true enough.
“Are you and your wife…?”
“Divorced. We parted last year.”
“Were you together long?”
“Ten years. It seems longer. It was such a sizeable and important part of my life.”
“Why did you come to Chalcedony, David? To get away from her?”
“To get away from Earth,” I said, and all the associations that planet held for me. Everything I knew on Earth reminded me of what I’d lost.
I went on, “What about you? Ever married?”
She smiled and shook her head. “No, never.”
“Never met the right person?”
“It’s more than just that,” she began, and stopped.
Into the silence, I said, “What happened?” and immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry. That’s rude. I shouldn’t have—”
“What happened?” She looked up. “You mean, why do I wear these strange clothes, and carry my own mug and cutlery around? Why am I some kind of freak?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that I’m curious. We’re friends, I like to think, and I’d like to know what happened.”
Maddie nodded slowly, staring into her drink. She looked up and said, “This happened way back, on Earth. I was at Cambridge, studying archaeology. This was a few years after the neuro-surgeon Callonezzi discovered the receptor sites in the hypothalamus. Apparently they’d lain dormant in humanity for millennia. At one time they probably played a vital part in our ability to survive… Anyway, he found that this area of the brain, if stimulated, gave the subject a… let’s call it a feeling for the history of things, objects, people, whatever. Only a mild feeling, a kind of vague empathy, an intuition. Obviously this had great potential in many fields—criminal investigations, personnel recruitment, art history—”
“And archaeology?” I said.
She smiled at me. “And archaeology. Just imagine having the ability to actually hold an ancient object and feel something of its history, its life: who owned it, what it had been used for. And skulls, David; the Callonezzi Process would allow archaeologists to touch the bones of the dead and reconstruct their lives… It was just too great an opportunity for a high-flying research graduate to miss.”
She fell silent, staring through the viewscreen at the bay but seeing what had happened all those years ago.
“So you went for it?”
“How could I refuse? I met others who had had the operation and they said it was like being suddenly granted another sense, one which they found impossible to believe they’d lived without for all their lives. I was young and ambitious—I wanted to learn everything. I wanted to know the secrets of history which until now had been beyond our reach. So I had the cut.”
“What went wrong?”
Her pale blue eyes seemed to die for a moment. “It was too successful. The operation gave me the ability, but something in the order of a thousand times more powerful than any previous subject. It opened me up to everything. Imagine that, David—imagine if everything around you, everything with human associations, gave off a jolt like an electric shock. When I accidentally touch something, I can feel the emotions of everyone who touched it before me, a dizzying emotional kaleidoscope that very nearly drives me insane.”
I gestured feebly. “Couldn’t they… I don’t know, reverse the operation, do something to damp down the effect?”
She smiled. “They did, and it worked. That was the terrible thing. I woke up after the first operation, and it was as if the world were on fire. Everything I touched screamed its history at me. The pain was unbearable. So Callonezzi and his team operated again, and damped down the effect. And this is the result. If I were to reach out and touch you, I’d feel your pain…” She looked at me, intuitively. “Your loss. The same if I were to touch something you’d touched. We imprint our emotional signature on everything around us, David, but thankfully most people can’t pick up these signals.”
I shrugged. “Isn’t it a bit like what Matt does, imprinting his emotions on those crystals?”
Maddie smiled at me. “I guess we’re all mood artists, David, in our own way. For me, it’s as if everything ever touched by human hands is as powerful as one of Matt’s crystals.”
“I can’t begin to understand what it must be like for you,” I began. “I’ve got used to it, over the years. Nearly twenty now. It’s okay if I’m careful, take precautions. But the worst thing…” She stopped.
“People,” I whispered. “You can’t touch people.”
“Can you imagine what that’s like, to crave physical contact with those you love, skin to skin, and to be denied the experience?”
I shook my head and murmured some platitude.
“Isn’t it ironical? The process that should have made me more receptive to the world, to the people around me, has had the opposite effect. It’s isolated me from everything.” She took a long swallow of beer and laughed. “Listen to me. Here I am, unloading all this rubbish on you.”
“I did ask, Maddie. I wanted to know.”
She sighed. “I’m fine most of the time. I have some great friends. Matt and Hawk. They’re good people. I just wish…”
“Maddie, I understand.”