by Tanith Lee
Although he talked, I didn’t understand most of what he said. None of us did, but for my father.
The doctor chewed gum; that was the mint smell. He left some for us all. It was good, but after you chewed for a while, it was only like chewing old bread that wouldn’t ever go soft.
In the night, in the deep shadow-feel of night, my sister, the sixth daughter, who is only two years older than me, said, “In the temple – was there anything there?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Liar,” said my sister. “Just because the doctor came from the city. They always put you first. Little show-off.” (She didn’t say that, but that was what it meant.) And she hit me, under the covering. “Was there anything? Eh, Meera?”
“No,” I said. “No.”
I could hear my mother crying softly. When my sister slept, my father said to my mother, “The doctor says there is a good chance. But we have to wait.”
Once or twice in the past, doctors had examined my eyes. What were eyes, anyway? You see, then, eyes didn’t mean much to me.
That night I did something bad. I got up, and went out, and through the village, and into the forest. Our word for the forest isn’t like forest. It means something more wild, greater, full of winds and beasts and huge trees. And secrets.
I wasn’t afraid. You see, I had a dream, and in the dream, I saw the glowing thing, moving in its pattern.
I saw it.
Well, if you were an elephant and had never had a trunk; but one day, just for a minute, in a certain place, you had a trunk –
I went back through the forest and found the temple by its smell and the feel of its stone, and the sense of its heaviness.
Inside, I climbed up. The bats were awake too, and the creeper seemed to be. I knew the way now to the tank of water. I stood there and felt the starlight through the cleared trees, and starlight feels just how it looks. I suppose, everything does.
After a while, she came.
Yes, it was a she. I knew, for she was like me. She was small, and she was wrapped in clothes, and even so, her legs could be glimpsed, moving, and her pattern that was a dance. Her hair shook out, and bracelets jangled on her wrists, but I couldn’t hear them. I could see them.
I said, “I came back, lady.” I wanted to be polite. “I didn’t bring you anything, I didn’t know if you’d like anything – except this packet of mint chewing gum. I’ll leave it here.”
But she only danced. She didn’t seem to care about the gum
She danced, she must have done, for hours. And I sat in the chilly night on the cold marble, and watched. I watched. The blind one, seeing.
And then, probably, the morning started, for a warmth came that would be a colour, and birds called.
And then she danced towards me, and I stood up.
I know when you read this, you’ll say, Meera, it’s a ghost story. But it isn’t frightening. Silly Meera!
But it wasn’t. Not frightening. Even though she came so close, the glow of her filled all my – all my sight. So it was just one glowing blue flame in my head. Except I didn’t know then, the look of flames or blue.
She made no sound. There was no scent or touch.
But she must have passed right over me, or through me. Because after that she was gone.
I got up stiff and cold, and walked back through the forest, and in the village I pretended I had only gone to pick the flowers by the roadside that my mother likes and that I had smelled growing there.
When I gave her the flowers, she burst out crying.
“Oh Meera, my baby. My poor little Meera.”
My oldest sister is to be married soon. Only she wasn’t jealous.
After my mother let me go, they came, one by one and pinched me, and one pulled my hair.
I felt so sleepy, and there was no time now to sleep. I knew I mustn’t go back to the temple.
When I was fetching water, Ranjish threw a stone at me, because he had been beaten.
That evening, to everyone’s surprise, the doctor came back. He said he would drive my mother and me straight to the station in the town next day. Then we would all go to the city, and they would change my eyes.
“There’s every chance,” he said. He kept saying that. He had brought sweets and coffee. Everyone got happy.
Except me. I was scared.
Outside, I could hear the old women whispering about knives.
The train was hot and horrible. It lasted a day. We got out sometimes to refresh ourselves. You would say, to use the toilet, which was a bush. There was some nice orange drink, very sweet.
My mother held me. She would hardly let go.
In the hospital it was cool and fans like great buzzing flies blew round and round.
Everyone was kind. They made me go to sleep. When I woke up I was sore, my eyes were sore, I could feel them. I was covered in bandages and yet, something was quite different.
I won’t describe it all, because I’m not writing about that. You came to visit me after the bandages were off and everything had changed.
At first, only shapes, and then the shapes were clear. So this is a hand. And this is a foot. And there was so much movement and light and – colour. I know I would have been frightened more than I could bear, at first, if I hadn’t ever seen before. But I had. I’d seen – her.
I didn’t tell you about her. You brought me the furry cat toy, pale like you and dark like me. I liked him. You told me about this school. You said, in English, I was “Bright”. What a strange word. Bright. Like a fire. Or the moon. Or your dress.
I knew, when I went home, they would sit and look at me, all my sisters, and hate me, in a row. Except the oldest, who is going to be married. And she’d say, “Look, Meera can be married now.” But my father would say proudly, “Meera is at school and will be a doctor.” My mother would clasp her hands. Which will be worth a lot of pinching.
But my father said Ranjish has gone away with his uncle. My father wore his tie, when he said it. It is red.
When I saw myself in a mirror, I laughed. There I was. How wonderful I was, like everyone and everything else.
When I go home, I don’t want to go back to the temple, because I know I won’t see anything there at all. I only saw her because I was blind.
That’s why I want the ruler, you see. Because I never saw a tiger, and there aren’t many tigers now, in the forest. And so I’d like to look at the tiger on the ruler. Probably I’ll never see another one.
But only give me the ruler if you think I deserve it. And if you don’t believe my story, I don’t mind. Because I know it’s true. As true as the forest and the train and the city and seeing and my cat.
Meera.
Meera. I’ve given you a high mark, and you shall have the ruler. Now I want to tell you a story, too.
The temple in the jungle by your village was visited long ago, a hundred years or more, before the trees hid it.
It is said to be haunted, by a dancing girl. I read this in the library this afternoon, and I’ll show you the book. It’s in English, but your English is so good, you can easily read it.
The dancing girl haunts the temple because she was so happy there. She died when she was ten – one year younger than you are now. We believe, don’t we, she will have gone to another place, and been born again as someone else. So this isn’t really a ghost – more a very happy memory.
You see, Meera, she was born blind, but her dancing was wonderful, and it pleased the gods. People still hear her laughing sometimes, in the temple, or the sound of her bracelets, or they smell her perfume, or feel her brush by.
No one has ever seen her – but you.
The Sky Won’t Listen
“...by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts... at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some
indiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space... forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.”
—Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
“He prayeth best, who loveth best.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
1. Grey in High Egypt
My name’s Maud Ruby.
I’m old now, but when young my long hair was red, quite a showy red too. Ruby comes from this, while Maud goes back to an ancestor of mine on Oldearth.
She wouldn’t know me, I doubt she would, out here among the New Planets. Come to that, I don’t really know myself. They tell you that you’ll get to know yourself better as you age up. But I knew myself better when I was twenty-five, or forty – that redhead who drank white wine and worked at Stargaze. This other one I live in now, who’s she?
I was sitting in a casbar called The Silk Market and drinking more than wine, as now I do. The place was fetchingly decorated in black, silver, grey, pink and damson, to match the geography and skies of the planet. Most of the city of High Egypt is like that, and by day you could hardly make it out from the surrounding terrain. They seemed to tint the local fauna too. Pink pigeons roosted on 4th Walk, by the canal they call High Nile. The people favoured the same colours. Even I toned, dressed in my pale skin, by now chopped-at-the-shoulders grey hair, and black clothes. Not my liver, maybe. That will be gamboge, I guess.
While I drank I waited for a message from Apharis, but the little LT stayed blank. So I looked about at the other drinkers, and wondered if any of them had ever heard of Lir McCloud, the ballineer.
Then they were staring out one of the windows. So I stared out too.
There was a whale in the sky.
I hadn’t seen any till then, and this was a large example, and passing over quite low. Earth-ocean whales are beautiful enough, once you can mentally cope with the idea of their sheer size. The sea Whalons of Titanus are even more impressive, if less aesthetically so. But the Ballin sky whales of New Planet Z/d7 are one of the wonders of worlds. Apparently similar in many ways to the earth type of spermaton, they’re easily that size once described as big as islands. Covered with scars, aerial barnacles and other tropo-stratospheric funguses, from a reasonable distance they look wet-sleek as a satin evening-glove. In colour they range from plum or puce to thunder-black. They gleam and shimmer, moving with unforgivably incomparable grace, through the shoals of pollution junk-cloud, storm out-banks, and occasional wary off-course aircraft. When, as this one had, they sail down low, the flocks of pigeons and flits disperse in tea-leaf showers before them. The whales of Z/d7 don’t feed on birds or planes. They suck and nibble nutrients from the cumulus and drink the unborn rain. They never fight that anyone knows, and they mate and birth up there. They only touch ground when they die, and for that they seek the open deserts. Unaggressive giants, they seem never to aim to do harm. And even fifty years ago they were only hunted by pioneers for the sake of their skins that, when treated after death, glow lamplike in the dark, or for the whale-ivory of their hollow bones, which make musical instruments of such sweet clarity.
Not a sound in the casbar but for the clink of glasses or rattle of auto-dice from the casino room. Then someone swore. “The soonest they move those fucking critters outta here the better. Ruining this bloody town.”
No one either challenged or agreed. (From what I’d read or seen, opinion was evenly split).
Nevertheless the guy swung his thick neck around to see if anyone might.
I wasn’t quick enough to duck. He tramped right over.
“Damn fuck whales oughta be shot down. Oh yeah yeah, I know IRS1 are rounding up whale pods, relocating them – so what’s holding everything up? Fancy word that, relocate. But to where? That’s what I wanna know. Basinopolis? Clovial Peak? Huh?”
“Mmm,” I said.
“And two-thirds of ‘em to get relocated. How about three-thirds?’
Something moved in my mind. I’m so used to it by now. Not like my training days at Stargaze, when sometimes it wouldn’t, then it might, or not. Now, reliable as breathing. Mindscape.
I saw the big boy’s jaw slacken and his eyes go cloudy as hate drained from them. Quietly I said, “And how about you have a nice day?”
“Sure... sure –” He lurched off into the casino.
In the sky the beautiful colossus had drifted toward the horizon. A light unseasonal spat of hail scattered on High Egypt – whale weather. For they did harm after all, the whales.
They disturbed the cloud masses when they passed low, the ionosphere when they moved up, and all points of the atmos in between. A small, peripatetic pod doesn’t matter, its effect is negligible. But the concentration of whale-kind gathering and loitering above the cities was by now intense – pods of one to two thousand, which en masse put out the light of the sun. Given time, Ballin wreck the local tropo-stratosphere. Then come freak storms, droughts, flood-rains, acid snows, sky-debris of several alien sorts. This had happened already at Basinopolis and Clovial.
Why the whales were attracted to centres of humanity no one figured. Men had never been their friends in the past. As I said, they were hunted through the skies, and in those days High Egypt was the prime whaler port.
I glanced at the LT; still no message.
I ordered another drink.
Wish I’s in High Egypt
How happy I ud be—
Ev ‘body know High Egypt you
Can pick the money offa tree—
All day long
The sun is strong
All through a night
The ‘ol casbars is alight
An ‘ their music playing –
H’Egypt issa place for me.
I’d heard some of the old whaleship songs in the archive. Rendered in voices of gravel and smoke. Sad, silly, bawdy – and workmanlike to haul up a grav anchor by. Like all sailors on all ocean worlds, even in the vast ocean of space, they always wanted to be in some town when they were at sea, or at sea when they were home. Most of us are like this, one way and another. We want to be somewhere else. Even the future or back in the past. Some of us even hanker for the next life, if there is one. And if there is, when we get there maybe we crave to get back here.
Unlike men, the Ballin don’t sing or make any communicative noise.
The message had come, and sunset was starting as I walked out to the docks. Magenta curtains closed the western mountains as far and further than Sphinx Ridge. But eastwards, north and True North (Z/d7 has two norths), the sky would stay icy white for another hour.
There were more whales passing, a pod-battalion this time, about two hundred. These animals swam higher. And along with others on the moving sidewalk, I gazed up. Nobody now made any comment.
One of the two moons rose, roughly east and barely visible.
Lights were coming on all around. After dark the camouflaged city showed up after all, outlined in the diamanté of fy-neon, like the song says. Two sides to everything.
They were tall, young and handsome people, the Indigenous Rescue Service crew of Spanish Lady.
The vessel herself was of the usual aerial small-craft type, modern and streamlined, an enclosed disc with just the central sail-vein mast projected upward to take prevailing winds. The old vessels that sailed such planet skies as these had been quite unlike. And though they would have recognised, probably, something like Spanish Lady, they wouldn’t have liked her much. The whaleships were made to a more romantic programme, and besides not above disabling each other in order to get their cargo to port first.
Captains Apharis and Jenx led me straight to the Captains’ Cabin, where we cracked a bottle of mauve sub-Lyran gin.
There wasn’t much small talk. Their job was to carefully capture in air-nets and safely rel
ocate whales to uncolonised areas of this big planet. But something had been preventing their work. And to deal with that would be the job which was mine.
I said, “So this is all about Lir McCloud.”
I’d read the relevant records, of which there were few.
Apharis shrugged. “You’ve seen the damage hologs on our ships.”
“Two vessels clipped, and one emergency landing. He fired on you?”
“Yes. But.”
Jenx said, “He can’t fire on us... can he?”
“Perhaps. What happened?”
They told me. The other ship had sprung from nowhere. Then the blast of fire – of course ineffectual – yet somehow two of the IRS craft were winged. The third one was tipped out of the sky.
“A form of Psy-kenesis,” I said. “Luckily rare. It isn’t physical, but can pack a punch.”
They nodded, respectfully convinced.
Startling. Decades back I used to be well-known in my own small corners of the universe. But new talent rises. Here and there someone may yet exclaim to me, Say, I read about you in this old book! Astonished I am still alive and walking the worlds.
I informed the captains of what I’d be doing. By then Spanish Lady’s gravs had warmed to full power. I watched as we made lift-up through the ice sky and the fading purple, into a darkness where the city lost its glare, and instead the bright wasps of stars had left their silver-swollen stings.
What was hampering the rescue operation at High Egypt was a NAATH.2 That is a recurrent, quasi-physical ghost. In form, it was a manned antique on-planet whaling vessel, the kind that had cruised these skies fifty to a hundred years before. Already the IRS, well read in Oldearth yarns, had christened her the Flying Dutchman. Her real name however, which all three menaced crews had noted, was Perilune.
Jenx, to look at, reminded me fleetingly of my second lover – I only ever had three true lovers in all my long years. Now, obviously, Jenx was much too young. At my age, (maybe I’m lucky), I can admire, but don’t fancy young men. Conversely they present to me as those sons or nephews I never had or wanted, yet now can sometimes be momentarily fond of. What I am saying is, and at this point I feel bound to say it, I’d ceased ever to fall in love by the time I was sixty-two, and on Z/d7 I was seventy.