by Tanith Lee
We were all on the bridge. Huge view ports made a half-ring, piercing the ship with ovals of shielded night. The solitary moon, white at last, made the upper atmos a miracle. The sheer glamour of the spatial skies leaves unmoved merely the blind or the fool. Seas are the same, surely. The physical worlds are the only way mankind can know the mystery of an unphysical God, until – or if.
Not a single Ballin was now to be seen.
“Empty air,” said Apharis, very low. “That’s usually been when –”
“What’s that?”
“Ah,” said Apharis. “Shit.”
Every alarm on the bridge echoed her in shrill antiphony.
2. The Open Skies
She came out of a moonlit cloud. She hadn’t been there, then she was. It was like looking at a holog made from an antiquarian photograph. Somewhere in my brain (the brain back-rooms, where the technicalities are evaluated and processed), I knew the two great masts full of sail were equipped with ethallic stras’ls, that it was the cranky grav engines gave off that choking chugging; that the elevation of the vessel’s nose was her prow, complete with daggered sprit. But my mind, my eyes saw only the shining shell, the exact curves of the sailage. Certainly she was physical, sufficiently physical that she seemed entirely real and of that moment. She glowed in strangely neutral shades of colour – pastel sand, tired dust. Her name was scored on her side in an old-time font: Perilune. And the moon lit her to a pale pearl, like the ion clouds of the highest sky.
My mind was already pursuing its trained function. I’d noted men on her upper deck. The old ships, particularly whalers, weren’t entirely closed. Rather like the ancient submarine of Oldearth, they could shut off their below-decks, if an ascent was made through or above the planet’s ozone layer, but generally the top deck was in use.
Images. The crew of the ghost were shadows. Just there – or there – a flash of movement, glitter-flick of eyes or earring.
Even so, the entirely shut bridge of Spanish Lady reeked with the high-ozone discharge of an early grav-ship.
My inner mind slipped free of me. It uncoiled through the physical barriers of self and rescue ship. It ribboned like a whaler’s harpoon-line across the gap, and fastened.
And so I found him. Lir McCloud.
His Oldearth ancestry (the archive) was Celtic, and he had retained the name, maybe amused at its new relevance. I couldn’t, of course, see him as such. He was, like the rest, a shadow. But my mind – my mind touched him. My mind was trained and well-practiced in the art. Yet never before had it contacted anything, anyone, of this kind. It wasn’t that he was dead, a remnant left hovering in limbo. I have contacted those. The oddity of this contact was – him. Or me. Me with him. Different. Like touching heat and cold, unalike, identical.
The NAATH ship had previously used her guns against IRS vessels. Being Psy-ken, the blow caused harm. Lady’s shields were fully raised.
I had sensed inside his mind, that is, this afterimage of his mind that death had somehow marooned in the living world, the mental stain of the past. The flavour of Lir McCloud was restrained yet violent anger, bitter blame and self-denigration, despair.
He had registered, aged sixteen, as a freelance ballineer and novice harper, or harpooneer. Aged thirty-eight, and until then a successful captain, he had disappeared, and certainly died, along with his current ship, somewhere between outer-system space and the planet’s F3 atmos layer. None of his crew were with him then. It seemed he’d driven them to mutiny by eccentric behaviour. But not one had left more testimony than that, and McCloud no testimony at all.
Now the ghost vessel floated there and the single moonlight dripped through her bones. Bit by bit, like wood in flame, she was eaten away, until she – and he, and all those shadows – were gone.
No one stopped me as I went to my cabin. Door closed, I used the auto to lock it and put out the lights.
Perilune might have fired, but she hadn’t. She hadn’t come for that. Her appearance was both a proof and an invitation. Not essentially to me, perhaps, but to someone. Now and then a mindscaper will encounter such a thing, and in my long career never before had I done so. And I’d been young then, physically fit, stronger, and, if less wise, also with less of the doubts all knowledge may bring.
Mindscape. I’d better put this down, in case someone reading this misunderstands the term; many do. To mindscape isn’t essentially to recreate mentally or otherwise, (though that may be entailed), some view, or non-actual place. Entire, the term should read mind-escape, mind-escaper. To get free of the fore-brain, even of the excellent encyclopaedic library and lab of the back-brain, and enter instead the physical astral plane of the inner gemynd, that awareness usually unfamiliar to and hidden from the consciousness – save for split seconds of memory or sudden rifts in dream – concealed even from the subconscious, and utterly unknown to the id: the central domain, the open skies where we are as we are. Or, as we have always been, or will come to be, once dislocated from our selves.
Here’s life to the living: long life to the skinners,
Keep um in cash and outa th’jail!
Keep um aloft and burny3 their irons,
And strength in their backs while they follows the whale.
3. Ruby Red
There’s a whale in the sky.
Just one, not so big, about sixty feet in length.
It’s mulberry-purple, and casts a shade on the narrow byway outside the casbar, which isn’t called The Silk Market but The Whale’s Eye.
No one takes any notice tonight. They are used to whales, expect and welcome whales, one or two of which drift over every day or so. Sometimes you get a whole pod – fifteen to twenty creatures. The kids look up at the pods and afterwards play at slinging the stress-iron harpoons, (represented by thin sticks), and for hours not a dog or pigeon is safe in the mountain port of High Egypt.
Not a city yet, H’Egypt would laugh if you told it what it will become, and how decored. It doesn’t try to match the sky. It is just paled dusts, dirty smoke and sand colours, like the houses, or human complexions. And the High Nile Canal is full of garbage.
Inside The Whale’s Eye, however, a pair of beautiful tall fretted lamps goldenly beam day and night with whaleskin luminescence. To keep the light, all you need ever do is rub the skin fragments over every month or so with a little drop of plant oil. Living skin that, stripped from the corpse of a Ballin, never dies. Which accounts for one of the whaler nicknames, skinners. There is a giant, often played, pan-pipes hooked on the bar wall too, made from hollow Ballin bone. Skin and bones are what make the whales of Planet Z/d7 so well worth hunting.
Out at the docks, where the mountain-side crumbles down to Ship Valley, and the vaults of open air wait around and above, some thirty vessels are chained up this evening, prow-noses to land, and their stratos-sails (stras’ls) of ethallic metal closed tight as shut umbrellas to their masts. Ethallic is a mix of stress-steel, galvanized bio-copper and slyve P.9. Anchors of course are made of grain lead, containing cells of magnetic slyvium. Haul, haul her up, with the proper rhythm on the buttons, four anchormen: Here’s life to the living, long life to the skinners, keep um in cash...
Maud is dressed in correct freewoman clothes of the town, where every street or alley is named for a sky ship or whaler captain, or some commodity of the whale. She wears long loose grey pants, tough boots for getting between the plank-built houses and over rocky tracks called maybe Cap Chace Boulevard, and not yet smoothed for sidewalks. Her shirt is clean, and she has two silver earrings, dollars that will be antiques in another thirty years. Her hair’s red, henna red on fox red. She’s aged twenty-five, because returning to the proper time via the navigation of the mindscape, she has retreated forty-five years into the past. This hasn’t happened before. It is his past, when he was thirty-eight, and still alive. He’s the ghost in her present-future. But now, she is the ghost inside the past of Lir McCloud.
Is it good to feel young and fit and fine again, Maud Rub
y? To design an outfit to be seen in? Nice just abstemiously to sip your one schooner glass of cold white wine?
Piercing back like this into the astral-mind place, you always remember, naturally you do as you must, that this isn’t you. It’s projection. That you’re young is – a boon. That’s all.
But it’s here, it’s here and now, and you’re in the midst of it, Maud the Escape Artist, sitting in the casbar called Whale’s Eye, waiting for the captain of the Perilune, his fury, pain, his shadow, his secret self.
The door slams wide.
But it isn’t McCloud, only some roisterers, who are going from joint to joint, playing card-games and diz-wheel, and getting drunk.
Maud gets up and goes out on the sidewalk. Not that Maud need fear any trouble, but there wouldn’t be any from drunks – they treat women alone here with courtesy and respect.
Like the very whale colonies they hunt, the females are in charge ‘at home,’ caring for children, running the port.
The stars blaze over High Egypt, but the town isn’t so well lit as it will be. At the docks the chained ships are lamped by skin, and rock gently on air currents. Maud walks by, and reads their names – Lightgoal, Fin-Chaser, Be Home Tomorrow. The clouds furl over the stars. Both moons are up, one against True North. (Although worlds move, they do so imperceptibly. Aside from animate, or animated things, only sky and water can be seen independently in volition. That is winds and clouds, rivers and tides and oceanic waves.) And other ship names – Racing Girl, Perilune.
“There you are,” he says behind her.
Maud knows his voice. Though she’s never previously heard it. It’s lighter than she would have thought from his dark looks that she sensed, and now turns and sees. Oh, so this guy knows with fore-brain consciousness that they are to meet? That must be unusual.
“Here I am, Captain McCloud.”
“Step aboard,” he says.
But she doesn’t have to. In the manner of an edited movie, or a dream, (which, when sleeping, involuntary mind-escapes can so often be taken for), she’s suddenly on the ship, and already they are hauling the grav anchor in.
Here’s life –
Stars cartwheel.
Seems five whale pods have been spotted, south and east. A couple of adjacent ships have lift-upped and taken off while she watched. No time to lose then, why let some other crew get all the skin. Anchor’s up; in peels the chain.
The twenty great ethallic stras’ls are unbrella-ing out on foremast and main, whining softly as they swivel to catch a brisk night wind. Engines coughing. These early ships make little if any of the sounds of a sea vessel, yet they fill the atmos with their noise. Later that must hush, when hunting. The wash and rush of air across the bows isn’t unlike, perhaps, the thicker splash of waters.
Maud is by the rail on the main deck and adds up the number of the crew. Only twelve men are needed for such a ship; McCloud’s has eleven. Maud knows that on the last night, when he and the ship vanished, he had no crew at all. This then is not the last night. But if so, there should be one man more. The names of his crew were not recorded (lax times). She has read though McCloud himself was well able to raft and use a harper’s iron with great skill. Would a twelfth man be redundant?
He stands on the bridge, and Maud looks up and studies him. That the other sailors see her is unlikely. That is, they won’t see her as anything unusual, mistaking her, (fore-brain coining a quite customary – if wrong – assessment that she’s a part of the ship’s furniture, or one of themselves, or a reflection or optical illusion). There may not anyway be even a rudimentary consciousness left in these shadow-figures, who irresistibly, and non-professionally, remind her of the phantom crew of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. They look mostly solid, but never entirely finite. Her eyes slide off their faces as theirs, if they are at all aware, will off hers. Sometimes ‘ghosts’ like these, which are only a replay of former action, do come with a wisp of awareness. Like a flicker of stray electricity crossing a dead LT screen.
But he, McCloud, is NAATH. He is aware. His type of ghost is neither a recording nor an impulse. It’s a fragment of the human being, left stranded by trauma in a sentient world. (It is this of him that invests the ship, and makes her also dangerous).
Here in his mind-recreated past, he looks as real as living Jenx and Apharis. Much more so, to Maud Ruby, as she studies him. The lean face just starting to show the maturity of thirty-eight years, the arched black brows and large black eyes, whose sight is still sharp as any burny iron. His hair, black thick, long and wavy as shore-weed, is tied back, revealing a strong neck, low, broad, intelligent forehead. He has a sensual mouth, but she thinks the sensuality in him isn’t necessarily sexual. He will like and have women, perhaps men, occasionally. But it’s the ship and the sky and the things he hunts that have his attention now. Maud can imagine him running the unsmooth skins of his kill through battle-calloused fingers. Ballin whales feed on sky; he too in his own fashion.
Standing one instant later behind him on the bridge, she knows he continues to see and hear her. “Tell me about the whales, Captain McCloud.”
“Oh, do you have a hundred years to hear that, then, Redhair?”
“I have all night.”
“But I don’t, you see. We’ve business tonight. Stay close and watch. You’ll learn all you need of them, the Ballin.”
She’s young again. She can’t not feel the excitement. She doesn’t touch him, the back of his coarse-cloth coat, where the wide muscles of his shoulders show, and the play of powerful lungs, enhanced by the thin airs of upper atmos. She looks at the line of his cheekbone, the decided jaw with already returning stubble, the dense black lashes of his dark eye.
“What happens tonight?” she asks softly.
“Before? Or after?”
“So you know it,” she says. And realises she talks a different way here, the rhythmic argot of old High Egypt, and the softer way of her youth. But she has never, in all her multifarious experience, confronted a ‘ghost’ like this one, who answers back, foresees, and culpably joins in.
And she says, “Both, perhaps. But now, just before, perhaps.”
He tells her, without emphasis, looking only out into the now gushing torrent of splitting moon-surfed cloud. “The Mate, Mr. Vemmer, he took sick and couldn’t sail.”
“Which concerns you? Are eleven men too few?”
“Never, not for me.”
“Why then?”
“I know in my heart’s pit – Vemmer isn’t sick. He’s sailing tonight aboard my wife, riding and rolling up there on the top of her and the town, in my bed on Amber Street.”
Despite their resemblance to a phantom crew, McCloud’s ten men work efficiently, just as they must have when alive.
The other harper (harpooneer) is overseeing the two sailless auto-rafts, which can move swiftly and with only the faintest phizz of noise. Each raft will carry three men besides the harper, a frontman, midman, and the lineman at the rear, who must with perfect choreography pay out the harpoons’ quicksilver cords. Two rafts manned will see three men still aboard to shipkeep the mother vessel – sometimes the rafters will leave her far behind, in hunting a whale.
Maud knows all this, has read it up. But reading is one thing. She’ll be in the first raft, a fifth member, if weightless and unapparent to any but McCloud. Her presence, she’s entirely aware, will make no difference either way. For this now is pure replayed mnemonic recording, unchangeable though able to exaggerate.
The raft crews don their eye-shields.
The rafts are birthed like bolts from a bow.
Inside seconds they’ve travelled at least one hundred zers.4 Bracers insulate from the launch-impact Maud hasn’t even felt, but the men grunt dully, used to it, a ritual honoured even by their shades. And now, racing due south, deep vocal silence closes down, to keep the quarry in ignorance of their advance. Only whispers come inside the face shields, hot greedy whispers like those of people aroused and urgent for sex. But
the dirty foreplay is for the Ballin.
Even he whispers with the rest. A kill means money – survival – a place in the world. Has he forgotten his wife, (some woman the records never even mentioned), and First Mate Vemmer, both of whom may also whisper just like this, before man and woman kick and tumble, howling with delight, in the rumpled bed?
OLDEARTH ARCHIVE ISSUE: X2. 06911
BALLIN WHALES (Ref: Z/d7)
Valued, accordingly hunted for:
1. Long-life luminescent hide (providing stripped from corpse, does not rot and is low-maintenance), superior to fy-neon or mercury. Supplies non-toxic, non hyper- G.-W. lighting.
2. Hollow bones (use: music).
3. Form of ambergris (gut) (use: Medicinal: rheumatic and allied conditions. Also in jewellery).
Meat – negligible. It has been estimated a single 90-foot Ballin whale supplies only the equivalent of one large earth-type turkey carcass.
Blubber – none. (Oil is also insignificant.)
Blood – High volatility and evaporable. Diasporous.
(Useless.)
The hunt
They are hunting the whale.
Ballineers, oh ballineers.
But is tonight’s hunt that tonight so long past – or some other past night of his. For a succession of vertiginous moments, the redhaired woman on McCloud’s raft, (or the old woman in her cabin on Spanish Lady), sees a mindscape montage of images and events from earlier times. Filtered through her new and profound awareness of this man, she can identify, she judges, which persons they are that crowd his memory.