Ghosteria Volume 1: The Stories (Ghostgeria)

by Tanith Lee

  A handsome, slightly younger shipman, dark-haired too, stands under the foremast playing a whale bone fluta as the ship flies. Between breaths he grins. Pleased with everything, himself included. This surely is Vemmer, First Mate, friend, possibly also lover. Has Vemmer met McCloud’s woman yet? But then he’s gone, and she sees two rafts racing in a morning sky tangled with mallow cumulus, and McCloud harpoons a vast seventy-foot Ballin, the line spinning out, the air cascading with broken motion and storm. These brief pictures seem to last less than fifteen seconds. In the mind in the cabin of Spanish Lady probably they have taken up thirty minutes.

  Then the memory-shoals clear. He’s thrown them free to see if she will note them. But in the raft she doesn’t speak, doesn’t mean to distract him, even though presumably she can’t.

  And right then the lineman at the raft’s stem whispers fierce enough they must all hear, “It blows!”

  Sky whales also breach for air. Downward.

  Descending from the upper atmos or higher, they spout through the blow-holes in their heads the differing vacuums or gaseous substances they’ve breathed in above. These spouts vary, transparent or in odd colours, (saturnine ochre, orange, alabaster white), and sometimes with stinking or perfumed odours. Harpers ‘stung’ by such a discharge have been known to become inebriated, pass out or puke.

  Tonight’s blows are still far enough off, and watery, with a vague taint like rust. The pod comprises eight in number. Now their tails swirl the mooney cirrus. “Flukes!” sighs the whispery lineman, and stands ready as McCloud seizes up an iron.

  The biggest of the whales appears. Maud thinks it looks at them with its small sidelong eye. The genitals are sheathed; Maud isn’t sure if the animal is female or male. But it’s a good eighty feet, and the others in the pod, now cloud-splashing and diving as they suck the sub-mesopheric air, are much less. The big whale is the prize. The wels5 of its bluish-magenta envelope are crusted with tropian barnacles, and scabbed from some fresh quarrel – undoubtedly not with Ballinkind, but most likely some careless human craft. This doesn’t mar the creature’s magnificence. For how gorgeous it is, swimming and unfurling its vast atomic-explosion-shape of tail, that smashes the moonlight like the waters of the deepest sea.

  They’re near enough now the whale has noted them. It shows no alarm. They haven’t seemed to learn, these pacific leviathans, that men mean harm. Curious, for in other ways Ballins are highly intelligent.

  The raft jumps. No one can be dislodged; the magnetic bracers hold every physical thing aboard.

  McCloud’s standing for’ard, leaning out. The athletic pose is statue-like, extremely pleasing to the eye. He casts the harp-iron unerringly and the lineman responds like another muscle in McCloud’s body, paying out the frizzled dazzle of the line.

  Straight in behind the slope of head the blazing point runs home.

  That doesn’t kill, it holds.

  Now the raft has fastened.

  The rest of the pod veers away. It’s as if they don’t understand, as humans often don’t when one of their number is attacked in front of them. What makes men stare and stand aside isn’t always solipsistic cruelty, cowardice or brainlessness. It can be mere shock. The dual barrier of personal isolation and personal connectedness to others, staggers – is it I who has fallen? If not, how can it fall? The bell tolls for all. We stare motionless at the bell.

  McCloud casts in a second iron.

  These lines don’t break, save in an extraordinary flurry, unless laser-severed.

  There is a third lung, up behind the head. It’s this which washes out the alternate atmoses from the two larger and lower lungs. And this tertiary lung, not the heart, is the only truly vulnerable place: the Life.

  Yet first comes the gallop. Line-attached to the panicked, furious and now-plunging whale, a raft must ride behind it as it speeds away.

  And so, as the whale rushes forward, trying to outrun the fate already clamped fast in its body, McCloud’s raft springs after. They gallop, like a silver kite at the mercy of a redly violet storm.

  God help a world that was so ill-designed,

  That we must kill this other prince-like kind,

  Christ help us all – but that’s to no avail –

  For we must live by

  Hunting the whale.

  Finally they caught her. (She was a she, as Maud saw at last.) The Captain of the Perilune stabbed once, twice, into the upper lung. Blood flew out of lung and blow-hole like crimson stars, like scarlet birds, all ruby red, and stained the fucking moons. But of course, it didn’t do that. It barely stains anything. The blood of Ballin evaporates quickly on contact with oxygenated air, as in the stratosphere, to which by then the raft had descended.

  They call the death dance a Floral. Why? Maybe for the red flowers of death. Luckily it does not take long when well- managed. Starved of true oxygen the whale’s brain darkens. She faded, fainted, died inside fifteen seconds. Like... memory.

  After this she lay like an island on the night (one moon down, another rising). She’s a sky-beast, hollow boned, light as – a heart. Secured to the raft by harper lines, easily they could pull her back to the ship, strip her and portion her, and search the ropes of her intestines for the chance bonus of dull-gleaming gems called grey amber.

  These men weren’t wicked. They slew because they needed to, to pay their way and keep themselves and their kin and kind.

  But what worlds. What a system. So ill-designed.

  Yet old Maud, in her locked cabin of trance, didn’t have another minute for any of that. Time had moved again. The kill was over.

  He’s leant back on the bridge rail, but looking in at her, where she stands under the sprit.

  The ship is empty of anyone else. The whale from the past, that she had just witnessed them hunt and slaughter, has vanished with everything else of flesh and blood. The mindscape edit has occurred again. It’s another night now. It’s that night now, the last. But he had been alone then. In this replacing reality she is here to share it with him.

  “They say these whales have no voices, but I’ve heard them,” he says quietly, “calling in my mind, singing sweeter than their own blown bones. They’re passionate, like men and women. Faithless like them, too. So we and they are the same kind in that, and in other things, and both of us live till death kills us. I kept on seeing him, Vemmer, playing that fluta bone, smiling. Light-hearted, as I never was. And that night he was in the town with her, and we took the first whale, that other piece of the night, him and her, I never turned my mind to it. I thought I could still be what I was. Then came the other whale, out of True North, black as tar and near on one hundred feet. Two giants in a night. I was always proud, Redhair, of my ship and my skill. I never killed a Ballin but swift and clean. Oh, I’ve seen plenty make a hash of it, and the whale slow-stifling, dancing floral around and around for twenty minutes and more, and the whole sky sopped in blood. But never from me. Never Captain McCloud. Even that night, when I knew he was at her – and she at him, I went on to take the second whale.”

  He stops. He gazes at her. Maud says, in her young, softer way, “And did you manage it, Lir McCloud?”

  “Christ help me,” he says.

  Maud’s familiar with the various pieties revived on the New Planets. But this is less prayer than preface.

  She waits. He tells her.

  What she has seen already during the first hunt, chase, harpooning, gallop, were once more created, now by his voice only. The harpoons went in flawless. The second raft too fastened. But as usual it was McCloud who swung solo to wield the lance and take the Life.

  As he boasted, and as his crew had boasted of him, he never made a mistake. But that night he did. He had thought himself focused as ever, but no. Maud could have told him, the side-rooms of the brain are never unbusy, while the sly subconscious and pathological id wait in ambush. But too it wasn’t always possible to be on guard against oneself. It took enough to guard against fellow humans.

 
; The lance, instead of running straight home, nipped the tertiary lung – and stuck. It had caught there in the protective cartilage that saved a sky whale from the assaults of birds, but not, obviously, from stress-iron. McCloud, seeing at once his misjudgement, tried to slice the lance back out, out of the black whale. If he could get it free, and instantly laser off the harp-lines, the Ballin would escape and drop lower to the tropos. Here, washed by richer oxygens, rent tissue would heal. In the code of any decent whaleship this was what you must do after a fouled strike. A minimally foul-lanced whale, metal still in it, could live on for ten days, strangling. It was quickly too dangerous to approach in its floundering, could not be cleanly finished, suffering – and useless. Ship’s guns were no good either. The animal was too large and elongate. Holed, it would suffer worse, lose directional sense, and might come down on a populated area. The only hope was to retrieve the iron, cut lines, and leave the whale to repair.

  McCloud tried but failed in this back-up manoeuvre. Some freak of angle, or of the individual creature’s construct, had gummed the bladed lance-tip irrevocably through bone matter and lung-case. McCloud then released himself from the bracers and attempted to climb alongside the zinging whiplash of lines and so pull out the lance. But now the Ballin was thrashing; he was dragged back by the frontman. A moment more and the raft was hit and keeled; turning upside down. Next all harpoon- lines tore out – or snapped, a rare event.

  Trailing silver and scarlet the whale plunged away. And from its blow-hole spouted an upward waterfall of ominous wine.

  Presently they saw the whale pitch headlong down. It had partly lost control, but was not yet heavy enough with dying blood to crash all the distance groundward.

  McCloud’s curses and those of the raft men went to silence. Back on Perilune, the shipkeeps stared in awe.

  Later on, he said, he returned to the port, found Vemmer at The Whale’s Eye and beat him to pulp. Those that didn’t know thought he blamed his First Mate for absence. Those that did, said Lir McCloud would have done better to bash his own head on a wall. But by then the captain was a Jonah, that Oldearth term meaning unlucky. Not a man would sail with him.

  That night of the foul-stroke, back aboard Perilune, he had set out to follow the injured whale. To start with his crew, crediting him still with sense and good fortune, had gone along with this.

  But naturally he couldn’t discover the Ballin. It was well known among all whalers that a hurt whale would conceal itself, among cumulus of the junk-clouds of the tropos, always falling lower and lower as it asphyxiated. Dying animals always struggled toward the deserts, collapsing eventually among the dust dunes and mesas. Totally camouflaged then by landscape, they were nearly impossible ever to locate. And though stories existed of whale-graveyards, stacked with still light-capable skin, unsplit skeletons, and heaps of gr’amber, if ever Ballin dead were happened on they were rotten, and their ivory smashed by falling to myriad splinters.

  He said he hadn’t sought the whale for any ‘sensible or sane’ reason. He had wanted to put it from its misery. He had wanted, (here he stumbled in his speech), to express regret for his crass and terrible blunder.

  Perilune’s search went on for several days and nights. Then five men rafted out. Then the other five. McCloud had lost his fortune, and his mind.

  He went on alone thereafter. His coat by then was stained from the port-visit and Vemmer’s blood, but someone let the captain know his own Mrs. had nursed Vemmer back to health. Soon they were off planet, heading towards Andromeda.

  How long in all did McCloud seek the dying whale?

  “One sixteen of days. And found him too. I don’t lie, you redheaded girl. Do you believe me?”

  “Yes, I believe it all, Lir McCloud.”

  “What’s your name?” unexpectedly he asks. As a man fully real might do.

  “Maud.”

  “That’s a strange name. I never heard it. It sounds like the word for death in Oldearth French.”

  “It means strength in battle.”

  Then he smiled. Which too she hadn’t expected.

  “But it’s all a battle,” he says, “and no victory. You have a fine name, Maud of the ruby red hair.”

  Maybe it was chance or fate, or a curse on him. He spotted the great black whale below, stretched where fallen on the peaks of mountains west of second north. Working the grav alone, he dropped Perilune, and came out, getting within some forty steps.

  “I won’t tell you how it was with him. The rocks were red – and black. He looked at me with his blank black star of an eye. And only then he died. He’d waited to show me, Maud Redhair, all I’d done to him by my blasted Goddamned error. All I had done to all of them, his kind, even at my best. So then–” McCloud says. But nothing more.

  He doesn’t need to say more. She knows he had lift-upped his ship again and shot her through all the ascending layers of the atmos, into open space. Unshielded and unclosed, Perilune had imploded then exploded, like a poisoned balloon.

  Does he recall he has done this? Does he know he is dead now, lost even of himself? Does he understand that only this ghost, this NAATH, remains of him, still searching – but for God knows what – and death unsatisfied.

  He is tied only to these places, can go nowhere else. But the IRS came with their rescue ships, and they move the whales away where he can’t go. Knowing the whale is dead, knowing that for him it never can be, only forever dying, he has tried to stop the rescue in fear he will miss the great black Ballin – even though he always must miss it. And for that he lashes out at the ships. And for this he will never be at peace.

  In a whisper like the rafting ballineer, Maud says, “If he lived, and you could find him again.”

  “Then he could kill me,” says Lir McCloud, soft now as she. “Quick or slow as he liked, and as I owe him and them all. Slow or quick. Whatever he’d have.”

  4. Grey Amber

  Jonah down whale-belly, he calls out his gal:

  Darlin git my dimer!

  But Darlin answers n ‘bother me,

  You in the belly of a whale—

  Ifn I feed ya—I feed him—

  Forgit your dinner, Jonah!

  Life should be more simple. Or else more complex and in more important ways.

  I said I ceased to fall in love when I was sixty-two, and by seventy I was free of that exciting ailment. This stays true. But then, back in the mind-escape of forty-five years earlier, I was twenty-five again. And I did fall in love. With Lir McCloud, as may be obvious enough, I guess. He wasn’t any stand-in en passant son or nephew, not he. He was all the things the lover is – my equal, my superior, my muse; wanted as lord and as slave; and wanted as the farthest brightest star, and as the only place of rest this side the grave.

  And how then could I woo this man? How could I attract him, how could I make him glad and see him healed and whole? In one way alone. By giving him what I, the medium and arbiter of a mindscape could – the black whale: His death.

  I knew he’d foreseen my role. How else had he arrived to meet me with that firm, unequivocal There you are. By appointment only. But now it must be phrased in the proper terms, not jarring the fragile sphere we inhabited, the past which wasn’t real, yet was more real than anything else.

  “We should go back,” I said. “Over the desert. Due west of second north, where the mountains are.”

  “If you say,” he replied again, resolute, nodding as if pleased with me.

  That was all.

  He took the helm-controls and Perilune turned her ghostly bulk through the deep dark seas of the sky.

  Behind us the morning was coming, pale and smooth like a child’s first skin.

  The light would follow and find us.

  But I stood back at the rail, and sent my mind away from me much farther, into steeper darkness, where the other ghost lingered, the one he wanted more than any woman, or any love in the world.

  By the time I was old and met Apharis and Jenx, those mountains had
been named, in the fashion of High Egypt City, Sphinx Ridge.

  Forty-five years before, however, they towered up nameless from the mindscape, and looking down, nothing lay on them, broken and bleeding.

  I heard him sigh. He said, “He isn’t there.”

  And then, up between the jagged peaks, like a rival black sun the cloud whale came through the sky.

  It was incredibly inky black, as in his descriptions. I wondered if this were because, perhaps, he recalled the Ballin as blacker than it had been. Its eyes burned too, not opaque or fiery or blue, but grey, the smoky-zircon colour of the amber sometimes found in their guts.

  “Maud –” McCloud cried out to me – “Don’t fear him – it’s me he wants – and me he shall have.”

  Every time I think of this now, it makes me hesitate – that he thought to reassure me, even though he knew – as he did – I could take no harm.

  Oh yes, the Ballin had come for him. He had been calling to it all these decades. I had only conjured its concrete memory. Yet there were scars along its back, whitish on the sable hide, where ancient harpoons had fastened and harp-lines razored. But not a mark from any lance. From its blow-hole spouted one long shining shot, like purest water.

  Then it closed in on the ship as would an anvil cloud. It brought the smell of birds and rain and smog, and next all was darkness, black within black, yet everything visible also like electric fishes in an ocean.

  Far ahead of me I saw McCloud throw up his arms, as if to catch hold of, or even embrace, the whale. Then its yards of jaw undid, and its triangle teeth were shown, they too black as polished coal, and it clenched him in them like a cat might its prey, and swung him off into heaven. He never made a sound. He vanished, and the tail of the beast crashed down on Perilune, and cracked her amidships.

  There was nothing to be nervous of personally in this. Not even the collapse and falling which came after. It was far less than in any ordinary dream of sleep.