“I did not run away,” I said, my voice strained. “Damn it. You should never have come.”
Crystal glanced at Gerry, looking very sad, and it was clear that suddenly she was thinking the same thing. Gerry just frowned. I don’t think he ever once understood why I said the things I said, or did the things I did; whenever we discussed the subject, which was infrequently, he would only tell me with vague puzzlement what he would have done if our roles had been reversed. It seemed infinitely strange to him that anyone could possibly do anything differently in the same position.
His frown did not touch me, but he’d already done his damage. For the month I’d been in my self-imposed exile at the tower, I had been trying to come to terms with my actions and my moods, and it had been far from easy. Crystal and I had been together for a long time—nearly four years—when we came to Jamison’s World, trying to track down some unique silver and obsidian artifacts that we’d picked up on Baldur. I had loved her all that time, and I still loved her, even now, after she had left me for Gerry. When I was feeling good about myself, it seemed to me that the impulse that had driven me out of Port Jamison was a noble and unselfish one. I wanted Crys to be happy, simply, and she could not be happy with me there. My wounds were too deep, and I wasn’t good at hiding them; my presence put the damper of guilt on the newborn joy she’d found with Gerry. And since she could not bear to cut me off completely, I felt compelled to cut myself off. For them. For her.
Or so I liked to tell myself. But there were hours when that bright rationalization broke down, dark hours of self-loathing. Were those the real reasons? Or was I simply out to hurt myself in a fit of angry immaturity, and by doing so, punish them—like a willful child who plays with thoughts of suicide as a form of revenge?
I honestly didn’t know. For a month I’d fluctuated from one belief to the other while I tried to understand myself and decide what I’d do next. I wanted to think myself a hero, willing to make a sacrifice for the happiness of the woman I loved. But Gerry’s words made it clear that he didn’t see it that way at all.
“Why do you have to be so damned dramatic about everything?” he said, looking stubborn. He had been determined all along to be very civilized, and seemed perpetually annoyed at me because I wouldn’t shape up and heal my wounds so that everybody could be friends. Nothing annoyed me quite so much as his annoyance; I thought I was handling the situation pretty well, all things considered, and I resented the inference that I wasn’t.
But Gerry was determined to convert me, and my best withering look was wasted on him. “We’re going to stay here and talk things out until you agree to fly back to Port Jamison with us,” he told me, in his most forceful now-I’m-getting-tough tone.
“Like shit,” I said, turning sharply away from them and yanking an arrow from my quiver. I slid it into place, pulled, and released, all too quickly. The arrow missed the target by a good foot and buried itself in the soft dark brick of my crumbling tower.
“What is this place, anyway?” Crys asked, looking at the tower as if she’d just seen it for the first time. It’s possible that she had—that it took the incongruous sight of my arrow lodging in stone to make her notice the ancient structure. More likely, though, it was a premeditated change of subject, designed to cool the argument that was building between Gerry and me.
I lowered my bow again and walked up to the target to recover the arrows I’d expended. “I’m really not sure,” I said, somewhat mollified and anxious to pick up the cue she’d thrown me. “A watchtower, I think, of nonhuman origin. Jamison’s World has never been thoroughly explored. It may have had a sentient race once.” I walked around the target to the tower, and yanked loose the final arrow from the crumbling brick. “It still may, actually. We know very little of what goes on on the mainland.”
“A damn gloomy place to live, if you ask me,” Gerry put in, looking over the tower. “Could fall in any moment, from the way it looks.”
I gave him a bemused smile. “The thought had occurred to me. But when I first came out here, I was past caring.” As soon as the words were out, I regretted saying them; Crys winced visibly. That had been the whole story of my final weeks in Port Jamison. Try as I might, it had seemed that I had only two choices; I could lie, or I could hurt her. Neither appealed to me, so here I was. But here they were too, so the whole impossible situation was back.
Gerry had another comment ready, but he never got to say it. Just then Squirrel came bounding out from between the weeds, straight at Crystal.
She smiled at him and knelt, and an instant later he was at her feet, licking her hand and chewing on her fingers. Squirrel was in a good mood, clearly. He liked life near the tower. Back in Port Jamison, his life had been constrained by Crystal’s fears that he’d be eaten by alleysnarls or chased by dogs or strung up by local children. Out here I let him run free, which was much more to his liking. The brush around the tower was overrun by whipping-mice, a native rodent with a hairless tail three times its own body length. The tail packed a mild sting, but Squirrel didn’t care, even though he swelled up and got grouchy every time a tail connected. He liked stalking whipping-mice all day. Squirrel always fancied himself a great hunter, and there’s no skill involved in chasing down a bowl of cat-food.
He’d been with me even longer than Crys had, but she’d become suitably fond of him during our time together. I often suspected that Crystal would have gone with Gerry even sooner than she did, except that she was upset at the idea of leaving Squirrel. Not that he was any great beauty. He was a small, thin, scuffy-looking cat, with ears like a fox and fur a scroungy gray-brown color, and a big bushy tail two sizes too big for him. The friend who gave him to me back on Avalon informed me gravely that Squirrel was the illegitimate offspring of a genetically-engineered psicat and a mangy alley tom. But if Squirrel could read his owner’s mind, he didn’t pay much attention. When he wanted affection, he’d do things like climb right up on the book I was reading and knock it away and begin biting my chin: when he wanted to be let alone, it was dangerous folly to try to pet him.
As Crystal knelt by him and stroked him and Squirrel nuzzled up to her hand, she seemed very much the woman I’d traveled with and loved and talked to at endless length and slept with every night, and I suddenly realized how I’d missed her. I think I smiled; the sight of her, even under these conditions, still gave me a cloud-shadowed joy. Maybe I was being silly and stupid and vindictive to send them away, I thought, after they had come so far to see me. Crys was still Crys, and Gerry could hardly be so bad, since she loved him.
Watching her, wordless, I made a sudden decision; I would let them stay. And we could see what happened. “It’s close to dusk,” I heard myself saying. “Are you folks hungry?”
Crys looked up, still petting Squirrel, and smiled. Gerry nodded. “Sure.”
“All right,” I said. I walked past them, turned and paused in the doorway, and gestured them inside. “Welcome to my ruin.”
I turned on the electric torches and set about making dinner. My lockers were well stocked back in those days; I had not yet started living off the forests. I thawed three big sandragons, the silver-shelled crustacean that Jamie fishermen dragged for relentlessly, and served them up with bread and cheese and white wine.
Mealtime conversation was polite and guarded. We talked of mutual friends in Port Jamison, Crystal told me about a letter she’d received from a couple we had known on Baldur, Gerry held forth on politics and the efforts of the Port police to crack down on the traffic in dreaming venom. “The Council is sponsoring research on some sort of super-pesticide that would wipe out the dream-spiders,” he told me. “A saturation spraying of the near coast would cut off most of the supply, I’d think.”
“Certainly,” I said, a bit high on the wine and a bit piqued at Gerry’s stupidity. Once again, listening to him, I had found myself questioning Crystal’s taste. “Never mind what other effects it might have on the ecology, right?”
Gerry shrugg
ed. “Mainland,” he said simply. He was Jamie through-and-through, and the comment translated to, “Who cares?” The accidents of history had given the residents of Jamison’s World a singularly cavalier attitude toward their planet’s one large continent. Most of the original settlers had come from Old Poseidon, where the sea had been a way of life for generations. The rich, teeming oceans and peaceful archipelagoes of their new world had attracted them far more than the dark forests of the mainland. Their children grew up to the same attitudes, except for a handful who found an illegal profit selling dreams.
“Don’t shrug it all off so easy,” I said.
“Be realistic,” he replied. “The mainland’s no use to anyone, except the spidermen. Who would it hurt?”
“Damn it, Gerry, look at this tower! Where did it come from, tell me that! I tell you, there might be intelligence out there, in those forests. The Jamies have never even been bothered to look.”
Crystal was nodding over her wine. “Johnny could be right,” she said, glancing at Gerry. “That was why I came here, remember. The artifacts. The shop on Baldur said they were shipped out of Port Jamison. He couldn’t trace them back any farther than that. And the workmanship—I’ve handled alien art for years, Gerry. I know Fyndii work, and Damoosh, and I’ve seen all the others. This was different.”
Gerry only smiled. “Proves nothing. There are other races, millions of them, farther in toward the core. The distances are too great, so we don’t hear of them very often, except maybe third-hand, but it isn’t impossible that every so often a piece of their art would trickle through.” He shook his head. “No, I’d bet this tower was put up by some early settler. Who knows? Could be there was another discoverer, before Jamison, who never reported his find. Maybe he built the place. But I’m not going to buy mainland sentients.”
“At least not until you fumigate the damned forests and they all come out waving their spears,” I said sourly. Gerry laughed and Crystal smiled at me. And suddenly, suddenly, I had an overpowering desire to win this argument. My thoughts had the hazy clarity that only wine can give, and it seemed so logical. I was so clearly right, and here was my chance to show up Gerry like the provincial he was and make points with Crys.
I leaned forward. “If you Jamies would ever look, you might find sentients,” I said. “I’ve only been on the mainland a month, and already I’ve found a great deal. You’ve no damned concept of the kind of beauty you talk so blithely of wiping out. A whole ecology is out there, different from the islands, species upon species, a lot probably not even discovered yet. But what do you know about it? Any of you?”
Gerry nodded. “So, show me.” He stood up suddenly. “I’m always willing to learn, Bowen. Why don’t you take us out and show us all the wonders of the mainland?”
I think Gerry was trying to make points, too. He probably never thought I’d take up his offer, but it was exactly what I’d wanted. It was dark outside now, and we had been talking by the light of my torches. Above, stars shone through the hole in my roof. The forest would be alive now, eerie and beautiful, and I was suddenly eager to be out there, bow in hand, in a world where I was a force and a friend, Gerry a bumbling tourist.
“Crystal?” I said.
She looked interested. “Sounds like fun. If it’s safe.”
“It will be,” I said. “I’ll take my bow.” We both rose, and Crys looked happy. I remembered the times we tackled Baldurian wilderness together, and suddenly I felt very happy, certain that everything would work out well. Gerry was just part of a bad dream. She couldn’t possibly be in love with him.
First I found the sober-ups; I was feeling good, but not good enough to head out into the forest when I was still dizzy from wine. Crystal and I flipped ours down immediately, and seconds after, my alcoholic glow began to fade. Gerry, however, waved away the pill I offered him. “I haven’t had that much,” he insisted. “Don’t need it.”
I shrugged, thinking that things were getting better and better. If Gerry went crashing drunkenly through the woods, it couldn’t help but turn Crys away from him. “Suit yourself,” I said.
Neither of them was really dressed for wilderness, but I hoped that wouldn’t be a problem, since I didn’t really plan on taking them very deep in the forest. It would be a quick trip, I thought; wander down my trail a bit, show them the dust pile and the spider-chasm, maybe nail a dream-spider for them. Nothing to it, out and back again.
I put on a dark coverall, heavy trail boots, and my quiver, handed Crystal a flash in case we wandered away from the bluemoss regions, and picked up my bow. “You really need that?” Gerry asked, with sarcasm.
“Protection,” I said.
“Can’t be that dangerous.”
It isn’t, if you know what you’re doing, but I didn’t tell him that. “Then why do you Jamies stay on your islands?”
He smiled. “I’d rather trust a laser.”
“I’m cultivating a deathwish. A bow gives the prey a chance, of sorts.”
Crys gave me a smile of shared memories. “He only hunts predators,” she told Gerry. I bowed.
Squirrel agreed to guard my castle. Steady and very sure of myself, I belted on a knife and led my ex-wife and her lover out into the forests of Jamison’s World.
We walked in single file, close together, me up front with the bow, Crys following, Gerry behind her. Crys used the flashlight when we first set out, playing it over the trail as we wound our way through the thick grove of spikearrows that stood like a wall against the sea. Tall and very straight, crusty gray of bark and some as big around as my tower, they climbed to a ridiculous height before sprouting their meager load of branches. Here and there they crowded together and squeezed the path between them, and more than one seemingly impassable fence of wood confronted us suddenly in the dark. But Crys could always pick out the way, with me a foot ahead of her to point her flash when it paused.
Ten minutes out from the tower, the character of the forest began to change. The ground and the very air were drier here, the wind cool but without the snap of salt; the water-hungry spikearrows had drained most of the moisture from the air. They began to grow smaller and less frequent, the spaces between them larger and easier to find. Other species of plant began to appear: stunted little goblin trees, sprawling mockoaks, graceful ebonfires whose red veins pulsed brilliantly in the dark wood when caught by Crystal’s wandering flash.
And bluemoss.
Just a little at first; here a ropy web dangling from a goblin’s arm, there a small patch on the ground, frequently chewing its way up the back of an ebonfire or a withering solitary spikearrow. Then more and more; thick carpets underfoot, mossy blankets on the leaves above, heavy trailers that dangled from the branches and danced around in the wind. Crystal sent the flash darting about, finding bigger and better bunches of the soft blue fungus, and peripherally I began to see the glow.
“Enough,” I said, and Crys turned off the light.
Darkness lasted only for a moment, till our eyes adjusted to a dimmer light. Around us, the forest was suffused by a gentle radiance, as the bluemoss drenched us in its ghostly phosphorescence. We were standing near one side of a small clearing, below a shiny black ebonfire, but even the flames of its red-veined wood seemed cool in the faint blue light. The moss had taken over the undergrowth, supplanting all the local grasses and making nearby shrubs into fuzzy blue beachballs. It climbed the sides of most of the trees, and when we looked up through the branches at the stars, we saw that other colonies had set upon the woods a glowing crown.
I laid my bow carefully against the dark flank of the ebonfire, bent, and offered a handful of light to Crystal. When I held it under her chin, she smiled at me again, her features softened by the cool magic in my hand. I remember feeling very good, to have led them to this beauty.
But Gerry only grinned at me. “Is this what we’re going to endanger, Bowen?” he asked. “A forest full of bluemoss?”
I dropped the moss. “You don’t think it’s
pretty?”
Gerry shrugged. “Sure, it’s pretty. It is also a fungus, a parasite with a dangerous tendency to overrun and crowd out all other forms of plantlife. Bluemoss was very thick on Jolostar and the Barbis Archipelago once, you know. We rooted it all out; it can eat its way through a good corn crop in a month.” He shook his head.
And Crystal nodded. “He’s right, you know,” she said.
I looked at her for a long time, suddenly feeling very sober indeed, the last memory of the wine long gone. Abruptly it dawned on me that I had, all unthinking, built myself another fantasy. Out here, in a world I had started to make my own, a world of dream-spiders and magic moss, somehow I had thought that I could recapture my own dream long fled, my smiling crystalline soulmate. In the timeless wilderness of the mainland, she would see us both in fresh light and would realize once again that it was me she loved.
So I’d spun a pretty web, bright and alluring as the trap of any dream-spider, and Crys had shattered the flimsy filaments with a word. She was his; mine no longer, not now, not ever. And if Gerry seemed to me stupid or insensitive or overpractical, well, perhaps it was those very qualities that made Crys choose him. And perhaps not—I had no right to second-guess her love, and possibly I would never understand it.
I brushed the last flakes of glowing moss from my hands while Gerry took the heavy flash from Crystal and flicked it on again. My blue fairyland dissolved, burned away by the bright white reality of his flashlight beam. “What now?” he asked, smiling. He was not so very drunk after all.
I lifted my bow from where I’d set it down. “Follow me,” I said, quickly, curtly. Both of them looked eager and interested, but my own mood had shifted dramatically. Suddenly the whole trip seemed pointless. I wished that they were gone, that I was back at my tower with Squirrel. I was down …
… and sinking. Deeper in the moss-heavy woods, we came upon a dark swift stream, and the brilliance of the flashlight speared a solitary ironhorn that had come to drink. It looked up quickly, pale and startled, then bounded away through the trees, for a fleeting instant looking a bit like the unicorn of Old Earth legend. Long habit made me glance at Crystal, but her eyes sought Gerry’s when she laughed.
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