Dreamsongs. Volume I Read online

  The food showed up about then, but Sanders continued as we ate. “The first sighting, for example. That’s never been explained satisfactorily. The Gregor Expedition.”

  I nodded. Dave Gregor had captained the ship that had discovered Wraithworld, nearly seventy-five years earlier. He had probed through the mists with his sensors, and set his ship down on the seacoast plains. Then he sent teams out to explore.

  There were two men in each team, both well armed. But in one case, only a single man came back, and he was in hysteria. He and his partner had gotten separated in the mists, and suddenly he heard a bloodcurdling scream. When he found his friend, he was quite dead. And something was standing over the body.

  The survivor described the killer as manlike, eight feet tall, and somehow insubstantial. He claimed that when he fired at it, the blaster bolt went right through it. Then the creature had wavered, and vanished in the mists.

  Gregor sent other teams out to search for the thing. They recovered the body, but that was all. Without special instruments, it was difficult to find the same place twice in the mists. Let alone something like the creature that had been described.

  So the story was never confirmed. But nonetheless, it caused a sensation when Gregor returned to Earth. Another ship was sent to conduct a more thorough search. It found nothing. But one of its search teams disappeared without a trace.

  And the legend of the mist wraiths was born, and began to grow. Other ships came to Wraithworld, and a trickle of colonists came and went, and Paul Sanders landed one day and erected the Castle Cloud so the public might safely visit the mysterious planet of the wraiths.

  And there were other deaths, and other disappearances, and many people claimed to catch brief glimpses of wraiths prowling through the mists. And then someone found the ruins. Just tumbled stone blocks now. But once, structures of some sort. The homes of the wraiths, people said.

  There was evidence, I thought. And some of it was hard to deny. But Dubowski was shaking his head vigorously.

  “The Gregor affair proves nothing,” he said. “You know as well as I this planet has never been explored thoroughly. Especially the plains area, where Gregor’s ship put down. It was probably some sort of animal that killed that man. A rare animal of some sort native to that area.”

  “What about the testimony of his partner?” Sanders asked.

  “Hysteria, pure and simple.”

  “The other sightings? There have been an awful lot of them. And the witnesses weren’t always hysterical.”

  “Proves nothing,” Dubowski said, shaking his head. “Back on Earth, plenty of people still claim to have seen ghosts and flying saucers. And here, with those damned mists, mistakes and hallucinations are naturally even easier.”

  He jabbed at Sanders with the knife he was using to butter a biscuit. “It’s these mists that foul up everything. The wraith myth would have died long ago without the mists. Up to now, no one has had the equipment or the money to conduct a really thorough investigation. But we do. And we will. We’ll get the truth once and for all.”

  Sanders grimaced. “If you don’t get yourself killed first. The wraiths may not like being investigated.”

  “I don’t understand you, Sanders,” Dubowski said. “If you’re so afraid of the wraiths and so convinced that they’re down there prowling about, why have you lived here so long?”

  “Castle Cloud was built with safeguards,” Sanders said. “The brochure we send prospective guests describes them. No one is in any danger here. For one thing, the wraiths won’t come out of the mists. And we’re in sunlight most of the day. But it’s a different story down in the valleys.”

  “That’s superstitious nonsense. If I had to guess, I’d say these mist wraiths of yours were nothing but transplanted Earth ghosts. Phantoms of someone’s imagination. But I won’t guess—I’ll wait until the results are in. Then we’ll see. If they are real, they won’t be able to hide from us.”

  Sanders looked over at me. “What about you? Do you agree with him?”

  “I’m a journalist,” I said carefully. “I’m just here to cover what happens. The wraiths are famous, and my readers are interested. So I’ve got no opinions. Or none that I’d care to broadcast, anyway.”

  Sanders lapsed into a disgruntled silence, and attacked his ham and eggs with a renewed vigor. Dubowski took over for him, and steered the conversation over to the details of the investigation he was planning. The rest of the meal was a montage of eager talk about wraith traps, and search plans, and roboprobes, and sensors. I listened carefully and took mental notes for a column on the subject.

  Sanders listened carefully, too. But you could tell from his face that he was far from pleased by what he heard.

  NOTHING MUCH ELSE HAPPENED THAT DAY. DUBOWSKI SPENT HIS TIME at the spacefield, built on a small plateau below the castle, and supervised the unloading of his equipment. I wrote a column on his plans for the expedition, and beamed it back to Earth. Sanders tended to his other guests, and did whatever else a hotel manager does, I guess.

  I went out to the balcony again at sunset, to watch the mists rise.

  It was war, like Sanders had said. At mistfall, I had seen the sun victorious in the first of the daily battles. But now the conflict was renewed. The mists began to creep back to the heights as the temperature fell. Wispy gray-white tendrils stole up silently from the valleys, and curled around the jagged mountain peaks like ghostly fingers. Then the fingers began to grow thicker and stronger, and after a while they pulled the mists up after them.

  One by one the stark, wind-carved summits were swallowed up for another night. The Red Ghost, the giant to the north, was the last mountain to vanish in the lapping white ocean. And then the mists began to pour in over the balcony ledge and close around Castle Cloud itself.

  I went back inside. Sanders was standing there, just inside the doors. He had been watching me.

  “You were right,” I said. “It was beautiful.”

  He nodded. “You know, I don’t think Dubowski has bothered to look yet,” he said.

  “Busy, I guess.”

  Sanders sighed. “Too damn busy. C’mon. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  The hotel bar was quiet and dark, with the kind of mood that promotes good talk and serious drinking. The more I saw of Sanders’ castle, the more I liked the man. Our tastes were in remarkable accord.

  We found a table in the darkest and most secluded part of the room, and ordered drinks from a stock that included liquors from a dozen worlds. And we talked.

  “You don’t seem very happy to have Dubowski here,” I said after the drinks came. “Why not? He’s filling up your hotel.”

  Sanders looked up from his drink and smiled. “True. It is the slow season. But I don’t like what he’s trying to do.”

  “So you try to scare him away?”

  Sanders’ smile vanished. “Was I that transparent?”

  I nodded.

  He sighed. “Didn’t think it would work,” he said. He sipped thoughtfully at his drink. “But I had to try something.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. Because he’s going to destroy this world, if I let him. By the time he and his kind get through, there won’t be a mystery left in the universe.”

  “He’s just trying to find some answers. Do the wraiths exist? What about the ruins? Who built them? Didn’t you ever want to know those things, Sanders?”

  He drained his drink, looked around, and caught the waiter’s eye to order another. No robowaiters in here. Only human help. Sanders was particular about atmosphere.

  “Of course,” he said when he had his drink. “Everyone’s wondered about those questions. That’s why people come here to Wraithworld, to the Castle Cloud. Each guy who touches down here is secretly hoping he’ll have an adventure with the wraiths, and find out all the answers personally.

  “So he doesn’t. So he slaps on a blaster and wanders around the mist forests for a few days, or a few weeks, and finds nothing. S
o what? He can come back and search again. The dream is still there, and the romance, and the mystery.

  “And who knows? Maybe one trip he glimpses a wraith drifting through the mists. Or something he thinks is a wraith. And then he’ll go home happy, ’cause he’s been part of a legend. He’s touched a little bit of creation that hasn’t had all the awe and the wonder ripped from it yet by Dubowski’s sort.”

  He fell silent and stared morosely into his drink. Finally, after a long pause, he continued. “Dubowski! Bah! He makes me boil. He comes here with his ship full of lackeys and his million credit grant and all his gadgets, to hunt for wraiths. Oh, he’ll get them all right. That’s what frightens me. Either he’ll prove they don’t exist, or he’ll find them, and they’ll turn out to be some kind of submen or animal or something.”

  He emptied his glass again, savagely. “And that will ruin it. Ruin it, you hear! He’ll answer all the questions with his gadgets, and there’ll be nothing left for anyone else. It isn’t fair.”

  I sat there and sipped quietly at my drink and said nothing. Sanders ordered another. A foul thought was running around in my head. Finally I had to say it aloud.

  “If Dubowski answers all the questions,” I said, “then there will be no reason to come here anymore. And you’ll be put out of business. Are you sure that’s not why you’re so worried?”

  Sanders glared at me, and I thought he was going to hit me for a second. But he didn’t. “I thought you were different. You looked at mistfall, and understood. I thought you did, anyway. But I guess I was wrong.” He jerked his head toward the door. “Get out of here,” he said.

  I rose. “All right,” I said. “I’m sorry, Sanders. But it’s my job to ask nasty questions like that.”

  He ignored me, and I left the table. When I reached the door, I turned and looked back across the room. Sanders was staring into his drink again, and talking loudly to himself.

  “Answers,” he said. He made it sound obscene. “Answers. Always they have to have answers. But the questions are so much finer. Why can’t they leave them alone?”

  I left him alone then. Alone with his drinks.

  THE NEXT FEW WEEKS WERE HECTIC ONES, FOR THE EXPEDITION AND FOR me. Dubowski went about things thoroughly, you had to give him that. He had planned his assault on Wraithworld with meticulous precision.

  Mapping came first. Thanks to the mists, what maps there were of Wraithworld were very crude by modern standards. So Dubowski sent out a whole fleet of roboprobes, to skim above the mists and steal their secrets with sophisticated sensory devices. From the information that came pouring in, a detailed topography of the region was pieced together.

  That done, Dubowski and his assistants then used the maps to carefully plot every recorded wraith sighting since the Gregor Expedition. Considerable data on the sightings had been compiled and analyzed long before we left Earth, of course. Heavy use of the matchless collection on wraiths in the Castle Cloud library filled in the gaps that remained. As expected, sightings were most common in the valleys around the hotel, the only permanent human habitation on the planet.

  When the plotting was completed, Dubowski set out his wraith traps, scattering most of them in the areas where wraiths had been reported most frequently. He also put a few in distant, outlying regions, however, including the seacoast plain where Gregor’s ship had made the initial contact.

  The traps weren’t really traps, of course. They were squat duralloy pillars, packed with most every type of sensing and recording equipment known to Earth science. To the traps, the mists were all but nonexistent. If some unfortunate wraith wandered into survey range, there would be no way it could avoid detection.

  Meanwhile, the mapping roboprobes were pulled in to be overhauled and reprogrammed, and then sent out again. With the topography known in detail, the probes could be sent through the mists on low-level patrols without fear of banging into a concealed mountain. The sensing equipment carried by the probes was not the equal of that in the wraith traps, of course. But the probes had a much greater range, and could cover thousands of square miles each day.

  Finally, when the wraith traps were deployed and the roboprobes were in the air, Dubowski and his men took to the mist forests themselves. Each carried a heavy backpack of sensors and detection devices. The human search teams had more mobility than the wraith traps, and more sophisticated equipment than the probes. They covered a different area each day, in painstaking detail.

  I went along on a few of those trips, with a backpack of my own. It made for some interesting copy, even though we never found anything. And while on search, I fell in love with the mist forests.

  The tourist literature likes to call them “the ghastly mist forests of haunted Wraithworld.” But they’re not ghastly. Not really. There’s a strange sort of beauty there, for those who can appreciate it.

  The trees are thin and very tall, with white bark and pale gray leaves. But the forests are not without color. There’s a parasite, a hanging moss of some sort, that’s very common, and it drips from the overhanging branches in cascades of dark green and scarlet. And there are rocks, and vines, and low bushes choked with misshapen purplish fruits.

  But there’s no sun, of course. The mists hide everything. They swirl and slide around you as you walk, caressing you with unseen hands, clutching at your feet.

  Once in a while, the mists play games with you. Most of the time you walk through a thick fog, unable to see more than a few feet in any direction, your own shoes lost in the mist carpet below. Sometimes, though, the fog closes in suddenly. And then you can’t see at all. I blundered into more than one tree when that happened.

  At other times, though, the mists—for no apparent reason—will roll back suddenly, and leave you standing alone in a clear pocket within a cloud. That’s when you can see the forest in all its grotesque beauty. It’s a brief, breathtaking glimpse of never-never land. Moments like that are few and short-lived. But they stay with you.

  They stay with you.

  In those early weeks, I didn’t have much time for walking in the forests, except when I joined a search team to get the feel of it. Mostly I was busy writing. I did a series on the history of the planet, highlighted by the stories of the most famous sightings. I did feature profiles on some of the more colorful members of the expedition. I did a piece on Sanders, and the problems he encountered and overcame in building Castle Cloud. I did science pieces on the little known about the planet’s ecology. I did mood pieces about the forests and the mountains. I did speculative thought pieces about the ruins. I wrote about rockcat hunting, and mountain climbing, and the huge and dangerous swamp lizards native to some offshore islands.

  And, of course, I wrote about Dubowski and his search. On that I wrote reams.

  Finally, however, the search began to settle down into dull routine, and I began to exhaust the myriad other topics Wraithworld offered. My output began to decline. I started to have time on my hands.

  That’s when I really began to enjoy Wraithworld. I began to take daily walks through the forests, ranging wider each day. I visited the ruins, and flew half a continent away to see the swamp lizards firsthand instead of by holo. I befriended a group of hunters passing through, and shot myself a rockcat. I accompanied some other hunters to the western seacoast, and nearly got myself killed by a plains devil.

  And I began to talk to Sanders again.

  Through all of this, Sanders had pretty well ignored me and Dubowski and everyone else connected with the wraith research. He spoke to us grudgingly, if at all, greeted us curtly, and spent all his free time with his other guests.

  At first, after the way he had talked in the bar that night, I worried about what he might do. I had visions of him murdering someone out in the mists, and trying to make it look like a wraith killing. Or maybe just sabotaging the wraith traps. But I was sure he would try something to scare off Dubowski or otherwise undermine the expedition.

  Comes of watching too much holovision, I
guess. Sanders did nothing of the sort. He merely sulked, glared at us in the castle corridors, and gave us less than full cooperation at all times.

  After a while, though, he began to warm up again. Not toward Dubowski and his men.

  Just toward me.

  I guess that was because of my walks in the forests. Dubowski never went out into the mists unless he had to. And then he went out reluctantly, and came back quickly. His men followed their chief’s example. I was the only joker in the deck. But then, I wasn’t really part of the same deck.

  Sanders noticed, of course. He didn’t miss much of what went on in his castle. And he began to speak to me again. Civilly. One day, finally, he even invited me for drinks again.

  It was about two months into the expedition. Winter was coming to Wraithworld and Castle Cloud, and the air was getting cold and crisp. Dubowski and I were out on the dining balcony, lingering over coffee after another superb meal. Sanders sat at a nearby table, talking to some tourists.

  I forget what Dubowski and I were discussing. Whatever it was, Dubowski interrupted me with a shiver at one point. “It’s getting cold out here,” he complained. “Why don’t we move inside?” Dubowski never liked the dining balcony very much.

  I sort of frowned. “It’s not that bad,” I said. “Besides, it’s nearly sunset. One of the best parts of the day.”

  Dubowski shivered again, and stood up. “Suit yourself,” he said. “But I’m going in. I don’t feel like catching a cold just so you can watch another mistfall.”

  He started to walk off. But he hadn’t taken three steps before Sanders was up out of his seat, howling like a wounded rockcat.

  “Mistfall,” he bellowed. “Mistfall!” He launched into a long, incoherent string of obscenities. I had never seen Sanders so angry, not even when he threw me out of the bar that first night. He stood there, literally trembling with rage, his face flushed, his fat fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.