Hugo awards the short st.., p.157
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 157
Sanders looked very glum. "I can guess," he said. "He called in all his damn gadgets a month ago, and he's been cross-checking findings on a computer. We've had a couple of wraith sightings since you left. Dubowski moved in hours after each sighting, and went over the areas with a fine-tooth comb. Nothing. That's what he's going to announce, I think. Nothing."
I nodded. "Is that so bad, though? Gregor found nothing."
"Not the same," Sanders said. "Gregor didn't look the way Dubowski has. People will believe him, whatever he says."
I wasn't so sure of that, and was about to say so, when Dubowski arrived. Someone must have told him I was there. He came striding out on the balcony, smiling, spied me, and came over to sit down.
Sanders glared at him, and studied his drink. Dubowski trained all of his attention on me. He seemed very pleased with himself. He asked what I'd been doing since I left, and I told him, and he said that was nice.
Finally I got to ask him about his results. "No Comment," he said. "That's what I've called the press conference for."
"C'mon," I said. "I covered you for months when, everybody else was ignoring the expedition. You can give me some kind of beat. What have you got?"
He hesitated. "Well, O.K.," he said doubtfully. "But don't release it yet. You can beam it out a few hours ahead of the conference. That should be enough time, for a beat."
I nodded agreement. "What do you have?"
"The wraiths," he said. "I have the wraiths, bagged neatly. They don't exist. I've got enough evidence to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt." He smiled broadly.
"Just because you didn't find anything?" I started. "Maybe they were avoiding you. If they're sentient, they might be smart enough. Or maybe they're beyond the ability of your sensors to detect."
"Come now," Dubowski said. "You don't believe that. Our wraith traps had every kind of sensor we could come up with. If the wraiths existed, they would have registered on something. But they didn't. We had the traps planted in the areas where three of Sanders's so-called sightings took place. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Conclusive proof that those people were seeing things. Sightings, indeed."
"What about the deaths, the vanishings?" I asked. "What about the Gregor Expedition and the other classic cases?"
His smile spread. "Couldn't disprove all the deaths, of course. But our probes and our searches turned up four skeletons." He ticked them off on his fingers. "Two were killed by a rockslide, and one had rockcat claw marks on the bones."
"The fourth?"
"Murder," he said. "The body was buried in a shallow grave, clearly by human hands. A flood of some sort had exposed it. It was down in the records as a disappearance. I'm sure all the other bodies could be found, if we searched long enough. And we'd find that all died perfectly normal deaths."
Sanders raised his eyes from his drink. They were bitter eyes. "Gregor," he said stubbornly. "Gregor and the other classics."
Dubowski's smile became a smirk. "Ah, yes. We searched that area quite thoroughly. My theory was right. We found a tribe of apes nearby. Big brutes. Like giant baboons, with dirty white fur. Not a very successful species, either. We found only one small tribe, and they were dying out. But clearly, that was what Gregor's man sighted. And exaggerated all out of proportion."
There was silence. Then Sanders spoke, but his voice was beaten. "Just one question," he said softly. "Why?"
That brought Dubowski up short, and his smile faded. "You never have understood, have you, Sanders?" he said. "It was for truth. To free this planet from ignorance and superstition."
"Free Wraithworld?" Sanders said. "Was it enslaved?"
"Yes," Dubowski answered. "Enslaved by foolish myth. By fear. Now this planet will be free, and open. We can find out the truth behind those ruins now, without murky legends about halfhuman wraiths to fog the facts. We can open this planet for colonization. People won't be afraid to come here, and live, and farm. We've conquered the fear."
"A colony world? Here?" Sanders looked amused "Are you going to bring big fans to blow away the mists, or what? Colonists have come before. And left the soil's all wrong. You can't farm here, with all these mountains. At least not on a commercial scale. There's no way you can make a profit growing things on Wraithworld.
"Besides, there are hundreds of colony worlds crying for people. Did you need another so badly? Must Wraithworld become yet another Earth?"
Sanders shook his head sadly, drained his drink, and continued. "You're the one who doesn't understand, Doctor. Don't kid yourself. You haven't freed Wraithworld. You've destroyed it. You've stolen its wraiths, and left an empty planet."
Dubowski shook his head. "I think you're wrong. They'll find plenty of good, profitable ways to exploit this planet. But even if you were correct, well, it's just too bad. Knowledge is what man is all about. People like you have tried to hold back progress since the beginning of time. But they failed, and you failed. Man needs to know."
"Maybe," Sanders said. "But is that the only thing man needs? I don't think so. I think he also needs mystery, and poetry, and romance. I think he needs a few unanswered questions, to make him brood and wonder."
Dubowski stood up abruptly, and frowned. "This conversation is as pointless as your philosophy, Sanders. There's no room in my universe for unanswered questions."
"Then you live in a very drab universe, Doctor."
"And you, Sanders, live in the stink of your own ignorance. Find some new superstitions if you must. But don't try to foist them off on me with your tales and legends. I've got no time for wraiths." He looked at me. "I'll see you at the press conference," he said. Then he turned and walked briskly from the balcony.
Sanders watched him depart in silence, then swiveled in his chair to look out over the mountains. "The mists are rising," he said.
Sanders was wrong about the colony, too, as it turned out. They did establish one, although it wasn't much to boast of. Some vineyards, some factories, and a few thousand people; all belonging to no more than a couple of big companies.
Commercial farming did turn out to be unprofitable, you see. With one exception-a native grape, a fat gray thing the size of a lemon. So Wraithworld has only one export, a smoky white wine with a mellow, lingering flavor.
They call it mistwine, of course. I've grown fond of it over the years. The taste reminds me of mistfall somehow, and makes me dream. But that's probably me, not the wine. Most people don't care for it much.
Still, in a very minor way, it's a profitable item. So Wraithworld is still a regular stop on the spacelanes. For freighters, at least.
The tourists are long gone, though. Sanders was right about that. Scenery they can get closer to home, and cheaper. The wraiths were why they came.
Sanders is long gone, too. He was too stubborn and too impractical to buy in on the mistwine operations when he had the chance. So he stayed behind his ramparts at Castle Cloud until the last. I don't know what happened to him afterwards, when the hotel finally went out of business.
The castle itself is still there. I saw it a few years ago, when I stopped for a day en route to a story on New Refuge. It's already crumbling, though. Too expensive to maintain. In a few years, you won't be able to tell it from those other, older ruins.
Otherwise the planet hasn't changed much. The mists still rise at sunset, and fall at dawn. The Red Ghost is still stark and beautiful in the early morning light. The forests are still there, and the rockcats still prowl.
Only the wraiths are missing.
Only the wraiths.
WINGS
Vonda N. McIntyre
Long after the last visitors had left the temple, after time had begun to pass almost unnoticed in a deep, unrippled stream, a shape appeared, far distant, unrecognizable through the thin-film watered-silk patterns of the auroras. It ignored the passages between the light-curtains, which led eventually, slowly, to the only structure on the hills, the only thing on which they could focus. As the shape pushed through the membranes, they roiled darkly, discolored, touching and attaching again. The keeper of the temple could follow the angry violet path of their healing, and his own wounds ached in sympathy. He hugged his long arms closer around his bony knees, and watched the approaching shape with great, reflective eyes, slowly blinking.
The keeper had been alone for so long that his isolation had become a habit; for a moment, he hoped the shape might be a wanderer, lost but needing to continue, so he could point it a direction and send it on its way. He could see, by then, that it was a person. Its progress was direct, purposeful. The keeper wondered how it had found its way, without following the labyrinth. The sky was obscured among the curtains.
He saw that it was tired. It neither faltered nor staggered, but came quite slowly. As it approached, the auroras seemed to impede it. It broke through the final veil, stumbled, fell against the low wall, reached to cross it, failed. The keeper could only see its hand, two black fingers and thumb, tips of silver claws, against gray stone.
He rose and limped across the courtyard, walking faster than when he wished to conceal the limp. A pulse beat in the wrist he touched, too slow, too weak. His hands lingered, touching delicate bones through thin bands of muscle and mole-smooth skin. He rediscovered the sensation of touch, the friction of fur as short as it can be against the same, the warmth of contact. It had been a long time since he had touched another person, even in greeting. His heartbeat quickened.
The thin shape breathed twice, shallowly, quickly, as he touched it. He saw the unnatural angles of its broken bones, and turned it over gently, caressing, so he could pick it up.
He drew back, guiltily. This person was a youth, barely a youth, one who had not yet made a decision.
His hands were more gentle as he picked the youth up-- gentle, as one carries a child.
He placed the youth on his own hard bed outside the temple. The collapse must have been from pain. The long third finger of the left hand was broken, and the wing it supported lay crumpled like a smashed ion sail. The keeper opened the dark wing, pulling long frail fingers away from the back of the arm where they had tried to fold. No bone had pierced the skin, nor were the soft membranes torn away or even cut. The wing might heal. The keeper set himself to straightening the bones.
He hoped that care would overcome lack of knowledge, and prevent the youth from being crippled. When he was almost finished, he realized he was being watched. He glanced up.
He managed not to look quickly away. The youth had pastel-green eyes that made his well-formed face ugly. The keeper looked back at the youth's broken wing, as if that were the natural thing to do. "I've done the best I could with thy hand," he said, speaking as one speaks to children and youths.
"I tried to fly over the auroras." The tone was defiant, proud, expecting castigation.
"That is dangerous," the keeper said mildly. Above the temple, the atmosphere was as confused as the light-curtained passages.
"I hoped I would be killed."
"Deep despair for one so young."
"It's dying," the youth said. "Everything's dying."
The keeper saw that the youth was half-irrational from pain and exhaustion. "Sleep," he said.
"Don't you believe me? Didn't you know? You're supposed to be a seer."
"Thou art very cynical."
The youth did not answer, turned away, tried, clumsily, to flex the splinted wing.
"It is less solid than the earth," the keeper said. "Thou shouldst be gentle."
"Why did you help me? Why should you care?" the youth cried in confusion, hatred, grief.
"Go to sleep," the keeper said.
He moved inside the temple to perform his duties. They were few, and empty tradition. The god had departed, long before its last, ridiculed worshippers, as gods always do. The keeper knew that, and allowed himself no illusions about his status. It was his by chance and luck and response to pain, not divine gift. He poured libations to a memory, to a real god, the soul of unconscious things, not outgrown but driven away.
When he had finished his rituals, he returned to the youth, who slept the healing sleep. The keeper felt the throat-pulse and temperature and found neither sufficiently elevated. The precarious, rapid metabolism of their species had to accelerate when called on to heal. The keeper hunched down beside the bed, newly concerned. The youth's fine wide broken wing lay stretched open across the gray stone courtyard, useless as insulation, losing heat. The keeper did not stir for quite a long time. Finally he moved, painfully, and lay down on the narrow pallet. Quite chastely, and with some guilty reluctance, he enfolded the youth in his own one good wing. Then he, too, slept.
Much time had passed since anyone had come to induce prophecies, to wait as he hunched before the altar, sleep-watching, tranced. Now, lying beside the youth, he could feel a vision at the edge of his mind, but it was too distant and too weak to grasp. All the youth's resources were focused within; none were left for resonances. After exhausting himself struggling toward the vision in sleep, the keeper only dreamed. He awoke with memories of close, beckoning stars and high thin air, and a twisting sense of loss. He had dreamed of flying with his mate, so high that below them the earth curved away, yellow and brown and white-wisped with clouds. The sky was purple and gold in the daytime, shading to pale blue on the horizons, black and silver at night. He had loved his mate, but she was dead, and he had loved the night, but it was beyond his reach.
The keeper lay still, unwilling to move and renew his pain. But he must; his own warmth had helped a little, but the youth's body needed food to maintain itself.
The keeper's supplies were not well suited to providing sufficient energy. No one brought meat anymore, and he could not hunt. He was crippled, fit only to serve an abandoned god. He lifted his wing, folded it silently, and rose, to prepare seed paste and broth. He moved slowly, masking pain with caution, and the appearance of grace. Before, when people had come, his manner toward them had been equally graceful, and the children had lost their reticence after only a little while. The adults preferred to pretend apprehension and fear, for they came to the temple to keep their excitement high, to combat impatience, as they would glide over a live volcano or chase a whirlwind. Sometimes the fear could be real. If they stayed long enough, he might tell them their deaths with enigmatic visions they would not recognize until they were imminent. That was the way of seers. But the people were gone; they did not need him anymore. They had not really needed him for a long time, and perhaps they had never needed him at all.
The keeper carried the broth outside and held the shallow bowl to the youth's lips. The youth, half-awake, eyes half-open, seemed not to notice the vegetable taste. The keeper felt the thin tight muscles and smooth skin against his supporting hand, but at the same time saw the ugly eyes again. They were like the soft jellied plants or creatures that grew in the dark, and died in the sunlight. He envied the youth's wings, but pitied the eyes. His patient could never fly much higher than the clouds without going blind.
The youth muttered incomprehensibly and flailed at the keeper's hand so the nearly empty bowl clattered across the Stone paving. The keeper sat back on his heels, but the youth was asleep again. After a little while, the keeper lay down on the pallet again and opened his good wing. He slid his hand across the youth's chest, slowly, gently, following sharp lines of ribs, soft skin. The youth shifted. Suddenly guilty, the keeper clenched his touching-fingers into a fist, and lay rigid.
* * *
Among the auroras, one day was indistinguishable from the next. The curtains of light screened out the sun and brightened the darkness. Without darkness or light as a rough guide, the keeper had no idea how long the youth slept. He only knew that his time became more difficult. He could not avoid touching the youth, who needed to be fed and kept warm and clean, and whose wing's tendons and muscles would contract without massage. He worked hard over the youth, trying to ignore his feelings, trying to control them.
Yet, who would know if he drew his hands along the thin body, half-extended the short silver talons, drew narrow lines of love against the skin? He could embrace the sleeper, extending both his wings, and no one would pull away at the rough contact of tattered webbing. Children fondled and explored each other's androgynous genitals-- why should he restrain himself? Whispered words might influence a decision yet to be made, words and the persuasion of experienced hands, even through sleep. And if the youth awakened, what right could anyone so ugly have to object? Who else but a cripple would take such a mate? Who was left to care?
He opened his eyes against his fantasies, and felt ashamed. The auroras-- his pride, his prison-- throbbed just beyond the low stone wall.
When he felt most cynical and most alone, he sometimes calmed himself with assurances that he was the most worthy of his people, strong enough (for was he not alive?) to afford kindness and even mercy. Yet of the few crimes his people recognized, the action he contemplated now was the worst.
He had been lonely for a long time. He had understood his solitude, but never accepted it. He was a proud thing, despite his wounds. He might have been bitter and cruel, or vain and futile, but he had even been too proud for that, too proud to allow despair to change him even when there was no one left to see. Now he began to fear that his strength and pride were near exhausted. Attracted, despite the ugliness of the pastel eyes, the keeper could feel himself falling in love. He forced himself to begin thinking of the youth in the masculine. When the youth... when he awoke, that could be even more influencing than treating him as sexed while he was asleep, but his awakening would force the keeper away from his fantasies.
And perhaps the youth would approach him, in the way that was right and proper, and then the fantasies would no longer be needed.
* * *
He knew the bones had knit, well or badly, when the youth's temperature sank toward normal even while he covered him. He folded his wing and rolled away, unwilling to be so near when the youth awoke. He got up, slowly, and limped into the temple.
