... and every sunrise sings a song for deathAs we came in fast to planetfall our speed matched the dawn and time stood still. The blinding, alien sun hung over the horizon, its burning rays veiled from my eyes by the light atmosphere already surrounding the ship and the clouded, protective `glass', but the song of its fierceness and energy poured through me, dazzling my mind, washing over the mass of colours covering the bright half of the ground with a surging brilliant turbulence.
--- John Osborne, Luther.
Drawing nearer, as my mind and eyes adjusted, details separated from the glow: blue-winding rivers and lakes; dark green areas that might have been forest; red, bare hills running in smooth ridges: all rushed out of the still shadow of night and slid towards the sun. Patches of red and yellow scattered on the slopes of valleys told of settlements. The thousand little thoughts and activities that made up human life rose humming to my mind, and below and around and above blurred the different voices of this world, from the soil stretching in the sun's fingers to the bird whirling in the warming air, a chorus of all its being - and a hint of something else again, a note I could not isolate, of alien desolation.
I turned to the night, where a moon's pale radiance pulsed in the air, which danced to its eldritch light. How can I tell one who does not know, who can only feel with their five senses? If you held your hand in boiling water and then plunged it into ice that might hold something of the quality: but this was not pain.
Around the crew were rock steady, proudly unaffected by the stress of landing, but a whirling dizzy blackness was rising in my head. I made a muttered excuse and staggered through to my cabin, assisted by unfriendly hands. We are not chosen even in part for physical endurance, but for rarer qualities, as much feared as respected. To feel their superior scorn follow me bit like acid into my pride when remembered later, but now as I fell on the couch it was full-contented homecoming to slip far away into that darkness.
I wandered in my childhood again, running from the household chores to idle by the stream, play in the summer-house, or climb the school wall and watch the boys at their lessons. Then even as I played there was something strange. The sunlight dancing on my face spoke of another place, a journey through a different atmosphere from a fiercer sun, and I woke to my cabin in the `Empress'.
There was a stillness and content in the air. The metal walls that had been battered by the engines' vibrations and the burning atmosphere seemed to have rested as I, and to sigh and settle in the quietness.
But I did not want to move yet. The first stage of my mission, the cruel journey through space that I had dreaded for so long, was now over, the second phase not yet begun, and for the first time I relaxed enough to indulge in the memory of the dangers I had come through safely. For months I had been unable to reach Central except in deep trance and with growing difficulty for shorter periods of time, and the consequent loss of guidance and comradeship available at a thought was hard: oral communication could have partially replaced it, but ignorance of the limits on my ability placed a bar of mistrust between myself and most of the others on board the ship.
Worse was leaving my home world for the first time, where all the familiar sensations formed meaningful patterns, for the discordant blackness of space that haunted me perpetually - the whining of the scattered particles, the yawning, incredible gaps of nothing, and the stars burning to eternity, star after star, pulling the mind on and on to wander limitlessly forward leaving everything known in a far search for eternity. There is no guard but alertness and an active ear to the earthly voices of the ship. Others have been lost, their minds travelling farther and farther away, while their bodies wasted and grew old in trance-like sleep. Some came back to themselves later with strange tales of disembodied travel in space and time, but they were strange in other ways also, hardly knowing the difference between reality and unreality; you might call them mad.
And then the landing. The crew, hardy and sure of their own skill, always scorned the first-flighter who suffered from landing stress: half their jokes were at the expense of greenhorns who spent the whole of the descent on their couches. My pride ached with the memory of their satisfied mental laughter as I hurried away: but it could have been worse, I could have blacked out on the spot. Others in similar circumstances had.
But the sun was a summons to live and move and throw off lethargy. Hunger scrabbled at the edges of my mind, as there emanated from the canteen the impression of people eating, on the whole with pleasure but also with occasional sparks of distress.
Then on the way there I met the captain:
"Ah - Officer D'Estan - I'd like to talk to you for a moment" - then seeing my glance at the canteen - "I'll have coffee sent in - no, on second thoughts, tea. That machine, you know..."
There were one or two minor points about the return journey to settle, and then the captain produced a bulky folder from the wall safe. The report that had led to my being sent to T'ra Rubris had contained only minimal facts: while I had slept a messenger had brought the necessary detailed reports for me to read myself before setting out for the trouble spot. It was a fascinating, well-compiled set of documents, containing all possible relevant history and legend. My enthusiasm for work returned. I was so absorbed that I forget to drink my tea and hurried cheerfully out to the reading room to study it properly.
Although the settlement of T'ra Rubris was scarcely 400 years old, already the first accounts of the explorers, passed down inaccurately in scanty records, had grown into legend.
Farmer Leigh of Weatherdale, who had fought the first and last great battle against the strange, logical but unthinking native scarrows (scarrows? I looked the word up: `etym. dubious, supposed origin O. Terran scarecrows') had taken on the stature of a folk hero. He had defended his home and family tribe under siege against their attack for three weeks, in fact until the eco-biologist Jorgsson cooked up the off-world germ that wiped the scarrows from the face of the planet. Tales had also grown around the names of most of his band: Roll the Fat, who had reputedly floated down the river gorge without a boat and found the first Uranium deposits, Maria and Petr, the simple couple whose life work was to modify the local vegetation, which indeed they did, with often hilarious results, thought probably exaggerated by being handed down through the centuries, which was no doubt true of many of the others also.
There was also one later legend of Weatherdale that clung in my mind as particularly strange. About one hundred years after the Great Siege, when the population of Weatherdale had grown to a small village, an off-world teacher was employed. He slept badly, and would spend hours wandering round the countryside. Most often he was seen walking up the valley into the hills in the direction of the `Cauliflower', a bizarre configuration of stone that grew from the smooth sandstone hill like a wart. Eccentric indeed he was, but he easily kept the children in order; they used to swear he had eyes in the back of his head, and scattered through the school also. Nothing escaped him, from the rapt attention paid in the back row to a caterpillar crawling up the side of a desk to the planned mischief of the inevitable bully. Week following week he ruled the school, capable and reliable. Then one morning he was not there. His landlady had not seen him since he went out for one of his walks the night before. They found him on the Cauliflower, muttering and weeping, and when they talked to him he rushed at them and had to be held down. They thought at first that he had simultaneously had a stroke and gone mad, for his movements were inhibited and his limbs twisted. They took him to hospital at Space-port, where no physical cause could be found. This strange paralysis wore off, but he was still incoherent. However he filled pages of paper, the walls of his room, anything he could obtain, with pictures of scarrows in their burrows, scarrows fighting, hunting, eating, detailed to each feeler and hair. The really strange thing was that he had never seen even the few specimen dead scarrows, much less their vast underground hives which, although their existence was known, had not at this time been properly explored.
And it was at Weatherdale, the scene of the destruction of an alien race and the madness of an unrecognised receptive, that the `disturbances' had appeared, whose cause and cure I must determine.
It had started with the childrens' nightmares: they would wake sobbing with terror and dreams of blackness and heat in long passages, and queer creatures that came on them out of the blackness. Their drawings became filled with scarrows, and the play-world built from their shared dreams became an obsession with them. There was an appalling consistency and brutality in these games: one boy had been admitted to hospital after the teacher, watching them play, stiff-legged and awkwardly as they always did, saw him set upon by the whole pack. So transformed were the children that she did not even think of trying to go straight out and rescue him, for fear of sharing the same fate, but instead rang the school bell for the end of the day, which recalled them from their `play' with its familiarity. None of them could remember what had happened and they were frightened and puzzled by their friend moaning, humanly now, on the playground. At the premature sound of the home-bell worried parents arrived at the school. The children were sent home and kept under close parental supervision, while the injured boy was taken to Spaceport for treatment. School had not yet re-opened.
Then the livestock began to refuse to eat the imported grass, chewing instead the hard-leaved native shrubs, even to the point of starvation, since they could get no nourishment from the indigestible food, and becoming vicious and erratic.
At this point they sent for help from the Alien Hauntings Department of Central Telepathic Control. It was only up to here that I had any knowledge of the situation. In the night a desolate wailing set up, heard by all within the township. Scarrows were sighted - but not real scarrows, for though they charged and fought there was no substance to them. Perhaps they were conjured up by mass hysteria - or then again, perhaps not. Even by day, few had the courage to venture out alone, though no-one had been harmed by the wraiths so far. At night whole families huddled together, with the doors and windows barricaded and the lights kept high, hearing the pale-eyed ghost army lit by the moonlight outside.
Suddenly I became aware of two people entering behind me, one the captain, the other, it struck me, a strong-charactered straightforward man worried almost beyond endurance.
"Farmer Haldan - this is Officer D'Estan from Central's Alien Hauntings Department."
Something was amusing the captain, but for a moment I couldn't tell what -
"Her! She's just a girl, and an undergrown one at that!"
A few seconds ago Haldan had been prepared to be impressed; his disappointment and shock now were painful. It was not that he let this solidify into a dislike of me, but his anxiety turned to bitterness.
"Officer D'Estan is a fully trained officer of Central and, I believe, very highly regarded in her department," the captain continued with relentless malice. "I am glad you do not feel that an escort to Weatherdale is necessary. The crew really need some time off-ship, and while they are good with machinery, would feel uneasy with ghosts."
"Aye, but..."
His unspoken objections to the whole situation were as thick as fog in the room. There comes a time for confident self-assertion -
"Farmer Haldan, I have no doubt that my own abilities are sufficient to deal with this situation, but in the unlikely event that I am mistaken, in need I can call upon the whole power of Central. When Central fails then so does Civilisation, and we may as well all creep to extinction."
The fog lifted slightly. Regarded as a tool or channel for Central, I seemed more credible to him.
The journey to Weatherdale seemed long, for inevitably I still thought in terms of rocket speeds. We stayed one night in a loner's farm house in the middle of a dust-driven plain, the next in a government station deep in the hills, and then in the afternoon of the third day came down into a river-valley between ridges of high, bare sandstone. As we drew lower, first tussocks of grass appeared, then thin bushes, and last a sparse scattering of trees, becoming thicker as the soil changed where the stone had been ground by the weather and washed down to form the typical red earth, mixed with richer, heavy black as we drew lower still. And now the woods were lush and full of scent and sound that pervaded the `car', speaking to my mind of life and growth almost deafening after the shrill, thin stone voices of the hills. Then this too gave way to neatly ordered crops and, at last, the township, apparently serene and still.
I briefly `felt' around; everything was more than normally peaceful. There was no alarm in the animals, the inanimate things unwittingly uttered as ever with no present trace of outside influence; only in the uneasiness of the people was there any sign to show that I was needed - unless an almost undetectable presence, like a distant scent, that could not quite be concealed, but neither would be apprehended.
Not many people came out to meet us. My arrival would have been a big occasion for the village in normal times had any business taken me there, but they were subdued by fear in spite of the cessation of the manifestations, and there was a strained quiet both then and later during a supper at Farmer Haldan's house, to which all the local people of standing were invited. I did not that evening meet Farmer Haldan's daughter Celia, whom he had mentioned adoringly on the journey several times with, I felt, an implicit unfavourable comparison to myself. She was in the kitchen helping to prepare the meal. Her mother emerged, proudly efficient and bustling, to take credit for all the organisation when all was served and drink the toast to the Emperor, but that was all.
The later it grew the less willing the guests seemed to leave - they had not been out in the dark for weeks and still felt fear of what might lurk behind the walls. But I was sickened by their narrow local gossip, the oozing hypocrisy as neighbour charmingly complimented hated neighbour, and their resentful attitude to me behind attentive courtesy. They had expected a super-man, combining the physical strength and handsome features of a Cineview Space-Hero with magical powers to drive back the Forces of Darkness, while they were faced with a half-grown youngster and, yet another blow to their conception of the `right' ordering of society, a girl. Even worse than the men's indignation was the women's. I represented a threat to their security in specialised inferiority. The assignment turned sour. I would find their `ghost' as required, but I felt there could be no personal fulfilment in helping these people. I longed to be going home to the comradeship and acceptance of my own kind.
After a decent length of time - for habits hold hard, and politeness is as hard as any - I excused myself, saying that I was tired after the journey, and was convinced that all would remain quiet for a few hours at least. This fitted well with their preconceptions of my lack of strength, and one or two of the matrons almost waxed motherly. The woman of the house, Wife Haldan, showed me to the guest-room on the first floor - a large, well-proportioned apartment with massive wooden furniture that matched it well. I discovered that I had not lied: I was more than ready for sleep.
My own dreams were wild enough - the people and faces of the day merged in a landscape of long ago, melted into the rocket in a nightmare of impotence against breaking walls, people that changed and evaporated, things that thought with human voices - and then, unplanned and impossible to bring about intentionally, I found myself slipping into another's dream. The natural `block' preventing voluntary, harmless mind-reading except between two trained to it fell in sleep, perhaps because the personality I met was not unlike my own: diffident, isolated from others by a difficulty in expressing intangible emotions and thoughts.
On the battlement of the stronghold, moulded from the Great Romances, stood the queen, tall and brave, watching the siege of her fortress. Darkness hung on all sides, cloaking the hordes of her enemy/lover in fear and horror. The walls below were manned by armour-gleaming guards, laser guns in hand, yet the anachronism did not seem strange. The captain of the guard came before her, gallant and loyal, waiting for her orders. She felt a surge of affection for him, but outside a greater force called. Resist she must but the walls would not hold forever - already the guard was thinner, the defences weakened -
Startled, I realised that in the blackness of the enemy, scarrows were moving. They were reforming for an attack and the queen was truly afraid.
Was the other here in her dreams? Was that the answer, a war to win a sleeping mind? I dreaded that it might be so - I was not prepared to take part in such a battle that could all too easily destroy the ground on which it was thought. Tentatively I reached out and felt - illusion, and one mind.
Then the dream changed again, and I could not stay with it. Abruptly I woke to the dark guest-room. I reached through the house and `saw' the mind whose dream I had shared, but now I could only sense the fear with an underlying security, as her subconscious self laughed at the trick it had played on the sleeping mind, building fantasy from fact. And that was the clue. Somewhere in that dream had been buried the truth as she knew it.
Outside the wind howled, and the windows shook. From the room below I could feel unease with each shrieking gust, but the fear was irrational, only the impersonal forces of nature were abroad tonight.
I woke late the next morning. My breakfast was brought to my room, and I could get up in as leisurely a fashion as I chose, free from the routine of the ship, and not involved in the household. But now, remembering the night, a fever of impatience was on me to meet the dreamer. She was downstairs, I knew, with the one whose fear I had felt after and a third I could not place. Dressed and with the empty tray in my hands I followed my impression of them down the stairs to the kitchens, where I saw the three - Wife Haldan, the `queen' and her `captain of the guard'. They were talking and laughing together, and were surprised by my arrival. The girl turned away to the sink, the boy stared rudely but without malice, while my hostess hustled forward -
"Why, how good of you to bring the tray down, officer - you really shouldn't have bothered. If you'd like to see round in the daylight Farmer'll be back soon" - she saw my glance at the other two -
"But I am forgetting my manners - this is our neighbour's lad, Pete Crodlingford. Pete, this is officer D'Estan from Central who has so kindly come to help us stop these terrible things that keep happening. And this is my daughter, Celia."
Love and pride glowed at the last mention. Pete stood to shake hands and then lounged uncomfortably, hands in pockets, in a vain attempt to turn awkwardness into a cinevu suavity. A thorough `son of the soil' from appearance, but beneath it all I could tell that Celia's romanticised dream picture of him might have some potential truth. Wife Haldan would have babbled for ever, but I asked to speak to Celia alone. She was surprised, and left the room without comment. Pete ambled slowly out after her. Celia's back was still to me as she fingered the work in the sink.
"Celia -"
She turned to me with an odd mixture of fear, bewilderment, and hate. The hair that in her dream had flowed like polished liquid around her face was pulled back in a lank greasy pony tail, and she suffered from spots, but she was still undeniably beautiful.
"Celia, you know why I am here. You can help me..."
"No - not me - I don't know what you are talking about, I don't want to hear!"
There was a rising, scarcely suppressed hysteria in her mind, and she laughed wildly in reaction to the nervous tension mounting between us. I lost patience with her. She was the focus of all the troubles; press her hard enough and I would be free, free to leave this primitive, godforsaken planet and go home.
"You will tell me all about it - " and with these words I held her quaking mind, a fragile shell within an iron grip -
I have said that I could not read thoughts but only `feel' emotions given off without volition, except of course with another practised telepath flexible enough to admit another into his thoughts. This was true, though not through lack of ability. I could take a mind apart piece by piece, but it would be destroyed in the process. She radiated through blind instinct a call of distress, a plea for help -
It came, as I had hoped. A surge of wild, ill-controlled alien energy filled the room. Crockery smashed, the rug curled itself up ecstatically, and I was held immobile while Celia ran from the house, surrounded by its protective, blanketing power.
I did not resist. After a few moments I shrugged off my opponent's hold and was ready to follow. As I left I briefly realised Pete was following behind, but that was unimportant now: I wanted to be face to face with it, to know what I must kill.
The path she had followed in its power still howled with the whirlwind strength, leaves scattered and twisted, stones changed to echo a different song. Up the hill it wound and I ran, through wet corn-stubble, dank undergrowth, and out on to the red hill to Cauliflower. Amazed at my own stupidity for not realising what it was, I stared with eyes and mind at the unknowably old being before me. The bones were stone, its soft brain hidden somewhere far below the surface. It had no senses. Yet now it watched me through Celia's eyes in cynical amusement as it showed me that it had not been tricked into showing itself by me, but I fooled into understanding its powers and running blindly into the trap it had set. A wordless question formed in my mind - what of Celia?
It flinched away, a mad mother clinging to a doll child. Celia was its hope, its love, its future. So unbalanced at this point were its feelings that I pressed my question home and saw its needs: the scarrows had been its eyes, hands and feet, and it had guided and controlled them so that they ruled the whole planet. But men had destroyed the scarrows, and left it in the dark, alone. And then had come a light. A strange, different vision, but sight from a mind it could feel, and it had seized upon the chance and tried to impose its old symbiotic relationship with the scarrows onto this different being - but with shattering results. Then it had been in the dark again, its agony intensified by the knowledge that so near were beings whose senses it could not share by so narrow a margin. Then the miracle occurred: a being whose thoughts it could reach was born, a thoughtless child whose joys and pains it watched from without, not daring to interfere for fear of crushing the mind that was its only contact with the outside world, forever overhearing, but never taking part - was it any wonder that sometimes its energy spilled over into strange ways? Celia must come to it of her own free will, for their minds and thoughts to be welded into the one that the scarrows and it had been -
My human mind was sickened by revulsion at the vision, the essential sanction against `mental trespassing' that is the keynote of independence was threatened and my course of action was clear. Besides, the warped part of my soul whispered why should she have all the love: Pete, her father and mother, and this too, when you have no-one of your own -
It thought I was alone and it had trapped me, like the desperate red-plumed fish that scarrows had netted so long ago. Nothing might be allowed to stand in its way, and it moved in to the kill -
I fled back, leapt into the dark, through the stars, a calling and seeking for home and help - light and strength as a thousand minds stood behind mine, filled now by their united power of thought.
It knew then it had lost. Celia, a rag-doll freed suddenly from its hold, crumpled to the grass, as it concentrated its defences as hands held to shield itself from us. But I burned through layer after layer of consciousness, through memories of the years of power growing over a planet, burrowing and achievement, rich beauty of sharded joy and battle as fierce as poetry, taking what I chose to store in memory for us and shattering the rest, as the alien shuddered beneath our assault, and died.
And so my job was done. The hauntings would happen no more, and human dignity was saved. I felt the warmth of satisfaction from my colleagues afar, and congratulations from my superiors. It was an unexpectedly complicated job well done, and I had proved myself to them. In the relaxation after the first exhilaration of success I knew I was exhausted and must break off contact -
The darkness in my eyes cleared. The sky was blue above, I breathed deeply of the cold air. Somewhere a bird sang. I did not want to think, just to breathe and to be and rest my mind. Celia was clinging to Pete, sobbing, not with grief for a dead stone lover but as a child cries after terror, safe again with one it trusts and loves. They walked together back down the hill, concerned only with each other. I sat mutely. The `Cauliflower' looked now different; of all the souls on this planet only I knew that it was now indeed nothing more than an ugly pile of stone that would slowly decay, while an hour ago it had been more alive than any of them.
In the village the bell rang out a jubilee. Farmer Haldan was coming up the hill calling my name, surprise and joy in his mind; and I the sole mourner, with cold tears in my eyes.