Dreamsongs. Volume I by George R. R. Martin
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 shrugged. “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
“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.
Later, as we climbed a rocky incline, a cave loomed near at hand; from the smell, a woodsnarl lair.
I turned to warn them around it, only to discover that I’d lost my audience. They were ten steps behind me, at the bottom of the rocks, walking very slowly and talking quietly, holding hands.
Dark and angry, wordless, I turned away again and continued on over the hill. We did not speak again until I’d found the dust pile.
I paused on its edge, my boots an inch deep in the fine gray powder, and they came straggling up behind me. “Go ahead, Gerry,” I said. “Use your flash here.”
The light roamed. The hill was at our back, rocky and lit here and there with the blurred cold fire of bluemoss-choked vegetation. But in front of us was only desolation; a wide vacant plain, black and blasted and lifeless, open to the stars. Back and forth Gerry moved the flashlight, pushing at the borders of the dust nearby, fading as he shone it straight out into the gray distance. The only sound was the wind.
“So?” he said at last.
“Feel the dust,” I told him. I was not going to stoop this time. “And when you’re back at the tower, crush one of my bricks and feel that. It’s the same thing, a sort of powdery ash.” I made an expansive gesture. “I’d guess there was a city here once, but now it’s all crumbled into dust. Maybe my tower was an outpost of the people who built it, you see?”
“The vanished sentients of the forests,” Gerry said, still smiling. “Well, I’ll admit there’s nothing like this on the islands. For a good reason. We don’t let forest fires rage unchecked.”
“Forest fire! Don’t give me that. Forest fires don’t reduce everything to a fine powder, you always get a few blackened stumps or something.”
“Oh? You’re probably right. But all the ruined cities I know have at least a few bricks still piled on top of one another for the tourists to take pictures of,” Gerry said. The flash beam flicked to and fro over the dust pile, dismissing it. “All you have is a mound of rubbish.”
Crystal said nothing.
I began walking back, while they followed in silence. I was losing points every minute; it had been idiocy to bring them out here. At that moment nothing more was on my mind than getting back to my tower as quickly as possible, packing them off to Port Jamison together, and resuming my exile.
Crystal stopped me, after we’d come back over the hill into the bluemoss forest.
“Johnny,” she said. I stopped, they caught up, Crys pointed.
“Turn off the light,” I told Gerry. In the fainter illumination of the moss, it was easier to spot: the intricate iridescent web of a dream-spider, slanting groundward from the low branches of a mockoak. The patches of moss that shone softly all around us were nothing to this; each web strand was as thick as my little finger, oily and brilliant, running with the colors of the rainbow.
Crys took a step toward it, but I took her by the arm and stopped her. “The spiders are around someplace,” I said. “Don’t go too close. Papa spider never leaves the web, and Mama ranges around in the trees at night.”
Gerry glanced upward a little apprehensively. His flash was dark, and suddenly he didn’t seem to have all the answers. The dream-spiders are dangerous predators, and I suppose he’d never seen one outside of a display case. They weren’t native to the islands. “Pretty big web,” he said. “Spiders must be a fair size.”
“Fair,” I said, and at once I was inspired. I could discomfort him a lot more if an ordinary web like this got to him. And he had been discomforting me all night. “Follow me. I’ll show you a real dream-spider.” We circled around the web carefully, never seeing either of its guardians. I led them to the spider-chasm.
It was a great V in the sandy earth, once a creekbed perhaps, but dry and overgrown now. The chasm is hardly very deep by daylight, but at night it looks formidable enough, as you stare down into it from the wooded hills on either side. The bottom is a dark tangle of shrubbery, alive with little flickering phantom lights; higher up, trees of all kinds lean into the chasm, almost meeting in the center. One of them, in fact, does cross the gap. An ancient, rotting spikearrow, withered by lack of moisture, had fallen long ago to provide a natural bridge. The bridge hangs with bluemoss, and glows. The three of us walked out on that dim-lit, curving trunk, and I gestured down.
Yards below us, a glittering multihued net hung
That, of course, was why the dream-spiders spun it. They were nocturnal predators, and the bright colors of their webs afire in the night made a potent lure.
“Look,” Crystal said, “the spider.” She pointed. In one of the darker corners of the web, half-hidden by the tangle of a goblin tree that grew out of the rock, it was sitting. I could see it dimly, by the webfire and moss light, a great eight-legged white thing the size of a large pumpkin. Unmoving. Waiting.
Gerry glanced around uneasily again, up into the branches of a crooked mockoak that hung partially above us. “The mate’s around somewhere, isn’t it?”
I nodded. The dream-spiders of Jamison’s World are not quite twins to the arachnids of Old Earth. The female is indeed the deadlier of the species, but far from eating the male, she takes him for life in a permanent specialized partnership. For it is the sluggish, great-bodied male who wears the spinnerets, who weaves the shining-fire web and makes it sticky with his oils, who binds and ties the prey snared by light and color. Meanwhile, the smaller female roams the dark branches, her poison sac full of the viscous dreaming-venom that grants bright visions and ecstasy and final blackness. Creatures many times her own size she stings, and drags limp back to the web to add to the larder.
The dream-spiders are soft, merciful hunters for all that. If they prefer live food, no matter; the captive probably enjoys being eaten. Popular Jamie wisdom says a spider’s prey moans with joy as it is consumed. Like all popular wisdoms, it is vastly exaggerated. But the truth is, the captives never struggle.