Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions

by Fritz Leiber

  "Oh, good!" the Robotist's Fond Companion urged. "I love spooky stories."

  "Tales of death and desolation – by all means!" the Planetographer's Sweet Love chimed, smacking her lips.

  "Morbid monster!" he told her playfully.

  "Prurient parasite!" she joked back.

  "Which of us should begin?" the Astrogator asked.

  "You!" they all chorused: his two fellow explorers and the stay-at-home mates of all three of them were gathered together in convivial and truly symbiotic friendship for the first time since the three explorers' great voyaging.

  The Astrogator finished his drink, was poured another, and began, "We surfaced from hyperspace out in the Arm. Our destination was a star in a tiny cluster, a star so small and somehow woebegone we called her Lonely."

  "Out in the Arm!" his Dear Friend commented. "Then it was during the period when we were out of telepathic contact entirely. Our lonely time."

  "That's right. As we approached her, we studied her planets. The Seventh was trebly ringed, quite a rarity. The Fifth was long since shattered, almost pulverized. An old deep nuclear suicide, or else a dual planet, inharmoniously paired. Analysis of data we recorded may still tell."

  "Or perhaps (remotely possible) he encountered a small dark wanderer passing through Lonely's space," the Planetographer put in.

  "What a way to go!" his Sweet Love said. "Serve him right for playing around."

  "No fault of his – he'd be a sitting duck."

  "Who's telling this?" the Astrogator complained. "Now moving in closer to Lonely, we found her Third altogether ideal for life, right in the middle of the viable volume. And he was paired, with tides to stir his atmosphere and waters – no chance of stagnation. The secondary was quite small, had long ago died a natural death–"

  "Perhaps," the Planetographer interjected.

  The other continued without comment, "–but the primary was the right size with a rich atmosphere, so we named him Hope. And there were radiations patterned by intelligence coming from him. That seemed conclusive, and yet" – he paused – "and yet almost from the start there was something about him that seemed wrong."

  He paused again. The Planetographer nodded and said, "His atmosphere was rich, all right – too rich in hydrocarbons to my taste."

  The Robotist observed, "And as for those radiations indicating intelligence, well, there began to be a sameness about them, a lack of interplay, a lack of the day-to-day dynamisms characteristic of mental life in ferment."

  "A time of cultural calm?" his Fond Companion suggested. "A quiet period?"

  "We thought so for a while, my dear."

  The Astrogator went on, "I put Quester into a parking orbit inn Three's natural period of rotation so that our ship hung above one meridian, shuttling north and south through an arc of about one-fourth of a circle as Three spun."

  He looked toward the Planetographer across the table floating between them.

  "Three showed at least three times as much ocean as land," the latter took up. "Our daily swing took us across two continents joined by a serpentine isthmus, from the east coast of the northern continent to the west coast of the southern near its tip, and back again. Three was, or had been, inhabited all right, and by beings of considerable if strange mentation, for we passed over numerous cities–"

  "Cities? What are those?" the Astrogator's Dear Friend wanted to know.

  "Abnormal concentrations of dwellings and other structures. Inorganic cancers. As I was saying – over numerous cities and great wide roads and paved flat fields that might have been for the mass celebration of religious rites, or else for the launching and landing of large winged vehicles. In fact, the inhabitants of Three seemed to have had a passion for sealing in the surfaces of their continents with various inorganic materials."

  "How very strange," the Robotist's Fond Companion observed.

  "Yes, indeed. At the north end of our daily swing there was an especially large concentration of cities – a cluster of inorganic boils, you might say – beside and in the ocean's edge. The one of these containing the most monstrous structures was a long narrow island surrounded by a mighty dike at least one-fourth the height of the tallest structures it guarded – and they were tall!–and against the top of which, or near, the dark, restless oceanic waters ceaselessly lapped and crashed. This city stood just off the continent. A very deep river led down to it from the north, while farther to the northwest lay five great, swollen lakes, half run together."

  "Did he have ice caps? I mean Three, of course," the Planetographer's Sweet Love inquired sharply.

  "No."

  "But had he formerly?"

  "My love, you are intuitive. Yes, he'd had ice caps until very recently, and they had melted, raising the ocean's level, and the dike had been built against that, stage by stage.

  "But oh, the monstrousness of those buildings the dike guarded!–especially toward the south end of the island. Their height, immensity, and blocky shapes! But most particularly the way they were crowded together stiflingly like giant columns of prismatic basalt. With your own eyes or by telepathy you've all seen monuments on other planets, built by races that favor such oddities. Well, imagine them without vistas, jammed side to side, literally wall against wall, hundreds and hundreds of them, thousands and thousands – and many scores of them tall enough to peer over the dike at the illimitable, wind-fretted sea. Or think of planets heavily overpopulated, so that two skyscrapers actually approach each other as closely as the sum of their heights, and then imagine them packed together with no room between, the windows of their eyes blinded, the doors of their mouths screaming against solidity – as if space herself had been conquered by matter, as threatens in the hearts of some dwarf stars. I tell you, as we stared down through our instruments at that monstrous city, we wondered only why it had not squeezed itself out of existence – popped like a pressured seed out of the space-time fabric into chaos!"

  "But just how high, really, was the dike?" his Sweet Love asked.

  "A hundred times my height."

  "So, ten times my length. Yes, that's pretty tall," she allowed, smiling at him beside her. The other four around the floating table nodded or otherwise expressed agreement.

  The Planetographer continued. "The walled and narrow off-shore island city, although spectacular and with a macabre fascination all its own, did not monopolize our attention. We studied other cities along our swing – in fact, all the sea and land we passed over. We set up two observation satellites in other orbits along other meridians. We sent down probes to sample the atmosphere and waters. We pinpointed the sources of Three's radiation and further analyzed it. By every means we knew, we looked for life.

  "Gradually it was borne in on us (and to our considerable astonishment since we'd seen the cities) that our first horrible suspicion was correct. Hope (Three) was dead – as sterile as an asteroid in intergalactic space, or baking as it orbits a star just outside her corona. By their unbridled industrial and technological development, Three's inhabitants had doomed and destroyed all life there, even the monocellular and the viral. The atmosphere was lethal. The great oceans were poison."

  "And the patterned radiations," the Robotist put in, "were being broadcast by automatic, self-repairing instruments that would continue to do so until their sun-power failed. Mere echoes of intelligence long since dead."

  There was a general silence.

  The Planetographer resumed, elegiacally, "The ruined dawn worlds are all sad, a hundred self-destroyed for every one that manages to cope with the first great crisis of intelligence: environment's control, ecology. Sad, sad to see a planet blasted by nuclear warfare, perhaps riven to its very core. But such deaths at least are swift and sudden. Saddest of all to see a planet like Hope, dead of slow poison, where even his intelligent inhabitants became, by overpopulation, only one more pollutant. To think of his vigorous peoples creating and building, entertaining all sorts of romantic and grandiose plans for the future, believing thems
elves in control of their lives, when all the while they were only quietly digging their own graves, planning their deaths, building their monstrous tombs, patiently elaborating the venoms that would carry them off – and all local life with them. For life was gone on Hope, totally gone."

  There was, as it were, a collective sigh from the three stay-at-homes around the floating table.

  "But then," the Planetographer said dramatically, "there came the event that appeared to refute that seemingly irrevocable conclusion. Out of the cenotaph of the monstrous diked island city there rose a fiery plumed rocket aimed at us. We let it approach for a space, then mastered it with repulsor and tractor beams and, when its fuel burned out, placed it in the same orbit as Quester at a safe distance. Robot examination -but that's the field of my friend across the table."

  "–showed it to be a fission-fusion missile of some potency," the Robotist took up. "It was the delay in the firing of the missile that seemed to argue against a merely automatic defense system triggered by the approach of Quester and for the presence of living intelligence. If it were merely a robot system like the sun-powered broadcasters, with the decision arrived at by computers, why the delay? Of course there were alternative explanations, such as a cumulative stimulus being required to work the trigger. Still, as I sent down the probes that would engage in detailed explorations, inside structures as well as out, far underground if need be, I felt more than usual excitement, even an uneasy anticipation, as to exactly what they would discover.

  "As you know, the probes are of several different sorts, ranging from spheroidal floaters to true robots with eight legs, about my size, able to walk and climb, open or cut through doors, and also fire grapnel lines to bridge gaps, et cetera.

  "Such probes were sent not only into the diked city, but also to other localities: on the two serpent-linked continents, on a larger cluster of continents on Three's other side, and on one lonely land mass at his southern pole.

  "The same quite interesting general finding soon came back from many localities. The larger structures everywhere were quite devoid of the remains of Three's intelligent life form, which later turned out to be a biped bibrach with an internal mineral skeleton. Its sensorium and organs of mentation were carried precariously in an external braincase, instead of within a sturdy cephalothorax, such as ours, or a single streamlined body, such as yours, my dears."

  "How very odd," his Fond Companion said.

  "A mineral endoskeleton instead of pliant cartilage," the Planetographer's Sweet Love observed with some distaste. "Bones on the inside, ugh!"

  "And how much nicer to be born with tentacles, like ours, or a neat and protective leathery exoskeleton, like yours," the Astrogator's Dear Friend said to him.

  "The biped bibrachs had tentacles of a sort," he told her. "Five on each limb, with little bones inside."

  "Sounds much too stiff. They must have moved about like rheumatic demi-octopuses. Or paraplegic arachnoids, for that matter."

  "As I was saying," the Robotist cut short the digression, "although we found numerous bibrach skeletons, there were none within the larger structures – no, these were empty except for large stores of video and audio records – which did not clash with the notion that these places were for the celebration of rare and arcane religious rites, holy and occult buildings. Why, several of them near the center of the cluster of continents on Three's other side were shaped like huge pyramids and almost solid – just a few tiny rooms and passageways deep inside. Another, which stood on a peninsula one-fifth of our swing down the diked city's meridian, was a hollow cube so vast that several of the bibrach's smaller winged vehicles could have been flown about inside.

  "But as you'd expect, the structures in the diked island city were the most monstrous, though one at the drowned foot of the fourth western lake was taller. A large number of our probes were busy there – many of them exploring underground, for the island was formed entirely of fine-grained rock, which the bibrachs had honeycombed with tunnels and basements under basements, like inverted buildings – towers and downward-pointing pinnacles of space inside solidity.

  "And then from the probe that had gone deepest – as deep below the surface as the tallest tower extended above – a message was relayed back: it had found life."

  There was an uneasy stirring around the round table. It almost communicated itself to the water in which the six friends floated.

  "We asked our probes for details and to a degree we got them, although the distance was too great, the angles too sharp, and the relays too many for the accurate transmission back of pictures. There was one source of life-indications only, one being, and it was strangely wedded to the inorganic."

  "Horrors! But how?" his Fond Companion demanded.

  "That is the thing our robots could not tell us. We were consumed with wonder and with dread, but above all with a burning curiosity. We decided to go down and see for ourselves – all three, since none of us would consent to be left behind."

  "But that was fantastically dangerous," she protested, "and quite against all sound exploratory practice."

  "When we are out in the wild worlds of the Rim," the Astrogator put in, "we are not always so particular. I'm afraid we take chances."

  "Especially when we are also out of telepathic range," the Planetographer added.

  "Besides, there was this drive, this burning urge," the Robotist continued. "As soon as the Quester had swung farthest north, we suited up and took the landing craft down.

  "The skies were brownish gray when at last we saw them from below. So were the seas storming around the island. We landed in a narrow gorge – slit, rather – at the base of two vast rectilinear pylons, from deep below which the signs of life were coming.

  "We disembarked, feeling claustrophobic and unclean, despite the sure protection afforded by our suits. The pavement was less littered than I'd expected, though I did note the braincase of a bibrach, brown as the ribbon of sky overhead. The structures hemming us in, their windowed walls staring shortsightedly at each other, were indescribably oppressive.

  "The cramping gorge ended at the great dike, and even as I looked up, up, up at its top, I saw a cloud of brown spray thrown high above it as a great wave broke against its other side. The thought of all that poisoned water pressing in on us from all sides, and we already far below its surface, added to the dark weight upon my feelings.

  "Our robots were waiting for us, and with them we began the subterranean stage of our journey. We descended chiefly by a series of narrow, vertical, square-sectioned shafts bored in the rock. These carried boxlike vehicles, but we preferred to drop by our own lines. I will not dwell on my ever increasing feeling of oppression. Suffice it that the rocks' vast mass was added in my thoughts to that of the waters.

  "We entered at last a dim world of computers, the inorganic remnant, mindlessly functioning, of the core of the bibrach's culture. At its nadir we found our robots clustered around a deep-set window. Here, we knew, was the life they'd found. We ordered them aside and looked through ourselves and say a life-support system automatically maintaining a single bibrach brain that was cyborged to the computer around it."

  "Cyborged – how very dreadful," his Fond Companion breathed. "The marriage of flesh to metal – abomination."

  "For a long while we stood staring at that poor pinkish thing. The same thoughts and feelings were building up in all three of our minds: the loneliness and agony and desolation of that captive mind, last of its race, sundered by light-years (at least until our arrival) from any other known mentality – the mind that at some pinnacle of hate or terror had sent the rocket at us, the mind that might die the next moment, or perhaps live for eons. In the end I found myself thinking just this one thought: that if Death has a brain anywhere in the universe, it is there on Hope (that circles Lonely way out in the Arm), deep in the rock of the diked island city.

  "Perhaps (you'll say) we should have tried to communicate with it, even to disentangle it at any risk from it
s environs. I only know we didn't. Instead we returned (fled would be more honest), up the skinny shafts into the brown day of the monstrous city, and embarked to chase the Quester down its meridian without a thought of waiting its return. Once aboard, we picked up all our probes and left (fled!) Hope and all of Lonely's planetary system and didn't feel really safe until we were in hyperspace again."

  "Think of the loneliness of that last brain..." the Planetographer murmured.

  "That was the eeriest ruined dawn world – just as I told you at the start," the Astrogator said with conviction. "Don't you agree, my love?"

  "I think all three of you behaved like a pack of lunatics," his Dear Friend answered. "You're not to be trusted, any of you, outside the range of our telepathy."

  "Why didn't you stay and at least try to talk to that buried brain?" the Planetographer's Sweet Love demanded.

  "We had this feeling–" he began, then shrugged.

  "We were scared," the Robotist said.

  "Well, it's been nice to get together," his Fond Companion said briskly, "but now it's time we broke up. You and I, my dear, have to check out that terrarium we're buying at Deep Six."

  And without further ceremony the three arachnoids, about as large as gorillas but with brains larger than man's and hands even more manipulative, scrambled into the shoulder niches of their ichthyoid partners. The latter, who were the size of long, sinuous whales with brains one-fifth their mass, supported by ocean and great webs of cartilage, arched upward and then dove down with ponderous grace. Now the ocean was empty again except for the abandoned table bobbing and rocking in the wake of that great treble sounding.

  RICHMOND, LATE SEPTEMBER, 1849

  GASLIGHT flared on white washed brick filmed with soot. Skirts swished against gritty slate sidewalks. There was the small skip-skop of heels, the occasional rap of a cane's ferrule, and the large klep-klep on cobbles of the iron-shod hooves of horses dragging creaking carriages. Everyone was hurrying a little. There was a hint of autumn chill in the air. And a feeling of aggressive pride and self-confidence. Bracing. Quickening.