Sinister Tales of Dread 2015: SINISTER, #3

SAIL GHOSTS

By

Billie Sue Mosiman

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The worst thing about the planet were the sailboats on the icy surface of a dead sea. Any thin movement of the atmosphere and the ghost ships skidded hither and yon like marbles across a mirror. The air filled with screeching animal sound of sliding, sailing, skidding on into oblivion as the sailboats went one way then another, the crashing-cymbal gong startling when they collided before veering off another direction.

Walter hugged his wife, Diedre, to his side as they stood watching, just to give her solace. No one had been able to clear the sea of the sail ships, though they tried for months. As soon as ones near the shore were taken apart like child’s toys and the parts put in a back shed behind the barracks, more sailed in from over the horizon, empty vessels whistling like cold doom, their bottoms scraping slick ice, their sails catching, holding, and releasing the currents that sent them out on useless missions.

Will they never go away? Diedre hugged herself, hand on his hand to bring him closer.

In a way they’re some kind of company now the crew’s gone. He wasn’t used to the ghostly ships, but he could see how their antics lessened his boredom. For what else was there to do on Excalibur X1, but track the insane stirrings of ships on the dead sea?

I don’t like it, she said, turning her face from the sea and her back on the parade.

He turned with her and, arm in arm, they paced their way to the barracks, also empty, and the oxygen-filled chambers met them with a whoosh when the doors parted, then shut. They pulled off the protective suits and helmets and each fell onto a cot, exhausted. The gravity was greater on Excalibur than on Earth. The effort expended to traipse around its surface tired the humans the way a marathon race through mountains might.

Should we have gone with them? Diedre was a worrier, always had been.

Walter stood, his knees buckling before he steadied himself. He was thirty-two, but on this earth-like planet he felt eighty. He went to the concentrator and brought back two glasses of water for them.

You could have gone. He gulped the water and felt it slide down his throat to land in his stomach like a slice of cool metal. The psycho-geneticist urged you. With your youth, you could birth and mother at least six offspring on the new planet where they’re headed.

They would never have a child on Excalibur. It was not permitted and the Council put Diedre in the beam machine before they left. This world, found a little farther from its mother sun than Earth from hers, a planet twice as large as Earth, rocky and icy-sea-laden, wouldn’t support families. It was too cold, too vast, no way to grow food, no water but what ice was hacked from the sea and filtered for drinking. Diedre was now barren and this hurt Walter more than if they’d just killed her outright. His babies, her babies, all of them now enigmas, dreams, dreams of dreams.

She gazed at him lovingly, her doe-eyes brown and soft and understanding his thoughts, knowing he was counting the sacrifice they’d made by staying. By volunteering!

We’ll send back a team to check on your progress, they said, waving gaily.

We’ll keep an eye on you!

We won’t forget. We won’t forg...

They might never return. Their ship could burn to cinder if they got too close to Excalibur’s sun. Their provisions might run out before they ever found another half-habitable place. They might have to go into the pods and sleep for a thousand years, pushed to it, and where would Walter and Diedre be then? Dust flying beneath the cots when the perpetual oxygen maker wicked on, blowing dead air over an empty barracks. Or they might go out and expire, just to stare into the face of the warm sun, dust out on the plains, moving inexorably toward the mountain ranges cupping this icy sea and silent barracks, dust, nothing then but their dust.

I never would have left you, she said. I never would have become a baby-maker with unknown fathers.

Their complete love was a thing of much beauty and spoken of by the crew in hushed tones. It was not usual for two of them to find they are soul mates, each the half of the other, never to be separated. It was never just Walter. Or Diedre. It was always Walter and Diedre. It was one of the purest events ever to happen in interstellar flight and hailed as such. When they volunteered to remain behind, everyone from the Captain to the lowest Service Machine knew they’d stay together. The last couple on the planet Excalibur X1.

Most knew no one would ever see them again.

Let’s make something to eat. Diedre rose to touch his cheek, to wipe a tear from her eye, and to turn this day around before they were both weeping uncontrollably.

Together they stood before the stores in the cavernous pantry, deciding. All of it had come from Earth, packed in cases, stowed in the rocket’s belly. There were jars of marmalade that tasted like orange summer. There were modified breads that would not spoil in a hundred years. To Walter these tasted like bright white cotton whether it was French loaves or sour dough. There were cans of this and cans of that—meat, fruit, vegetables, even peanuts and coconut oil. There was such a plethora of items, it was hard for them to decide.

Finally, Diedre reached out for dehydrated spaghetti, sauce and all.

Seeing her choice, Walter did the same.

I’ll go for ice, he said.

The concentrator had to be ice-filled several times a day. It was a small machine and couldn’t handle much.

He shrugged into his suit and helmet, slipped out the automatic doors, and strode straight to the icy, ship-noisy sea.

He stood a time on the shore, the sunset blasting gold light down on the silver ice, and watched the sail ships veer, cast off, careening first towards him and then away. He thought their paths over the ice was a crackling, an opening of the planet, a grating of fissure expanding. He closed his eyes, his face turned into the lowering sun. Who were these ancient people who had built nothing, not even a city, not even a structure, save for the sailing ships?

He and Diedre had caught one with a hook and rope two months after their crew abandoned them. Pulling with all his might, Walter was able to wrangle it to shore. The crew had already examined a few of them, puzzled at their longevity unless the occupants had only recently vacated Excalibur. Did they live on these ships? It appeared they did, for there were pans and pots, clothing and suits and helmets (revealing the creatures couldn’t breathe the thin air either), blankets, and even...cribs.

The ship he and Diedre pulled to shore was a large schooner with massive sails, obviously home to a large family. Walter pounded a steel post into the dry sand of the shore and anchored the ship so they could explore it. They found a creature. Not unlike human, his nose was prominent and brow slanted. He was hairless and small, so small. He lay with one arm out-thrust from a bunk pressed against the ribbed wall of the schooner. He was desiccated, thin as a wisp, his face that of a mummy hiding inside his helmet. They stood over him, mourning. The loss of any creature made Diedre cry. She sobbed for half an hour, kneeling at his bedside.

He’s a Walter without a Diedre, she said. He’s been left so alone.

Walter pulled her to her feet and wrapped her in his arms, feeling her tremble against him like a bird caught in his hand. It’s all right, he said. We all go the way of this beast. One day.

He tilted her face and kissed her tear-stained lips and told her of his love. She murmured about her sadness at dead things and he shushed her, whispering against her ear, and reminding her the two of them were among the living and the loving, both being the same.

Later, when under control, he took her to the helm and they saw the same kind of spoked wheel, made of metal that on Earth would be made of teak. They went into the living area and saw the small seats, the cooking apparatus in the center, the discarded socks and ribbons of little children.

They left the ship moored, dead still near the shore, the ice no longer the sailing ship’s master. On days when they felt up to it, they explored it again and again, wondering at a civilization that had been here and gone now, builders of ships, sailors of the ice-crowned sea.

He turned now and looked down the shore at the schooner. He’d taken down the sails so she sat there like the carcass of a hump-backed whale. Last light twinkled through her tall elegant masts, leaving moving shadows on the deck.

Diedre was waiting for ice, for water, for dinner. He’d hurry now and spend a pleasant evening with the woman he loved. They would read to one another or play chess or wrestle in the tiny shower, grabbing one another and giggling.

He hacked at the ice, cracking it into silver-white chunks. He put the pieces into a container and carried them to the barracks. If she asked him what took so long he would tell her a tale of ships that raced in the night, nearing then fleeing the shore, ships of creature-men and creature-women who had finally decided the sea was not enough.

She asked nothing of him, as if she knew his mind. And she did.

They sat eating the food and drinking the protein vitamin drink from colorful cans. He suggested chess after dinner and she opted for Parcheesi. They compromised and played a game of spades.

That night, in their separate cots, her voice drifted across the aisle between them. Could you fashion a single bed from these contraptions tomorrow? I want to sleep next to you.

It had been ages since they’d slept side-by-side—in the days they occupied Earth.

I can do that, he said with confidence.

He fell asleep content to know he had work for the morrow. Work was always welcomed to combat the boredom. Though how he could ever be bored with his sweet Diedre around, he could not say. He called himself a man of hyperbole and fancy, turned onto his side, and let sleep take him.

#

A year passed without event, the couple mostly content. In their double bed they made love and swam out of the depths of ecstasy like salmon leaping from rushing waters. They posited new games, made up the rules, shouted in glee when one or the other won. They rearranged the stores in the vast pantry at least twice, taking them weeks to do so. They stomped over the captured ship’s deck down at the shore, and taken by a fit of the sillies, they sang sailing songs at the top of their voices.

One day Walter said, gazing down at the cadaver in the anchored ship, Let’s take him back to the barracks with us. He weighs nothing.

Walter! If you’re not going to bury him, you can’t bring him like a living man to supper.

I know mechanics, he said, rubbing his chin, staring hard at the little creature-man.

Diedre gasped. You won’t mechanize this thing. He’s dead. He’s a...he’s a person.

Walter turned to her and leaning down kissed her on the lips, a peck of touch like fingers walking over a brow saying, calm down, it’s nothing to be hysterical about.

Let me do it. Please. Let me do it. I have to do something.

Except for gathering ice and helping Diedre make the bed, his days were so filled with ennui that he sometimes thought he was going mad. He didn’t confide this to Diedre since it would confuse and upset her. He, mad? He could never be mad, her strong original Viking from the planet with the dead moon. Not her Walter.

She relented, bowing her head, blinking her eyes, tears gathering for the wispy little dead alien with his arm thrown out and his helmet askew.

It took days for each tiny muscular hydraulic bit to cement the dead man into semblance of living tissue. He was not stiff, but soft, not decayed, but fresh, his flesh other than human and immune to the ages. Walter probed thinking the little beast was already mechanical, but no. No. He was made of a flesh man had never seen and he was perfect for machination. Now if he could speak...

Diedre entered his workshop where all the tools lay orderly upon the shelves and seeing suddenly the creature-man turn his neck and look at her, she squealed and covered her mouth with her hand.

He moves!

Indeed.

Walter kept tinkering with a valve, his attention full on his important work.

But Walter what are we to do with him when you’ve finished?

Why, we’ll teach him to play canasta.

Oh you. She fled the workroom, pretending to be more anxious than she was. For couldn’t they use a third in their games, someone unpredictable, someone who might be challenging, after all?

That night at dinner Walter asked if he could present Sailor Joe at their table. He was ready for company and for that matter, weren’t they ready for company too?

You named him Sailor Joe? That’s silly.

If you’d like I’ll reprogram him and call him what you like.

Bastard Ant Man from Excalibur?

Now who’s silly? He grinned and touched her breasts ever so lightly, his eyes closed, Braille-reading her body.

Okay. All right, bring in Joe. I refuse to call him Sailor.

The thing walked like a gorilla, arms hanging low below his knees, his back bent. He had to pause to raise his head.

Why does he walk like that?

Walter took Joe’s arm, straightening him a bit. It was the best I could do. You know I only studied mechanics a year. Not nearly enough to call myself good at it.

Diedre gathered her manners and bowing a little she said, Welcome, Joe. We hope you like it here.

Silence reigned. Does he talk? she asked.

Walter shrugged. I tried.

Joe slowly raised his hanging head and stared directly at Diedre. His voice when it came was rusty like a bucket of nails rattling. You’ve done a wrong thing. We never come back. It’s not permitted. We’d over populate our worlds if we came to life again.

Stunned at this little speech, Walter and Diedre stepped back. Diedre’s eyes