2954-09-09 – Tales from the Service: The Siren of Galbrandt
It took longer than Vann Rudenko expected to pick his way down the scorched pebble slope to where he'd seen what looked like a face. When he got there, he poked his laser carbine through a few patches of shrubbery, not sure he knew quite what he was looking for. There were certainly no obvious signs that someone had been skulking around – but then, Vann was hardly a trained tracker. He might have been able to on a heads-up overlay to help, if his implants weren't totally fried, and they weren't well out of range of standard Incarnation tactical networks.
He circumnavigated the tree he'd seen the creature, or person, hiding behind, still seeing nothing. Then, for good measure, he went around it again, looking for marks in the leathery bark such as an animal's climbing claws might make. When he found nothing, he shook his head. Perhaps he had only imagined seeing something; there was certainly nothing there anymore, and he'd heard no sound to indicate something fleeing. He'd only wasted his own time, and Guardian Langer's.
As he turned to head back up to the burnt wreck on the hilltop, though, something brushed against Vann's face. Thinking it to be an insect-like pest of the sort that proliferated on his home-world in the wet season, he swatted at the sensation. This proved to be a mistake; his rough glove grazed the sensitive, freshly-healed flesh on the side of his face, setting off a wave of stinging pain. Grinding his teeth together, Vann dropped to his knees and dug his hands into the dirt, fighting the urge to clutch at his cheek, which would only make the pain worse.
The pain subsided slowly. As Vann got to his feet, something nearly invisible swished in front of his eyes a second time. This time, he stepped back, and looked harder. It was only a few strands of some silky filament, like those used by predators to catch small flying creatures on many worlds. They drifted back and forth in the breeze, and if they were once part of a more complex snare, its structure was entirely unraveled.
The strands seemed to be anchored somewhere above, and Vann idly looked up to see if there was some remnant of the web which they had once composed. There was nothing, though.He lost track of the strands in the shadows between the thickly-clustered branches.
As he looked up, though, Vann realized that any number of things could be lurking up in that tangle of tree-limbs, completely out of sight from the ground. He was in no shape to climb up there and check, of course; instead, he activated the flashlight on his carbine and swept the tree's canopy.
The glitter of translucent strands sparkled everywhere the beam touched, though there was no particular structure to the construction. As he looked, Vann shuddered. This was the work either of one particularly large spinner, or a whole colony, crawling about unseen up there. He recalled the face he thought he'd seen, and decided that maybe it was better not to be too inquisitive so far from any sort of help.
As he turned to march back up the hill for the second time, Vann found his way blocked by a fluttering veil of dozens of strands of gleaming silk that he was sure hadn't been there before. He could simply step through them, of course – they would do nothing to impede him – but where had they come from?
As he wondered this, a strain of distant melodic sound caught his attention. Once he attended to it, it was as if it had been there since he stepped between the trees. Perhaps it had been growing from inaudibility for some time, underneath the sound of the breeze rustling the treetops. Vann couldn't decide if it was the call of an avian, the shrill voice of a wind instrument, or the crystalline notes of a singer's voice. Whatever it was, it sounded close – perhaps twenty meters farther into the trees.
Torn between leaving well enough alone and investigating, Vann hesitated. After a moment, he decided to have a look. After all, if it was an avian – and that was most likely – it would only fly off the moment it heard him. But the sound, musical without tune or structure, had a sort of comforting quality. It felt familiar, even though Vann had never heard anything like it, on Håkøya or elsewhere, and it made him think of the quiet of a clear morning back home in the narrow, bright springtime between the torrential rainy season and the scorching heat of summer.
Though he expected the noise of his footfalls to spook the creature from its music making, the sound grew louder as he approached, as if the singer – it sounded more and more like a voice, now – was growing louder and more confident.
Vann pushed past a cluster of fan-leaved shrubs and came into a shadowed hollow, where the roots of a long-dead fallen tree still stretched their decaying fingers toward the greedy, light-seeking branches of surrounding trees which had arched overhead to fill the gap. Everywhere light filtered down into this arboreal grotto, Vann saw the glitter of silken strands.
He didn't have long to wonder at this, however, before the music stopped. Vann's eyes were drawn to movement underneath the roots of the fallen tree. There, half-hidden by draping curtains of hanging vegetation, a pale, feminine form lounged, head turned away, one arm raised in a beckoning gesture.
Vann raised his carbine and cleared his throat to order the woman to her feet.
She spoke before he did. "I mean you no harm, son of other stars." Her voice had a lilting, dreamy quality, as if she were not fully awake, though her words were clear enough. "Little harm indeed could I devise that has not already been done."
Vann let the barrel of the gun droop toward the ground. "Who are you?"
"I give no answer." The woman pushed herself up into a sitting position, but her face still remained fixedly faced away. Her garments – as pale as she, many-layered, and translucent – rustled with every movement. "What good to you might a name be?"
Vann shook his head, fighting an odd, lazy feeling, as if he were getting sleepy. "Someone left behind when we took this world. Hiding in the wilderness. Spying for the-"
She finally turned her head and looked at Vann through a gap in the veil of dangling plants. Her eyes, too large for her face, luminous and somehow also the sort of pure black that reminded one of the cold expanse between the stars, were certainly not those of any normal Confederated human. She fixed him with those eyes as one fixes an insect specimen with a pin, and he felt sure that the only reason he remained alive and conscious was because she allowed it to be so.
"You and your fellows face a hard death as gnawing, slinking beasts in this wood." She spoke again, after a long pause. "A death unbefitting of the men of the stars."
Vann shook his head. "We might find a way back to our comrades."
"You will shortly have no comrades to rejoin." The woman-like creature looked away again, and Vann was relieved as her eyes departed from him. "It goes ill for your cause, and your part to play in it has ended."
"The Incarnation will not fail." Vann squared his shoulders. "Or all human life fails with it."
She laughed, a light, melodic sound, somehow full of mirth and cold as stone. "Perhaps then your kind is doomed to fail." She held out one pale, thin hand, and Vann knew no human hand could be so long and so thin, not without body-mods which the people of the Confederated Worlds reviled. " But I think not. I can show you the way to survival."
"Why?" Vann frowned. Human or no, might he have found a sympathizer with the Incarnation cause?
"Because all life in my domain is in my care." She stood, her arms dropping to her sides. "I will come in the night to lead the way. Follow, even if your fellows will not, and you will live."
The pale creature must have walked away through the trees, but to Vann, it seemed that he only blinked, and then he was alone in that silk-draped hollow. Somewhere behind him, faint and thin, he heard Langer's voice calling.
Consistent with many Gossamer encounters, the coming and going of these creatures always seems sudden and unpredictable. This is theorized by enthusiasts to be due to their combination of having a sort of audial hypnosis and apparently great quickness.
The willingness of these creatures to guide those lost in the wilderness places of Håkøya is alsso consistent, though the help in this instance was far more direct than is usually reported. Perhaps much of the conversation reported here was constructed by the account-giver after the fact; hypnotic effects do have a way of muddling the memory, even when one is not suffering from mild brain damage from a haywire implant, as this individual claims to have been.
