The elderly pair retired early that day.
The three Education Service passengers had essays to work on, so they went off to continue their observations and interviews. Four members of Manessa’s crew headed for Olde Towne where they were working their way through the museums and attractions. Kibi and Ilika found themselves wandering into Forestland, hand in hand, without a clear plan for the evening.
The sun bathed the planet station in angled shafts of orange-tinted light as it approached the western horizon.
As the captain and steward strolled by Forestland Lake, one of the small rowboats at the dock rocked a little and caught Ilika’s eye. “We haven’t been out on the lake. Would you enjoy a quiet evening on still water?”
Kibi smiled and wished she could feel romantic, but was worrying too much about the elderly station hosts. “Sure. It will keep my mind off . . . you know.”
“I think you’re worrying about it more than they are.”
“Probably.”
Ilika held the little boat while Kibi stepped in, then joined her. They each took an oar and spent the next half hour finding a rhythm that would propel the boat anywhere but in a little circle. They were both laughing so hard they soon forgot all about Jimox and Teina.
The waterways of Forestland Lake turned out to be more complex and
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confusing than the pair of visitors had realized. After they gained some control of the direction and speed of their little vessel, they discovered that fingers of land from both the shore and the three islands made the voyage long, even though the lake was not really that big.
Two of the islands were small, with little docks and two or three picnic tables. One was already occupied, with a rowboat tied up and a crew of reptiles sharing an evening meal. They waved as the pair of monkey mammals passed.
The largest island, Ilika and Kibi knew, was Ghost Island. Signs every eight meters or so along the shore reminded planet station visitors that no mortals were allowed. It appeared to be completely silent and still.
They had passed Ghost Island and were heading back toward the main dock, when suddenly a stiff breeze came out of nowhere, and the inexperienced rowers couldn’t make headway. Soon they were exhausted from trying, and decided to give up and wait for the wind to die down.
Kibi happened to look up at the evening sky. Scattered clouds still glowed slightly with sunset light. “Ilika, why are the clouds going in the opposite direction from this wind?”
He shrugged. “Winds often blow in different directions at different altitudes.” But even as he said those words, he frowned.
The wind stopped . . . until they tried again to row back to the dock.
Puzzled looks came to both of them when they saw the reptilian crew row across the lake with no difficulty.
Kibi and Ilika remained stuck between two islands, the smallest and the largest. One contained only picnic tables. The other was forbidden.
The captain and his steward conferred and came up with a plan. They would row around the small island, which would put them on the same finger of Forestland Lake that the reptiles had just easily crossed.
They put their plan into action, but as soon as they started to gain a little distance from Ghost Island, the wind came up again, blowing them back. This time it didn’t let up, and they were forced, against their will, to approach the shore of the forbidden island. Soon they were so close they could read the fine print on one of the signs.
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NO MORTALS ALLOWED
except by invitation
Ilika sighed. “I think . . . we’re being invited.”
Kibi frowned. “More like kidnapped.”
A gust of wind threatened to shove them right into a thorny bush on the shore of the island.
“Okay, okay!” Ilika barked, and began to row toward the Ghost Island dock.
The wind ceased.
Just as they tied the little boat to the dock, the last light of evening faded from the sky.
In the twilight, Ilika and Kibi held hands as they slowly made their way from the dock to the clearing in the middle of the island.
Kibi began to drag her feet, and Ilika could feel the fear in her tight grip and sweaty hand. He let her set the pace, which slowed to a crawl.
As they inched toward the clearing, Kibi remembered something about rugs and pillows spread out for Jimox and Teina. Only dead leaves and fallen branches greeted the unwilling visitors. Every insect sound and snapping twig made her heart skip a beat, and she gripped Ilika’s hand tighter and tighter.
Ilika knew they were being watched.
Kibi knew too, and the feeling made her heart race, her skin tingle, and every hair stand on end.
“They won’t . . . hurt us . . . will they?” she mumbled in an unsteady voice.
“There’s little they can do to hurt us physically. Affecting the material world is extremely difficult for them. But . . . they have a long history of playing on the emotions of weak people. They don’t get far with anyone from Nebador.”
Kibi’s mind raced, and she realized that many of her Psychic Development lessons had attempted to prepare her for this moment. She just wasn’t sure
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they had succeeded.
“And remember,” Ilika went on, “these are NOT the advanced spirits you are used to working with in Nebador. These are more like the wild creatures of your home planet — most of them just want to be left alone, but some are full of pain or hunger.”
“I . . . I sense that.”
As the darkness deepened, misty shapes began to lurk among the trees, most of them a dull-green color, but often tinged with orange or red.
With wide eyes, Kibi stared into the haunted darkness, and vaguely remembered something about dull-green ghosts in the stories Jimox and Teina had told, but couldn’t force her mind to recall the details. And worse than the sickly dull-green, the tinges of angry red and frustrated orange made Kibi shiver.
More by feel than sight, the pair of visitors discovered a fallen log and Ilika coaxed Kibi to sit down.
She hesitated, somehow feeling stronger standing up, until the words of a Nebador teacher came to her. One of the greatest strengths you can have, especially at trying times, is calmness of spirit.
They sat down on the log, held each other tightly, and the ghosts came out and began to speak.
At first, the ghostly voices were tangled and confused, all trying to speak at once, as if they had not spoken to a mortal in a very long time and were aching to be heard. As the minutes passed and the visitors showed no signs of understanding, but also no desire to run away, the voices slowly became clearer, with only one or two speaking at a time.
“They promised us!” one voice shrieked.
“We tried hard for a hundred years!” another moaned.
A misty dull-green shape swooped through the clearing. “Not fair, not fair, not fair!”
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Both Ilika and Kibi started to remember bits of the stories Jimox and Teina had told.
A fuzzy orb, mostly red, jumped out from behind a tree. “They hardly ever visit us anymore!”
“Bad monkey mammals!” a smoky-orange shape declared. “They deserve to grow old and die!”
Kibi
cringed.
A misty form oozed along the ground like a slug. “They treat us like dirt!”
“Chopped
liver!”
“Cow
patties!”
Suddenly Kibi bristled, stood up, and planted her hands on her hips while breathing with deep gasps. The clearing fell deathly quiet.
Ilika, still on the log, smiled in the darkness.
“You sound like a bunch of whining brats!” she began. “I remember the stories about you. You were the ones responsible for the plague. You were given the opportunity to do community service for a century, and since that time has passed, you must have failed. Am I getting warm?”
The dull-green ghosts lost their tinges of color and slunk behind trees or
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under dead leaves.
“Very warm,” Jimox’ voice said from the darkness.
Teina activated her bracelet light to reveal both elderly hosts, one on each side of Brora the healer. Behind came Rrr’tana the station host.
Kibi wasn’t finished. With a little light in the clearing, she took several steps forward and continued speaking. “When I was eight years old, I was forced to become a slave for the rest of my youth. All you whiners had easy childhoods, got good educations, then wormed your way into positions of power in your biological weapons labs. That’s why you were judged, by the planetary prince and princess, many years ago, to be guilty of creating the disease that destroyed your civilization!”
While catching her breath, Kibi glimpsed Teina nodding.
“And I can see why you failed your community service,” Kibi went on.
“You’re still whining, to this day, instead of finding something you can do to contribute to the universe!”
Kibi, feeling completely exhausted, stumbled backwards and plopped down on the log beside Ilika, who quickly put an arm around her.
A large, glowing purple orb formed high in the trees over the clearing and slowly descended.
“Arantiloria,” Kibi, looking up, whispered.
Ilika, also recognizing their training specialist, nodded.
Jimox and Teina glanced up, then continued moving forward into the clearing.
The dull-green ghosts tried to find holes to slink into, but some greater power kept them from hiding or running away.
Jimox reached inside himself for strength he hadn’t used in many years.
“How dare you force our guests onto this island against their will!” he boomed.
“Never again!” Teina sputtered, but could find no more breath.
“You are pathetic little ghosts with small minds,” Jimox continued. “You led empty lives, giving nothing to the world while you grabbed all the money and power you could find. You chose not to think about what you were creating in your laboratory.”
Teina swallowed several times and found her voice. “Giona, the most
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noble and powerful ghost of all, who is now in advanced classes at the local universe capital, was once a waitress in a small town.”
Jimox nodded. “You will get the remainder of your thousand years of community service, but not here, and not at any of our retreats. Go!”
Arantiloria became a small purple ball and descended onto the log beside Ilika. The dull-green ghosts, with only about eight hundred and sixty years, by their reckoning, in which to find something worthwhile to do with themselves, dashed away in all directions, never again to be seen or heard at Siminia Three Planet Station.
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Chapter 34: Kibi’s Ghosts
Kibi lay awake for hours going over and over in her mind the events on Ghost Island. When she finally fell asleep beside Ilika, she dreamed.
Big machines on wheels clanged and chugged as they went to and fro in a dark, ugly building, pulling levers and turning valves. Soon things started exploding, and the clanging machines ran out all the exit doors to save themselves. Just an instant before the entire building burst into flames, a hundred or more tiny voices cried out from rows of little cages.
Kibi flew out of her dream, tried to stand, and fell onto the floor.
Ilika was quickly beside her, calling for soft lighting as he tried to determine if she was hurt.
Kibi soon figured out where she was, then collected her wits and relaxed.
“Very strange dream . . .”
Ilika helped her back onto the bed.
Suddenly she looked at him with wide eyes. “We missed something last night. We have to go back to Ghost Island!”
“Is tomorrow . . .”
“No, now! Tomorrow could be too late.”
Ilika wasn’t completely sure Kibi knew what she was doing, until they arrived at the Forestland Lake dock, in the dark hour before first light of dawn, to find Jimox, Teina, and Brora getting into a boat by bracelet light.
Teina looked at Kibi. “Did you have a dream, too?”
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Kibi
nodded.
“That means we’ll need you.”
Ilika’s doubts disappeared as he got another rowboat ready.
The four monkey mammals and one ursine crept onto Ghost Island silently, save for Teina’s occasional cough. They settled onto old logs or the leaf-covered ground in the only clearing on the island.
Kibi fully intended to just watch and learn, following Jimox and Teina’s lead in everything that happened.
Ilika felt his only role was to support Kibi.
The two old planet station hosts sat calmly and silently, so Kibi and Ilika did the same.
A quarter hour passed with no sign of anything stirring, except an insect or two.
After half an hour, Brora shifted positions.
Three-quarters of an hour into the vigil, all four monkey mammals stretched their legs but otherwise remained silent.
A few minutes later, all at about the same moment, Ilika shivered, Kibi felt a tingling in her bones, and Teina cocked her head, listening intently.
After a long minute, they all relaxed, as whatever had caused the sensations was gone.
“Kibi,” Jimox whispered, “please set your bracelet to pick up audio frequencies outside the audible range, shift into the audible, and amplify.”
Kibi worked with her bracelet for a moment, then cringed as five thumping noises, each at a slightly different speed, drowned out all other sounds.
“Our heartbeats,” Ilika said. “Sub-sonic.”
Kibi instructed the little device to filter them out.
A constant scratching sound began that Brora identified as insect wings, normally ultra-sonic. Kibi eliminated them from the amplified sounds.
Finally, her bracelet fell silent, except for occasional sounds they could identify as coming from themselves or the forest creatures around them. They sat silently and waited.
Kibi had lost track of time when a tiny scream came from her bracelet,
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then they heard a scurrying sound that quickly faded away. It caused both Teina and Jimox to jerk their heads toward the far side of the island where no trail penetrated and no boat dock was available.
After she was sure the event had passed, Teina spoke in a whisper. “That didn’t sound like a monkey mammal to me. In my dream, it was caged lab animals screaming.”
“Mine, too,” Kibi whispered.
“And that scurrying sound wasn’t coming from Kibi’s bracelet,” Jimox declared. “Let’s see if it repeats,” he suggested.
“You think it’s a residual haunting?” Teina asked softly.
“That’s
my
hunch.”
About a quarter hour later, a hint of dawn light was creeping into the sky when the scream came again, and the same scurrying sound, seemingly going in the same direction as before.
“You were right,” Teina admitted. “But there was no biological weapons lab in Similand!”
“But what if . . .” Jimox began, pondering the evidence as he spoke, “. . .
what if the guilty ghosts we chased away yesterday were still practicing some of their old bad habits . . .”
Teina’s eyes snapped open wide. “Keeping some weak little animal ghosts captive? I’m going to wring their . . .” A coughing fit took her and she couldn’t finish her sentence, but everyone got the meaning.
In the growing dawn light, as the group picked their way through the trees toward the part of Ghost Island where no mortal had set foot in more than two centuries, Jimox spoke. “A residual haunting is an important event that gets recorded by the spirits of a place, and is played back under certain conditions, such as when a visitor is receptive to those events. Didn’t you say you were a slave once, Kibi?”
“Yes,” she confirmed while climbing over a fallen log.
Teina nodded with understanding as she paused to catch her breath before even attempting the log. “But I think . . . this is much more . . . recent . . .” A deep coughing fit took her and she wilted into Brora’s strong arms.
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“I don’t think Teina is up to this journey,” the healer asserted, looking at Ilika and Kibi.
Teina looked frustrated, but eventually nodded and spoke in a whisper.
“They called you, Kibi. I’m sure you can do whatever needs to be done.”
Kibi wasn’t as sure as Teina, but she remained silent as the healer and her two charges make their way back to the Ghost Island boat dock, one of them coughing almost constantly.
Not far beyond the log, Kibi and Ilika came upon a tiny clearing formed by three trees growing close together. Kibi again felt the tingling in her bones as they stopped and stared at the ground.
Ilika couldn’t suppress a shiver.
In the clear area under the trees, twigs had been carefully poked into the soil and woven with other twigs to form a little symbolic fence around a space less than a meter across.
A dozen or more animal screams suddenly came from Kibi’s bracelet. Ilika recognized the cries of small mammals, the squawks of frightened birds, and the hisses of cornered reptiles before Kibi cancelled the amplification.
In the minute of silence that followed, Ilika could see Kibi collecting herself and thinking about what to do.
“I don’t know enough about what’s going on here, Ilika. I wish Teina and Jimox could have stayed.”
“We are here because they need to pass on many of their responsibilities. I can’t think of a better person for this task than a highly-intuitive steward who has a deep love and respect for animals.”
Kibi tried to smile, but her smile quickly faded. “Let’s . . . sit down on the ground just outside the little fence.”
The ground was soft and free of weeds and stickers under the three trees.
Each of them found a small space between two trees, leaving one side of the triangle of trees open, the side to the east, closest to the edge of the planet station and the wilderness beyond.
After another minute of thoughtful silence, Kibi spoke. “At first I was wondering why they didn’t just leave. These twigs couldn’t keep in a living animal, much less a ghost. But before I even finished thinking the question, I
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knew the answer.”
Ilika looked at her.
“Fear,” she said, “and who better to understand fear than a slave.”
Ilika nodded. “Don’t forget that frightened animals sometimes bite and scratch.”
“Yeah, I know. Just the price of . . . being a steward.”
She tapped her bracelet to resume the frequency shift and amplification that would allow them to hear the little ghost voices again. Even as the tiny screams, squawks, and hisses returned, Kibi began humming a simple tune, almost a lullaby, and carefully, twig by twig, taking down the symbolic fence.
Boro and Sata sat on the Forestland Lake dock as Ilika and Kibi rowed across the lake in the morning light.
“Brora said we’d find you guys here,” Sata called.
As the captain and steward got close, scratches on their faces and hands could be easily seen.
“What happened to you two?” Boro asked as he received the rope from Kibi and tied it to the dock.
Kibi grinned. “Oh . . . just some twigs where they shouldn’t have been.”
Ilika
laughed.
Sata narrowed her eyes with suspicion, but knew Kibi wouldn’t tell the story until she was good and ready.
