Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (29 page)

I removed my glove and placed the palm of my right hand firmly on the black identification plate. I felt a warmth under my hand and a prickling. Three magnetic locks suddenly closed over my wrist and held me firm. If I were an impostor these locks would never release until I was either dead or captured. They held me for over a minute and then withdrew. A message flashed up on the black tile where I had pressed my hand. “Welcome, Captain Wilberfoss. Beyond this door the vacuum is absolute. Be sure you are wearing your survival suit. The vacuum lock will not function if it detects exhalation or body heat. Now you may proceed.”

I palmed the lock again and the door slid open. I stepped inside and the door nudged me as the magnetic locks closed. At about head height facing me there was a glowing green pressure panel marked Vacuum Demand and I touched this. Immediately, I was aware of a vibration as the pumps got to work. I felt my survival suit change shape about me as it compensated for the lack of external pressure. The green panel paled to gray and finally brightened to red as the atmosphere vanished. It changed its wording and announced: “Vacuum established. There will be a delay of 60 seconds.”

I knew what it was doing. The delay was to establish that my survival suit was not leaking. The procedure was for the protection of the bio-crystalline brain.

I and my survival suit passed the test. The panel blinked once and then a message in yellow flashed up. “You may proceed into the Bio-crystalline Seed Chamber. The atmosphere lock will remain open.”

In front of me there was a jerking movement and part of the wall began to slide open. I stood and watched. No bright light flooded in though I knew this room should have been filled with the silver effulgence of the working bio-crystalline seeds. I cannot say that darkness flooded in though that was my impression. I did not move. I was not anxious to advance until I could see my way clear.

And when the doors were finally open I found myself peering into a chamber filled with shadows and blackened shapes of sculptured ash. My way was blocked by things like trees coated with soot, which hung broken and deformed from the roof. I stepped forward and at the same time brought my suit lights to their maximum brilliance and drove the shadows back.

The shadows moved as I advanced and that was eerie, but stranger still was the absolute stillness of the blackened bio-crystalline shapes. Death is so still. I have had my fill of that stillness. I raised my arm which glittered with energy and touched the dark branches which barred my way. They broke at my touch and crumbled and fell and smashed like black coral, silently. Black dust rippled across the floor in a single shock wave and then everything became still again. Such a fell deserved a roaring.

All the troubles of the
Nightingale
were clear before me. I had never been in this room before but I knew that it should have been throbbing with light and energy.

I stepped out of the vacuum lock and ducked under the dark branches. I was aware of the crushing and crumbling of bio-crystalline fiber under my feet. The entire floor was littered with broken branches and I stepped over them. Those I touched crumbled.

The room I entered was not large. I advanced to the center and looked around. Surveying the damage, I wondered how the
Nightingale
still managed to function. Perhaps the symbol transformation generators were supplying the necessary sentience. But then I saw, close to the vacuum lock, a single gleam of light in the seed trough and the pale shape of living bio-crystalline fibers climbing up to the roof and branching. This was not bio-crystallism in its full and healthy fluorescence, but it was life. I moved over to the seed trough as quickly as I could, ducking under the dark elephantine growths and pushing the fallen parts aside. I found that three crystals were still vital. One was hectic but the other two glowed with a steady white fire. I switched my suit lights off and was able to follow the branching paleness of the living fibers. They fed into all the main trunk lines. These fibers, no doubt assisted by the STGs, were all that was keeping the
Nightingale
vital.

I now knew what I had to do and felt an uncanny optimism. My plan was bold but offered hope. I intended to replace as many of the dead crystals as I could with new ones and try to make them grow. I would feed them with my own thought.

The
Nightingale
carried spare living seed-crystals, held in a state of suspended consciousness, in the seed bank close to my quarters.

I spent the next couple of hours trekking back and forth carrying the seed containers down to the seed chamber. I then began cleaning the trough. Some of the dead crystals were glassy and the fibers growing from them were brittle. They were enameled, and their blackness contrived to reflect my suit lights with a deep amber glow. These seeds had died quickly, shriveling within the lattices of their crystal supports. Others had died more slowly and these resembled large candles that had been exposed to sunlight under glass and which had melted into monstrous striated shapes. In their dying they had spattered the floor like teardrops of pitch. I cleared them all, reasoning that the presence of any dead bio-crystalline fiber might exert a negative influence on the new seeds. The old linkages in the troughs were useless and so I prepared new beds of vermiculite and then placed the crystals so that they touched the existing living seeds.

I am not a skilled bio-crystalline engineer but I knew enough to have confidence that my procedure was sound. When a new sensory/logic chain is being developed, seeds are often linked in this way. My hope was that the new seeds would be vitalized by the old seeds and that the old seeds would be strengthened and rejuvenated by proximity to the new. Above all I wanted the tenuous command structure to be strengthened for without that nothing was possible. I felt confidence since the seeds which were still vital had obviously survived the worst ordeal and were hence of great strength.

I cleared the seed chamber as well as I could. I brought vacuo-sacks down from above and shoveled the heavy black dust and shattered fragments of bio-crystalline circuitry into them. Then I lugged the sacks up to my apartment and handed them over to the disposal unit. I saw them fired from the ship. I saw them describe stunted arcs before plunging straight down to the surface. When they hit the stony ground they exploded and the black dust and fragments quickly lifted and then settled leaving pools of ash.

Over the next few days I visited the crystals morning and night. To help their development I kept my communication room live and I spent a part of each day lying in my couch pouring my mind into the bio-crystalline darkness. Occasionally I received an echo of my thought back and that gave me hope. I was like a nurse with a comatose patient: even a repeated whisper tells of consciousness.

On the third day when I visited the chamber I could just detect a glow spreading from the central seeds to the outer ones. It was like a fire catching from embers. Looking closely I could see that the seeds had begun to bond sending out small filaments of bio-crystalline fiber. They resembled patterns of frost.

By the fifth day the glow was clearly perceptible and from the door of die vacuo-lock it was as though a candle were burning in the still chamber.

That candle, if I may so call it, brought me more joy than a thousand prayer lights of St. Francis Dionysos. At the same time, I was realistic. There was no way I could restore the
Nightingale
to full operation. Too much was lost. Too much was damaged. Too much might still fell into decay. But at least we were no longer sliding helplessly into ruin and death. We were making a stand and the
Nightingale
was responding.

I did not tell my colleagues what was happening as I did not want to build their optimism. They had enough to do as it was, hunting through the ship, making what repairs they could and isolating those areas which could not be saved. The crematorium in the
Nightingale
was fractured and useless and so we held funerals for the dead and scored out graves in the rock and sand of the planet and buried the bodies.

There came the day, it would have been some three weeks after we landed, that I was lying in my couch reaching out to the consciousness of the
Nightingale,
that I heard a sleepy, somewhat feline voice, murmur, “Hello, Jon Wilberfoss. I have been listening to you for days, gathering you in, but only today have I found the strength to reply. We are in a sorry way. But hope is not dead. Tell me how I can help.”

What a question. The naivete of bio-crystalline consciousness sometimes appalls me. I suppose because biocrystalline brains have the power of speech and their expression sounds thoughtful, we assume they have the wisdom of the human. But they do not.

“There are many ways you can help us,” I said and then decided to test the power of the healing brain. In the canteen which had become our center of operations there was a malfunction in the heating system. The heaters had begun to turn themselves on and off at random. This was not dangerous to us but was inconvenient and costly in terms of energy. I asked the newly-awakened consciousness to try and repair this situation.

And it did.

Within minutes the temperature controls had been corrected and the heating system in the canteen was functioning as it should. This change was noticed by those who were living there.

When next I visited the dining area people told me of the change, wondering what had happened and glad that the
Nightingale
seemed to be returning to normal. They felt hopeful.

I did not tell them about my visits to the bio-crystalline chamber and how the new seeds were growing. That news would keep.

We stood in silence, feeling the awful drag of the gravity of the planet, and gave thanks that we were still alive.

WULFNOTE

And with those words, Wilberfoss’s face became tranquil and moments later his eyes opened. He sneezed suddenly and violently. I think it was the need to sneeze that had brought him out of his trance.

I was pleased with this report. I could hear the real man. I could sense a focusing down on his experience. We are moving into his narrative but there is a long journey ahead. I also knew that I must not rush things despite my impatience.

Just as bio-crystalline fiber grows slowly so is Jon Wilberfoss slowly growing toward health.

WULFNOTE

As the winter passed Wilberfoss grew stronger. He took a deeper interest in gardening and that Lily regarded as a most healthy sign. He was still not allowed to move about unattended.

Frequently lucid in his discourse, there were yet occasions when he stuttered and spoke only fragments of sentences and these were brutal and chaotic. I noticed that these outbreaks tended to occur most often shortly after he had woken up and I told Lily this. My observation concerned her. She considered that these outbreaks reflected the chaos of his nightmares: nightmare visions swallowing the rational day. She came to believe that Wdberfoss’s apparent health and wed-being were a fabrication of his mind to hide the profoundly disordered state of his subconscious and that that subconscious would one day brutally assert itself. As we shad see, Lily was correct in her prediction.

However, as far as we at the time were concerned, Wilberfoss seemed to be recovering his memory slowly and naturally. His physical health was rude and strong.

One day, two pairs of fruit trees were delivered to the Poverello Garden, a gift from a Talline benefactor whose wife had spent time in the garden and who had recently given birth to twins. The trees needed to be planted and Lily arranged for this job to be given to Jon Wilberfoss.

And so it was that one morning the trees were deposited outside our enclosure. Wilberfoss tied them onto Lily at her insistence. The previous night we had enjoyed a particularly heavy rainfall which had softened the frosty earth. Lily churned the leaf mold under her tracks to a soggy and noisome brew as she moved away from the small hospital and up a shadow hid. Wilberfoss followed her carrying a spade, a pick, a sack and a bucket which contained a stout pruning saw. He was wearing the rough clothes of a Talline farmer and I consider that they suited his burly frame and the natural swagger of his walk. I followed them at a height.

Lily came to the river and followed it for a while until we came level with the Pectanile. At this point the river was shadow and wide and ran rippling over the stones and shingle. Lily crossed and heaved herself up the farther bank. I was concerned for her. Her engines, while strong, are not new and I could not understand why she was putting herself to such strain. But as always she had a purpose. She was leading Wilberfoss on a journey of discovery. This was the farthest he had been allowed to travel during his convalescence. As he walked along I could see him glancing from right to left examining the tad trees and the dark shrubs. He paused for a long time looking at the Pectanile. Perhaps he was remembering it. Perhaps he was evaluating it. Wisps of steam were rising from its funnel as the day gathered some warmth.

Up the bank, Lily pushed through a thicket of straggly bushes and entered a small orchard. Here were fruit trees from many planets. The branches were bare. Long, damp winter grass grew between the trunks and was glazed with rain. Within minutes of entering the orchard Wilberfoss was soaked to the waist.

She led him down a row of trees until we came to a small clearing at the edge of the orchard. Beyond was the wild wood. We could just hear the chatter and roar of the river as it plunged through the rapids. The rain had given the river a frill voice.

Lily instructed Wilberfoss to untie the trees and plant them and he set to with a will. Soon he had four holes opened up in the black and stony soil. Even I could see that the work was familiar to him. Perhaps he was remembering the agricultural tricks of his boyhood for I saw how carefully he cut the grassy top sods and placed them to one side and then set down his sack flat on the ground and shoveled the soil from the hole onto it. I observed the careful way he made sure that the soil didn’t get lost amid the high wet grass.