Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (30 page)

He planted the trees one by one, tipping the loose soil from the sack around the roots and pressing it down with his foot. He was absorbed in his work, making sure that the roots were spread and the trees were upright.

When he had completed the planting, Lily sent him down the lines of fruit trees, to prune them. And when he had finished that task, he gathered the severed branches and twigs together in the middle of the orchard and set fire to them. The blue smoke rose like incense through the still orchard.

Over the next week Jon Wilberfoss tidied the orchard and at the end of the week I again approached him for the story of the
Nightingale.

★ ★ ★

He sat one evening on the veranda outside his room. He smelled of wood smoke and the backs of his hands were smudged with ash. He sat back in his chair, making the chair seem almost too small and frail to bear his weight, with his hands clasped behind his head and his eyes closed. I could tell that Wilberfoss was looking inward.

“Talk to me,” I said. “Tell me what you are thinking.”

“I have spent today remembering,” he murmured. “For the last few weeks I have been like a man walking in mist, and now the mist is beginning to clear and I am looking down into a dark valley. I cannot see far yet, but far enough. The valley is my life . . .” He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Do you understand that?” he asked.

“I understand,” I replied, for I have read widely about the symbolism of dark valleys. Wilberfoss remained silent for many minutes looking at me until I began to wonder whether he had slipped into a phase of silent meditation.

But then he sighed and rallied himself and said, “You cannot understand. No one can understand unless you were there. And even then ...” His voice trailed away and he was silent for several minutes and then he whispered, “Help me, Wulf,” and I spoke the hypnotic words and he relaxed.

Wilberfoss’s Narrative

The
Nightingale.
You want to know more about the
Nightingale.
Let me tell you that after I had got the new seeds to grow and strengthen the bio-crystalline system, life on the ship grew easier. There were a hundred and one things which we had taken for granted—like the sewage ingestion system and the automatic lighting and the ever-present whisper of the atmosphere filters—things which were noticed when gone. Well, each day we noticed some small improvement. It was as though a God was protecting us, working behind the scenes to make things better. I remember the day the air filters came back on. We had been living in and breathing air that would not have disgraced a sewer—you can get used to anything— but then one day the filters came on again and we stood with our feces close to the filter panel and breathed in air that had the smell of trees and mountains and flowers. It was the kind of air you would like to eat. Like the air in this garden after rainfall. Do you know what the
Nightingale
had done? The old filters were ruined and so the ship had channeled our air supply to the hydroponics filters which were robust. We were breathing in the fragrance of tomatoes and flowers.

Having expected a lingering and painful death, it was hard not to feel optimistic as every day the
Nightingale
showed that it was fighting to survive. We thought of the ship as a mighty organism with a will to live.

But then one day I was outside, riding in the gravity mule, inspecting the damage to the stabilizing arms. The mule is a kind of flying workshop. It is enclosed and you sit astride the anti-grav unit. I always used it for trips outside.

I had landed the small machine among the thick-stemmed gray scrub bushes and found myself watching the antics of a pair of creatures like land crabs that were tearing at some of the refuse we had jettisoned from the ship. Suddenly I received a call, a warning call, on the radio telling me that there was a disturbance of some kind in the hills. I rose up several meters above the scrub and looked up the gentle slopes. Advancing toward me was a gray cloud which seemed to boil and chum and which filled all the space from earth to sky. I recognized a dust storm.

The wind was driving the dust before it like a flapping curtain. We had not seen any storms on the planet until then, but now I could see the shrubs shake as the storm front reached them. There had been no warning. The storm’s advance was so rapid that all I could do was plunge down to the shrubs and dig in. The land crabs had already disappeared and were deep in their burrows. I managed to lodge the gravity mule under an overhang and switched its power so that it pressed into the shallow cave. I was like a limpet in a rock pool when the storm waves come pounding in. I felt the storm arrive. It flowed over me. The light became brown and then dark brown. Fine particles of dust crawled in flowing shapes over the viewplate. I felt the wind suck at me and felt the sand and rock scoured from beneath me. I kept the power in the mule as high as I dared until the pack was running hot. I felt like a mouse cornered in the wainscot while the cat reaches in to claw it loose. And the noise! The roaring. Like an avalanche . . .

I could not have survived long. And the storm did not last long. It was a front only: a wave of wind, triggered by God knows what, which swept over the land and sea and was gone. The howling died away to a whisper of felling dust.

After the storm came clouds of moisture which drifted low and completely obscured my view. Beads of water formed on the viewplate of the mule and I could see drips felling from the nearest shrubs. A land crab worked its way out, scrabbling under the clear plastic base of the mule. It basked in the damp, digging a shallow hole where the drips fell and then settling its shell into the hole, like a lid on a pot.

Slowly the visibility cleared and I could see the gray shrubs which pressed about the cave mouth. Eventually I could see the low shape of the distant hills. I could not see the
Nightingale
and yet it should have been towering up over me. At first I did not believe this. I thought that I must have dived around the hillside in my first panic when I saw the storm approaching. I used the radio to try and contact the ship but all I received was a high whine of static. I raced through the different call frequencies. Nothing. Finally I used the private frequency which connected me to my command room and then I heard the
Nightingale.
The voice was soft, almost like someone waking from a dream. It said, “Ah, Jon Wilberfoss. You have survived. I am glad. I thought I was alone now. Please come to me. I think I have done something very wrong. Please come quickly I think I have made a mistake. I need your help, Jon Wilberfoss. Come quickly to me.”

I told it where I was and that I was on my way. I felt myself become ice cold and very calm. There was no panic in me. If anything, there was a blank surrender to my fete, whatever it was. I did not try to make guesses.

I adjusted the power flow in the mule and eased it out of the cave. I lifted above the shrubs and immediately saw the
Nightingale.
What had happened was clear. The ship had shifted position. The wind had tom away the earth beneath it and the wind had battered it. The ship had begun to topple but it had not fallen. The ship had saved itself.

Now, blazing from it, bright as bars of silver, were the stabilizing beams with which it had anchored above our old Pacifico monastery. These beams were like incandescent rods and they reached into the low valley and to the nearby hillside and even to the shore of the gray sea. They were holding the ship upright against the crushing force of the planet’s gravity. I recognized that the energy drain was enormous and wondered what could be left for the rest of the
Nightingale.

As quickly as I dared I flew over to the
Nightingale

and began to rise slowly up beside it. I could not push the energy pack on my mule too hard as it was already depleted. I passed the dark caverns of the particle vents and the evacuation chutes which rimmed the DME sector. I rose by the view windows and there were no lights within. I moved under the Symbol Transformation Generators and gave a wide berth to one of the stabilizing beams. Even so the field generated about the beam made my small gravity mule tremble and rattle. High above me I could see the access port which led to the small area where we few refugees had set up camp. I took long minutes to get there.

And when I did get there I found a warning light blinking outside the air-lock. It advised me that the atmosphere within was toxic. Toxic!

I opened the air-lock using the emergency override switch and drifted inside. Two minutes later I had matched atmospheres and the door into the ship slid open. No lights were burning. I switched the mule lights on and glided down the short corridor which connected the access bay to the dining-room. A man lay crumpled against the wall, his mouth open and his fingers in his hair. The door into the canteen stood open but the mule which was designed for work outside the ship would not fit through. I let it sink to the floor and anchored it with magnetic clamps and then cut its power. I checked that my survival suit was sealed and functioning properly with a steady flow of air and then I released the clear plastic door of the mule and stepped outside. I peered into the dining-room. The men and women who had been my companions since our descent onto the planet, now lay sprawled on the tables and on the floor. No one moved. Nothing moved except a wisp of paper that someone had tied to the air filter when it first began to function for us. This fluttered showing that whatever atmosphere had killed my companions was still being circulated. There was nothing I could do for anyone and I felt my grip on reality loosening. I entertained the unreason of a child. Unfair. Unfair. How could life be so
unfair
? Why was I singled out for this? Why had everything gone wrong? What was this malignant phantom of death that stalked me, this shadow?

I knew I needed to quit this place of staring eyes. I walked over to the door which led to my personal quarters. There were several bodies against this door and I had to reach down and take them by the legs and drag them away. And then I saw why they were there. The door was an atmosphere lock and the clamps were secure. No warning lights were showing and it was a fair presumption that the atmosphere in my quarters beyond the door was human normal, the air of Earth, the air of Juniper.

I opened the lock, slipped through quickly, and closed the door behind me and sealed it. I checked the air. It was breathable and without hesitation I stripped off my survival suit and left it clinging to the floor. I pulled myself laboriously up the ramp and into the room that was constructed like my dining-room at the monastery. Can you believe that amid all this chaos of death and destruction, my fire was still functioning and the flames flickered and licked at the wooden logs and sent shadows marching around my room just as it had in my house at Pacifico? Of course the fire gave out no heat. It was an example of electronic legerdemain. It would have burned merrily in a vacuum.

But it worked, you know. The fire was a psychological device and it gave me a reassuring sense of the familiar. It brought me contact with my own reality and the panic that had threatened me retreated. I breathed deeply.

The voice of the
Nightingale
greeted me. “Welcome home, Jon Wilberfoss. Shall I talk to you now or later?”

“Now. Now.”

“Do you want an in-depth analysis?”

“I just want to know why my companions are dead and what has happened to the DME and are we stable and what did you mean when you said that you have made a mistake?” As I spoke I slumped down into my easy chair by the fire and held my hands out to its cold flicker. “Tell me. Simple or complex. Tell me.”

The
Nightingale
had a beautiful, calm, caring and thoughtful voice. Above all it was a voice that gave an impression of wisdom. In careful phrases it told me of the wind that had caught the ship unawares; of the sand and rocks that flayed its surface; of the shifting patterns of stress resulting from the different wind speeds and which the
Nightingale
had tried to keep in balance; of the vortex that scored away the rock at its base; of the lurching of the ship and the sudden need to power the anchor beams to save the ship from falling
;
of the mistakes that resulted from the sudden drain of energy; of the fit that possessed the
Nightingale
for a few moments and which resulted in the ship confusing all the atmospheres; of the vacuum in the DME sector; of the toxic gases in the hydroponics garden which had sluiced through to suffocate my companions; of the temperature shift in the Close Metabolism center.

I asked. “Are you telling me that I am the last living creature aboard the
Nightingale
?”

The
Nightingale
did not reply and so I asked my question again. Eventually it made answer.

“I am. You are.”

“And are we stable?”

“We are, for the time being.”

“And what is your state?”

“Not good . . . Holding.”

“The
Nightingale
is a graveyard.” It did not reply to this. It saved its energy. But I knew I had spoken a truth. The entire ship was a graveyard. And as I sat there staring into the flickering embers I saw them flare for the last time and die away to darkness.

I knew that the dead ship was a replica of my mind. I had no hopes. Blackness.

WULFNOTE

Wilberfoss had reached the end of his memory. He sat there relaxed and dark. I asked him several questions but he did not reply. Finally I murmured the hypnotic release words and his eyes opened.

It took him many minutes to register where he was and I feared lest he had strayed over into madness. But he rallied, and then he looked at me. “I’m not sure that I want to know any more, Wulf. I’m at the end of all reason. Can’t I just be? Here? With you and Lily. Can’t I begin again?”

I did not reply and he took my silence for negation, which of course it was.

He stood up, and with a sigh made his way indoors. Lily was with him. She administered a sleeping draft and the next sound I heard from Wilberfoss was his loud ragged snoring.