Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (33 page)

WULF:    Explain    unreality.

WILBERFOSS:    Oh, I was aware of this. Just as the force of gravity can bend space, so the gravity of the events I had experienced bent my understanding. Warped it. Can you imagine what it is like to be the only thing alive in a ship filled with dead creatures? I was the only thing alive! Everything was dead except me! Everything! I can be excused for asking the question, “Why me?” I can be excused for finding answers to that absurd question.

I was aware that I was behaving in strange ways. It was as though I could watch myself, but I was powerless to stop myself behaving strangely. One thing I took to doing was spending time down in the room where the bio-crystalline seeds were growing. I drew a strange strength from being close to the origin of that mighty alien brain. I used to sit with my helmet as close as possible to the blazing strands and filaments. I remember on my homeworld when I was a boy, I used to sit at the observation port of our solar energy station and look at the sunlight, focused to a beam that could vaporize steel. It was a similar thing. . . the desire to be close to naked power.

But the strangest part of my unreality was that I began to believe that I was not alone on the ship but that there was another figure present. This was not a living person, you understand, nor an alien, but something other. I never saw it directly but I saw its shadow several times and I heard its footsteps. It was a man, not unlike me, but with a distorted head. Once I woke up in the blackness of the ship with the knowledge that the figure had been leaning over me. I reached up but encountered nothing.

WULF:    Were    you afraid?

WILBERFOSS:    There is a strange thing. I was not afraid. I was disturbed. I was worried but... I had the feeling, the idea, whatever it was, that the visitor who roamed the ship was also me. That doesn’t make sense, does it? But that is what I felt. I wanted to meet this other being. I wandered through the dark ship with my lights dowsed hoping to surprise it. I shouted and challenged, but it never responded. Perhaps I shall never meet it now. Perhaps . . . Who knows . . . But the main thing is that I was aware of my strangeness. At times it seemed as though the
Nightingale
was just an extension of myself. It could expand my thought. It could expand my strength. When I lay at night I could feel the ship about me like an extra skeleton.

WULF:    Were    you ever lonely?

WILBERFOSS:    Lonely. I don’t remember being lonely. I had so much to do. There is this side to me that always wants to bring things to order. While I was occupied I didn’t have much time for myself. And there were the crabs and the starfish. I have heard of people who, condemned to a solitary life, have made friends of flies. Well, I spent hours watching the crabs scuttling over one another, engaging in skirmishes, picking through the material ejected from the ship and going about their business.

But then there were times when I wanted to sit down and talk to friends. I used to spend hours daydreaming, talking to people in my mind and sometimes talking out loud. I used to talk to Tancredi. He was like a father to me.

WULF:    Did    you    ever    talk    to Medoc?

WILBERFOSS:    Medoc    visited    me one night. In the flesh. I didn’t ask her to come.

WULF:    What    do    you mean, “in the flesh”?

WILBERFOSS:    She    was there . . . herself... I told her I didn’t want to see her.

WULF:    And    what did she say?

WILBERFOSS:    She    didn’t    speak.    Just stood there, in the firelight, looking at me. I asked what she wanted. She had flowers and she offered them to me. She was wearing the kind of clothes that Talline women wear when they are mourning the dead. I thought she was mocking me and I told her to leave. She shook her head and so I took her by the neck and strangled her. I threw her from the ship. At least I think I did. I don’t remember putting on my survival suit. I was dreaming but it all seemed so very real from the musky smell of her skin to the way her eyes would smile but not her face. I threw her from the hole in the ship’s wall and she floated away, tumbling downward. Of course I was dreaming yet she seemed more real than the stones. I did not see her land, but suddenly she was standing on the ground looking up at me and one by one she was joined by all the creatures that had traveled in the
Nightingale
and that were now dead. They stood looking up at me . . . Not accusing . . . just looking. They looked to me as their leader. Ah! The leader of the dead. The leader of the killed. The killer. Was not the
Nightingale
made in my likeness? This temple of death.

I ran from them.

Of course I was dreaming. But when dreams are more real than the waking reality, how is a stressed mind to cope?

The next day, I got on with my work, clearing the ship.

WULF:    Don’t    you think that Medoc could have helped you?

WILBERFOSS:    Medoc would have destroyed me. She would never have let me rest. Medoc is a realist. There are times when we need a bit of deceit to get us through the day. Medoc is as pitiless as the eye of God on Judgment Day. I would not have survived a week on that world if Medoc had been among my voices. That is why I killed her. Survival. You’ve not been there. You don’t know.

She left her mark. Every night after her visit I’d hear them, the crowds outside the ship, milling about, the un-dead.

But Medoc only came the once. The once. WULFNOTE

I observed that Wilberfoss had become agitated with this line of inquiry and so I decided to terminate the interview. I spoke the recall words and he relaxed and slipped into normal sleep. However, I want the following observations placed on record: I believe that Medoc was a symbol of truth in the mind of Wilberfoss and that he denied her and thus entered falsehood. His retreat into madness was a retreat from the truth.

I also believe that Medoc did visit him. She was not a creature of his imagination like the figure who haunted the ship, or the paternal voice of Tancredi. She was there, actual. Medoc crossed time and space; but do not ask me how. I can record truths that I can not explain. A human commentator must explain this.

There is something else strange to me. As Wilberfoss described his life on the stricken ship, he sounded almost happy, almost contented. This cannot be the truth that he was avoiding, the truth that had left him black and silent. Many men have killed in their dreams and woken to live normal unmurderous lives. There is more.

It will be strange, though, if the event that has cast such darkness on his mind should prove to be trivial in the light of reasonable day. It might be the kind of event which another man would shrug away with a laugh. Each man has his own truth. Each woman too, I think. And by these truths they measure their lives. Only we bio-crystalline entities, while we can perceive contradictions, seek general truths.

WULFNOTE

We believe that Wilberfoss is now on our side. He is a willing participant in his restoration. We are now the ones that bid him make haste slowly. He has accepted a regular daily routine which consists of walks under the trees and work in the garden followed by brief periods of meditation.

In the evening we talk about anything that might be of interest. Wilberfoss wants to know about the monastery. I tell him what I know. Occasionally I visit Tancredi and learn what little news there is that matters. I do not tell Wilberfoss that the entire order is waiting to discover what happened to the
Nightingale.
I let him believe that he is a forgotten man in a quiet backwater and that the affairs of the Gentle Order are progressing as usual. Which in a way they are. Despite tragedy, life goes on.

Once a week we have retrieval sessions and I speak the hypnotic words and Wilberfoss remembers and I record.

Lily insists that these occasions take place only once a week and then only when Wilberfoss is rested and in good spirits. Wilberfoss would like more frequent sessions but Lily is not to be challenged. Her word is law. I have not bothered to quote these sections since they mainly filled in details in a picture that we already knew. They do not advance the story.

I accompany Wilberfoss at all times. He likes to chatter about things. He has taken to wandering close to the Pectanile. It seems to fascinate him. He is attracted to it and is responding to it as a symbol of health.

For myself I listen, question and record. Whenever possible I cross-refer, trying to evaluate the truth of his comments. Wilberfoss wants the truth but I am suspicious of him. As ever there is something else moving under his still waters. I watch and wait.

Spring is well advanced in the garden and the short, sharp winter of this world is in full retreat. Already there are flowers in the Hapsa Trees. They smell of lemons and the smell is everywhere. Flying through the trees I have glanced against the bright blue balls of blossom.

Responding as though I am a bird, the blossoms explode against my hard and pitted side, painting me with fragrance and plastering me with their sticky horseshoe-shaped seeds.

I know that I smelled of lemons when I recorded the following important segment of Wilberfoss’s life.

Wilberfoss’s Narrative

WULFNOTE

This interview is one of the most important. Wilberfoss began by describing incidents which have already been covered in earlier transcripts. I have edited the interview so that it begins with new and rather startling information.

WILBERFOSS:    Occasionally,    you know, the
Nightingale

and I were at odds. I wanted one thing and the biocrystalline brain wanted something else. To me the cleaning of the ship was all-important. But the
Nightingale
became obsessed with its weight! It undertook extraordinary calculations linking the gravity of the planet with its own mass, the drag of the atmosphere and the ship’s power reserves. Despite all we had suffered, the ship was far from dead. It was recovering and making economies, like any creature. The massive symbol transformation generators, for example, were alive but dormant. They could be brought back into the game when the need required. Self-repair circuits kept them under constant check.

The
Nightingale
was bending all its efforts to getting us off the planet. Each day it unavoidably leaked energy and the equations changed. Each night it had to charge my gravity pack and the mule. It tolerated my fussing with the dead and my labored attempts at cleaning, but it demanded that I heave out anything that could be unbolted.

The simple truth was that given the gravity of the planet we did not have sufficient power to achieve escape velocity. But we had almost enough. The question for the
Nightingale
was how much could we trim from the ship and still leave it viable in space. To the
Nightingale,
a loss of weight was the equivalent to an increase in energy. Much of the ship was now open to the atmosphere of the planet and would be open to the vacuum of space if we escaped. My control area was the only part of the ship that retained breathable air. Hence there was much that could be abandoned. But how much could one small man do?

I moved the various landing craft down to the surface leaving only one stored in the hold. I tore out machinery that the
Nightingale
decided it no longer needed. I threw the entire library of tapes and books out of the door and watched the land crabs chomp and tear.

Such activity became my life.

One day I was in the gravity mule high on the top of the
Nightingale.
I had my laser torch and was cutting at the space doors which led to the hangars where the landing craft had been stored. These were excess weight that the
Nightingale
had told me to dispose of. I cut one door free and watched it twist around on one of its hinges as the high gravity swung it. The metal tore and the hinge broke. The door slid over the skin of the
Nightingale
and accelerated to the ground where it caused a brief, subdued commotion among the pressed rubbish. I paused to rest and looked out toward the sea.

The sea was always interesting. It was gray and rolled like molten lead. It did not have waves but heaved in slow undulations. It ran up the rocky shore like oil in a pan. Where the currents moved (and they changed by the hour) the sea took on different colors: sinuous eddies of gray-green and slate-blue. Where currents met I was reminded of snakes coiling and sliding past each other. And never a sound. To those of us who know the sea of a planet like Juniper, its different voices are as familiar as our own moods. But this sea was silent as thought, and its silence disturbed me and thrilled me. I remembered the dangerous sea of my boyhood.

And as I looked it seemed that the sea was changing. It became spotted. This I had never seen before. The spots were evident from the shore to the horizon and spread as wide as my field of vision. And even as I watched they changed. The spots became mounds and these quickly expanded into domes of redness. The red was the color of raw meat. I was aware that what I was watching was the emergence of many spheres from beneath the sea. What could this mean? So far as I could judge, there had been no intelligent life among the creatures that swarmed around our ship, but now something new and unified was emerging.

You can imagine my concentration as hundreds of red spheres rose to the surface and bobbed there for a moment before lifting from the sea. As they lifted they expanded to twice their size in the atmosphere. I could see veins on them, like patterns in marble, and they each dragged a tail which resembled an umbilical cord.

The spheres rose, the cords stretched, a body rose. They were attached to a body which slowly emerged from the sea. It was like a coiling mass of red worms. Its size at this distance awed me. It seemed as if the whole of the sea had become an undulating mass of red. As the body rose at the end of its cords it began to disentangle itself. Tentacles separated from the main body and rose. Each was like a segmented worm. At the worm’s ends were blind mouths which opened and closed as though tasting the atmosphere. Last to emerge from the sea were coiling black tendrils which trailed from the underside of the body and dragged over the surface. I realized that what I was watching was the emergence of a single giant creature.