Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (5 page)

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The city of the Tallines.

I have said that Talline culture is a nature culture and nowhere is that more clearly demonstrated than in their buildings. The entire city is constructed from the egg-cases of the giant Featherfin Drifters which ply the oceans of this world. The egg-cases, which really are creatures in then-own right, are either oval or square-shaped. They can be found at any time of the year floating in long strings, like linked barges. When the eggs are ready to hatch and need only the pummel of the seas to bring them to ripeness, the egg-cases split and spill their cargo into the sea. It is a scene of carnage and I have witnessed it many times, as the predator fish, who always follow the slowly drifting egg cases, swarm and bite and gorge on the soft, near-to-hatching eggs. As for the egg-cases, the moment of splitting is quickly followed by their death since in the process of shedding their eggs they expose their innards to the sea. As they drift, empty, they also harden. The soft inner parts are washed away and eaten. Along any Talline shore can be found the shiny jet-black shards of the Featherfin egg-cases. They can be worked into jewelry.

The Tallines capture the egg-cases shortly after they have disgorged the eggs and while they are still very much alive. At that time they are still flexible. They are brought to shore quickly and kept alive by a process which the Talline people call “buttering.” Then they are re-formed. Their hard but flexible cutaneous layer is cut and the rehealing is directed in whatever direction the Tallines require. Many cuts can be made and so long as the egg-case is kept clean and well fed, the healing process continues and the egg-case grows. Cutting the case in just the right places is an art I am told. A single egg-case can be made to grow into an assembly hall or a many-corridored school or a domestic house. No Talline need ever live in more or less than a mansion. Most prefer simple dwellings.

When the egg-case, in attempting to heal itself, has grown to the required dimensions, it is killed. It is then lugged to whatever location has been prepared for it and is joined to the other buildings. To anchor the houses, dormitories, gutting sheds, schools, restaurants, houses and what-have-yous to one another and to the bedrock, the
Tallines
use an organic glue which they obtain from the “feet” of giant kelp.

The house in which Jon Wilberfoss and his wife and children lived was once, say two thousand years ago, a living creature carrying eggs. Indeed, all the buildings that make up this complex and compact city are made from the dark egg-cases. Interesting. No?

Jon Wilberfoss watched the shuttle dock. A few moments later a companion shuttle took off and climbed slowly into the sky. Wilberfoss, feeling considerably refreshed by this pause above the restless sea, continued his climb. Any speculation he might have entertained as to why he had been summoned in this strange way was stilled as he concentrated on the climb. He was hurrying.

In his youth he would have taken pride in running up the entire slope. But now, entering his middle years, his wind was not so good and there was a fleshiness in his waist and neck and all of this slowed him. The lean and ambitious cadet had given way to the fuller and satisfied man.

He came to the last row of steps at the top of which stood the square tower occupied by Magister Tancredi. A brilliant light shone out briefly from the top of the tower and cut a swathe through the darkness. Tancredi’s residence still served, as it had for generations of Talline sailors, as a beacon. The symbolism had pleased the early confreres who had established the Gentle Order on Juniper. Each Magister lived in this lighthouse.

Waiting at the top of the stairs was one of the Children of the War. Miranda, Wilberfoss guessed, though he had no way of knowing from her appearance. She banged her stones together to attract his attention and waved to
him
and then retreated into the house. Wilberfoss wasted no time. He ran up the steps and through the doorway and down the corridor to the room where Magister Tancredi had his study. The study door stood open.

The old man was at his desk, reading. Behind him roared an open fire which was burning blue and green, showing that it had only recently been lighted. This fire provided most of the illumination in the room, the remainder coming from Talline candles which burned brightly and gave off a sweet aroma. Two large padded chairs were placed convivially near the fire with a small table between them. Standing on the table were two glasses and a decanter of red liquor which sparkled like ruby in the bright light of the fire. Dark blue curtains closed the windows and portraits of the earlier Magisters of the Pacifico Monastery stared down from the walls. Away in one comer of the room hovered a giant antique autoscribe with its crest fully displayed and the name WULF printed on its brow. A sheet of text dangled, like an absurd oblong white tongue, from a slit in its front. Clearly Tancredi had been dictating. In the comer opposite, partly hidden in the shadows, stood the diminutive Miranda.

Tancredi was reading a bio-text document with a bright red border. The border signified that the document was top secret and had come from the very heart of the Gentle Order, from Assisi Central itself. As he read, Tancredi’s Ups moved. Being slightly deaf and deep in concentration, he had not noticed the arrival of Wilberfoss.

Abruptly Miranda brought her stones together in a clatter of staccato raps and Magister Tancredi looked up.

“Ah, Wilberfoss,” he said, peering at the door. “At last. Come in. Come in. Close the door behind you. Come and sit down and get warm. Sorry to be so mysterious but you’ll soon see the reason why.”

Miranda glided over to one of the seats placed near the fire and plumped the cushion and smoothed the back and beckoned to Wilberfoss. Mystified, the confrere moved over to the chair and sat down. He had many questions to ask but none of them would form properly, and so he waited. Magister Tancredi was not a man to beat about the bush.

The Magister joined him at the fire, unstoppered the decanter, poured two drinks and then sat back. “Sorry about all the cloak and dagger stuff. Not my idea. Orders from Assisi. They wanted me to use a Caller.” He gestured toward Miranda with his head. “More confidential than the net-line. Less risky. Might have woken everyone in the house. And besides ...” his voice trailed away. “Besides what?”

“Not that anyone would have listened in intentionally, of course. But we are all human, at least in our curiosity. Ignorance provides a certain security.”

Wilberfoss did not know what to make of these remarks and so remained silent. Obviously the old man was saying less than he was thinking and trying to suggest more. “Assisi Central wanted me to talk to you privately without anyone else knowing. I take it Medoc did not wake up?” Wilberfoss shook his head. “Good. Well. Tonight you are going to have to make some decisions.” Tancredi paused and looked at Wilberfoss. It was a look which could have been envy or it could have been pity. “Assisi Central have sent me this.” He tapped the red-edged document. “They have invited you to become Captain of the
Nightingale
.”

How simple the words!

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The
Nightingale
! Who has not heard of the
Nightingale
? In those days that ship was the stuff of dreams and fairy tales. I think more has been written about the
Nightingale
than about any other craft made by man.

The
Nightingale
was the pride of the Mercy Fleet of the Gentle Order. The ship had taken several generations of men to build. It represented the highest ideals of craftsmanship and speculation.

Mankind needs symbols to make tangible its beliefs and hopes, whether these be flags or crosses or faces carved in stone. And the
Nightingale
was a symbol of hope. It was also a statement about the beauty of mathematics and the beauty of architecture.

I will now tell you about its making.

After the War of Ignorance, knowledge was dissipated and the entire structure of interstellar relations was in danger of final collapse. Humans always live only one generation away from their stone age. After the War of Ignorance the Confreres of the Gentle Order traveled the known centers of civilization throughout the galaxy securing and bringing together whatever knowledge remained. They gathered libraries wherever they could find them, like beggars picking up wind-fallen fruit. (Speaking of symbols, the Library is the greatest symbol of civilization that I can think of: the knowledge of the ages, gathered together and made available.) The
Nightingale
grew from the knowledge so gathered. It was a tangible expression of knowledge. It was to be the greatest ship ever built, the flagship of the new order. It was to be the greatest hospital ship which had ever served the force which is called LIFE and which would extend the work of the Gentle Order of St. Francis Dionysos to the farthest realms.

The ship was completed when Wilberfoss was a young man. Its maiden journey was from Tinker, in the Blind Man System where the ship was built, to Assisi Central in the Lucy System. Since that time it had completed many trials and tests. Now it waited, tethered high above Assisi, flickering slightly as it held its place in our time scheme.

Such was the nature of this ship, being partly mineral and partly sentient, that it needed its captain before it could completely come into its own. The relationship is crucial as we see in the relationship between a head of state and state servants. The mean beget the mean. The just beget the just. The cruel create cruelty. The kind allow growth. The sour stifle and the happy generate laughter. And so with the
Nightingale.
The ship had the ability to become gentle and kind in the hands of a good captain or savage in the hands of a pirate.

No wonder then that the Magisters of the Gentle Order took their time before appointing a captain.

To return to our story.

Jon Wilberfoss is sitting facing Magister Tancredi. He has said not a word since receiving the terrifying news that he is invited to captain the
Nightingale.
His hand is on his glass, but he has not drunk.

Wulf, me, the autoscribe, silent in the comer: I watch him and tremble in every electric circuit to hear the slightest response. Nothing.

If an autoscribe may be permitted brief poetic license then Wulf imagines that Wilberfoss is saying to himself, “Why me? Why me?” He says this and is receiving no reply, no answer back.

Here I think we must pause again, for you need to know more about Wilberfoss the Man if you are to understand why he was offered this horrific task. What follows is a brief biography which Wilberfoss dictated to me as he sat in Lily’s Garden during the time of his convalescence.

The following transcript was made one fine sunny afternoon in springtime when many of the trees in Lily’s Garden were bursting into bloom. Wilberfoss had been in our charge for some seven months and Lily was already trying to wean him off the drugs which had kept him in a passive state since the recovery of the
Nightingale.
As you will see, Lily was optimistic in her treatment. But this brief period of lucidity showed that a vital mind was still functioning (albeit obsessed) and that the personality was intact.

Jon Wilberfoss was sitting on the grass with his back to a tree. Lily had cleaned him and fed him and injected him so that for the next hour he would have voluntary control of his limbs and voice. She hovered close. We both knew the dangers. She had him on a leash of sorts. A discharge monitor was strapped to the back of his neck. If he started to become too erratic Lily could send a radio signal to the monitor which would release a prescribed drug into his blood.

I have edited this transcript somewhat heavily. There were long pauses in the narrative, periods when Wilberfoss just sat with his eyes closed peering inside himself. He jumped topics erratically. However, his entire speech has an emotional logic and in preparing this text I have been able to jig it all together so that it reads coherently. At least I hope so. Sometimes he would begin a sentence and then stop and then start again differently. There might be up to five different beginnings. I have deleted these as there was no way I could discover what he intended.

The danger for you, the reader, is that I have made Jon Wilberfoss sound too urbane, too polished, too much in control of himself. Let us be very clear about this. If Jon Wilberfoss sounds cheerful in this narrative, it is the cheerfulness of the ignorant. There is no reason to doubt the facts of his narrative, merely be cautious with the tone.

A strange man was Jon Wilberfoss, as you will see. Most of the biographical material in this section was new to me.

WULF: Jon Wilberfoss wants to talk and I am leading the conversation. We know so little about him and we need to know how he sees himself. I have asked him to describe where he grew up.

WILBERFOSS:    I    was    born    a    long    way    from    here.

Have you heard of the world called Icarus? No? Ah well. That was its name. It was one of the partly colonized farming worlds. My father and mother had a dome farm out on the rim, at the place where the Sour Sea met the Nilpluva desert. A terrible place .. . no, it had its own beauty. But to a one like me who wanted to climb and hunt and run with the wind, that little farm in a dome where we counted the growth of every plant in centimeters and where water was measured by the cup and where you had to weigh yourself before and after taking a crap and where every move was subject to a paragraph in the survival manual, that squat little farm was as near to hell as I wanted to come.

If I hadn’t been given the school books which told us about old earth. If I hadn’t seen the Fantasia Imago cubes which taught us history. If I hadn’t looked up through the shiny curved walls of our dome and seen the stars gleaming like fire reflected on water. If. . . if. . . Tell me to be quiet. It is not poverty that makes rebellion, you know. It is the knowledge of poverty. And wherever I looked I knew I was poor and that life owed me more. I had a game, you know. A game I used to play alone when I could get away from the others. I’d be about ten or twelve, I suppose. I’d found the door that led from our dome down to the sea. It was closed with vacuum seals and siren locks but I was a smart little lad, always good with my hands, good at figuring things out. So anyhow, I soon worked out a way to short circuit the door and get outside. The air outside was poisonous. My game was to breathe deeply while I was inside the dome and then hold my breath and open the door and run as far as I could and then double back. I wanted to reach the sea and touch it. The sea was about a hundred meters from this part of our dome. I used to dream about running to the sea and plunging my hand in its pale pink water. I trained myself, running out from the dome, making a mark on the sand, sprinting back and then seeing how much longer I could hold my breath. And one day I knew I could do it. Two hundred meters on one breath. And I did, except that I fell in the wet ooze at the sea’s edge and it wasn’t water. It was something else, something that made my skin itch. The wind was out of me and I breathed and I know no more. I suppose I must have climbed to my feet and run for the next thing I remember is waking up inside the dome with my lungs on fire and my eyes streaming. The dome door was shut. Strange, eh? As a child I couldn’t explain it. And I can’t now, now that I am a man. But I remember it made me feel special. By rights I should have been out there on the margin, a little bit of earthmeat, food for the crabs that lived in burrows by the sea or for the long green sucker things that crawled out of the sea. But there I was in the dome, hurt but alive, and my parents never knew a thing about it. Something saved me. Something was looking after me. Did all this start then?