Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (20 page)

Such were Sandy’s memories when he met the blue cat which hosted the Quelle face to face. What the Quelle thought at the moment of contact we do not know.

Jon Wilberfoss reached up to the cage and thrust one of his fingers through the mesh and tickled the cat under its chin. He was rewarded with a gentle miaow. He turned to Sandy. “You will sleep here tonight, Sandy. None of us are sure about how the transference will take place. You must discover that.” He turned back to the cat. “Can you help us Quelle?” he asked. “Sandy is willing but none of us has experience of how to make such a move. You must help us.”

“Leave it to me,” said the cat, screwing up its face. “Sympathy is all, but I am already hurting. I need to move. This bag of fur can no longer contain me. Sandy and I will soon be acquainted.”

Mohawk had been listening carefully and she placed her hand on Sandy’s arm. “I shall be close,” she said. “Don’t hesitate to call on me. I may be able to help.”

Let me say now that Mohawk had already detected trouble. She could not have specified what, but she was uneasy. Wilberfoss too, to his credit, also felt uneasy but he, not being deeply trained in alien contact, thought that the problem was in him, in his own sense of strangeness and newness. It would never have occurred to either of them to think that the Quelle might be mad, but that I am afraid is the case.

I, the historian Wulf assert this. Had either of these two sensitive beings acted on their feelings and requested a deeper diagnosis and assessment of the needs of the Quelle, then the
Nightingale
would have been saved along with all the life-forms within her, and Wilberfoss would now be a champion of Life to rival old St. Francis Dionysos himself. Historians cannot rewrite the facts of history no matter how they gloss them.

Wilberfoss and Mohawk left Sandy alone in his cell with the blue-furred cat. They returned to their different jobs though Mohawk made sure before departing that her call line was open. This meant that Sandy could contact her directly. It also meant that if she so chose, she could listen to what was going on in Sandy’s room at any moment.

Left alone, Sandy suppressed his memory of the mountain hyena and released the cat from the cage. It immediately ran into the small garden enclosure and defecated among the flowers.

While Sandy prepared for bed the cat prowled the room. Occasionally it spoke to him, sitting back on its haunches and fixing him with its sharp yellow eyes. It spoke of the beauty of the Quelle’s homeworld and the joy of union with a sympathetic mind.

Eventually Sandy slept and the cat sat watching him.

At about the middle of the night the cat crawled into the sheets and curled up between Sandy’s arms. The boy murmured and turned and the cat spoke to him uttering words of comfort and peace.

Mohawk heard those words and hurried to Sandy’s cell. She slipped through the door and was in time to watch the Quelle possess the sleeping boy.

The cat was crouched on his stomach with its legs spread and its for standing out stiff from its body. The boy was asleep on his back with his arms thrown wide.

The Quelle emerged like water. It seeped from the cat’s eyes and ears, mouth and anus. It became a pool of rippling sliver, which lapped around the cat’s stiff body and then flowed up toward Sandy’s mouth and nose. The boy moved and sneezed as the Quelle attempted to enter his nose. That stopped it. It lay around his throat like a pool of sliver, like fish scales, like moonlight on water, like a sliver scarf, like the traces of a snail over slate . . . and then it gathered and thrust itself into his body through his mouth and ears and nose. Sandy stopped breathing while the last bead of the Quelle found its way inside him. Then he sighed and the sigh turned into a snore. He twisted on the bed and his legs and arms thrashed for a moment and then reached out stiffly. The fingers and toes flexed. To Mohawk it looked as though Sandy were imitating the movement of the cat. Then the boy curled into the fetal position, turning onto his side. The dead body of a blue furred cat slipped from his chest and onto the bed. It lolled back, indecent in death, and Mohawk removed it carefully and placed it in the cage.

Sandy seemed to be sleeping peacefully and Mohawk withdrew quietly carrying the cage. She hoped that all would now be well. She contacted Jon Wilberfoss and told him what had happened. He seemed relieved.

Hours later the symbol transformation generators meshed in a blinding release of power and the
Nightingale
disappeared as it tore spacetime like cheesecloth and set out on the first of its missions.

I affirm the oneness of Life.

Among my friends I number the stars,

Shining in darkness and the serene moon.

I praise the rising sun that gladdens me.

Everything holds to its rightness:

The leaves that fall in Autumn,

The sap that rises in Spring,

The strong roots that break stone under soil.

Everything holds together: the fish, the birds 

And the things that crawl in the darkness.

I affirm the oneness of Life.

I celebrate tangled branches,

The tumbling of clear water,

The flowers of Spring and the berries of Winter.

I am in everything and everything is in me.

I am where the red desert meets the blue ocean.

Where the white mountain joins the green valley.

Everything joins. The stones too have their life.

I affirm the oneness of Life.

Where the baby cries and the woman opens,

Where the man calls and the child stands,

There too am I.

I glory in opposites, in fragrance at nigh fall,

In death in the morning, in tears and laughter.

I hear the voice that whispers,

Gentle and deep, from old sea shells 

Content with centuries of ocean,

And it is my voice,

And many voices.

I affirm the oneness of Life.

I have decided to place this song here lest, in all the excitement of narrative, we forget what we are about. I may include a few more songs later for they will help as the sadness of the story deepens.

The
Nightingale
returned from Noh-time to normal spacetime without any problems. The bio-crystalline consciousness at the heart of the ship first created a potential reality, cracking into normal spacetime through different dimensions, and then allowed the ship to reconstitute itself at the new point in space hence transforming potential reality to actual. The entire change was the physical equivalent of a metaphor in which two realities meet and exchange. It is surprisingly simple and yet infinitely subtle.

To the life-forms aboard the
Nightingale
the change in their status as they moved from actuality to potentiality and back again, was hardly noticeable. Those who were staring out through the view ports saw the stars swirl to a point of brilliance which vanished with a bang of light. Then there was darkness which seemed to press in on the ship. And then, when the darkness seemed all but unbearable, the stars poured forth again and reassembled themselves into new patterns. Only the bio-crystalline brains which had calculated the odds of the new reality, knew just where the
Nightingale
was.

There are those philosophies which maintain that there is no actuality except death and that so long as there is life there is only change and potential. Perhaps that explains the indifference of life-forms to the spacetime change. Opinions differ.

The important thing to those aboard the
Nightingale
was that there were no difficulties. Jon Wilberfoss alone among the life-forms on the ship witnessed the change as a personal event for in every change, his was the spiritual brain which worked with the clever bio-crystalline entities. It was naturally exhausting.

The
Nightingale
appeared close to a bright yellow sun that swung in a complicated dance with a glimmering red giant and a point of blackness defined by a glittering corona of energy. Despite appearances, this was a stable system. It had endured for many millions of years during which one of the worlds which swung around the yellow sun had achieved life-forms. This was the homeworld of the Trimaton. It was a world of misty blue-green swamps which were frozen at the poles and steamy at the equator. In the equatorial region there was a vast blue lake where the water was deep and in the center of this was a single, emerald-green island. This was the center of the Trimaton civilization and it was the Trimaton who kept the lake clear of tangling plants. It was here they built their ever changing, growing cities.

The
Nightingale
secured as close to the world as it dared and one of the land-rafts set out to establish contact. Mohawk was aboard this, accompanying the Trimaton she had been caring for.

After four days had passed Mohawk returned bringing greetings from the Trimaton world and inviting all those aboard the
Nightingale
to descend to the surface. This was clearly impossible but Jon Wilberfoss, as the senior representative of the Gentle Order, traveled down and entered the city of webs and woven stalks and shaped plants. There he remained as a guest, and in some ways as a hostage, while the other Trimaton aboard the
Nightingale
were ferried down to the surface.

A dead Trimaton, still and black within its waxy pod, was received and Wilberfoss was allowed to attend the funeral. This was a rare event since the Trimaton hardly ever died close to their main island unless they had suffered an accident or succumbed to disease. When a Trimaton grew old it simply divided and became two young Trimatons. Young Trimatons were engaged in lonely exploration on the mainland far from the great island and only the fortunate few returned to divide and keep the line alive. With them they brought whistle melodies which in a way which no human could understand were able to describe mountains and rivers and caves and trees. These melodies also told of the fete of younger Trimatons. So, as you can understand, funerals were few and far between.

A giant Trimaton, holding the pod containing the dead body aloft in its shorter tentacles, swam away from the island. Some two miles off shore it gulfed oil over its body and then dived and attached the pod to the sea floor. While the Trimaton was underwater, the others on the island began a whistle chorus which was like a thousand organs mixed with flutes and bagpipes. The sound spread from the place where the Trimaton had slithered into the sea. It traveled down the coasts and it traveled inland. As the tribes of Trimaton holding in the branches of their city or tending the young or gathering fruit or sleeping heard the whistle chorus, they joined in. Once started the wave of sound was unstoppable. It spread across the many thousands of miles of the island. When the Trimaton that had dived had done its job and the dead Trimaton was pegged to stones on the sea bed, it bobbed back to the surface and swam ashore. Seeing it arrive safely on shore, those Trimatons that were close stopped whistling and moaning and thus a wave of silence followed the wave of sound.

“What are they whistling?” asked Wilberfoss.

Mohawk strained to hear. “I can only catch fragments,” she said. “Some are telling genealogy, some are narrating exploits in which they were involved, some are describing what is happening. No two are the same. It is a great song of their here and now. One of them,”—she pointed up into the canopy of a wide-girthed tree—“my lad I think, is whistling about you and me and about how we come to be here.”

Gradually silence grew about them and they could hear the whistling grow fainter as the wave of silence chased the wave of sound. And when the silence was total, they made their farewells quietly and climbed aboard the land-raft and gently lifted and floated up to where the
Nightingale
held orbit.

Waiting for Wilberfoss was young Sandy. He was sitting on the floor outside the control rooms. There was already a blueness about his eyes and throat, like bruising.

“We don’t feel well,” he said, and then his face twisted and he bit his lips but not so hard as to draw blood.

Wilberfoss took him into the room which resembled his dining-room on Juniper and sat him at the table. The artificial fire flared in its grate and then settled to a pleasant semblance of burning logs and wood ash. Wilberfoss brought milk and some of the fruits he had gathered on the homeworld of the Trimaton and set these before the boy. “Now tell me,” he said.

Sandy tried to drink the milk but he gagged and dribbled. After another attempt he pushed the glass aside. He managed to eat some of the fruits. Occasionally his face moved uncontrollably, flitting from a frown to a smile, to a look of wonderment and then to the vacancy of an idiot. Wilberfoss watched in silence. He lent his presence and his patience.

Finally, Sandy managed a few words. “I don’t think we like ourself,” he said and took a deep breath. With his breath held he seemed to be able to keep control as Sandy. Then he spoke without breathing, using the stored air. “Quelle wants Sandy to be a cat. Sandy can’t. Sandy hurts. Sandy is sick.”

The air escaped from him and his face set with the Ups pushed forward as though he were pretending to be a fish. The next time he spoke the voice was different, sharper and with less intonation. “Quelle wants to be clean. You have given me a dirty vehicle. How can I live in a sewer? I insist on a sanitary mind. Miaow.”

The dialogue went on. Sometimes Sandy spoke and sometimes the Quelle. Once they both tried to speak together and the result was that Sandy held his breath until he swooned. The argument did not progress but merely moved in circles. What did emerge clearly was the deep antipathy between Sandy and the Quelle.