Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (32 page)

But there is an optimism in the human spirit too: an awareness that things can be better. That optimism is a guide toward health. Lily has told me a great deal about this for she saw it in the children she guarded who had lost everything but could still play.

And what of Wilberfoss? That man remained for a long time kneeling unmoving like a horse at a hedge in the twilight. His tears stopped and the blood dried. Later Lily cared for him.

There for the moment we will leave him. We will accord him some dignity for there is nothing more to be gained for the moment from contemplating his sad and ruined face.

Some seven days later, suddenly, late in the afternoon he called to me saying; “Wulf. I want to talk.” I swooped through the door and found him lying face down on his bed.

He had hardly spoken a word during the time since Medoc left and had spent the hours lying in his bed musing, murmuring to himself. Lily had never left his side day or night. She distrusted him, remembering Medoc’s warning. She monitored his every move and told me that he had begun to masturbate at night. I asked her what significance this might have and she told me that she did not know in a profound way but that it did not worry her and at least showed there was movement in him. I agreed. To me it showed that his fantasy life, or whatever danced in his head when he closed his eyes, had entered a new and perhaps erotic phase. But I hoped he was not dreaming of Medoc. For that lady had gone, and there would be no dignity in chasing her. Dignity would come with a proper quittance.

And then came his call. This was only the second time since he had begun his convalescence with us that he had actually stated that he wanted to talk. In every other case I had more or less taken the initiative. I had used the hypnotic implant to release his memories.

“Help me, Wulf,” he said. “I remember so much but. . .” He frowned for a moment in concentration.

“But... do you remember that story about a man who stood with his back to the fire watching the flickering of flames on the cave wall and his own shadow and tried to find meanings there? There is so much more. I need to face the fire, but I am afraid. The fire is here.” He pointed to his head. “In here. Help me.”

I began to prepare a reply but before I could speak he went on. “You see, yesterday, I heard people beyond the wall of the garden. They were talking about fishing, about catching the next tide. It all sounded so normal, so wonderfully normal that I could have cried for envy. I envied two ignorant Tallines who could think of nothing but nets and beer! Once I could have sat down and mended nets with them. But now...” His face changed again, suddenly scowling. “Damn Medoc and her witch ways. She should have stayed away. I was safe in my madness. She killed the dreams. You and Lily were the eye of my life, still and calm. Now I have nightmares when I sleep and nightmares when I wake and the days are filled with an aching strangeness. Who am I? What am I? Where am I? I’m half a man. I’m a guilty drunk. I did something last night which appalls the light of day and I don’t know what but my flesh stinks like dead meat and my eyes bum and I want to die but I can’t die.”

Wilberfoss spoke all these words in a clear hard voice, like an actor who has learned his lines but who is speaking without any emotion.

“I’ll help in any way I can,” I said. “And so will Lily. You know that. We both want to see you returned to health.”

“Health? What is health? Health is the interim between diseases.”

I realized that he was testing me. If Medoc had been present I know she would have hit him hard for the silliness of his words. I, of course, may not hit a human and so I did the next best thing. I made to leave.

“Where are you going?” he called. “I demand that you stay.”

“I’ll stay to hear your story,” I said. “But the rest is floss.”

“I’ll tell you my story. But I need help. Don’t mind if I get silly. Don’t mind if I talk pompous ... I don’t have a shape. Don’t know what I am.. . how to talk.” He looked at me and I saw through to his emptiness. Where there was once a man with drive and motive there were now only responses. Even so, the demolition begun by Medoc was not complete. He needed to recall his full history, only then could rebuilding begin. “How do you make me talk?” he asked.

“I use a hypnotic implant.”

“Words?”

“Yes, words.”

“Use them.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Now. Nothing can be worse than the uncertainty. I feel guilt but I don’t know why I feel guilt. . . not the deep why.”

I spoke the words and his eyes closed. He lay back on the bed and became calmer. His voice, the next time he spoke, was deeper and more his own.

Wilberfoss’s Narrative

WULF:    Do    you    remember    our last conversation?

WILBERFOSS:    Yes. A graveyard. My mind and the ship. I need to know the extent of the destruction. To see it for myself.

WULF:    Begin    there.

WILBERFOSS:    I rested and then I set out on a tour of inspection. I took food with me and spare power packs and I donned my survival suit with its gravity unit and set out.

I spent several days drifting down dark corridors and shunting myself into the living areas and resting areas and opening the power locks in the different zones and exploring. I was looking for life, you understand. Though I believed the
Nightingale,
I still needed to see for myself. I entered all the chambers in the CME and the DME. The creatures that had lived there were already beginning to decay.

Saddest of all were the small Rhymesters. They had held close together since the trouble started. When I broke into their chamber I found them dead in a ring, holding hands. They had been singing of course, singing their song without an end. I wonder what they were singing when the end came.

It was the universality of death which most captivated my mind. Nowhere was there an intelligent creature which had managed to withstand vacuum or a serious shift in the gases of its homeworld. Individual life is so feeble: only the race can adapt. Show me the creature that can adapt to a new environment in thirty seconds or that can take a sudden plunge of thirty or forty degrees in its local temperature with equanimity. They don’t exist.

At first I was appalled by the monstrous presence of death. But then I became passive. I shunted by screaming faces of Tallines and the coiled bodies of the Bonami and looked at them as I might have looked at paintings of the Inferno.

When I was tired, I camped in my little pool of warmth, usually by a wall or in a comer, for I needed the presence of something physical to remind me that I really existed. Once or twice I tried switching my suit lights out and the darkness was so complete that I quickly began to fantasize. I thought the darkness was black fur choking me. Or I thought I was in the mouth of some beast that had eaten me. The darkness was dangerous. I slept with my lights on, rocking in the gentle oscillation of the gravity field.

By day I drifted from cell to cell and slowly a plan began to form in my mind. Perhaps I was already going crazy but I don’t think so. As I explored the stricken ship I felt an overpowering desire to cleanse it. I decided to clean out the
Nightingale.
I thought that by doing this I would be honoring the dead. I would make that the last work of my life, for I had no thought of escape. The randomness of death has no dignity. I would bring dignity. I saw the feces and bodies flattened and distorted by the crushing gravity and I knew that I could not leave them like that.

When I had toured the entire ship I returned to my quarters and explained my plan to the
Nightingale.
The ship’s bio-crystalline brain was now stronger since it did not need to monitor the varied life systems beyond my small speck of warmth. It had even allowed my fire to come back on. It listened to me with approval and told me that in all my wanderings it had been able to track me. I had never been alone.

It was the
Nightingale
that first suggested that I should try to reduce the weight of the ship. I don’t know whether that thought would have occurred to me. It might have eventually but how could one small man reduce the weight of so great a ship? I had no idea but the
Nightingale
did. It made calculations. So, two motives flowed together.

The
Nightingale
had sampled my mind. Had it sucked up my cunning? I realize now that just as I was sworn to protect life, so the
Nightingale
was following its own most basic directives. Its job was to protect and save life too. I was the last bit of life aboard that it could identify with and so it was determined to save me.

Simple, eh?

And so a daily routine developed. I began to clear the canteen first. I opened up a wall door and allowed the atmosphere of the world to flow in. It was air of a kind. High in nitrogen: low in oxygen. One by one I dragged the bodies to the hole and tipped them out. They fell scraping down the side of the ship to explode on the ground. “Where is the dignity in this?” you may ask. All I can reply is that this seemed better than letting the corpses rot. Moreover, I have never liked to see waste. Rotting meat, rotting vegetables. When the spirit is gone what is left but earth? To me, the conversion of my dead colleagues into food for alien life seemed good usage.

I watched as the land crabs tore and devoured. This was an unexpected feast for them. Word spread among them. I suppose that is a way of putting it. Each day there were more crabs until they were a heaving brown carpet covering all the ground about the
Nightingale.

*
Other creatures came too, things like giant starfish with hooded dark eyes that they could raise on pseudopodia and with hundreds of suckers fringing their arms. The largest were over a hundred feet from crown to tip and shrubs and bushes grew on their backs like stiff hair. These creatures could crawl up the
Nightingale.
I found them plucking at the vents and vacuum chutes, trying to get inside the ship, and the force they could exert was immense. Two of them did manage to enter the abandoned dormitory and recreation areas and they began to suck at the bodies. They were doing my work but unacceptably. They left a trail of slime which dirtied the ship. Moreover, I was afraid lest they broke into a section where the bio-crystalline brain was still functioning. And so I went out in my survival suit and drove them back with fire from a laser torch. Fire was the only thing - that could make them move. Their suckers writhed and withdrew and these hulking beasts, each like a knot of snakes, slipped out of my ship and down the side. Each day, shortly after dawn, I made it my first job to ride around the
Nightingale
in the harness and bum them where they were climbing.

Of course, clearing the
Nightingale
of its dead life-forms, while it gave me an occupation and a sense of meaning— I was at least working for something—had a negligible effect on the ship’s weight. That problem did not concern me. I really had no hope of escape from the crippling force of the planet’s gravity. I didn’t think about my end. If I’d thought about that at all it would have been in terms of entropy: a slow winding down of the power packs; another storm tearing at the
Nightingale;
the ship
fallin
g and being tom open on the rocks; an invasion of the brown and hairy starfish; slow contamination of the air in my living areas; perhaps a heart attack for you know a man cannot live all the time in a gravity harness and the strain on my body was immense. Occasionally I sickened as microbes evolved in my food. Sometimes, if I slept in an awkward position I woke up with my skin strained into sores. You have seen the silver patterns on my skin. As I say, I had my daily round and so long as I was occupied I didn’t think. I didn’t let myself think.

The
Nightingale
had its own plans and bade me spend part of each day with a laser cutter severing some of the I internal links with the hydroponics belt. At first I did not know what it was about and then I understood. It was trying to lighten itself, and the hydroponics ring was like a belt of lead about it. While I cut and sealed on the inside, the ship used its own maintenance program to identify and sever external links. The hydroponics wing was constructed in a series of modules which had been more or less bolted together. These were slowly cut free.

One day the
Nightingale
asked me, for safety’s sake, to stay in my quarters. I felt the ship shake and lurch and then become still again. When I went outside I found that sections of the hydroponics ring had fallen away and now lay crashed and broken on the rocks outside the ship. In that one action we shed almost one eighth of our weight. Later that day I lay on my couch while the
Nightingale
fed power to its anti-gravity boosters and lifted and shifted and settled some two miles away on a rocky plateau closer to the sea. The ship was stable and the powerful beam anchors which had almost bled us white for power but which had held us upright against the gravity of the planet, were reduced one by one and finally stilled. During the afternoon I flew around the ship in the gravity mule. Where the hydroponics ring had fallen away the ship was gashed and much of its splendid symmetry was lost. There were the black sockets of corridors which led nowhere, each of them stopped by one of the safety locks. Pipes poked out from the ship like carpet needles stuck in a cork. These had been tom loose when the ring fell. From one of them there was a dribble of brown water. The plates of color which had made the hydroponics area one of the most cheerful places on the ship now looked tawdry and cheap. The living quarters of the gardeners who had managed the ring were laid bare. Pictures were still tacked to cupboards. A vacuum toilet hung away from the wall. An oven and a bed had jammed together incongruously in a doorway where they were now held securely, buckled by the force of gravity. The intimacy of human dwellings was laid bare. I was reminded of the bombed houses that I had seen in picture books.

That night as I lay in my room, the
Nightingale
began to describe ways in which the ship might be further lightened. It seemed to think that the severing of the ring had been a great success. I remember that I felt a boyish enthusiasm spring up within me. In retrospect, this was just another aspect of the unreality that was already clouding my thinking.