by Phillip Mann
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.
13 Wilberfoss and Sandy. The First Trial
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 w
e 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.
Finally the Quelle tired and Sandy took more complete control. The boy was bewildered beyond reckoning. “Help me,” he said. “Help both of us. My training never told me about all this—the sickness, the visions. I’m starting to hate myself. I want to poke my eyes out. I want my flock back. I want to go home.”
Wilberfoss took his hands and held them between his own giant palms. He could think of nothing to say for the moment. He saw the boy shiver and then droop and place his blue-tinged face on the table. Both creatures which inhabited the same body were asleep. Wilberfoss fetched a cushion from the chair by the fire and placed it under the boy’s head. Then he took a woven cover from one of the chests by the wall and draped it over his shoulders. The boy murmured in his sleep like a cat.
Wilberfoss was uncertain what to do for the best. He sat and looked at the sleeping boy and faced the first real trial of his captaincy. He reviewed his options.
One possibility was to turn back to Shamrock on the grounds that this contact was not working and needed a substitute. He rejected this option. He told himself that the disruption to the schedule would be too great and besides, it was early days yet and the wise confreres who knew more than he did about contact with Distant Metabolism Entities had presumably taken care over the selection. Perhaps time would effect a shakedown. To his credit, Wilberfoss was not consciously aware that turning back might seem like a lack of decisiveness, though that may have been an unconscious motive.
A second possibility was to invite the Quelle to change hosts. To do this he would need the help and advice of Mohawk and the bio-crystalline brains that controlled the ship. He immediately summoned Mohawk to join him and opened lines of communication to the bio-crystalline consciousness at the heart of the ship. There was, of course, no certainty that a change of hosts would be successful. It might be a case of out of the pot and into the fire.
A third possibility was that he should take the Quelle inside himself. Wilberfoss did not entertain this possibility for long as it had many unknowns, though speaking with the wisdom of hindsight, I know that it was his best option. Wilberfoss had a rare way with creatures. I have seen his power, and something of the great Dionysos flowed in him. Quelle would not have mastered him. I would maintain that if Wilberfoss had received the alien Quelle inside himself then he would have found the strength to cope with the implantation. We shall never know. But perhaps Wilberfoss, in his deeps, found the idea of alien infestation intolerable. It is even possible that he felt a lack of sympathy for the boy simply because he had allowed himself to be possessed.
A fourth possibility, and one which greatly appealed to Wilberfoss, was that he should use the power he could exercise over creatures to subdue either Sandy, making of the boy a passive host, or the Quelle, making of the parasite a gentle rider. We may observe that there is something of vanity in this choice.
There were other possibilities which Wilberfoss did not consider. He could, for instance, have reached out with one of his giant hands and killed them both while they slept at his table. Had he done so the Nightingale and all who were in her would have been saved. Naturally, the rules of the Gentle Order by which he lived forbade this. However, I, Wulf, who do not have to worry much about a human conscience, have to consider this option. Perhaps Wilberfoss allowed himself to be too controlled by the rules. The true leader is the one who can improvise. Ethics are harder than logic.
Nor did he think of trying to move the Quelle to a semi-living host such as a bio-cyrstalline entity. Talking with Wilberfoss during his convalescence in Lily’s Garden I made the point to him that if I had been aboard and had been aware of the problem, I would have offered myself as host. I have just enough bio- to be acceptable (I believe) and my -crystalline parts are very pure. I could have coped with the Quelle. I could have miaowed to keep it peaceful. I could have straightened it with reason. But I was not there and so I wonder why those great bio-crystalline brains which ran the ship with such sophistication never thought to offer a part of themselves. Clearly they knew nothing of literature or history, for the Renegade swine would have given them a clue how to proceed and they were cleverer than swine. Surely they could have modified a part of themselves to create a host which resembled the Hydron of the Quelle’s homeworld? They could have isolated the madness of the Quelle within a bio-crystalline pen. They could have freed Sandy of his pain. But apparently this possibility never was considered. There may be reasons for this. I don’t know.
I have used the words “madness of the Quelle.” This is Wulfs conclusion though it can not now be proved. I believe the Quelle was mad. No host would have suited it, not even St. Francis Dionysos himself. The pure boy Sandy it likened to a sewer! But how do we understand the madness of an alien brain? Shall we say that sanity consists in that which is on the side of Life? A life-form that is opposed to Life is opposed to itself and that is surely insane. This is a distinction easy to grasp and hard to apply. But it is a guide. When logic feds, ethics may still be up and running.
Mohawk arrived, drowsy and worried, and she and Wilberfoss entered the small vestibule off the diningroom where they could gain direct access to the powerful and unsleeping bio-crystalline constructs which ran the ship. They discussed the problem and were amazed to discover that the bio-crystalline minds already had some inkling of the trouble. Maintaining the structures in the DME section of the Nightingale, they had become aware that Sandy was not sleeping well. They had heard him crying and miaowing. “We can even, sometimes, pick up thought patterns broadcast by humans for we scan all levels of emanation. We have been aware of sadness and suffering.”
“Why did you not tell me?” asked Wilberfoss. “Because sadness and suffering are common among the life-forms aboard this ship. It is like the background noise you hear when a dominant sound has gone away.”
“Are Sandy and the Quelle louder than the rest?” “Somewhat louder.”
“Why is that do you think?”
“Because their thoughts are fueled by strong emotion. Emotion is the engine. Thought is merely the emanation.”
Both Mohawk and Wilberfoss absorbed this. “Well, what do you think we should do?” asked Mohawk after a long pause.
“That must be up to you,” said the bio-crystalline minds of the Nightingale. “You know far more about such things than we do. We can feel sympathy, but we cannot make decisions the way you can. We can only carry out your decisions once made.”
Mohawk and Wilberfoss looked at one another. “Over to you, Captain,” said Mohawk.
Wilberfoss felt the thrill of decision-making. “We have a crisis in the making. I cannot judge how serious it is but I don’t feel like taking chances. I am going to move Sandy and the Quelle up here where I can keep a close eye on them. Any problem with that?” he asked the air and the ceding.
“No problem at all,” came back the reply. “They have no special requirement beyond food and air.”
Mohawk nodded. “I think that would be a good idea.” “Furthermore,” said Wilberfoss, “I want to look at changing our schedule. After this visit to the homeworld of the Trimaton we are scheduled to travel out to the rim to the Dysers homeworld. We are expected and t
here is a rare conjunction of planets taking place—a once-in-ten-thousand-years event in which they have invested much magic and ceremony. We cannot miss that, but thereafter the schedule is variable. We had planned to go to Croppa’s World and take on supplies, but I suggest that we move directly to the homeworld of the Quelle. We can give them advance warning. I know there is a team from the Gentle Order already on planet and they will do everything they can to have a true host, a Hydron, standing by. Can this be done easily?”
“We can reschedule. So long as there are no species that are dying and have a limited timespan.” There was a moment’s pause. “We can see no problem,” replied the bright voice of the Nightingale. “We can begin to contact the Quelle homeworld immediately.”
“That plan has an added advantage,” said Mohawk, the practical. “We can inform both Sandy and the Quelle of the change and the knowledge that their suffering is close to an end will probably help greatly. They are not scheduled for planet fell for some two ship years I believe.”
“Two years and seven months.”
“Well then. I am sure they can hold on for a couple of ship’s weeks. Especially if you take a hand.” Mohawk nodded at Wilberfoss.
Wilberfoss smiled.
The decision pleased them all. The meeting ended.
Mohawk helped set up a special room for Sandy/ Quelle and then she bade Wilberfoss good night. “Just a word of warning,” she offered as she turned to leave. “Don’t fell asleep with the Quelle close by. I watched it take over Sandy and it is quite irresistible. I know so little about them. Keep the door secured.”
Wilberfoss laughed. “I’ll be careful,” he said. “Perhaps now that your Trimaton is gone you might be able to study up on the Quelle?”
“I will,” she said. “I will.”
“We also will be watching and on guard,” came the voice of the Nightingale.
Thus all should have been well, for the plan was a good one. Miscalculated only was the severity of the breakdown between Sandy and the Quelle and the danger that that breakdown posed. Nor was there any talk of madness.