by Phillip Mann
They arrived back close to their parent world and reported what had happened.
They were denied landing rights.
A technical crew from the homeworld landed on the outside of their craft and gelded it of its power to flit through space. The ship became a hospital prison. Those humans aboard, the mutinous crew that had escaped from Parade, remained on the ship until they died at the end of their natural span. The last human, a woman called Zena, outlived her companions by over thirty years and died at the age of ninety-seven. She had lived on the ship since her early twenties. When Zena died her corpse was ejected into space and burned high above her native world.
The ship drifted in its safe orbit for some years and then a detoxification crew arrived. They destroyed any fabric that might harbor germs and then sprayed the entire interior of the ship with a germicidal spray. Finally, some months later, convicts were ferried out and the ship became a prison and Lily became a prison warder. Her bulky protective armament was removed. She was reprogrammed and most of her dexetels were replaced. She was given rubber wheels and voice circuits. For the next forty years Lily took care of the prisoners and carried out operations ranging from the removal of wisdom teeth to the binding of broken limbs. As she has informed me, the reason why the prisoners were sent out to the ship was simply to discover whether the fearful disease had been eradicated.
It had. The convicts died from many causes but not from the intestinal plague.
Then the prison was closed. The ship was cut up and Lily was sold for scrap.
Anything could have happened to her for she was already something of an antique. Luckily for us, Lily was bought by a charitable organization and prepared for duty on one of the pioneer planets. Her skill as a field surgeon was recognized. Before dispatch she was again refitted and given elementary bio-crystalline ability. Her new specialties became gynecology and pediatric care. The cradle/womb was fitted. Her voice was upgraded so that she could tell stories.
On her new world Lily was put in charge of a children’s hospital. She had only held this job for a few months when the War of Ignorance entered its truly cruel phase.
Her world was not capped by roving pirates as my world was, but she experienced the destruction of civil war.
Her hospital was attacked with incendiary bombs. Can you believe that? Bombs which can cause a blaze so powerful that it can bum concrete were tossed into a hospital for sick children.
The ground burned. The soil burned. Trees in the hospital gardens exploded into fire. The outer walls charred and the paint bubbled and blackened.
Lily gathered as many children as she could inside her cradle/womb. She had them drape wet blankets over themselves and then, with her wheels melting, and the cradle/womb withdrawn as deeply as possible, she tore through the walls and out through the ash and the burning grass and did not stop until the iron rims of her wheels were slipping on pebbles by the sea shore.
Coughing and chafed and half-roasted, the children climbed out of her and the older ones walked into the sea carrying the babies in their arms and they hunkered down in the cool water and looked back at the red and flickering shore where the hospital burned.
Lily’s wheels churned the pebbles until her drive motor burned out. She was following the blind and simple imperatives of her bio-crystalline intelligence. She was trying to return to the blaze to save the mothers and whatever else there was to save. Lily had not been taught to face reality. It had not been given to her to understand that nothing can survive in a fire maelstrom. Had her rubber wheels not melted, and had her engine not burned out, she would have trundled straight back into the fire and would have exploded like the cylinders of oxygen which tore through the roof like rockets. As it was, disabled, she did more good.
The fire raged all night. The tide which was ebbing when the children entered the water began to flow. When dawn came the tide was advancing quickly and the tired and cold children climbed back inside Lily as the water began to lap around her wheels and fill the depressions in the shingle. Lily closed as much as she could and the. sea lifted her and moved her a few meters up the shore. Salt water entered the place where the children huddled together.
Lily told stories. She made soup which the children drank though plastic straws, sucking as they might have once at their mothers’ breasts.
In the bleak light of day, the hospital was a stinking ruin. When the sea retreated, carrying on its surface a scum of charred wood, dust, fantastic blackened shapes of things that might once have been plastic cups and plates, burned papers and singed clothing, the elder children climbed down onto the damp shingle and went exploring.
Miraculously they found food. There was a hospital garden behind a protective stone wall. There they found burned lemons in the grass beside the stumps of the lemon trees. They found pumpkins that were almost perfectly cooked and potatoes too. These had survived almost undamaged and were quarried from the clamps.
On such meager rations the children survived for three days. At night they slept inside Lily and during the day they scavenged. Then help arrived.
A team of relief workers from off-planet landed. They had watched the brief and inconclusive civil war from the safety of their communications torus. Now they wanted to help.
Wheels were found for Lily and her drive motor was repaired. She and the children she had saved moved to a building that was still more or less intact on the outskirts of the nearest town. Not much of the town remained. The incendiary bombs had done their work well.
The building had once been a luxury villa and quickly became known as Lily’s Home. A red and green flag was made from sheets and a dressing-gown and run up the flagpole outside the building. It was a signal of hope.
Survivors began to arrive, straggling in from the outlying forms and villages. Scholars who had escaped out to sea in a submarine also came ashore and sought refuge.
Lily was stretched to the limit of her bio-crystalline endurance and while I know it is wrong to ascribe human emotions to a machine, yet I will make bold to say that she was happy. Bio-crystalline intelligence allows us an awareness of when we are being effective in the use of our particular talent. When we are effective we have meaning. That is our happiness.
It was during this period that some child or playful adult painted the face in blue on Lily’s side. As I mentioned in the introduction, that face is still there and is still capable of bringing comfort.
The distress of this world was broadcast widely and resulted in a visit from some senior confreres and consoeurs of the Gentle Order of St. Francis Dionysos. They took over the reorganization of the world and Lily the autonurse was withdrawn from service.
She was brought to Juniper and to the Pacifico Monastery. Here she was put in charge of the ancient Talline garden and here she has remained up to the present.
The Talline garden is a place of rest and security. It is a natural place of healing. It is a retreat for those who are oppressed by worry and doubt or who need to rebuild themselves. Lily is the guiding angel of the garden. Since she has been here she has acquired a knowledge of Talline herbal medicine and has worked with Talline doctors. She has cured many and her success with Jon Wilberfoss is only the most recent of her many triumphs.
If Lily had literary aspirations (and the necessary circuits) she could write a fine book. When I suggested this idea to her, she at first did not understand and then she told me with some asperity that she was too busy for such things and had for too much to do.
That is Lily.
Part 3
18 The Return of Jon Wilberfoss
We are approaching the climax of this biography.
After the damaged shell of the Nightingale was found drifting with all its emergency systems screaming MAYDAY, Jon Wilberfoss was treated with fear and contempt.
The first rescue party to board the ship discovered that it had been damaged in complicated and horrific ways. Moreover, it had been cleared of all life-forms. This clearing had been done careful
ly and methodically. They explored the empty ship with amazement.
Wilberfoss was removed from the ship in what at first seemed to be a state of profound aphasia. He neither recognized nor responded to the outside world. But then he began chattering. When asked about what had happened to all the life-forms aboard the Nightingale, he laughed. One report stated that he was “bright and cheerful and talking nonsense.” Then he became quiet again and would not speak and shortly after that made his first attempt at suicide. He was judged insane and stun drugs were administered for his own good. Lily discusses his state in the next section.
After long debate among the Magistri and Magistrae of the Gentle Order it was finally decided that Wilberfoss should be dispatched back to the Pacifico Monastery on Juniper. I think this was a compromise solution. No one could think what to do with him. No one wanted him. In many quarters he was seen as a great criminal. To others he was a victim. As you will see, Magister Tancredi took his return to Pacifico as an insult. He believed that Wilberfoss should have been sent to a prison world. But he was overruled.
Lily and I were instructed to attempt to restore Wilberfoss if we could and to find out the truth of what had happened aboard the Nightingale and how it came to be that the finest spaceship ever created had foundered.
We now begin that final truth. I will try to recreate the opening circumstances for I know them well and there are some sad ironies to be observed.
We begin with a story. Please remember both Sandy and Medoc.
Two Talline sailors were aboard the small coble boat which pitched and jarred in the gathering southerly. All day they had stood the buffet, while a small rain pelted them and the heavy ropes which held their nets strained and sweated and the sea banged under their small craft. Now the wind was freshening as the day darkened to its end.
The two men, Aptagar and Petrin by name, father and son, huge in their black and green oilskins, scrambled about on the narrow wet decks preparing to bring the nets in.
Though there were no radio broadcasts to warn them, both men could read the sea and both could feel the weather changing about them. A storm was coming. With legs and arms braced on the heaving decks, they worked side by side with the calm efficiency of long practice. They did not speak. Aptagar worked the hand winch, rocking back and forth as he used his weight to help turn the large wheel which dragged the net up and over the stem of the ship. Petrin guided and opened the net, separating the corks from the mesh and shaking free the fish which slithered, flapping, down into the dark hold.
Gradually the weather closed in and the sky darkened.
At the horizon the sea and the sky merged into one plane of gray. The islands became shapes of darker gray above the hissing sea. Lights could just be seen twinkling above the shore line. The homesteads and small communities which clung to the islands were getting ready for the night. Aptagar glanced up and squinted at one of the distant lights. He was thinking of his new wife, Medoc, and imagined her glancing out of the windows as she stirred the evening meal at the fire. He knew that she would have placed a special prayer lamp in the high window of their house to offer cheer and hope. He also thought of his two daughters who would at that moment be carrying wood into the house and stacking it by the fire. Without losing pace or rhythm in his work he smiled and dreamed.
At long last the end of the float-line came aboard and a few moments later the tail of the net with its bunch of weights. They tied the weights to the low guard-rail which ran down the sides of the small boat and lashed the net to the deck. When it was secure the two men scampered and stumbled over the coils of mesh and manhandled the heavy hatch-cover into place. By now the wind was beginning to lift the tops of the waves and the sea had roughened. Great slabs of water clashed together and threatened to swamp the small boat when it strained and turned at its anchor. The sooner they were running before the wind and toward shelter the better.
With only the jib raised, Aptagar brought the coble boat around into the wind and the anchor rope slackened. The angle of the rope changed and Petrin spun the winch and the pawl clattered as the slack was taken in. There was a moment when the sea lifted the coble boat and the rope squealed and sweated and the sailor at the winch turned his back and ducked down behind the winch in case the rope broke and came scything across the deck ... but then the anchor dragged free from the sea bed and the small ship bounded.
They began to work the wind, tacking for home. For the first time since they had begun to bring the net in, the two men relaxed. They sheltered in the tiller hole, snug and protected from the slap of the wind and the flung spray, and Aptagar felt under his oilskins for his short pipe and tobacco. Together they looked out from their small ship and tried to work out how many tacks for home.
And as they looked it seemed that the air grew lighter. At the same time, the wind held its breath.
The caps of the waves which slid by began to turn a bright lime green and the spume became gradually yellow. It was as though the sun had parted the clouds above them and was now streaming down. Or, stranger still, as though a brilliant light was shining up from deep under the sea. Everything became unreal.
The short mast of the coble boat began to gleam and ripples of light ran up and down it like snakes. The two men looked at one another and their faces shone and the hair in their beards began to straighten and stand out stiff. One began to shout as a hot rash of pins and needles ran from his scalp to his face and along his arm.
He was pointing. He was pointing at the sky.
Above the small boat the sky was churning to a slow whirlpool with a cold silver light forming at its vortex. The clouds flickered: they were like liquid marble streaming in the sky.
Then there came a roaring like the clashing of boulders and a shape began to emerge from the glowing clouds.
It came down like the hoof of a horse breaking the silver surface of a stream.
To the startled eyes of the men in the boat, it seemed as though the shape of a giant creature lowered and hung above the lemon and silver sea. At first it looked like a giant beetle with its legs spread. Then they saw the six open cups which protected the anti-gravity units and the dud and pitted dome which held the transformation generators and they knew it for what it was.
Lightning flickered about the base of the old starship and glanced down. It danced across the surface of the sea. Briefly the small coble boat and the giant ship were joined in a dazzling arc. Then it was ended leaving only an acrid smell in the air.
The starship hung still while the clouds closed above it.
Gradually the lights and sharp colors faded from the sea and the thunder roded away and the bitter wind came whispering back.
The coble boat pitched and made headway. Both sailors applied themselves. Above them the giant ship turned slowly, orientating itself with the planet’s magnetic field, and then it began to slide through the sky.
“There’s a rare treat for the kids,” said Petrin. “Starship by any reckoning. Just come in from the- dark eh?” He waited while a wave struck the side of the coble boat and spilled away. “Been a while since one of them’s been through down here. Wonder why they didn’t use the shuttle. Must be something secret.”
“Aye, well they might have warned us,” said Aptagar. He gripped the tiller under one arm and held up the arm that had tingled and was now starting to throb. “Stung me with its anti-grav. What about you?”
“Just a nip on my hand. You stopped most of it.” Petrin grinned revealing a gap-toothed smile. “Must’ve been in a hurry, eh? .. . Coming through this far south. Starships usually come in east of Kithaeron or south of Fum, specially if they’re making for Pacifico.”
“Bugger the hurry,” said the other. “They still could have warned us.” He spat with the wind and the wind carried his spittle onto the surface of the sea and away.
Far from them now and gathering speed the giant starship disappeared into the murk under the dark gray clouds.
Medoc looked out from her window and
watched the spaceship depart. She had seen it hover over the small boat where her new husband was toiling. The sight of the ship had stirred up memories in her which made her smile briefly. Being ignorant of developments concerning the Nightingale, she wondered how Jon Wilberfoss was faring. She hoped he was doing well and that he had a sense of achievement. Certainly her life was now full and satisfying albeit routine and she had no real regrets. Her course had been inevitable, but yet, from time to time, she found herself wondering and worrying about Jon Wilberfoss.
Initially Medoc had gone off with the dashing merchant. He had given her a good time and that was just what she needed to break the links with Jon Wilberfoss. She had enjoyed the parties and the fine clothes and the challenge of new environments. But finally the high life with her merchant had come to seem like a game. She was a careful and serious-minded woman and she found herself thinking more and more of the lonely and serious Aptagar who truly needed her. One day she packed her bags and went to join him. They married a week later.
And now here she was, mistress of a garden by the sea, with step-daughters who were already confiding in her and with a fine solid house that looked out over the bay where Aptagar made his living. She could see him now, just as he’d promised, out at sea with his son, battling the gathering storm, and she knew he was thinking about her. She was content.
Any further speculation was cut short when one of her new daughters came running in with a splinter in her thumb from the firewood. Medoc put the past away and concentrated on the future.
It so happened that the starship was chasing the sun. It overtook the evening and a few hours later the sky above it had the pale blue of a fine afternoon.