by Phillip Mann
He remembered that same night.
21 Wilberfoss in the Bio-crystalline Cave
The grip of winter tightened on the garden. The birds which needed the warmth of summer were long gone. The hardier ones who would stay with us during the cold months could be found singing and scrapping close to the berry trees.
In the mornings there was mist which lingered behind the garden walls. At midday the shadows were long and spindly and the sunlight revealed spider webs stretched between trees. Evenings came quickly with a shower of rain and after that a smell of leaf mold. The nights were cold and a fire was lit in Wilberfoss’s rooms.
Wilberfoss seemed to thrive on the winter.
One morning he was up early and I came upon him standing outside his rooms with a blanket over his shoulders and breathing white vapor into the air. He had also pressed his hand against the patterns of frost on his window pane and a print of his palm was beginning to dribble. I felt hope at this. He was showing an interest in the world outside himself.
But under the blanket he was naked. For a while nakedness and washing became an obsession with him. He seemed to believe that clothes were a filthy skin and sometimes he would wash himself until he was raw. I think he wore the blanket rather like a hair-shirt. The mortification of the flesh is an old theme especially with those who feel guilt. I have many references to it. I was amused in my dry way to observe that Lily was more concerned by his fervent ablutions than I was. She saw the sores, I saw the mind straining for cleanliness and for the one and only time I told her to be calm. By showing himself naked to the world he was trying to create a naked psyche.
Later that day it began to snow. The snow came in large, soft chunks where several flakes had clung together. Wilberfoss amazed me by saying that he could smell the snow coming. That was in the morning when the sky was still clear.
About midday the wind started from the south and quickly the sky darkened. I floated up into the trees above Wilberfoss’s cell and looked out over the walls of the garden. The sea was leaden below the dark, gathering clouds. In the monastery, bright lights were already twinkling in windows though it was scarcely into the afternoon. The first flakes of snow drifted down like ash. Then the fell became steady. The headland and the shuttle port disappeared.
I looked out across the garden and could see the white flakes vanish on the surface of the river where it wound slowly through the limestone caves. The snow settled on the rocks by the river and on the slopes of the hills and on the Pectanile, revealing the curves of that monument like the sleek gray shape of a dolphin. The snow tumbled through the bare trees and built on branches and clung to the dry bark. The temperature dropped steadily and as the snow covered the land the quality of sound changed. Every sound was softened, even the call of the Crowhawk which has a voice that has been likened to the crying of the damned in Dante’s Inferno.
When I looked down I saw Wilberfoss. Silly man was pulling off his clothes and throwing them down in the slush in front of his small home. Naked he spread his arms and turned in a circle stamping his feet so that every part of him was touched by the snow.
Lily arrived with a clatter and a roar. She scolded Wilberfoss and sent him inside waving her dexetels. He retreated before her like a reluctant child. I swooped down and gathered up his sodden, stiffening clothes and took them inside.
Wilberfoss was already in bed. He lay on his back and the covers were pressed tightly under his chin in a no-nonsense manner. Lily was over him, a thermometer held in one of her dexetels. There was a smell of broth cooking.
As I entered Wilberfoss sneezed heartily and I can record that this first day of snow gave Wilberfoss a mighty cold which kept him in bed for many days. For me this was a bonus. While Wilberfoss wheezed and snuffed and Lily fussed, I was able to talk to him. The cold took over his body and left his mind free.
The following story, fit in its way to be a winter’s tale told by a roaring fire while the cold dark wraps around the house like a scarf, was recounted to me by Wilberfoss as he lay on his back, immobilized by Lily and the sheets.
I murmured the hypnotic trigger and his eyes closed and his face became animated.
“Tell me about the Nightingale,” I said. “How did you live on the crippled ship? Did you visit the bio-crystalline core? Tell me.”
Wilberfoss’s Narrative
I slept well. Despite my worries I slept well. I think that when one sees the shape of the disaster that has befallen one, then relaxation can come. It is doubt that causes the sleepless, red-eyed night.
When I awoke I found that a plan had formed in my mind. The key to so many of our problems was in the malfunction of the bio-crystalline brain of the Nightingale. I knew how that brain had grown in part from my own consciousness and I decided to visit the seed chamber to see if I could put matters to rights or perhaps change things for the better.
The main seed chamber of the Nightingale was a circular room some considerable distance beneath my command chambers. It was an area which was difficult of access since no one had anticipated that anyone would ever need to visit the chamber while the Nightingale was in transit. But access was possible, of course.
I ate breakfast, pampering myself somewhat with fresh bread, boiled eggs and Talline broth such as Medoc once made for me. The ingredients were not in short supply in my quarters though I know that my bread had never known yeast, nor had my eggs ever known a chicken and my Talline broth came from a freeze-dried packet. For reasons best known to themselves, the planners of the Nightingale had made sure that the Captain had a decade’s supply of excellent food. I suspect that they considered that food equals morale. I also suspect that in giving me ten years’ supply they had calculated on providing me with a year of variety before repetition set in. I was grateful for this consideration. The broth in particular was excellent and I could taste the herbs and remembered the chant that Medoc sang: ‘ Ropeweed for courage, Starseye for sight, Meat for the hunter, Bring strength in the night.”
Rested and fed, I donned my survival suit. Then, with the anti-grav unit strapped to my back, I made my way through my apartment, my toes merely brushing the floor, as I pushed myself along. I went past the room where Sandy/Quelle had died. I was moving in the opposite direction to the ramp which led down to the staff canteen. This particular corridor ended in a small alcove which contained an entry to a transit shaft. There was a standard control panel and I tapped out the access code adding my own personal code and palm print. The answer flashed back that the transit system was not working. This was as I expected. I operated the override switch and a section of the floor slowly slid open. There was a rush of air and an alarm bell rang briefly until all pressures had balanced. I looked down into a black well. It seemed to suck at me. I knew that if I had fallen down that shaft without the anti-grav unit I would have been compacted to an eighth of my size at the bottom.
I switched on my suit lights and increased the anti-grav power so that I was floating and then I pushed myself out over the black hole. A slight adjustment of the power and I began to sink. I passed the rim. My lights lit up the depressed emergency handholds which were set into the wall of the transit chute and which rose past my eyes. There was just sufficient room for me to descend without bumping the walls. The presence of the gravity pack meant that I could not bend and look downward. I used my hands to direct me and pushed myself downward, feet first.
I did not know how far I needed to descend. I measured each rung as a foot and when my counting reached ninety-eight, my feet suddenly touched something. My reaction of surprise was such that I sent myself back up the chute by several feet. The next time I landed I was ready.
I was on the roof of one of the transit seats. It must have been parked here at the moment when the power failed. I turned around slowly, wondering if I would find myself trapped in the chute, but discovered that I was just under the roof of an oblong chamber which was filled with pipes and festoons of cable and conduit trunking. It was easy for me to step o
ff the roof of the transit seat and sink slowly down to the ground.
The lights of my suit showed the room starkly. The walls and pipes were stenciled with technical graffiti which defined their function. Beside these were scrawled autographs and dates. Many different construction teams had worked here. The room was little more than a vast junction box where many parts of the Nightingale met.
One pipe was particularly important to me. It was about two feet in diameter and stretched the length of the chamber without any bends or curves. It was the color of old, rubbed ivory—this was the ceramic jacket you understand—and within I knew were the organic threads of the bio-crystalline brain. It had grown within this pipe, advancing as the Nightingale grew and adding more and more strands as the complexity of the ship increased.
I began to lope slowly beside this pipe, ducking occasionally to avoid cross pieces, until finally I came to the entrance to an air-lock. It had a notice printed in red on its surface.
“WARNING. Bio-crystalline Seed Chamber. Only authorized personnel are permitted to enter this air-lock. Unauthorized persons seeking to gain entry are advised that their action will place them in extreme danger.”
This was a standard announcement and the entire biocrystalline system was protected behind similar air-locks. What the notice meant was that any unauthorized attempt to enter would result in alarms and the sudden closing of doors and in some cases a beam of lethal radiation.
I of course should have been safe. My credentials were the best. I was part father of the bio-crystalline consciousness and could be admitted without fuss or question. Even so, given the strange state of the Nightingale, I doubted.
I removed my glove and placed the palm of my right hand firmly on the black identification plate. I felt a warmth under my hand and a prickling. Three magnetic locks suddenly closed over my wrist and held me firm. If I were an impostor these locks would never release until I was either dead or captured. They held me for over a minute and then withdrew. A message flashed up on the black tile where I had pressed my hand. “Welcome, Captain Wilberfoss. Beyond this door the vacuum is absolute. Be sure you are wearing your survival suit. The vacuum lock will not function if it detects exhalation or body heat. Now you may proceed.”
I palmed the lock again and the door slid open. I stepped inside and the door nudged me as the magnetic locks closed. At about head height facing me there was a glowing green pressure panel marked Vacuum Demand and I touched this. Immediately, I was aware of a vibration as the pumps got to work. I felt my survival suit change shape about me as it compensated for the lack of external pressure. The green panel paled to gray and finally brightened to red as the atmosphere vanished. It changed its wording and announced: “Vacuum established. There will be a delay of 60 seconds.”
I knew what it was doing. The delay was to establish that my survival suit was not leaking. The procedure was for the protection of the bio-crystalline brain.
I and my survival suit passed the test. The panel blinked once and then a message in yellow flashed up. “You may proceed into the Bio-crystalline Seed Chamber. The atmosphere lock will remain open.”
In front of me there was a jerking movement and part of the wall began to slide open. I stood and watched. No bright light flooded in though I knew this room should have been filled with the silver effulgence of the working bio-crystalline seeds. I cannot say that darkness flooded in though that was my impression. I did not move. I was not anxious to advance until I could see my way clear.
And when the doors were finally open I found myself peering into a chamber filled with shadows and blackened shapes of sculptured ash. My way was blocked by things like trees coated with soot, which hung broken and deformed from the roof. I stepped forward and at the same time brought my suit lights to their maximum brilliance and drove the shadows back.
The shadows moved as I advanced and that was eerie, but stranger still was the absolute stillness of the blackened bio-crystalline shapes. Death is so still. I have had my fill of that stillness. I raised my arm which glittered with energy and touched the dark branches which barred my way. They broke at my touch and crumbled and fell and smashed like black coral, silently. Black dust rippled across the floor in a single shock wave and then everything became still again. Such a fell deserved a roaring.
All the troubles of the Nightingale were clear before me. I had never been in this room before but I knew that it should have been throbbing with light and energy.
I stepped out of the vacuum lock and ducked under the dark branches. I was aware of the crushing and crumbling of bio-crystalline fiber under my feet. The entire floor was littered with broken branches and I stepped over them. Those I touched crumbled.
The room I entered was not large. I advanced to the center and looked around. Surveying the damage, I wondered how the Nightingale still managed to function. Perhaps the symbol transformation generators were supplying the necessary sentience. But then I saw, close to the vacuum lock, a single gleam of light in the seed trough and the pale shape of living bio-crystalline fibers climbing up to the roof and branching. This was not bio-crystallism in its full and healthy fluorescence, but it was life. I moved over to the seed trough as quickly as I could, ducking under the dark elephantine growths and pushing the fallen parts aside. I found that three crystals were still vital. One was hectic but the other two glowed with a steady white fire. I switched my suit lights off and was able to follow the branching paleness of the living fibers. They fed into all the main trunk lines. These fibers, no doubt assisted by the STGs, were all that was keeping the Nightingale vital.
I now knew what I had to do and felt an uncanny optimism. My plan was bold but offered hope. I intended to replace as many of the dead crystals as I could with new ones and try to make them grow. I would feed them with my own thought.
The Nightingale carried spare living seed-crystals, held in a state of suspended consciousness, in the seed bank close to my quarters.
I spent the next couple of hours trekking back and forth carrying the seed containers down to the seed chamber. I then began cleaning the trough. Some of the dead crystals were glassy and the fibers growing from them were brittle. They were enameled, and their blackness contrived to reflect my suit lights with a deep amber glow. These seeds had died quickly, shriveling within the lattices of their crystal supports. Others had died more slowly and these resembled large candles that had been exposed to sunlight under glass and which had melted into monstrous striated shapes. In their dying they had spattered the floor like teardrops of pitch. I cleared them all, reasoning that the presence of any dead bio-crystalline fiber might exert a negative influence on the new seeds. The old linkages in the troughs were useless and so I prepared new beds of vermiculite and then placed the crystals so that they touched the existing living seeds.
I am not a skilled bio-crystalline engineer but I knew enough to have confidence that my procedure was sound. When a new sensory/logic chain is being developed, seeds are often linked in this way. My hope was that the new seeds would be vitalized by the old seeds and that the old seeds would be strengthened and rejuvenated by proximity to the new. Above all I wanted the tenuous command structure to be strengthened for without that nothing was possible. I felt confidence since the seeds which were still vital had obviously survived the worst ordeal and were hence of great strength.
I cleared the seed chamber as well as I could. I brought vacuo-sacks down from above and shoveled the heavy black dust and shattered fragments of bio-crystalline circuitry into them. Then I lugged the sacks up to my apartment and handed them over to the disposal unit. I saw them fired from the ship. I saw them describe stunted arcs before plunging straight down to the surface. When they hit the stony ground they exploded and the black dust and fragments quickly lifted and then settled leaving pools of ash.
Over the next few days I visited the crystals morning and night. To help their development I kept my communication room live and I spent a part of each day lying in my couch pouri
ng my mind into the bio-crystalline darkness. Occasionally I received an echo of my thought back and that gave me hope. I was like a nurse with a comatose patient: even a repeated whisper tells of consciousness.
On the third day when I visited the chamber I could just detect a glow spreading from the central seeds to the outer ones. It was like a fire catching from embers. Looking closely I could see that the seeds had begun to bond sending out small filaments of bio-crystalline fiber. They resembled patterns of frost.
By the fifth day the glow was clearly perceptible and from the door of die vacuo-lock it was as though a candle were burning in the still chamber.
That candle, if I may so call it, brought me more joy than a thousand prayer lights of St. Francis Dionysos. At the same time, I was realistic. There was no way I could restore the Nightingale to full operation. Too much was lost. Too much was damaged. Too much might still fell into decay. But at least we were no longer sliding helplessly into ruin and death. We were making a stand and the Nightingale was responding.
I did not tell my colleagues what was happening as I did not want to build their optimism. They had enough to do as it was, hunting through the ship, making what repairs they could and isolating those areas which could not be saved. The crematorium in the Nightingale was fractured and useless and so we held funerals for the dead and scored out graves in the rock and sand of the planet and buried the bodies.
There came the day, it would have been some three weeks after we landed, that I was lying in my couch reaching out to the consciousness of the Nightingale, that I heard a sleepy, somewhat feline voice, murmur, “Hello, Jon Wilberfoss. I have been listening to you for days, gathering you in, but only today have I found the strength to reply. We are in a sorry way. But hope is not dead. Tell me how I can help.”
What a question. The naivete of bio-crystalline consciousness sometimes appalls me. I suppose because biocrystalline brains have the power of speech and their expression sounds thoughtful, we assume they have the wisdom of the human. But they do not.