by Phillip Mann
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 falling 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 w
as 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.
WULF: Explain unreality.
WILBERFOSS: Oh, I was aware of this. Just as the force of gravity can bend space, so the gravity of the events I had experienced bent my understanding. Warped it. Can you imagine what it is like to be the only thing alive in a ship filled with dead creatures? I was the only thing alive! Everything was dead except me! Everything! I can be excused for asking the question, “Why me?” I can be excused for finding answers to that absurd question.
I was aware that I was behaving in strange ways. It was as though I could watch myself, but I was powerless to stop myself behaving strangely. One thing I took to doing was spending time down in the room where the bio-crystalline seeds were growing. I drew a strange strength from being close to the origin of that mighty alien brain. I used to sit with my helmet as close as possible to the blazing strands and filaments. I remember on my homeworld when I was a boy, I used to sit at the observation port of our solar energy station and look at the sunlight, focused to a beam that could vaporize steel. It was a similar thing. . . the desire to be close to naked power.
But the strangest part of my unreality was that I began to believe that I was not alone on the ship but that there was another figure present. This was not a living person, you understand, nor an alien, but something other. I never saw it directly but I saw its shadow several times and I heard its footsteps. It was a man, not unlike me, but with a distorted head. Once I woke up in the blackness of the ship with the knowledge that the figure had been leaning over me. I reached up but encountered nothing.
WULF: Were you afraid?
WILBERFOSS: There is a strange thing. I was not afraid. I was disturbed. I was worried but... I had the feeling, the idea, whatever it was, that the visitor who roamed the ship was also me. That doesn’t make sense, does it? But that is what I felt. I wanted to meet this other being. I wandered through the dark ship with my lights dowsed hoping to surprise it. I shouted and challenged, but it never responded. Perhaps I shall never meet it now. Perhaps . . . Who knows . . . But the main thing is that I was aware of my strangeness. At times it seemed as though the Nightingale was just an extension of myself. It could expand my thought. It could expand my strength. When I lay at night I could feel the ship about me like an extra skeleton.
WULF: Were you ever lonely?
WILBERFOSS: Lonely. I don’t remember being lonely. I had so much to do. There is this side to me that always wants to bring things to order. While I was occupied I didn’t have much time for myself. And there were the crabs and the starfish. I have heard of people who, condemned to a solitary life, have made friends of flies. Well, I spent hours watching the crabs scuttling over one another, engaging in skirmishes, picking through the material ejected from the ship and going about their business.
But then there were times when I wanted to sit down and talk to friends. I used to spend hours daydreaming, talking to people in my mind and sometimes talking out loud. I used to talk to Tancredi. He was like a father to me.
WULF: Did you ever talk to Medoc?
WILBERFOSS: Medoc visited me one night. In the flesh. I didn’t ask her to come.
WULF: What do you mean, “in the flesh”?
WILBERFOSS: She was there . . . herself... I told her I didn’t want to see her.
WULF: And what did she say?
WILBERFOSS: She didn’t speak. Just stood there, in the firelight, looking at me. I asked what she wanted. She had flowers and she offered them to me. She was wearing the kind of clothes that Talline women wear when they are mourning the dead. I thought she was mocking me and I told her to leave. She shook her head and so I took her by the neck and strangled her. I threw her from the ship. At least I think I did. I don’t remember putting on my survival suit. I was dreaming but it all seemed so very real from the musky smell of her skin to the way her eyes would smile but not her face. I threw her from the hole in the ship’s wall and she floated away, tumbling downward. Of course I was dreaming yet she seemed more real than the stones. I did not see her land, but suddenly she was standing on the ground looking up at me and one by one she was joined by all the creatures that had traveled in the Nightingale and that were now dead. They stood looking up at me . . . Not accusing . . . just looking. They looked to me as their leader. Ah! The leader of the dead. The leader of the killed. The killer. Was not the Nightingale made in my likeness? This temple of death.
I ran from them.
Of course I was dreaming. But when dreams are more real than the waking reality, how is a stressed mind to cope?
The next day, I got on with my work, clearing the ship.
WULF: Don’t you think that Medoc could have helped you?
WILBERFOSS: Medoc would have destroyed me. She would never have let me rest. Medoc is a realist. There are times when we need a bit of deceit to get us through the day. Medoc is as pitiless as the eye of God on Judgment Day. I would not have survived a week on that world if Medoc had been among my voices. That is why I killed her. Survival. You’ve not been there. You don’t know.
She left her mark. Every night after her visit I’d hear them, the crowds outside the ship, milling about, the un-dead.
But Medoc only came the once. The once. WULFNOTE
I observed that Wilberfoss had become agitated with this line of inquiry and so I decided to terminate the interview. I spok
e the recall words and he relaxed and slipped into normal sleep. However, I want the following observations placed on record: I believe that Medoc was a symbol of truth in the mind of Wilberfoss and that he denied her and thus entered falsehood. His retreat into madness was a retreat from the truth.
I also believe that Medoc did visit him. She was not a creature of his imagination like the figure who haunted the ship, or the paternal voice of Tancredi. She was there, actual. Medoc crossed time and space; but do not ask me how. I can record truths that I can not explain. A human commentator must explain this.
There is something else strange to me. As Wilberfoss described his life on the stricken ship, he sounded almost happy, almost contented. This cannot be the truth that he was avoiding, the truth that had left him black and silent. Many men have killed in their dreams and woken to live normal unmurderous lives. There is more.
It will be strange, though, if the event that has cast such darkness on his mind should prove to be trivial in the light of reasonable day. It might be the kind of event which another man would shrug away with a laugh. Each man has his own truth. Each woman too, I think. And by these truths they measure their lives. Only we bio-crystalline entities, while we can perceive contradictions, seek general truths.
24 The Creature from the Sea
WULFNOTE
We believe that Wilberfoss is now on our side. He is a willing participant in his restoration. We are now the ones that bid him make haste slowly. He has accepted a regular daily routine which consists of walks under the trees and work in the garden followed by brief periods of meditation.