by Phillip Mann
In the evening we talk about anything that might be of interest. Wilberfoss wants to know about the monastery. I tell him what I know. Occasionally I visit Tancredi and learn what little news there is that matters. I do not tell Wilberfoss that the entire order is waiting to discover what happened to the Nightingale. I let him believe that he is a forgotten man in a quiet backwater and that the affairs of the Gentle Order are progressing as usual. Which in a way they are. Despite tragedy, life goes on.
Once a week we have retrieval sessions and I speak the hypnotic words and Wilberfoss remembers and I record.
Lily insists that these occasions take place only once a week and then only when Wilberfoss is rested and in good spirits. Wilberfoss would like more frequent sessions but Lily is not to be challenged. Her word is law. I have not bothered to quote these sections since they mainly filled in details in a picture that we already knew. They do not advance the story.
I accompany Wilberfoss at all times. He likes to chatter about things. He has taken to wandering close to the Pectanile. It seems to fascinate him. He is attracted to it and is responding to it as a symbol of health.
For myself I listen, question and record. Whenever possible I cross-refer, trying to evaluate the truth of his comments. Wilberfoss wants the truth but I am suspicious of him. As ever there is something else moving under his still waters. I watch and wait.
Spring is well advanced in the garden and the short, sharp winter of this world is in full retreat. Already there are flowers in the Hapsa Trees. They smell of lemons and the smell is everywhere. Flying through the trees I have glanced against the bright blue balls of blossom.
Responding as though I am a bird, the blossoms explode against my hard and pitted side, painting me with fragrance and plastering me with their sticky horseshoe-shaped seeds.
I know that I smelled of lemons when I recorded the following important segment of Wilberfoss’s life.
Wilberfoss’s Narrative
WULFNOTE
This interview is one of the most important. Wilberfoss began by describing incidents which have already been covered in earlier transcripts. I have edited the interview so that it begins with new and rather startling information.
WILBERFOSS: Occasionally, you know, the Nightingale
and I were at odds. I wanted one thing and the biocrystalline brain wanted something else. To me the cleaning of the ship was all-important. But the Nightingale became obsessed with its weight! It undertook extraordinary calculations linking the gravity of the planet with its own mass, the drag of the atmosphere and the ship’s power reserves. Despite all we had suffered, the ship was far from dead. It was recovering and making economies, like any creature. The massive symbol transformation generators, for example, were alive but dormant. They could be brought back into the game when the need required. Self-repair circuits kept them under constant check.
The Nightingale was bending all its efforts to getting us off the planet. Each day it unavoidably leaked energy and the equations changed. Each night it had to charge my gravity pack and the mule. It tolerated my fussing with the dead and my labored attempts at cleaning, but it demanded that I heave out anything that could be unbolted.
The simple truth was that given the gravity of the planet we did not have sufficient power to achieve escape velocity. But we had almost enough. The question for the Nightingale was how much could we trim from the ship and still leave it viable in space. To the Nightingale, a loss of weight was the equivalent to an increase in energy. Much of the ship was now open to the atmosphere of the planet and would be open to the vacuum of space if we escaped. My control area was the only part of the ship that retained breathable air. Hence there was much that could be abandoned. But how much could one small man do?
I moved the various landing craft down to the surface leaving only one stored in the hold. I tore out machinery that the Nightingale decided it no longer needed. I threw the entire library of tapes and books out of the door and watched the land crabs chomp and tear.
Such activity became my life.
One day I was in the gravity mule high on the top of the Nightingale. I had my laser torch and was cutting at the space doors which led to the hangars where the landing craft had been stored. These were excess weight that the Nightingale had told me to dispose of. I cut one door free and watched it twist around on one of its hinges as the high gravity swung it. The metal tore and the hinge broke. The door slid over the skin of the Nightingale and accelerated to the ground where it caused a brief, subdued commotion among the pressed rubbish. I paused to rest and looked out toward the sea.
The sea was always interesting. It was gray and rolled like molten lead. It did not have waves but heaved in slow undulations. It ran up the rocky shore like oil in a pan. Where the currents moved (and they changed by the hour) the sea took on different colors: sinuous eddies of gray-green and slate-blue. Where currents met I was reminded of snakes coiling and sliding past each other. And never a sound. To those of us who know the sea of a planet like Juniper, its different voices are as familiar as our own moods. But this sea was silent as thought, and its silence disturbed me and thrilled me. I remembered the dangerous sea of my boyhood.
And as I looked it seemed that the sea was changing. It became spotted. This I had never seen before. The spots were evident from the shore to the horizon and spread as wide as my field of vision. And even as I watched they changed. The spots became mounds and these quickly expanded into domes of redness. The red was the color of raw meat. I was aware that what I was watching was the emergence of many spheres from beneath the sea. What could this mean? So far as I could judge, there had been no intelligent life among the creatures that swarmed around our ship, but now something new and unified was emerging.
You can imagine my concentration as hundreds of red spheres rose to the surface and bobbed there for a moment before lifting from the sea. As they lifted they expanded to twice their size in the atmosphere. I could see veins on them, like patterns in marble, and they each dragged a tail which resembled an umbilical cord.
The spheres rose, the cords stretched, a body rose. They were attached to a body which slowly emerged from the sea. It was like a coiling mass of red worms. Its size at this distance awed me. It seemed as if the whole of the sea had become an undulating mass of red. As the body rose at the end of its cords it began to disentangle itself. Tentacles separated from the main body and rose. Each was like a segmented worm. At the worm’s ends were blind mouths which opened and closed as though tasting the atmosphere. Last to emerge from the sea were coiling black tendrils which trailed from the underside of the body and dragged over the surface. I realized that what I was watching was the emergence of a single giant creature.
This single creature rose silently until it filled the sky. It came between me and the pale sun and its complex shadow patterned the dun earth. It pulsed once, gathering itself and then releasing, and I noticed that it was able to take in atmosphere through valves on its side and then blow it out through the blind mouths. It pulsed again. With this slow jetting motion it began to turn in the sky and then moved inland. It was moving in my direction.
I noticed that the creature was not as disorganized as I had at first thought. The largest balloons, for such they were, supported the center of the body. Fringed around these were smaller balloons which were able to move independently on long thin necks, each like the head of a reared snake. These, I soon realized, were eyes. I had not been able to distinguish them at a distance. The eyes were studying the ground.
With a sudden compression the creature dropped and some of its black tendrils uncoiled and scrabbled on the earth. Then its balloons filled again. Straining, it rose. To my astonishment it lifted one of the giant starfish. It heaved the starfish high in the air and the blind mouths got to work, burrowing directly into it and sucking its juices. While it ate the creature moved on.
I did not stay around to watch any more. I steered the mule down the sloping sides of the Night
ingale and into the ship through the hole in the staff canteen wad, close to my chambers. I parked it and climbed out wearing only my survival suit. As I did so the shadow of the creature darkened the entrance way. I could see tendrils dangling down, plucking Up the land crabs, and fossicking among the material ejected from the ship. I felt the Nightingale lurch slightly and guessed that it had been bumped by the creature. I could imagine it above us and beginning to explore us with its tentacles.
One of the tendrils poked in through the door and began feeling about. That set me running, but then I stopped. Staring in at me through the gaping hole in the ship’s side was one of the giant eyes. I saw its pupil contract as it focused on me. The tendril stopped moving abruptly. It did not suddenly strike for me. It held still like a frozen branch.
I moved slowly and as I did so, the eye shifted slightly, to keep me in view. I wanted to get through the safety door and into my quarters. But the scrutiny of the eye was extraordinary. It made my every move seem enormous.
Finally I reached the door, opened it and dived through. The door slid shut behind me and immediately I heard something begin a soft exploratory tapping.
My control room had, of course, external cameras and I was able to view the creature as it touched the ship and ogled it, its eyes swooping down at the ends of their extendable supple necks.
I observed that it was careful in its interaction with us. There were many small aerials that it could have broken, but it touched them lightly. Where the hydroponics ring had been detached there were safety doors and these it explored gently. Mounted on the side of each door was a security panel consisting of twelve independent digits. Each panel had a simple code, a sequence of eight numbers. The cluster of several eyes gathered at one of the doors and a delicate tendril began to tap at the panel. This amazed me. A monkey tapping a typewriter might accidentally write a sentence given enough time. But this creature was methodically tapping out sequences of numbers which would inevitably lead it to the combination for the door.
It had puzzled out the function of the panel and how to operate it. Perhaps harder, it had worked out what a door was! Yet how could this be? There was nothing about the creature that suggested high technology or even domestication. Given the thumb, it was odds on that we humans would one day invent the door knob. This creature had tentacles and eyes and floated on thousands of red balloons of gas. What would it invent? The speculation daunted me. I knew I was facing intelligence of a raw and yet very pure kind.
I saw the moment when the creature found the correct combination, and the door slid open. Several eyes lowered to watch this. The creature closed the door and then tapped out the code again. The door obediently opened. Whereupon the creature closed it again and then moved over to another of the doors. It tried the same code. No result. At this it set to with a will and within minutes had the new code cracked. Thereafter it set both doors opening like the clatter of castanets. The creature was playing with the ship.
Now, intelligence and compassion are not necessarily linked, but there is a good chance that the intelligent creature which shows restraint in the face of the unknown, may be an entity one can treaty with. I observed the creature closely as it bobbed around us, its red balloons holding it steady and its jets occasionally puffing. There was a lightness about the eyes. One of them floated right in front of one of the cameras and stayed there looking. I could have been forgiven for thinking that the camera’s function had been reversed and that the creature was looking at me. The eye was dark and lustrous. It had a black pupil and a lens and an iris which could open and close. It was covered with a film, like plastic, and fluids permeated through this. Can I say the eye was thoughtful? Humorous even? There is a danger in such assumptions, I know, but such were my impressions.
Eventually, as the day ended, the creature departed. The eyes, and the large spheres which took most of the weight, expanded and the creature rose. It relinquished contact with the ship with a curiously caressing motion. The tentacles slid over us, tapping. The creature rose so high that it became a pattern in the sky like a deep red stain. It disappeared behind the hills, contracting and expanding, as it jetted.
You have already gathered that here was a creature that I rather revered. After all the death aboard the Nightingale and the dumb company of the land crabs and mute starfish, here was intelligence of a high order. It was not like the bio-crystalline intelligence of the Nightingale. It was other.
But my life returned to the same pattern. The days became indistinguishable. I ferried around the ship at the Nightingale’s behest and chopped at it to reduce its weight. Then one day I was sitting in the mule, resting on the ground, wondering if I could use the land crabs to help clear the DME section, when a shadow fell over me.
I looked up and found that I was surrounded. Six or seven eyes on long red extensions bobbed in the air near me. The body of the beast was hunched and compressed. It reminded me of the untidy bag that wasps make for their nest except that it was blood-red and not paper-white. Before I could do more than let out a cry of fear, one of the tough tendrils that were coiled like ferns under its body released and darted at me and wrapped around the mule. It gripped like a steel hawser, but there was no mistaking the life in it. The end of the tendril, much to my surprise, was hairy and I noticed that each of the hairs had a small sucker at its tip which adhered to the clear plastic of the mule. I saw the creature grip and the walls of the mule buckled. I made sure that my survival suit was working as the mule was jerked off the ground throwing me to the floor. I was carried up to the .. . (pause)
WULF: Go on.
WILBERFOSS: I am seeing it all. I faced death. Ask anyone ... I thought I was going to be eaten. The blind mouths were open ... I had seen them plunge into a creature and suck it dry. One drew close to me. It was ringed with triangular teeth. They were small within the funnel where they were growing but became large at the tip. Beyond, on the outer skin of the lip, they were broken and missing. They could grind and cut. An elephant’s trunk with teeth is not a bad image to describe them for there was also something sensitive about the way they nuzzled.
I was carried higher, beyond the blind mouths. I was lifted by the tendril and at the same time the creature was rising so that when I looked down I saw the Nightingale far below me. How high I was lifted I do not know but the red balloons which supported the creature reached a tremendous size so that they became translucent and I could see the veins within them and the smoky shape of clouds through them.
I assume we hovered in the stratosphere of this world. I was placed on the upper part of the creature’s body which was soft but firm like well-toned muscle.
Giant eyes gathered around me.
Several tendrils rose. Carefully the plastic membrane of the mule was gripped and cracked and picked apart. The anti-grav unit which was situated in the lower rear portion of the small craft, tore free. It fell away and rolled down the creature’s red belly and disappeared. The roof of the mule was tossed aside and then the door and walls. A tendril touched me.
I was held simply. One tendril was around my chest and I held it with my arms. Another was between my legs so that I rode. A third pressed into my back. They were careful, but I was turned around, upside down and once was held only by one leg. The scrutiny was enormous. Once a tendril touched the energy and atmosphere pack on my survival suit and I shouted in alarm and waved my arms at which the probing ceased.
I was set down on my feet and the tendrils released me slowly. I immediately fell down. The skin of the creature was as hard as the laminate panels inside the Nightingale and yet was easily flexible and moved under me. I pulled myself together and I stood up warily with arms outspread until I was actually standing on the creature. I could feel the tremble of its life through my feet. I looked at the gently moving hills of the creature and could occasionally see a pulse beat under the surface. I was reminded of the fluttering of birds caught in a net and that is a strange image to be summoned up for a creature so vast.
It stretched all about me, acres of red skin. I was standing in a shallow concave depression.
The eyes were very close to me. I took two difficult paces and reached out and touched one of them and it did not flinch or blink but a tendril immediately rose and tapped my helmet. I guessed that the creature thought that my helmet, which has a single plastic face plate, was a single eye. I stood squarely in front of the eye and thrust my head forward and I blinked and opened and closed my eyes several times trying to make the movement obvious. I wanted the creature to understand that I was an entity who lived within the protective environment of my survival suit. It studied me intently. I pointed at my eyes, making myself stare like a fish, and then pointed at one of its eyes. The eye drew even closer and I saw its lens bulge. The iris contracted. I was hypnotized and motionless before its scrutiny. After several minutes it drew back. I had the clear impression that it was thinking, weighing up what it had seen.
The tendril which had tapped my helmet and which had been waiting close with its hairy tip furled, now reached down and tapped my metallic gloved hands. I thought for a moment and then reached and tapped the tendril.
One of the thick tentacles that I have called blind mouths now reared over the near horizon and hung over me. In diameter it was perhaps one and a half times my own height. It could have eaten me easily. With great deliberation, the tendril tapped the blind mouth with its fringe of sharp teeth, and then waited. I lifted my head, opened my mouth and showed my teeth. The eye looked down on me.
What a breakthrough that was! Tendrils opened and closed, the eyes bobbed, the trembling in the creature increased and I was astounded to see a deeper red suffuse through that segment of the body of the creature that was close to me. Of course, I fell down again.
Communication. We had created the beginnings of language! A tapping meant, “What do you have that is like this that I have?”