Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (17 page)

If one wants to be truly rigorous one can trace the origins of the War of Knowledge back to the Western Renaissance of old Earth (and possibly earlier). However . . .

The first truth to grasp is that knowledge is power.

The second truth is that those who possess knowledge have a vested interest in making sure that others remain ignorant.

Those two truths explain much of human history.

Variations on the first crude Mungo drives were developed in different institutions more or less simultaneously. How different the history of space exploration would have been if the different interested parties in the world had chosen to cooperate. But they didn’t. Nationalism and self-interest won out over common sense and humanity. The United States of America which controlled a disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth had seven independent programs operating. Africa had none. South America had one located in Brazil. India had one. China had two. Anglo-Europe had one. Russia had one and France had its own independent system. The Roman Catholic Church had bought into several systems and, unbeknown to anyone except a few senior confreres, the Gentle Order of St. Francis Dionysos had allied itself with the system being developed in Brazil.

Looking back to that time one recognizes that by and large it was the commercial future of the world that mattered to those in charge of research. From my own humble standpoint as a pattern analyst with Tonks Bros I recognize this truth. I am fairly certain that Tonks Bros allied themselves with one of the US undertakings and paid out vast sums of money. What they wanted was to control the import of alien cloth.

I have already described in the section on the Gentle Order how access to the stars and the encounters with non-human life-forms led to a vast enrichment of Earth’s philosophy. What you have now to know is that the new planets and systems began to compete in wealth. The War of Knowledge entered a new and sinister phase. A couple of examples may help. There was a world called Coca-Cola and beside the vast lakes on this world there lived an amphibious creature called a Do-bo. It was found that the blood of the Do-bo contained a substance which slowed the aging process in humankind and which was effective against various forms of cancer. As a result of this good fortune, the rulers of Coca-Cola became very wealthy and began to regard themselves as aristocrats of human life. They used their wealth to buy or filch art treasures from old Earth. There was once a budding in Athens called the Parthenon. Do you know where it is now? Half-submerged in a lake on a ravaged world called Coca-Cola.

The planet called Spinoza became famous for its music and dancing. It plundered old Earth for instruments and manuscripts. What could the countries of Earth do? They were bled white and so sold their treasures for a stake in space. When later the library on Spinoza was bombed, the manuscripts of Bach and Scullion were destroyed. Let it be said that had they remained on Earth they would probably have been destroyed in any case for old Earth suffered as much as any when the War of Knowledge became the War of Ignorance.

Let it also be said that here in the Lucy System we have many treasures lifted from old Earth. The statue of St. Francis Dionysos which stands outside Lily’s Garden is one such and there are others.

To return to the biography of Wulf.

The first initiative of Tonks Bros into space was to the planet Crwy (or Caraway as it became known). There they encountered a species of spinners who wove fabric in the trees where they lived. The paths of fabric were the roads on this world for the jungle floor was lethal with stinging plants and predators and the spinners never ventured there. The fabric they spun came from their bodies, from an orifice in their throats. It was manipulated by three pairs of arms. Weaving was always performed communally as a kind of rite. The spinners sang as they spun and the verbs to sing and to spin are the same in their language. They had a written form of their language which resembled hieroglyphs and which was incorporated into every inch of fabric that they spun. Thus a traveler along their tree roads always knew the history and the ideas of those who made the roads, for the hieroglyphs told a story.

Well, none of the humans could understand the written language since it took so many different forms, depending on the warp and the woof and the shifting tensions which resulted from the flexing of the trees.

I could, trained pattern analyst that I am. Someone in the R and D section of Tonks Bros had the bright idea of hooking linguistic cells and printer cells on to me and lo . . . on about my hundredth birthday I became a translator. That was a massive transition. The surgery was radical, of course, and from this time (CE 2193) I date my consciousness. All I retained of my earlier life was my supreme ability to recognize patterns and colors and comment on them. Beyond that I was now tri-lingual. I could move between the restricted vocabulary of Space English, the major code of Space Eidetic and the Glyphs of the weavers of Caraway.

Of course, from this it was a quick, brief step to espionage. My powers were extended and I became a listener. I monitored space looking for messages that had commercial significance for Tonks Bros.

And then, abruptly, they sold me. They were going broke and I was a disposable asset. Meshed in the fibers of one of their alien fabrics had been eggs which, when they hatched in a benign environment, became predators. In this way the entire population of a mining moon was destroyed and the compensation which Tonks Bros had to pay beggared them.

I was bought by a firm called Infostat and my job was simply to translate technical instructions between a range of languages. More “hook ons” were added. I translated everything from messages in code (I was very good at breaking codes) to instructions on how to install and use a roll of toilet paper in a latrine. I was also equipped with anti-gravity units and began to achieve my present shape and appearance.

All these changes made me cleverer in a way, but I was not yet Wulf Plato’s cave would still have been devoid of meaning to me though I could have explained clearly in a variety of languages just how one should go about lighting a fire in a cave and the best way of projecting shadows on the walls. I had not yet been granted bio-crystalline consciousness. Indeed, such consciousness was still far in the future.

The War of Knowledge ground on. Slowly, limited resources were culled and garnered. There are only so many truly great works of art available. When De Chirico is dead, there can be no more De Chiricos. Likewise with Lindauer and Chekhov. Human intelligence is also limited and creative brains rarely fit into systems. An interesting feature of human ethics is that so many systems are built on doubt. It is a brave and rare organization that can tolerate a member who doubts the validity of the organization itself. Brains were in short supply and gradually the War of Knowledge which had originally, to give it its due, been expansive and creative, turned to its anti-type and became fettered and sterile. It became the War of Ignorance. The transition is simple and irreversible. That which one cannot have oneself, one denies to others.

Planet A has a brilliant researcher who is perhaps beginning to manipulate the arrow of time. If he cannot be kidnapped then the planet where he works must be bombed. End of research. End of intelligence.

Planet B has many works of art from old Earth and from these it derives prestige. To destroy its prestige it becomes necessary to destroy its works of art. It was by just such an angry and irresponsible act that Coca-Cola was bombed and the Parthenon sank in a swamp.

Fear begets fear and once the War of Ignorance had begun there was no stopping it. Do you remember Miranda, who first summoned Jon Wilberfoss and who belonged to the blind race called the Children of the War? Her planet was destroyed by accident dining the War of Ignorance and it was only by chance that the race was saved.

During the War of Knowledge, the Gentle Order of St. Francis Dionysos grew steadily. It occupied the systems of Lucy, Blind Man and Oriente which are now the heart of its operation. It concentrated on contact work and the gathering of knowledge. And when the War of Ignorance began to unfold, it defended itself with rigid determination. It did not go hunting, but it fought.

I have intimate knowledge of the War of Ignorance and I shall now tell you about it. I had been bought and sold several times since serving as translator for Infostat and found myself working on one of the Communications Planets when the war touched me personally. The planet was “capped.” An interesting word. I have encountered the notion that capping is to do with beheading or the removal of the top of an egg. It can mean a conferring of honors and in ancient usage could refer to the deliberate crippling of a human being by smashing the knee joint. None of these meanings apply here. In the War of Ignorance “capping” meant the destruction of a life-bearing planet by the explosion of a cluster of thermonuclear devices over any polar cap. Not only did this inundate the world but it changed the climate and created dirty rain and snow. As a means of destruction it was effective and cheap.

I was translating an article on water purification when my world was capped. The effects of this action reached us in hours. I remember there was an earthquake and this in itself was unusual since the area where the main city was situated was seismically stable. People ran into the streets in surprise. Shortly after the earthquake there was a power failure and the chattering machines I was controlling became dead. Intrigued to know what all the fuss was about and lacking instructions to the contrary,

I floated out of the office building where the central translation agency was housed. We were located high on the wooded hills above the main city. I looked down over the hills and could see the neat rows of blue and white houses and the red barracks and the airport and the long piers which stretched out into the bay. Our city was on the coast and occupied the flat land close to a shallow bay which faced out to a reef beyond which was the largest sea on the planet. It extended seven thousand miles down to the southern ice cap. The season was early summer and the trees which grew beside the pale blue sea were all in flower: pink and yellow and red. A light breeze was blowing from the west carrying the smell of blossom.

People stood still in groups and pointed out to sea. The sky was turning black. There came a roaring and I saw the water sucked away from the shore exposing the fringe of dark seaweed and the rocky sea bed and the reef. It was as though our bay were a basin that had been suddenly tipped.

Far out to sea the horizon seemed to move and a dark line appeared in the ocean and this quickly grew until it became a towering hump of water rushing toward us.

I have warned you about my metaphors. What I saw reminded me of a roll of dark green cloth that had jumped from its supports and was now unrolling toward us. Paradoxically, as it came closer it grew larger and I saw it begin to curve upon itself.

People stood and watched, still as Vonnarberg statues in a park. Some fell on their knees. A few ran, gathering children. Then came the buffeting wind, howling before the giant wave. My last sight was of the wave rearing, a sudden wall of water rushing toward us.

I sent all my reserve power to my small anti-gravity cells and flew up the hills as quickly as I could. I cannot fly high, rarely more than sixty feet above the ground, and my anti-gravity cells are really little more than an aid to stop my having to be carried everywhere. I ran them hot. I climbed as well as I could. I followed the rocky spine of a ridge. Behind me was a roaring not unlike the sound that a rocket engine makes when it matches gravity on landing.

I dipped into a valley among the fir trees and everything became suddenly quiet. Then the earth started to shake and trees above me bent and snapped in the wind. Terrified animals ran and barged into one another.

I hung there in the valley until quiet returned. When I climbed and looked back down toward the bay I saw desolation. There was no city, merely stumps of concrete like decayed teeth. There was no bay, only a mud flat. The sea was gray and black and covered with a scum of oil and tom vegetation. Nothing moved except the sea which shivered under the wind. I noticed that the temperature was dropping and the sky was black and yellow.

There was nothing to return to, so I climbed on past the last trees and up to the snow-line. And when I crossed the snow-line I stopped and dangled.

Even now, so many years after, I do not know why I acted as I did. I was not consciously saving myself at the expense of others. I was too stupid for that. And yet that in effect is what I did. I suppose, being a simple translator, no one had ever thought to equip me with the altruistic desire to save my human colleagues. Hence I followed the line of least resistance. Perceiving danger, I avoided it. Lacking bio-crystalline intelligence, I can truly say that I felt no more for my human colleagues than the train feels for the cow that it crushes.

The world I had lived on was destroyed.

From the snowy heights I watched. In all there were seven tidal waves which scoured the land.

At night the sky was black and starless and in the hours of daylight it was brown. Earthquakes became regular and the weather went crazy. For years the rain fell and the land dissolved and slumped. I found a cave where I could lodge myself and keep my power pack dry. This saved me. I closed myself down except for watchfulness.

Finally, one day, there came a break in the clouds and for a moment brilliant sunlight streamed down and revealed the dreary mess. Then the clouds closed again and the wind blew and the chill rain returned. But that moment of sunlight was a moment of change. Thereafter I remember brilliant sunsets and freezing temperatures and a gradual settling. And after twenty years I set out from my cave.

I drifted. There was almost nothing I could recognize of the old world. All the time I was looking for a human establishment where I could continue my work. I was a translator: I looked for something to translate. I believe I toured the entire mainland.