Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (18 page)

My adventures—I suppose I can call them that—would fill several volumes and perhaps one day I will set them down. I observed the slow pattern as life, once seemingly dead on the planet, came sprouting and wriggling out of crevices as the sunlight returned.

One evening several years later, quite by chance it seemed, as I descended a narrow valley near the coast, I saw a ship from space break through the low clouds above the sea and begin to cruise along the shore. I gave chase. Pathetic really, when I think back. I doubt if I could have traveled more than ten miles an hour as my power cells were dying and the large ship quickly disappeared. But I

was in a part of the coast I knew. I was close to the site of the old city where I had once worked. It was now a swamp.

I crossed the low hills as quickly as I could and was rewarded with the sight of a camp. The ship from space had settled on high ground close to where my translation headquarters had been. It stood on gravity poles and shimmering blue lines of energy danced between these and the ship which had not, of course, landed. I had never seen such advanced design before.

Set about a hundred yards from the ship were self-inflating domes of the type used for mobile hospitals and the like. Lights were moving inside the domes.

I glided down the slope of the hills, just above the trees, and made my way to the nearest dome.

There is no dishonor in likening myself to a dog that scampers with delight when it hears its master’s tread, except that delight was beyond my range. I felt something like relief that perhaps now I could return to my true vocation. Humans made that possible and so I scampered. It is actually difficult to remember. I was a simple creature then, primitive in all my responses .. . The point I am trying to make is that I doubt if the butterfly can remember what it was like to be a caterpillar. Likewise, I have seen dogs wag their tails even when they greet cruel masters .. .

Anyway, I came to the first dome and lowered until my earthing sensors touched the grass and I landed. Two of my dexetels had been wrenched off in an accident years earlier. The hydraulic support rods on a third hung useless. I could just drag myself. I had never been designed for the harshness of outdoor life. I was rusty and dirty and my power cells were failing fast. But where it counted, I still functioned surprisingly well. I knew that my voice circuits and synthesizer, unused since the time of our capping, would squeeze into action.

I dragged myself to the open door of the dome and through. A human male was working at a table and he looked up in horror and screamed. I realize now that to him I would have looked like a giant snail or a creature I have only seen in pictures, a mighty armadillo.

“Have you anything to translate?” I asked.

I remember all this so clearly. He was a big man with a bushy gray beard and an immense shiny forehead—a reversed pattern for most men that I knew. His mouth was open and his eyes shone like two blue marbles. He wore a dark green tunic which to one more knowledgeable than myself would have identified him as a senior confrere in the Gentle Order. Overcoming his surprise he came toward me and gripped me by my main sensing antennae and tried to lift me. I responded by activating my anti-grav cells and the result was that the man lost his balance and sat down heavily on the soft damp grass in the door of the dome. “Have you anything to translate?” I asked again and he shook his head at me in amazement.

Other men appeared at the entrance to the dome and I remember they laughed. One, who seemed to know something about the function of entities like me, took me by my guidance handle and led me deep into the dome. He settled me on a white table and severed the connection to my anti-grav unit which was distorting badly and had burnt the grass. He also cut my meager power to half. I became just aware. In human terms I dozed.

While dozing, a great deal happened to me I am glad to say. I was given special attention as I was the only functioning artifact on the whole planet. I was cleaned and given a slow recharge. Some power cells which had corroded were replaced. My dexetels were removed entirely and the engineer aboard the ship fashioned me new ones. I still have one of these and it serves me well. The anti-grav cells which had kept me drifting for so many years were completely abandoned in favor of a smaller and more powerful unit. My printer, which had for years been a spongy mass of wet and decaying leaves and which was clogged and dangerous to me for it trailed a metal recording tape, was carefully removed and then thrown away. My contacts were cleaned and a new printer was wired in. This had its own self-referencing cells and I found that a great relief. I had never known such ease.

When I was again tuned and powered up I found myself sitting opposite the beard and the forehead. I did not know it then but I was facing Cedric Forrester, the foremost historian of this sad age. He handed me a small section from a manual on vivisection to translate and I dutifully rendered it in two alternative languages.

He was impressed. Apparently I was one of the few early translators still functioning. One of the languages that I knew was Space Eidetic which was no longer a living tongue.

However, it was not so much my ability as a translator which interested Professor Forrester as that I had witnessed at first hand the capping of a planet and had survived.

Forrester tried to interrogate me and found that task almost impossible. I could translate his questions but not answer them. Yet I had observed, and held locked in my memory, most of the information he required. I was a library without a key.

Professor Forrester made the most important decision of my life. He decided to incorporate bio-crystalline cells into my memory to liberate my thinking. The crystals were then growing in the computer bank of his ship. This was radical new technology and was scarcely understood.

The operation did not take long. Essentially it was the lodging of certain key crystals among my circuitry and then waiting while they grew into me. The great strength of bio-crystalline technology is that it integrates all areas of knowledge. It creates of a disparate entity a whole being. While the operation was being conducted my awareness was taken over by the shipboard computers and that was an experience . . . there are no words for what that was like.

And when I was returned to myself, the bio-crystalline fibers had worked their way through me. Self-awareness. I knew what I had been and what I was. My memories were a focused sequence of images. Most important, a bridge had been formed between my memory and my old language circuits. I could speak my memories. I suspect that the frog that has successfully escaped being a tadpole feels pretty much as I did as it takes its first free leap in the air.

I was smaller too. Being in part bio-crystalline my sensors were now reduced but were more effective. Visually (and humans are always amazed by me visually), I came to resemble the ancient helmet I mentioned in my Preface. My sensitivity was now in my crest and this was patterned and discolored as a result of the bio-crystalline activity. It is from these markings that I gained my name. The historian Forrester first called me Wulf because, fancifully, he saw in my markings a fierce and ravenous face. And Wulf I have remained to this day. My name has nothing to do with my nature.

I described all that I had seen to Professor Forrester and my narrative became the basis for a chapter in his penultimate work,
Lost Without Name: Final Stratagems in the War of Ignorance.
He adopted me onto his staff and thus I began the final phase of my career as an amanuensis in the service of the Gentle Order.

Each year my bio-crystalline ability was upgraded. Forrester gave me a love of history and the upgrading developed my research abilities. We completed one last book before he died,
The Summer Grass.
The title comes from the famous Basho haiku:

Behold the summer grass

All that remains of the dreams of warriors.

This book is mainly devoted to Forrester’s own philosophic ideas and he dictated and I prepared the final copy. When he died I was sufficiently bio-crystalline to feel something like grief. Looking back I can say that I was a serious little scribe. I had taken on the personality of my closest human.

All that was four hundred years ago and since those days I have served many masters and mistresses, the most recent being Magister Tancredi. But the effects of that War of Ignorance are still vividly with us. Pockets of humans and aliens remain stranded on thousands of worlds which were once part of the vast network of galactic exchange. It is the task of the Gentle Order to put things to rights if it can. Hence the emphasis on the love of life. Hence the
Nightingale.

We are now back to the present and will rejoin Wilberfoss and the
Nightingale
as they return to normal space and enter the Oriente System where are found the hospital and holding worlds of Bull, Bryony and Shamrock.

The
Nightingale
was eagerly awaited.

On Bull there was a newly trained team of three hundred contact specialists. They had been training for years, living in the environments of alien species, learning alien languages, acquiring medical skills and absolving themselves of the taboos of Earth. It was on Bull that the
Nightingale
first paused. Apart from being a training world, Bull was also the main supply depot for all the Mercy Fleet and there was a constant coming and going of spaceships in that planet’s skies.

The
Nightingale
anchored off-planet and began taking on supplies. Uniformed caterers, with lists of the needs of all the varied life-forms the
Nightingale
would carry on its maiden voyage, swarmed through the storage bays. Exotic fruits were planted in the hydroponics tanks. Some livestock was brought on board. Where possible set meals were prepared and placed in deep-freeze chambers. In all, the provisioning of the
Nightingale
took over thirty standard days.

Then the ship withdrew its anchor rods and slipped through space to Bryony where were waiting many of the Close Metabolism Life-forms. As I have mentioned, “close” means close to human. Here were Tallines who would help in the running of the ship and would stay with it until its eventual return to Juniper. Here also were a colony of the Bonami who quickly established themselves in the same chamber as the female Bonami we had met.

Dysers came aboard, gray and dignified, each wearing the insignia of its clan and bristling with weapons. They were returning to die on their tight cluster of worlds far out on the rim. Dysers could endure up to three months without sleep or food or water and during the War of Ignorance they had been used as occupation troops. Spread throughout the galaxy were many pockets of Dysers who had adapted and settled and whose new mythology told of a home of happiness and plenty far away in die sky. The Dysers were long-lived and these who came aboard were the children of an expeditionary force.

There were the Rhymesters, as they were known. They grew no taller than five-year-old children and their lifespan was about ten human years. They achieved maturity within weeks of birth and their main task in life was to keep the song of their people going. A mature Rhymester could recite the song of its particular line or family, telling of events which happened many thousands of years earlier right back to the time when light was born in darkness and all the Rhymester ancestors emerged from the “great mountain.” I describe the Rhymesters as “its” for they do not have a sex as such but have three sexes all waiting to be revealed in the one individual. They believe that the more people who can be at a mating the better. At a mating, the one who is not to bear or inseminate sings a special song which has the extraordinary effect of changing its body. It swells and the palms of its hands emit a hormone which the other Rhymesters lick. The hormone determines sex changes which occur dining the course of one evening. Copulation is a public affair, like going to see a play in a theater. Apparently the song is so powerful that human males upon hearing it have been known to lie down with their legs spread like women. Women upon hearing it have mounted their men or one another in a delirium of desire. Such scenes cause great merriment to the Rhymesters and of course are incorporated into their songs.

More seriously, the Rhymesters’ songs are an important reservoir of information on the War of Ignorance. I must tell you that the reason the Rhymesters are widespread is because they were once considered as mindless as sheep and were used as a quick source of protein. Humans don’t talk about that much now.

And there were more species, many more, but they will hardly be present in this story and so I will not mention them.

After Bryony the
Nightingale
journeyed to Shamrock which is the world where the far aliens are housed. Here the
Nightingale
was to complete its cargo.

Now it was on Shamrock that an event occurred which has great bearing on this biography and I have no choice but to tell it in full. As is so often the case in human affairs, the significance of a particular moment was not perceived until much later and the story I am about to tell you I have had to piece together, bit by bit, from the
Nightingale’s
records and from Wdberfoss’s memoirs.

I trust you will excuse a slight flamboyance in the telling for I wish to put flesh and plumes on the bare bones of history.

On Shamrock there live the young trainee contact specialists who have dedicated their lives to serving the DME. You have already met Contact Nurse Mohawk so you know something of their natures. Well, this is the story of Sandy, a boy of fourteen years of growing but who had been alive and learning for over forty years. He was just entering his manhood.

The valley where Sandy endured his vigil was completely enclosed in mist. All that he could see were the dark shapes of pine trees as they climbed up the valley walls and disappeared into the drifting grayness.