Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (22 page)

Let me state that another way. The Quelle was aware that Wilberfoss could have stripped it of its power and made it a servant. The Quelle also knew that if that happened, it would simply dwell in awe of the powerful human and would forsake its own destiny. Wilberfoss was of course aware of the Quelle’s feelings and respected them which made the Quelle even more nervous.

There is no end to such a wrangle. Wilberfoss could have crushed the Quelle until it gave itself to Sandy at which moment Sandy would have become a very powerful, and I think a very happy young man. This I suppose must be regarded as another option available to Wilberfoss.

Have you heard of the theory that at the dawn of human consciousness, there was a creature like the Quelle that dwelled on Earth and that it entered Mankind and became his conscience? It is sometimes depicted as a serpent in which guise it may be reviled. In other religions it is venerated as a source of spiritual awareness. No matter.

To give him his due, Wilberfoss could not have solved his dilemma without sacrificing either the parasite or the host and he was pledged to protect both.

Affairs of the ship took Wdberfoss’s attention and in his absence the war between the two entities intensified. The Quelle, who was stronger than Sandy, learned how to control the boy’s moods.

When Wilberfoss came to ask how Sandy was he found the boy laughing and seemingly at ease. The tears stopped and in his conscious activity Sandy seemed well. But the Quelle could not control his dreams. In the night when the Quelle relaxed, for it needed its rest too, Sandy screamed and screamed and screamed. The night was one long scream of nightmare until Wilberfoss, himself weary with the day, brought calm with his own deep spiritual energy.

And what were these nightmares?

Suffocation was one. Fur growing inside the skin and closing all the apertures through which air could enter and then bursting out through the skin again until Sandy was like a hairy caterpillar, twisting and writhing and trapped.

Drowning was another. Sandy saw himself beneath pack ice, banging and scraping his face on the rough under-surface. Blood came from his ears and nose while he fought for air, until he was finally forced to breathe in. The cold water was sweet and shocking, like brilliantine, and he gagged and fought and in his dream died.

Only occasionally, when Wilberfoss placed a great wall between him and the Quelle, could Sandy relax. At such times he dreamed of the silly shreep that trusted him and feared him and finally depended on him in a wholly uncomplicated way.

At such times the Quelle could also dream. Its dreams of ease always involved unfolding and spreading. In its dreams it rode within an expansive beast that could gallop over plains and the sea and which had a heart like a furnace. When the beast sneezed, the Quelle expanded outside its body in a great bubble of energy that absorbed the light of the sun and the stars and the richness of the night vapors. When the beast breathed in, it drew the Quelle back inside it and made it welcome and warm. Then they ran again. The animal came to know ecstasy. And ecstasy found an animal home.

You see how different they were in their dreams.

When the
Nightingale
reached the world of the Dysers, Wilberfoss was unavoidably involved in ceremony. He spent many weeks on the surface of that planet clearing problems to do with the past and helping establish an outpost of the Gentle Order. He had no time to spend with the Quelle or with Sandy. Consoeur Mohawk took his place.

That lady, for all her skill, tended to favor the nonhuman. She watched the bland-faced boy as he wandered, miaowing in his room, and she spoke to the Quelle within him, talking of the peace that was soon to come, after the next jump, when they reached the Quelle’s homeworld. The Quelle spoke to her, delighted to have an ally after the hard, dangerous, impartial vitality of Wilberfoss.

As the days stretched into weeks Consoeur Mohawk was distressed to observe that Sandy, while he seemed calm in his manner, was physically declining. First eczema appeared on his face and under his arms and in his crotch. A deeper blueness like bruises to the bone spread in his face and on the backs of his legs. Then she found that he was not eating properly but had been throwing up his food in the lavatory. One day Sandy suddenly stopped smiling his bland smile and growled at her and tried to seize her by the throat to strangle her. But then he buckled and slumped unconscious on the floor and the voice of the Quelle came to her through strangled lips saying, “Sorry.” And saying, “The anger of the human is hard to control.” The Quelle took upon itself responsibility for the attack implying that it had been unable to quieten Sandy. In this the Quelle went too far, for Mohawk was no fool and wise in the ways of contact.

This last statement was all the clue that Mohawk needed. It triggered her suspicion. Suddenly Mohawk began to wonder and finally it dawned on her that what was happening was that the Quelle was devouring the boy’s mind and spirit and that Sandy was blindly and desperately fighting for his life. Seen in this light, his attack on her was an appeal for help.

Mohawk contacted Wilberfoss on the surface of the Dysers’ world. He said he would come when he could but that could not be for some days. He advised massive sedation.. .

. . . but when Mohawk came to find the boy, a hypodermic needle hidden in the folds of her robes, he was not in his room. She searched through Wdberfoss’s apartment and Sandy was nowhere to be found. She knew that he could not have escaped into the other parts of the ship for Wilberfoss had given orders that Sandy/Quelle was to remain in his quarters. Baffled she contacted the bio-crystalline consciousness and asked it to locate Sandy. The voice of the
Nightingale
replied, “Where would he be but with me? We have been talking. We are in the contact room.” A strangely worded reply and one which should have given deep cause for alarm. No one but Wilberfoss should have used that room. Unsuspecting, Wilberfoss had faded to place an interdiction on its use.

Consoeur Mohawk hurried to the small private room where Wilberfoss communicated directly with the master brain of the
Nightingale.
There she found Sandy curled up on the couch, his thumb in his mouth, and all systems alive.

The boy was vacant. Sometimes he scowled and sometimes he smiled. Neither expression meant anything. He was talking in a rambling way. Sometimes the voice was that of Sandy and sometimes the voice of the Quelle. Although he was rambling, there was one theme that kept returning, and that was the notion of killing.

“I want to stab you,” said Sandy.

“And I want to boil you alive,” said the Quelle.

Quickly, deftly, Consoeur Mohawk, with a lifetime of practice, slipped the point of the needle into the boy’s blue arm and pressed. His eyes turned up in seconds and with a terrible sigh, he slept.

“What has he been telling you?” asked Consoeur Mohawk as she checked his pulse.

“Distressing things,” said the
Nightingale.
“Such a complex . . . such complex .. . Where does such hatred come and go? How do you contain .. . ? We are distressed. We have much to learn.”

“Nothing you need to learn here,” said Mohawk briskly, sensing the kind of conversation arising that can have no resolution. She wanted to get the boy out and into his own bed with as little delay as possible. “I suggest you close down this room for the time being. Wilberfoss won’t be back for some days. You can help me by monitoring Sandy/Quelle when I have got him settled.” So saying, Mohawk set her stick to one side and pulled the prone body of the boy toward her sharply by the arms and then hoisted him over her shoulder. Despite her age and infirmity, Mohawk was very strong. Gathering her stick for support, she carried him out of the small conference room and across Wdberfoss’s apartment and down the corridor to his own room. There she deposited him on his bed and tucked him in and even kissed him, following an instinct as old as motherhood itself.

There was no response. The drug Mohawk had administered had tied the boy’s consciousness into a dark unreflecting bad which hovered only a few inches above the dark sea called death. Ironically, it was the very same drug that was later used to subdue the mad Wilberfoss when he was returned to Lily and me in the garden on Juniper.

In the bedroom a red light glowed above the door and the gentle voice of the
Nightingale
whispered, “I am here. I will watch. You must rest now Consoeur Mohawk.”

That lady agreed. Tireless as she was when it came to duty, she could not deny her age. “I’ll rest on condition that you wake me if there are any problems and you need a human guide,” she said, and then could not stifle the yawn that seized her.

She made her way to her makeshift bed in Wdberfoss’s study and after murmuring the song which I have already quoted on the oneness of life, she fell into a deep, and as far as she was concerned dreamless, sleep.

★ ★ ★

Sandy and the Quelle too slept. They had no choice.

Not so the bio-crystalline brain of the
Nightingale.
That brain had now been poisoned. It had imbibed grief and hatred and was henceforth contaminated. The poison spread. A healthy human bitten by the fleas of the plague rat or injected with venom is a fair comparison.

But it is a limited comparison. The human can seek the doctor, be he priest or witch or surgeon. Such was not available to the
Nightingale.
The brain of the
Nightingale
had only its own resources to turn to. It contained its own value systems. It discovered a hard truth, that hatred cannot cure hatred, anger cannot cure anger, jealousy cannot cure jealousy. There was no escape for the poison.

Sadly, to the bio-crystalline mind, metaphysics is a game like chess, not a reality. Spirituality is a dead concept. It would be as absurd for me to believe in an alternative reality as to believe that I had a soul. The logical brain of the computer becomes trapped by negatives: in the human that is called depression and in extreme circumstances can lead to suicide. Compassion and forgiveness and Common sense are the powers that bring relief from the darkness to the human. We, who enjoy the light of bio-crystalline consciousness, do not have such: only programming.

The brain of the
Nightingale
sought to understand the contradiction it found in Sandy. It tried to understand the hatred and like a beast that struggles in the quicksand, it sank more deeply into the morass. It also absorbed the pain into itself. Pain which has a cause such as a rotten tooth or the anguish of a Trimaton, the biocrystalline brain could comprehend and shed. But the pain and anguish of Sandy/Quelle it could not ground.

That anguish just went on and on, around and around, scoring deeper with each turn and spreading.

And there was another effect too. Close intimate contact with Sandy/Quelle opened the psychic floodgates so that the brain of the
Nightingale
began to be aware of the pain at all times. It was like the clamor of a bell or the screeching of a saw on iron. That silly brilliant brain, instead of calling for help, tried to cope. It trusted in its own resources. Vanity, eh? And where had it gathered that? The
Nightingale
had taken up the vanity of Wilberfoss.

You see, bio-crystalline intelligence is very honest, but it does not have much common sense. It has the limits and strengths of the human master who shapes it. My master was the historian Forrester, and I am rugged. The
Nightingale,
for all its power, had Wilberfoss, and he, for all his gifts and gentleness and care and goodness, was flawed.

The days dragged by.

Wilberfoss was delayed.

During his absence, Mohawk did her best to bring relief to Sandy/Quelle. She discovered that if the boy were allowed to curl up for an hour a day with the bio-crystalline brain of the
Nightingale,
then he slept better and the Quelle was less demanding. She did not consider that these visits could be causing damage to the great consciousness of the
Nightingale.
Nor did the
Nightingale.
It was trying to understand. Note the pathos of logic. The
Nightingale
believed that if it could understand it could heal. It did not see that in attempting to understand it was damaging itself more and more and undermining its own objectivity.

If Mohawk had been able to see into the chamber one hundred feet below the contact room she would have begun to worry. Some of the white fibers were mottled and blue. Others were livid. The main link which joined the inner brain to the outer STG brain had a vein of bright red running through it. The color symbolism need not detain us for it has no significance. The important fact is that the colors indicated a shift in resistance. The synchronous property of the bio-crystalline brain was impaired. Worse, certain kinds of thoughts were impeded while others were accelerated. The bio-crystalline brain became negatively selective. Such a brain cannot hate for that requires human consciousness, but in attempting to understand the enmity of Sandy/Quelle, it imitated hatred and thus became negatively selective.

Came the day that Wilberfoss returned, he found a calm ship. Mohawk was tired for the work of alien contact is a terrible drain on the creative powers of the human. Sandy seemed to be more at peace than Wilberfoss could ever remember.

“How did you achieve this?” he asked Mohawk, looking down at the boy who appeared to be sleeping quietly-

“Drugs,” replied Mohawk, “but mainly we have the
Nightingale
to thank. She has taken over the caring.”

Wilberfoss was pleased and relieved.

That night he settled himself in his couch and allowed his mind to join with the great bio-crystalline brain. He wanted news of ad that had happened aboard the ship during his absence. The thoughts flowed through him but the quality was wrong. The thoughts had the tartness of lemon juice. He was startled out of his ease.

But he did not pursue the matter. He assumed the problem was caused by his own tiredness. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we will jump to the neighborhood of the Quelle. We will all feel better when that contact is ended.”