Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic Read online

  “Is he happy, would you say?” asked Confrere Isidor, the cook.

  “Happy. Ah, happy. Now that is hard to say. Do you know what makes you happy? Does anyone? We think we do, but happiness is a transitory commodity. I don’t know what would make Wilberfoss happy.”

  “I know what makes you happy.” This from Isidor. “What?”

  “Good wine and good food.”

  “Yes, but they are transitory.”

  “All things are transitory,” said the bursar solemnly and drained her glass. Immediately it was refilled.

  The conversation was becoming silly and its further progression was stopped by Wdberfoss’s return. He was smiling. “That was Consoeur Mohawk,” he said. “She wanted to let you know that the Trimaton had calmed after your departure. It is now eating and making music.”

  Tancredi led a round of applause for the Trimaton. He then raised his wine glass. “To Contact Nurse Mohawk,” he said. “Long may she serve the needs of the Gentle Order of St. Francis Dionysos.”

  “Contact Nurse Mohawk,” came the reply from all the people around the table.

  A short time later we departed on one of the land-rafts. Tancredi managed to have a few moments alone with Jon Wilberfoss before we set off. He shooed me away when I hovered close, so I do not know what they said. But at the end Tancredi kissed Wilberfoss on both cheeks and then wiped away a tear. The meaning is, I think, obvious.

  We landed, disembarked, and the land-raft took off again.

  That night the Nightingale withdrew its laser lines which had kept it in precise orbit and edged away from Juniper. I was among those who sat on the hills to watch it depart, Male and female Tallines, consoeurs and confreres of the Gentle Order, spindly technicians from the Blind Man System joined hands and waved as the ship grew smaller and fainter.

  Then suddenly the Nightingale became brilliant, incandescent. The space between the symbol transformation generators (the “claws” as I have called them before) came alive and began to crawl with strange shapes of power. The mirrors glowed red and then blazed, creating a ball of energy as dimensions of space were teased open. The ship advanced and entered its own orb of power and was gone.

  Silent and mysterious. A candle snuffed without smoke.

  Now you see it. Now you don’t. And not a sound.

  Gradually eyes and sensors adjusted to the dark and the familiar night sky became again apparent. Those who had brought wine stayed to drink it on the hillside. Others drifted home and the night rang with called goodnights and messages for the morning.

  For myself, since Magister Tancredi was snoring and had no further need of me, I drifted down to the Pacifico library and began to gather the threads of my research into the causes of the War of Ignorance—research that had been interrupted by this whole Jon Wilberfoss business. I put Jon Wilberfoss out of my mind.

  INTERMISSION

  10 A Brief Biography of Wulf and Some Talk of the Wars

  I include this chapter out of conscience, out of my own sense of propriety, reasoning as follows: how can you understand this story unless you know the story teller? History is nothing more than the songs of historians.

  On another level this is but another pebble in my mosaic and one which may entertain you during the brief half hour it takes for Jon Wilberfoss and the Nightingale to whisper their way from the Lucy System where we exist to the Oriente System where the main hospital worlds of the Gentle Order are located. Later I will add another pebble and tell you about Lily.

  I am older than Lily.

  Age is of course hardly significant. Given favorable conditions I could probably tick-tock along for many generations of humankind. No matter.

  I am aware that deep inside me there are primitive circuits which reflect the mind of my first maker. These still function and provide the core of my talent. Stamped within me on a thin platinum plate is the year of my manufacture, CE 2092.

  I began my proper working life as a quality inspector with a carpet and imported fabrics firm called Tonks Bros. I was part of their automation, one of their first robots. My job was simple. I would watch hour-in, hour-out as bolts of fabric unrolled before my sensors. Dyed linen, woven wool, fine-spun bark-thread temple matting, carpets from all comers of the world and domestic plastic sheet, were all part of my trade. I possessed the most rudimentary speech organs. I knew just enough to growl, “Error here,” “Dye mismatch,” “Oil stain,” “Chemical fade,” “Tension variation,” “Yam weakening,” etc. I had some one hundred and fifty comments in my vocabulary. I had second-phase analytic powers which meant that if you asked me to describe a dye mismatch, I could tell you by what percentage a particular color differed from its parent and even what quantity of pigment needed to be added to a dye vat of given size to bring that color up to its true value.

  Clever stuff eh? Bah! Routine stuff. Thank my maker that bio-crystalline consciousness had not yet been developed or I might have devised plans to become an artist! In those days, if you had asked me about a design I would not have known what you meant beyond the elementary mathematics of pattern. But I had this one supreme talent: I was a brilliant observer of shape and line and color. As the fabric flashed before me I could analyze it down to its finest fibers. In this I was special. I was a prototype. I was a one-off. Many machines could analyze but I was the fastest and the most discriminating and what’s more, I was flexible. Given the right “hook ons” I could have devoured a Mona Lisa or a Sistine Chapel ceiling or a Granu-Laferg Laser Striation and told you everything about the composition of those works . .. but I could not have told you why they are great works of art. My maker, an inventor called Su-lin, had built “secret” circuits into me which have never been duplicated. A historical accident! It was not intended to be this way.

  Su-lin was a genius in his way: a lonely genius more at home with abstract circuits than with the world of men. He hawked me around from country to country displaying my promise and skill just as young W. A. Mozart, if this comparison is not too bizarre, was paraded by his father. Su-lin sold me to the Tonks Bros textile house and I believe I would have been brought into mass production except that this was the time when anti-gravity and particle physics were being developed. They gobbled up all the R and D funds. How could a humble pattern analyst compete with the multi-dimensional physics which led to the first starships? For whatever reason, I remained unique.

  To cut a long story short, anti-gravity led to space travel and space travel led to the War of Knowledge.

  I cannot remember this time but I can reconstruct it.

  It was the physicist Christian Jenner who first calculated the entropic effects of artificial gravity and gave the first mathematical description of how a minor gravitational field can operate within a major field. This was in CE 2127.

  The engineer Mungo, who had served his apprenticeship designing ice crawlers for use on Neptune, constructed the first integrated anti-gravity unit and flew it at the 7th Interplanetary Exposition which was held on Mars in CE 2140. He lifted four kilos through twenty meters in 0.5 of a second using a standard 9 volt battery. Almost overnight the traditional forms of transport and locomotion were obsolete.

  Finally Jenner evolved a series of equations which were able to bring together particle physics and alternative dimension probabilities. These equations provided the basis for the Noh-time drive. For the first time it became possible for humankind to think of visiting the stars.

  Experimentation went on apace all over the Earth. Initially it was multinational corporations that sought to use research to gain a technological advantage over their competitors. The multinationals bought entire universities. The race was on and the War of Knowledge had started in earnest.

  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 knowle
dge 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.