Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (24 page)

When the
Talon
returned it found its own technology turned against it. It landed and made contact with the Sorillos only to find that the contact engineers had been eaten. Their skulls were paraded before the ship. The crew of the
Talon,
some of whom had lost relatives, decided to teach the “Water Pigs” a lesson and they burned one of the settlements within its protective hedge of kelp. There is a wonderful description extant of how the black and bottle-green straps of kelp rose out of the water like many-fingered hands and fladed the surface in an attempt to frighten off the attacker.

You can imagine the surprise aboard the
Talon
when from the sea and from the forests and from the mountain tops there came answering blasts of laser cannon fire. The
Talon
narrowly escaped. Even as it rose laser beams danced about it and made it glow like a ruby.

But the humans had left a more deadly weapon than the laser. They had left disease. It was disease, and mutant disease, which finally destroyed the civilization of the Sorillos and led to the abandonment of the planet.

The company which had funded the first exploration decided that the platinum and gold were valuable baubles (having provided a handsome return on investment) but that the biological science of the Sorillos was worthy of an invasion fleet. That fleet was assembled.

They made no mistakes this time. Each ship was equipped with an armed satellite which could be placed in a precise orbit. With every satellite in place, every inch of the planet was covered and vulnerable. When they landed the ships were protected by a particle cannon which created a dome of energy about the ship. The human occupying force rode out onto the surface within robot constructs.

Despite all these defenses, casualties were expected. No matter what softening up took place, the last assault on the Sorillos had to be human. The danger otherwise was that the planet might be sterilized by too general a confrontation. That would, of course, defeat the aim.

Enter Lily.

Lily was not front line, Lily was second line. Lily was designed and built to bring medical assistance to injured human troops. However, as a result of a mistake in her programming or perhaps a deliberate error (who knows?) she ended up tending for the sick and injured whether Sorillo or human.

Parade was a sick planet when the invasion force landed. There was little resistance. Disease, a mutation of a minor intestinal ailment, had wiped out sixty percent of the population. Only those Sorillos who lived in the ice swamps of the far north and south had survived in significant numbers and they were among the least technological and hence of least value to the invaders.

Elsewhere, in the temperate and tropical zones, entire tribes had been destroyed and now floated, noisome and a breeding ground for flies, within the protective walls of their grieving kelp. Some resistance was put up by the mountain Sorillos who lived in the rivers and waterfalls. And they died as heroes. The invasion force was an eagle battening on a kitten.

I will describe Lily at this time. She was a defensive sphere of gray metal. Her skin was of seven-ply carbon steel laminate and she moved on protected tracks (as she does now). She once had an amazing turn of speed, she tells me. She could function on land and on water, her tracks converting to paddles when the need arose. In her front she had an access chute and could scoop up the injured. She also had twin claws mounted above her tracks and with these she could tear a hole in a wall or extract an injured human from its robot carriage.

Lily went back and forth. She brought in a human whose left leg had been shattered when her robot tank was stopped by a land mine. She lifted sick Sorillos from the water. She dug in the earth and extracted a young male Sorillo who had been buried in silt after a sudden tidal wave had swamped his home.

Within her gray metal sphere she had sophisticated dexetels which could carry out a wide range of operations. She saved many, she tells me, and brought them back to the parent ship where there was a proper hospital. Those she could not save and those that died inside her she buried decently in a trench which she excavated on the margin of one of the marshes.

She could nurse, but she could not defeat the mutant disease which, having passed through the gut of the Sorillos, now returned to its human parent as a deadly plague. Lily was not a laboratory. She could nurse but not invent a cure. The disease found its way into the invasion ships.

In some cases the entire crew of a ship died. Only the ship lived on for a few months, spewing out its particle energy until finally its power pack ran dry and the particle cannon faltered, flared and fell silent. The robot nurses, similar in every way to Lily, hurried about the silent surface around the ship, burying the dead and hunting for survivors. Eventually even this army of Lilys succumbed to the rain, the soft ooze by the marsh, metal fatigue and exhaustion. One by one they churned to a halt and became still.

Here endeth this footnote of history. So far as I am aware, Parade has never been revisited.

Our Lily was more fortunate than her sisters. Her ship closed its bays while she happened to be aboard restocking her medical supplies. The ship blasted off in a unilateral declaration of quittance. The small crew ejected the sick and dying through the garbage chutes and then took the ship up to the velocity necessary for the primitive Noh-time space manipulators to function.

They arrived back close to their parent world and reported what had happened.

They were denied landing rights.

A technical crew from the homeworld landed on the outside of their craft and gelded it of its power to flit through space. The ship became a hospital prison. Those humans aboard, the mutinous crew that had escaped from Parade, remained on the ship until they died at the end of their natural span. The last human, a woman called Zena, outlived her companions by over thirty years and died at the age of ninety-seven. She had lived on the ship since her early twenties. When Zena died her corpse was ejected into space and burned high above her native world.

The ship drifted in its safe orbit for some years and then a detoxification crew arrived. They destroyed any fabric that might harbor germs and then sprayed the entire interior of the ship with a germicidal spray. Finally, some months later, convicts were ferried out and the ship became a prison and Lily became a prison warder. Her bulky protective armament was removed. She was reprogrammed and most of her dexetels were replaced. She was given rubber wheels and voice circuits. For the next forty years Lily took care of the prisoners and carried out operations ranging from the removal of wisdom teeth to the binding of broken limbs. As she has informed me, the reason why the prisoners were sent out to the ship was simply to discover whether the fearful disease had been eradicated.

It had. The convicts died from many causes but not from the intestinal plague.

Then the prison was closed. The ship was cut up and Lily was sold for scrap.

Anything could have happened to her for she was already something of an antique. Luckily for us, Lily was bought by a charitable organization and prepared for duty on one of the pioneer planets. Her skill as a field surgeon was recognized. Before dispatch she was again refitted and given elementary bio-crystalline ability. Her new specialties became gynecology and pediatric care. The cradle/womb was fitted. Her voice was upgraded so that she could tell stories.

On her new world Lily was put in charge of a children’s hospital. She had only held this job for a few months when the War of Ignorance entered its truly cruel phase.

Her hospital was attacked with incendiary bombs. Can you believe that? Bombs which can cause a blaze so powerful that it can bum concrete were tossed into a hospital for sick children.

The ground burned. The soil burned. Trees in the hospital gardens exploded into fire. The outer walls charred and the paint bubbled and blackened.

Lily gathered as many children as she could inside her cradle/womb. She had them drape wet blankets over themselves and then, with her wheels melting, and the cradle/womb withdrawn as deeply as possible, she tore through the walls and out through the ash and the burning grass and did not stop until the iron rims of her wheels were slipping on pebbles by the sea shore.

Coughing and chafed and half-roasted, the children climbed out of her and the older ones walked into the sea carrying the babies in their arms and they hunkered down in the cool water and looked back at the red and flickering shore where the hospital burned.

Lily’s wheels churned the pebbles until her drive motor burned out. She was following the blind and simple imperatives of her bio-crystalline intelligence. She was trying to return to the blaze to save the mothers and whatever else there was to save. Lily had not been taught to face reality. It had not been given to her to understand that nothing can survive in a fire maelstrom. Had her rubber wheels not melted, and had her engine not burned out, she would have trundled straight back into the fire and would have exploded like the cylinders of oxygen which tore through the roof like rockets. As it was, disabled, she did more good.

The fire raged all night. The tide which was ebbing when the children entered the water began to flow. When dawn came the tide was advancing quickly and the tired and cold children climbed back inside Lily as the water began to lap around her wheels and fill the depressions in the shingle. Lily closed as much as she could and the. sea lifted her and moved her a few meters up the shore. Salt water entered the place where the children huddled together.

Lily told stories. She made soup which the children drank though plastic straws, sucking as they might have once at their mothers’ breasts.

In the bleak light of day, the hospital was a stinking ruin. When the sea retreated, carrying on its surface a scum of charred wood, dust, fantastic blackened shapes of things that might once have been plastic cups and plates, burned papers and singed clothing, the elder children climbed down onto the damp shingle and went exploring.

Miraculously they found food. There was a hospital garden behind a protective stone wall. There they found burned lemons in the grass beside the stumps of the lemon trees. They found pumpkins that were almost perfectly cooked and potatoes too. These had survived almost undamaged and were quarried from the clamps.

On such meager rations the children survived for three days. At night they slept inside Lily and during the day they scavenged. Then help arrived.

A team of relief workers from off-planet landed. They had watched the brief and inconclusive civil war from the safety of their communications torus. Now they wanted to help.

Wheels were found for Lily and her drive motor was repaired. She and the children she had saved moved to a building that was still more or less intact on the outskirts of the nearest town. Not much of the town remained. The incendiary bombs had done their work well.

The building had once been a luxury villa and quickly became known as Lily’s Home. A red and green flag was made from sheets and a dressing-gown and run up the flagpole outside the building. It was a signal of hope.

Survivors began to arrive, straggling in from the outlying forms and villages. Scholars who had escaped out to sea in a submarine also came ashore and sought refuge.

Lily was stretched to the limit of her bio-crystalline endurance and while I know it is wrong to ascribe human emotions to a machine, yet I will make bold to say that she was happy. Bio-crystalline intelligence allows us an awareness of when we are being effective in the use of our particular talent. When we are effective we have meaning. That is our happiness.

It was during this period that some child or playful adult painted the face in blue on Lily’s side. As I mentioned in the introduction, that face is still there and is still capable of bringing comfort.

The distress of this world was broadcast widely and resulted in a visit from some senior confreres and consoeurs of the Gentle Order of St. Francis Dionysos. They took over the reorganization of the world and Lily the autonurse was withdrawn from service.

She was brought to Juniper and to the Pacifico Monastery. Here she was put in charge of the ancient Talline garden and here she has remained up to the present.

The Talline garden is a place of rest and security. It is a natural place of healing. It is a retreat for those who are oppressed by worry and doubt or who need to rebuild themselves. Lily is the guiding angel of the garden. Since she has been here she has acquired a knowledge of Talline herbal medicine and has worked with Talline doctors. She has cured many and her success with Jon Wilberfoss is only the most recent of her many triumphs.

If Lily had literary aspirations (and the necessary circuits) she could write a fine book. When I suggested this idea to her, she at first did not understand and then she told me with some asperity that she was too busy for such things and had for too much to do.

That is Lily.

We are approaching the climax of this biography.

After the damaged shell of the
Nightingale
was found drifting with all its emergency systems screaming MAYDAY, Jon Wilberfoss was treated with fear and contempt.

The first rescue party to board the ship discovered that it had been damaged in complicated and horrific ways. Moreover, it had been cleared of all life-forms. This clearing had been done carefully and methodically. They explored the empty ship with amazement.

Wilberfoss was removed from the ship in what at first seemed to be a state of profound aphasia. He neither recognized nor responded to the outside world. But then he began chattering. When asked about what had happened to all the life-forms aboard the
Nightingale,
he laughed. One report stated that he was “bright and cheerful and talking nonsense.” Then he became quiet again and would not speak and shortly after that made his first attempt at suicide. He was judged insane and stun drugs were administered for his own good. Lily discusses his state in the next section.