Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (6 page)

WULF:    At this point in his narrative Wilberfoss looked across at me and said “I hope you are getting all this down, Wulf the autoscribe. I’m sure the Confrere psychiatrists will want to know my secrets.” Then he reached up behind him and grasped the trunk of the tree against which he was leaning and squeezed it. There is something childlike about Wilberfoss, I have seen him do this before. He seems to need to touch things in order to confirm his own reality.

WILBERFOSS:    I    was    the    eldest.    We all lived together, my mother and father and my two brothers and little sister and me. On our farm we grew sweet corn and kumara. You can only eat so much of those vegetables before you start to feel like them. We grew the crops in trenches lined with plastic. We fed them with a kind of seaweed extract which came from the factories out in the middle of the Sour Sea and with recycled water. Each dome had its quota of water and there was none to spare. If you wanted a pee while you were out in the fields you had to sprint back to the house. I can remember my dad saying, “Every drop counts,” as he peed into a funnel.

I grew up strong and big. There came a day when my father stopped talking roughly to me and I knew that it had dawned on him that if I wanted I could take him down into the sweetcorn field and bury his head in the seaweed manure. My mother was still rough with me though. I think the truth is she didn’t like men. She never talked gently to any of us, her sons. Not even when Roman died and he was my youngest brother. But she crooned over little Hannah.

Well, life was boring but not hard. If there had just been me I could have done all the work the farm required and still had time to study. And I was seething with a thousand desires I didn’t understand and so I took to running down the long tube corridors which joined our farm to all the rest. I didn’t have anywhere to go, you understand. I ran for the sake of it. For relief.

For some reason I never thought of running away. I think I knew that on Icarus there was just farm after farm after farm and all of them identical. There was a town of sorts five farms in from us where some of the young men gathered to drink a brew they concocted from rotting corn stalks and kumara skins. Somewhere there was a shuttle port. That was about all I knew about Icarus. I knew more about the myths of old Earth. The only future I had at that time was perhaps to get a farm of my own further out along the rim. Then find a woman and settle down. Settle down! Settle down from what?

Then one day, unforeseen, my life changed.

It was early afternoon and I was running through one of the link tubes, working up a sweat, when I saw ahead of me someone who waved. I waved back and then the figure crossed into the tall plants of sweetcorn which occupied a thick strip down the center of the dome tunnel. I paid no special heed, but when I reached the place where the figure had been I heard my name called. I stopped and pushed my way through the stiff upright stalks of corn and there, reclining in the middle, was a woman. I knew her, had known her since I was a boy. We’d shared lessons and played together. Now she was different. I knew all about sex (our lessons were thorough) but sex had never meant much to me. It had seemed silly and my father and mother were no advertisement for married ecstasy. But now, suddenly, here was a woman, and she was lying back and her skirt was up above her knees and there was darkness there between her legs and her arms were lifted to me. I stood stupid as an ox, knowing and yet not knowing. I stood above her and she pulled my shorts down, hurting me, for my cock was standing out like a bottle. I know my throat went dry. I know I went down on my knees. I know she took my ears in her hands. I know I smelled her, a smell of earth and sweetcorn and sweet skin. I know I wanted to lick and tear and . . . and she was so hot, so smooth and fluid, that only her heat told me I was in her and then I came as though I had been stabbed, as though there was blood flowing from me. And she came moments later and made the kind of noises that made me think I had hurt her except that she kissed me and smiled and threw her arms back. Moments later she relaxed and I had a vision. I was lying on my face in a lake of water and the waves were washing over me and I wanted to stop breathing and loll and slip under the surface. But she eased me off her and said, “Thank you.”

This was the first of many visions. Many deceptions. How can there be other than deception when we who live know so little? Hope is God’s mockery.

Later, I do not know how much later, some five or six times later I think, I donned my shorts and took to the road again but there was no run in me. I managed to make a hundred yards or so back toward our farm but then I went down on my knees, my forehead on the earth. It was lovely to be on the earth and I squirmed around and looked back down the tube tunnel and she was walking away from me. I loved her then in my mind and I doubt if I have ever felt such clarity of love, such a pure mingling of desire and effort in my life since. I fell asleep in the road. As simple as that. Her name was April.

We made love many times after that, April and I, and we were careless who heard us. But later I became curious about other women. Slow in some ways, quick in others, I was growing up. I reached my present height when I was eighteen. I said to myself one day after I had finished mulching the corn stalks, I sat down in the field amid the growing plants and I said, “I am afraid of no man or God.” And it was a revelation to me for it seemed to me when I looked at my father and mother that they were afraid of something but they never knew what.

I grew up. I continued my running. I continued my excursions outside the dome holding my breath and I took to spending nights away from home. I began to drink the tear-making liquor brewed in the town. It was commonly called Holy Water.

I think I believed I was something special, something other than clay. And then one day I made love to the wife of one of the farmers who lived in the Rill Hinterland and he caught us. Think of that, if you can imagine it. His face was like something screwed up and thrown away in the rubbish.

Later he came after me. That was the next great learning in my life for I killed him. I was in the barn where the Holy Water was served and there were about twenty other young people with me. I had my back to the door and the first indication I had that anything was wrong was when the room suddenly fell silent. I turned around and there he was, the farmer. He looked crazy and his face was blotchy. He had a baling hook in one hand. Have you ever seen one of those? No. You still find them on old-habit planets. It’s a sharp hook mounted on a handle so that you can grip it. You dig the hook into bales and then drag them. Well he didn’t say anything. He just stared at me and then he swung the hook low and up. I jumped. I used my hand to parry the blow and the point of the hook went right through the palm of my hand.

WULF:    Here Wilberfoss offered his left hand and Lily and I could clearly see the pale scar in the center of his palm.

WILBERFOSS:    I bled like Christ or Francis Dionysos with stigmata, but I had the hook. The blow had unbalanced the man and he fell against me and I closed my right hand around his throat and squeezed. There was nothing he could do. He tried to knee me. He tried to squirm. But I squeezed and my face was only inches from his. I could have kissed him. I saw blood on his lips. I felt the stickiness of my own blood as it ran between us. I saw his eyes stare. I saw the moment of his death. And at that same moment, something in me turned black. I had enjoyed the
killin
g.
I had him bent back against the bar, I could have been embracing him. I enjoyed the
killin
g
and something in me turned black. With his staring eyes in front of me, a small black acorn lodged in my heart and it has never gone away and now it is grown into a black oak tree.

WULF:    Wilberfoss    was    getting excited in a way that we had observed before. There was no tolerant linkage between his thoughts and his feelings. He was like a human baby, not like a grown man. Lily moved in. She administered a small injection and this stopped Wilberfoss. He sobered and his passion drained away.

Self-hatred can have many manifestations. To Wilberfoss, his past was so marred and filled with disfigurement that he wanted to obliterate himself, body and spirit. Of course, at this time in his cure, we did not know the depth of his self-loathing. We could only guess at what he meant when he talked about a black oak tree which was growing in his veins.

WILBERFOSS:    They dragged me off and someone worked the hook from my hand and within minutes it seemed I was under guard in the local dispensary and the nurse was packing my hand with a sweet-smelling balm which numbed it. He also gave me a shot of something which took away my sense of color and made the inside of my mouth dry and when I tried to stand I found I had no strength. Then my father arrived and talked at me but I could not understand a word. Nothing seemed to matter.

So, hours later, I was sent up in the shuttle, still in a drug-jacket, and then I was sent to hospital and then to prison. I was like a cork on a stream. I had no control over my life. And it was while I was in prison that I began to understand the darkness that had grown inside me.

I had strangled and had liked doing it. The strength in the arms, the stiffness of the body, the thrill of full commitment. You see, the killing had caressed that same secret area in me that had been so quickened by lovemaking. And yet how different. My innocence was gone. I felt that everything I touched became dirty. The leaves that should have been green were black.

But it wasn’t just the
killing
. As a former’s lad I was used to killing. I used to lie in wait for and flay the sand snakes when they tried to steal the vegetables from underground. You could always tell when one was there. You’d see the vegetable, a lettuce say, in the family plot and it’d be moving, rocking, like a float on the sea. Then you’d see the lips of the sand snake, like a band of blue rubber, come up from underneath and grip the body of the plant with its gritty little teeth. That’s when you’d strike. There was a kind of fork called a snaketine with sharp barbed prongs. You’d jab this underground, well below the Ups, and then hang on. Sometimes I’ve seen a snake drag the entire tine fork under. Most times you’d just hold on and let the snake convulse under the ground and then, when it had tired itself out, you’d drag it out and slit it open. One of my first inventions was to link a tine fork up to the farm generator and that cut the snaking time by half. Give them a charge and then drag them out like a stocking filled with sand and slit them.

No, it wasn’t just the
killing
. It was the killing of a man. Was he better or worse than me? No. He was me. I was, am, him. All men and women became my family.

I wanted their forgiveness. But there in the prison there was no forgiveness. I slept with my crime. I lived with my crime. There was no forgiveness.

No, that’s not quite true. There was some forgiveness. There was some gentleness. Kindness came like . .. There was a warder who took a liking to me. At first I noticed little things. A nod of recognition. An extra ration of toilet paper. An extra potato. A book without the last page tom out. Then the man who shared my cell was moved out without warning and sent to another wing. That suited me. I wanted solitude. But then three days later my warder friend came to visit me. We had to whisper. He wanted to know my story, wanted to help me to see the prison psychiatrist or monk, whichever would help, wanted to help me pull myself together. He wanted me.

I saw it coming. Even now, so many years later, I wonder whether he knew what was driving him. Came one night I talked about myself in whispers and even as I spoke I felt him kiss me. And in the next moment I kissed him and held him as though holding and kissing him would somehow cleanse me. And he whispered something strange to me. He said, “You have a fire in you. Warm me.”

We made love then and many times later. Quietly and intensely. Whenever we could. And I knew he had forgiven me and trusted me for he stood holding my iron bunk with his strong back toward me and his neck bare and I ran my fingers over it.

Then one day he came to me and he said, “Do you love me or am I just what’s available?” The question caught me off guard. It seemed irrelevant. I had no answer. And then he said, “You who have so much must never be cruel to those that love you. But you are cruel and cold.” I did not understand what he meant. “Your case has been reviewed,” he said finally. “The wife has given more evidence in your favor. You have been given your freedom.” He paused and looked at me and then continued, “You will be leaving tomorrow. I shall be staying here. Who has been most in prison? You have all the heat a man can want, but you are a cold-hearted bastard.”

And I did leave prison the next day. He did not come to say goodbye and I did not go looking for him.

An official of the prison gave me my few belongings and papers which stated that I was a free citizen. There was money too.

I sat in the air-lock waiting for the shuttle to carry me down from the prison torus and I cried. You see, for a while I had known peace, and then my friend, or the man who I thought was my friend, with his cruel words had opened the wound again, had revealed a blackness inside me. Misery gave way to anger, which is healthier, but the anger was directed against myself. You see, I was not what my friend had called me ... I was not cold. Am not cold. I have followed my lights into darkness. I have tried to be kind. I have shared. But I have been ignorant and vanity is a sure sign of ignorance. “What do people want of me?” I asked as I sat in the shuttle sliding down toward the surface of Icarus. And I wondered what I could do to achieve peace and where I could place the fierce energy that threatened to tear me apart.