Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (7 page)

Every question has an answer. The problem is knowing what questions to ask and recognizing answers when they come.

The shuttle port was busy when we landed. There was no one to meet me and I was glad. I doubted if my family and friends yet knew where I was. I was alone and unknown. That felt clean. There was a transit vehicle about to leave for my home sector of Icarus but I avoided it. I remember how turbulent I felt: free and frightened, angry and hopeful. I could not sit, passive in a transit carriage, my bag on my knee.

Then I made a decision. I decided to run home. I was half a planet away but I would run home. No sooner was the thought born in me than I knew it was the right thing to do. I thought the run would be an achievement. I hoped it would bring meaning of some kind. There are those whose spirit is only satisfied by challenges. I had the money I had been given and with this I bought a small tent, some provisions, a small pack for my back and shoes that I could run in. Then off I went.

Icarus is covered by a network of translucent tunnels which join all the dome farms. The tunnels are like canals of air. Within them there are always plants growing and the air is sweet and pure. The tunnels He like a giant silver net thrown over brown rocky hills and swamps where the mineral water bubbles pink and green and poisonous.

I had never seen my own world. The shuttle port was somewhere close to the equator and the crops there were soft red fruits which grew under the shade of leaves and a chewy grass which stained the mouth yellow. Here everything was larger than at home. The domes were higher and enclosed trees and I saw flowers which had a crown like a single staring brown eye. They produced oil.

I ran. I was not fit but I had will. I ran and avoided the main transport routes. I took the tunnels which had only been built for the convenience of the farmers. At night I slept in my tent. When my provisions ran out I began to live off the land, eating the food raw. I was punishing myself for being what I am and curiously I felt better for it.

Eventually, after three weeks or so on the road, I came to a narrow tunnel which climbed up a rock face in a series of long zigzags and emerged on a high plateau.

Here there were no forms. The air was thinner and the sky which shone above the crinkled plastic cover was a deep blue, almost aquamarine. Standing with my nose pressed against the stiff plastic wall I looked out on a wild desert where coils of dust and sand were the only things that moved as they scoured the landscape. Here nothing grew. I saw black ice in the fissures between rocks. I saw rocks split as though with a knife. Once a sandstorm blew up and the black and brown particles crawled over the clear plastic like water and left marks like the sucker prints of one of the creatures that lived in the Sour Sea close to my home.

At night it was so cold that I dared not sleep but ran blindly, my hand pressed against the smooth dome until the fingers were numb and then hunkering down, sucking my fingers until they began to tingle. I slept in the day, making a bed of soil. I had no food and I sucked stones. My bowels ached and my stomach made wind as it tried to digest air.

But there came a day when I knew I was running downhill. It was a slight descent, but oh what hope it gave me and for out across the plain I could see a splash of green. A plantation, surely.

I ran on but it was not running such as you know. I hopped and jumped and nursed my feet which were cracked and bleeding.

Eventually I came across green shoots growing in the tunnel. These were a native shrub which had adapted to the kind of air we breathe. The leaves were poisonous, I knew, but the roots held nourishment and the worst I would get was a bellyache. I ate those roots, spitting out the grit, as though they were confections of the finest chefs. Starvation quickens every sense just as privation quickens one’s understanding of what it means to be human. But I could not eat much. My stomach felt full after a few mouthfuls. But I felt livelier and hopeful and more awake.

I ran on and at about midday when the shadows were at their smallest and the roof of the tunnel became misty, I thought I saw a figure in the distance in front of me. There was a place where a cross-tunnel of clear plastic joined the tunnel in which I was running and it was here that the figure seemed to be standing as though waiting for me. I waved but the figure did not respond. At first I thought it was a child, it seemed so small. Then I thought it was a woman, it seemed so poised. Finally I could see it was a human, a man, but he was as small as a monkey. He was dressed in a plain brown garment which matched the color of the soil. As I came closer I could see his face. It was compact, almost the face of a weasel, and he seemed to be smiling in a quirky way as though he knew something that I did not, and yet I did not feel alarmed or threatened by him. At the last moment I realized there was a light shining about him.

Then, when I was about twenty yards away, the figure suddenly started to expand. I felt an explosion in the space between my ears. The man’s face grew into the muzzle of a bull. Golden horns sprouted from his forehead. The shoulders bunched. The brown garment transformed to black fur. The legs became stiff and short and solid-muscled. I found myself facing a bull and its bulk almost filled the tunnel. It stared down at me with lowered head and eyes of yellow flint.

I approached it carefully, unafraid, filled with wonder, my arms upraised, and I stroked the fur between its eyes. I felt its hot breath. I touched its horns and as I touched them I knew I was in the presence of a God. I wanted to clasp the bull by its horns and swing my legs up and grasp it around the neck. I wanted to straddle its back and dig my fingers in its black fur and solid muscle. I wanted the bull to turn me and mount me and crush me. And when I wished this it seemed that the bull grew even larger until it occupied all the space in the tunnel. I fell down in a faint, unable to move but still conscious, and in that state the spirit of the bull penetrated me. Man or woman, bull or beast, the God entered me and possessed me utterly, through mouth, nose, ears, eyes and skin; yes, through penis and anus. Totally. No scrap of me was left untouched and yet I lived with dignity. The spirit of the God bubbled in my veins and made me merry. “Dip me in wine, O ye powers, and I will be one with the grape and the harvest.”

The God broke into pieces of gold and these spun around me. They became people, a golden blur of people. April was there, and the man I had strangled, and his wife and other women, and my mother and father, and my jailor and Medoc who lay for in my future. They were dancing around me like children around a bonfire. And I shouted that I was not dead, and as I shouted the visitors faded and I woke up.

I lay on the ground savoring the silence and privacy.

And everything was changed. I awoke with the knowledge that the gold of the God had entered my veins and that I had eaten the sun like an apple. I saw as though for the first time or like a man recovering his sight after a long period of blindness. I saw colors I had never seen before. The dark blue of the sky had a rich texture of crushed velvet and light swarmed in the sky like silver snakes. The brown world outside the walls of my tunnel ran with colors of earth: with red and gray and brown and cream. The green shoots of the small plants whose roots I had eaten glowed like flame. There was a small creature, a bit like a beetle and a bit like an ant and I had crushed it under my heel in my ecstasy so that one of its legs trailed. I picked it up marveling at the iridescent colors which patterned it. I could see moisture at the broken leg joint and I willed it to heal, saying, “I affirm the unity of all life.” I closed my eyes and when I opened them again the small leg was working like a machine hammer and the insect scampered to the edge of my hand and launched itself into the air and fluttered to the ground.

That was when I noticed the difference. My hand was no longer my hand. It was larger and luminous. I crossed to the side of the dome and peered at the clear plastic, seeking an image of myself. I saw a homed man. I reached up and could feel my horns, short and stiff and cruel and throbbing with new life. My feet had healed and were larger and golden like my hands. Wonderingly, I picked up my pack and few belongings and began to run away from that cross-path where tunnels met. I ran with the fierce energy of the bull that had entered me. I ran with the care of the gentle man in the dun brown habit guiding me for I would not willingly bruise any living creature.

Something eke. I was now running
toward
and not away from. Punishment became pleasure. I was not running home except in a new philosophical sense. I was not running toward my parents’ farm but toward the nearest outpost of the Gentle Order of St. Francis Dionysos. I had recognized that small man who met me on the way for I had seen his statue mounted outside the small dwelling occupied by the Gentle Order. It was St. Francis Dionysos.

Wulf:    And    the    bull?

WILBERFOSS:    The bull was part of him. And the bull was myself. My true nature. The stamp of the God made manifest. Life, if you like. The force of life. Kind and cruel and neither of these and both.

WULF:    And    did you really have horns and golden skin?

WILBERFOSS:    For a time I did. I had them for as long as I needed a sign. Then, with my decision to join the Gentle Order they gradually faded.

WULF:    And    when you came to The House of the Gentle Order?

WILBERFOSS:    When I came to the House I knocked on the door and I was welcomed and I told my story and I was accepted. And so my commitment to the Gentle Order began. The next day I was given the green habit of the postulant and I felt great relief as I drew it over my head.

WULF:    Didn’t    it    get tangled in your horns?

WILBERFOSS:    No.    The    outward    bull    was gone and had taken residence inside. Inside inside.

The effects of the liberating drugs were fading. Lily and I watched as Wilberfoss began to close down. His eyes which had held some sparkle when he spoke now became dull pools of pain and finally blank. The voice began to slur and the sounds transmuted into grunts and stops. The arms relaxed like dead eels.

But before he faded entirely he rallied and spoke clearly and urgently for one last time.

WILBERFOSS:    Such    was    my    youth.    Such    was    my happiness. How could such happiness lead to such sadness? How could it be that I, who came to love all life and to hate all killing, should come to kill so many? How did I come to kill the God?

Wilberfoss stared at me and Lily as though we were sharks and demons. I do not know what he saw. Some gateway into his private hell sprang open and he looked in. He started to scream and he jabbed with his fingers for his eyes. But Lily was quick. She caught his hands in mid-strike with one of her dexetels and at the same time injected him from the cache at the nape of his neck. He collapsed, shuddering and heaving, and then lay still. I remembered his description of how he had caught the soil snakes and how they convulsed underground.

Lily picked him up and hefted him into her womb-cage and trundled away toward the living quarters without so much as a word to me. I stayed on in the garden. I had much to think about. An autoscribe is good with facts and figures and solid stable syntax. But with regard to Jon Wilberfoss, I was at the margin of my ability. Perpetual self-referencing can only lead to meaninglessness and hell. Inside inside, as Wilberfoss says.

That day I found no answer.

The next day I wrote my case notes and although this chapter is dealing with Wilberfoss’s life, I will here quote my original notes as they illuminate Wilberfoss’s discourse:

What are we to make of this? I cannot tell what mode Wilberfoss is speaking in. He sounds realistic most of the time, matter of fact almost, but then it becomes clear that he is speaking emblematically.

In a way that is exactly his problem. He is trapped between two worlds and has confused them. He has the world of his feelings where meaning comes from his intuition and is perceived in visionary terms. And he has the real world in which children are born and men and women die and autoscribes swoop. At any moment Wilberfoss can experience a collapse of the real world into the world of his emblems. And there he must make his own way for Lily can keep him alive and I can tell his story but only he can journey through.

Well, that is the perception of an autoscribe and I am aware of my rationalism. I am perplexed by the thought that I may have got it all wrong. Perhaps the emblematic world
is
the real world after all and I am no more than a passing fantasy in Wilberfoss’s world. In which case Wilberfoss really did have horns and golden skin and killed the godhead in him. In my rationalism I am glad that I do not have dreams. What dreams can an oil can have?

There is more to come. I can tell that. What we have heard today is merely the sighing of wind before the coming of the rain. There are things Wilberfoss cannot face, yet. Things for which he has no shape of words. Things of which he is perhaps numbly unaware and which are waiting to open their jaws and bite as he moves closer through the darkness to his own truth. We saw that happen in his last moments of consciousness.

What then did take place aboard the
Nightingale
?

POSTSCRIPTUM

This section cannot end on that question. There is more. But you do not need to hear Wilberfoss’s voice to understand it. I can tell the tale briefly.

Jon Wilberfoss was accepted as a postulant in the Gentle Order. I have the notes made by the Magistra who accepted him and that lady comments on the fire that seemed to bum inside him. She mentions his quickness and the candor with which he confessed. He talked about his home form, the man he had killed, life in prison and the vision he had seen. The Magistra had some doubts about Wilberfoss mainly, it seems, concerned with his youth but she was also excited by his strangeness. The Gentle Order absorbed the fact that Wilberfoss had killed a fellow mortal. They absorbed it in the sense that they did not hold that a man’s Life should be forever marred by one mistake. In their view, as the Magistral notes make clear, Wilberfoss had accepted his act and was set on a new path. Was it not true that the gentle St. Francis himself had once aspired to be a soldier? And was. not Paul once Saul and the passionate Augustine of Hippo a philanderer before a Saint? Most men seem to require a shock to push them into their true spiritual vocation. Even so Wilberfoss was watched closely especially as he took the sacred oath of the Gentle Order, vowing to protect Life.