Free Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic by Phillip Mann

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