FSF Magazine, February 2007 Page 12

  Bandar came down onto the Swept, looking about avidly. The projector that allowed Father Olwyn to address the passengers was deployed and he heard some more blather about chuffe and mantras. But the nonaut's attention was drawn to the Rovers and their vehicles. Seven of the lightweight, high-wheeled carts were spread around the rim of the flattened area. Made of plaited bamboo withes, each rode on two tall metal-and-rubber wheels, thin-spoked and fat-tired. Bamboo ribs curved from one side to the other, surmounted by a canopy of tightly woven grass to shade passengers from sun and rain.

  Each cart was drawn by a team of eight shuggras, round-eared, sharp-incisored, oversized rodents bred up long ago from vermin. Their legs were long and powerful, ending in splayed hairless feet with spoon-shaped leathery digits. At the moment they crouched, resting but keeping up a constant muttering.

  Wasselthorpe also seemed to lack interest in Olwyn's sermonizing. He was clearly curious about the Rovers and drifted in the direction of the nearest team. Bandar felt a strong impulse to warn him away. Shuggras were intensely social, but only amongst themselves; any creature outside their own clan or their Rover master's family might suffer an unprovoked attack.

  The Rovers had been lying beneath the carts until the passengers came down from the Orgulon. Now they emerged and each went to his vehicle and pulled down a tailboard that unfolded into steps.

  Wasselthorpe was clearly surprised by the Rovers’ nonhuman appearance. He asked Bandar if they were of ultraterrene origin. Now it was Bandar's turn to be surprised: even a provincial lordling ought to have heard of Rovers. They had been sharing the planet with humans for eons. The nonaut wondered about the young man's education. Much commonplace knowledge seemed to have eluded him.

  His plump mentor made a remark that revealed his unhappiness about exchanging the landship's comforts for the more austere conditions of a Rover cart. Still, Abbas assumed a look of resignation and steered Wasselthorpe toward one of the vehicles. The young man was staring at the nearest Rover, a mature male who was showing his species’ usual discomfort at direct eye contact. Bandar stepped up beside Wasselthorpe and advised him to try a less direct inspection. He also briefly summarized the creatures’ origins.

  "They are dogs?” Wasselthorpe said.

  "That is not a word they like to hear,” Abbas said. They climbed into the cart, making its leather springs creak. On each side of the interior, four seats of woven wicker faced forward. Erenti Abbas expressed some relief that the seats were cushioned by pads of woven grass. He and Wasselthorpe took the foremost pair and Bandar sat behind the young man. The cart squeaked and bounced again as Ule Gazz and Olleg Ebersol boarded, the former helping her spouse into a seat behind Bandar. Despite the efforts they had made to elevate their chuffe, Bandar thought that Ebersol showed signs of sinking deeper into the lassitude.

  Two more passengers climbed in, a pair of sturdy young women who had the look of students. Bandar had seen them on the Orgulon but had not met them. The new arrivals named themselves as Corje Sooke and Pollus Ermatage, though in fact Ermatage did all the speaking, Sooke having been rendered mute by the disease. They identified themselves as cohorts, a lifelong relationship of intense closeness practiced by citizens of the county of Fasfallia.

  The remaining seat was soon filled by the slim young woman whose companion had been crushed beneath the landship. She was escorted to the cart by Raina Haj, demanding all the way to be allowed to leave and return home. Haj said something to her that Bandar didn't catch but which clearly did not please its hearer. She flung herself onto the seat cushion, crossed her arms and glowered at all of them before turning to glare at the Swept.

  Bandar overheard Abbas and Wasselthorpe discussing the new arrival—he learned that her name was Flix—but their low voiced conversation was interrupted by their Rover's securing of the cart's tailboard, accompanied by a yelp that Bandar knew meant “Important information follows."

  "Yaffak I am called,” the Rover said in his species’ odd way of speaking, that always sounded to Bandar like a modified howl. Seeing incomprehension on the faces of the other passengers, the nonaut translated the statement for them.

  Yaffak went around to the front of the cart and leaped into the driver's uncovered seat. He seized the reins and flourished a whip, and in a moment eight whining shuggras pressed powerful shoulders against the padded harness. The cart jerked forward but settled into a smooth passage across the unnaturally level ground. They picked up speed, racing straight into the sunrise, leaving a cart-wide track through the long grass.

  Bandar watched the other carts with interest. He had learned from his studies that Rovers were intensely competitive, with a strong instinct for hierarchy. A pack of Rovers driving their carts across the Swept should be, he thought, a kind of race, each driver struggling to be the leader. He was disappointed, therefore, to see the carts take up a line-abreast formation.

  "I don't understand,” he said.

  "Don't understand what?” said Erenti Abbas.

  Bandar explained about the Rovers’ supposed competitive spirit. That brought a dismissal of the usefulness of competition from Ule Gazz. She extolled the Lho-tso philosophy of fatalism.

  Erenti Abbas engaged her from an epicurean's point of view, using his enjoyment of food as a metaphor for seizing pleasure from the passing transience of life. Then Pollus Ermatage weighed in with an observation that, from the perspective of manure, the whole cycle of fertilization, growth, harvest, processing, and consumption was just a complex way of producing fresh manure.

  It was the kind of discussion Bandar remembered from his early years at the Institute, when undergraduates would sit around a tavern table and regale each other with beery perspectives on the meaning of life. Now he offered the view that some things were effectively eternal, and cited the nosphere as an example of permanence, whereas individual human lives tended to be repetitions of generic themes, with minor embellishments.

  Wasselthorpe protested that his life was not a trivium. No one had ever been him, doing what he was doing, in the way he was doing it, and for the reasons that moved him.

  Viewed from within that life, Bandar replied, all that was indubitably correct. But from a wider scope, whatever the shape of Wasselthorpe's life might be, it differed only marginally from those of the billions upon billions of young men who had come before him.

  "What is your quest: power, passion, riches, spiritual insight? Each has been looked for and found—or not found—countless times. At best you might add some slight variation to the grand scheme. But the effort is ultimately no more important than to have shifted one grain of a desert's sand."

  Bandar saw forlorn sadness wash across the young man's face. There was pain somewhere in his history, pain and loss. And Bandar's glib words had somehow evoked a memory of it. Now something else stirred in the back of the nonaut's mind: a vague sense that what he had said to Phlevas Wasselthorpe was completely untrue; that this young man's quest might be more than a minor variation on a theme.

  It is fatigue, Bandar told himself. I have not slept well. And perhaps a disappointment brought on by the failure of the Rovers to live up to my romantic expectations.

  While he was immersed in his own thoughts, the discussion had moved on, but only to spread a glum mood over the other passengers. Conversation dwindled, then stopped. After a lengthening silence, Pollus Ermatage suggested singing the new chuffe-raising chant that Father Olwyn had taught the believers while Bandar had been inspecting the Rover carts. More nonsense, Bandar thought, but this one's rhythm—ta-tumpa, ta-tey, repeated endlessly—matched the rocking of the cart as they drove across the grass.

  He joined in for a while, out of politeness, but soon the chanting and the growing heat of the advancing day made him sleepy. He broke off to enjoy a capacious yawn. Wasselthorpe also ceased to chant and wanted again to ply him with questions about the Commons.

  "The Commons is not for you,” the nonaut said. “Find another interest."

  "But I am
called there,” Wasselthorpe said.

  "All the more reason not to go. Now I mean to make good some of the sleep I did not get last night.” He folded his arms across his small chest and leaned one shoulder against the upcurving rib that supported the cart's plaited roof. He elicited a promise from Abbas to ensure that Wasselthorpe remained awake while Bandar slept.

  * * * *

  Bandar slipped into dream. His first impulse was to exert his nonaut ability to control its direction, but some other part of him counseled letting it unroll under its own dynamic.

  He was in a garden, with neatly ordered lawn and well-tended but unremarkable flower beds. Wasselthorpe appeared and Bandar felt a frisson of fear before he realized that this was not an incursion of the other's consciousness but merely a rendering of the young man created by Bandar's own mind.

  He was in the Hero's guise and, as Bandar regarded him, now memory filtered up from somewhere. He vaguely recalled the variant that wore mail, winged helmet, and wolf pelt. It was a Hero who slew a foul monster that had preyed upon ordinary men, tearing its arm off so that it ran away and died. But then a worse threat loomed, though he couldn't remember exactly what it was; the information dated from his undergraduate years, before he had fully developed his memory. Besides, nonauts worked to remember categories, not individual incidents—the totality of the Commons was far more than any mind could encompass.

  Bandar observed Wasselthorpe-as-Hero cross the garden, sword held low and positioned for a coming thrust. Then the man shimmered and became just a sad-faced boy at play. He held a wooden sword and wore a toy helmet, but the way he thrust at empty air with the rough weapon showed a man's determination. And the young face showed the same serious cast of expression that governed the mature man.

  Bandar sensed an unbearable poignancy in the scene and turned away. But now his gaze fell upon the Rover Yaffak. The creature stood disconsolate, ears drooping and black lips drawn downward. The nonaut took control of the dream and addressed the Rover. “What is wrong? Why do you grieve?"

  Yaffak opened his mouth to answer but the only sound that emerged was an odd creaking.

  * * * *

  Bandar awoke to the creaking of the carts. They had slowed and the Rovers were driving them in a circle to create another broad area of trampled grass. Erenti Abbas rubbed his substantial stomach, expressing optimism that lunch was imminent. Bandar informed him that it was too soon for the passengers to be fed. They would be stopping to rest the shuggras, which were not built for the long haul and required frequent pauses.

  When the grass was flattened, the Rovers positioned the carts in a small circle at the center of the larger one, with the teams of shuggras facing outward. They lowered the tailboards that the passengers might dismount. Yaffak indicated the tall grass and said, “Empty your bodies."

  Bandar translated the words into a more seemly phrase then asked, “How long will we stay?"

  "Small time,” Yaffak answered. “Rest shuggras. Also Rovers rest, eat little before big heat comes."

  Bandar relayed the sense of this to his fellow passengers, then watched with interest as Yaffak went to join the other Rovers in the center of the circled carts where one of them had piled up jerked meat and some kind of hard biscuits. He would have liked to see a display of Rover dominance-and-submission behavior, with the junior members of the pack shouldering each other aside to eat a larger share. Instead, the Rovers took their rations without ceremony and squatted down to chew. None looked at the others or demonstrated any of the displays Bandar's studies had told him should be natural to them.

  After a while, Bandar shook his head and turned away. Wasselthorpe had wandered over and now asked if something disturbed him. Bandar revealed his puzzlement at the Rovers’ uncharacteristic behavior. Wasselthorpe proposed that the Rovers might have changed their ways, but Bandar dismissed the idea as not possible. Rover consciousness was a thin layer over a deep-set mass of instinct.

  "They do not change,” he said.

  "Disease, perhaps?” the other suggested. “Perhaps this is how the lassitude affects them."

  "No,” Bandar said. He explained the Rovers’ reaction to illness, which was for the sick one to go away and either return cured or die alone. It was an instinct that protected the pack.

  They walked back to where Abbas sat in the shade of one of the carts. “You know a great deal about Rovers,” Wasselthorpe said.

  "Not much more than what is common knowledge."

  The young man showed a puzzled countenance. “Not common to me,” he said.

  Bandar wondered aloud about what other commonplaces were unknown to Wasselthorpe. Abbas pointed out that the question was a tautology; the young man could not be expected to know what else he didn't know.

  Bandar conceded the point. Provincial gentlemen were not required to know much beyond the folderols of fashion and the intricacies of social rank that separated one from one's neighbors. “Yet he wears the scarf of an Institute graduate."

  He saw a look pass between Abbas and Wasselthorpe. “Though only third-tier,” said the fat man.

  Bandar shrugged. Third-tier matriculates from country aristocracy could not be expected to shine. Still, his ignorance was sometimes startling. “What was your field of study again?” he asked.

  "Criminology."

  "A curious pursuit for an aristocrat,” Bandar said.

  Abbas chimed in with a fresh note: Wasselthorpe could quote lengthy passages from Bureau of Scrutiny manuals.

  Bandar thought this a peculiar distinction. “I am sure the ability would be useful to a Bureau employee, but even the most dedicated scroot needs to encompass a wider field of knowledge than official manuals and standing orders."

  Bandar saw Abbas give his student an odd look. “Perhaps the most dedicated scroot might not be aware of the need."

  "A troubling thought,” said Bandar, “for it would mean the man was narrow and strange, like those too tightly wound types who know everything about some limited pursuit but cannot manage a conversation about the weather."

  Wasselthorpe seemed stung. “What is wrong with feeling that one has a calling?” he said.

  The term gave Bandar a slight shiver. A call from the Commons was a summons that offered no return. “I remember a tale about a man who pursued a bright star. His eyes on its brilliance, he did not notice that his feet were leading him over a cliff."

  Wasselthorpe said that he was not familiar with that story. Bandar was not surprised, since it was unlikely to be found in a scroot manual.

  They had walked back to their cart. “I believe I must sleep,” Wasselthorpe said. Indeed, he seemed to Bandar to be almost weaving on his feet. The nonaut felt an upwelling of concern: a sudden, unaccountable need for sleep could indicate that the unconscious was exerting its influence.

  "I will be sure to remain awake until you are done,” he told the young man. Indeed, he meant to keep an eye on Wasselthorpe and rouse him back to consciousness if he showed signs of distressed dreaming.

  The young man thanked him and laid himself down in the shade of the cart. After a moment he rolled onto his stomach and regarded the Rovers who, their meal finished, were now lying asleep. He drew Bandar's attention to Yaffak, whose legs were twitching as if he dreamed of running, and wondered if there was any danger of his intruding into the Rover's dream, as he had into Bandar's.

  Bandar complimented him on his ambition, but assured him of the impenetrable Wall between Commonses of different species—though even as he said the words he thought about the Bololo and the hydromants of Gamza. There had been attempts to educate Rovers enough to have them explore their own Commons, but though some of the creatures had managed to get to the entry level of the Rover nosphere and even to view the archetypes in the prime arrondisement, they were too easily captured by the characteristic entities, and none made more than a few visits to the Rover Commons before being absorbed and lost.

  "Their psyches are too much closed around by instinct,” Banda
r said, “nor are their upper and lower brains well separated. Not far beneath Rover consciousness lies the Old Sea of presapience, where the great blind Worm swims eternally in pursuit of its own tail."

  Abbas opined that the young man might be a visionary. His offhand tone annoyed Bandar who snapped back that Wasselthorpe might also be a full-tilt loon, the terms being all too often interchangeable.

  While they argued, Wasselthorpe slipped into slumber, his cheek pressed against the trampled grass. Bandar sat with his back against the cartwheel and engaged in a desultory conversation with Erenti Abbas. But he found the fat man's cynicism difficult to take in sustained doses, and after a while their conversation lapsed and Abbas reposed himself to sleep, as had many of the passengers. A group of others, including the two couples from Bandar's cart, had gathered to chant ta-tumpa, ta-tey, Brond Halorn's voice rising above the common chorus. The handful of stewards who were accompanying the passengers on this leg of the journey sat in a ring, engaged in some game of chance that brought occasional shouts and hoots of celebration or schadenfreude.

  Time went by. Suddenly, Bandar saw the sleeping Yaffak give a mighty kick of one leg. The Rover's eyes flew open, so wide that Bandar could see a rim of white around each great brown iris. Yaffak sprang into a crouch, growling something Bandar could not make out. The sound awoke the other Rovers, who gazed at their enraged fellow without visible emotion.

  The behavior went against everything Bandar knew about the Rovers. Yaffak's display should have earned him either growls and bristling manes or lowered heads and turned-away eyes. The one reaction it shouldn't have brought was no reaction. But the rest still looked back at the snarling Rover with cold indifference, even as Yaffak stood erect, his ruff standing straight up and his teeth bared. He barked something that Bandar thought was, “Wrong!” before he suddenly turned and raced toward his team of shuggras. He leapt onto the back of one, yanked a strap that freed the eight from the wagon, and dug his heels into his mount and raced the whole team out into the long grass.