FSF Magazine, February 2007 Page 13

  The other Rovers had risen and for a moment Bandar thought they might go in pursuit. Then, as one, they visibly lost interest in the incident. They yelped at the stewards, who left their game and began to rouse the passengers to reboard the carts.

  "What of these?” the chief steward called to the Rovers in their own language, indicating Bandar's cart.

  "No seats,” said the largest of the Rovers, the one who ought to have been pack leader, by Bandar's lights, but who showed none of the traits of a dominant male. Still, when the chief steward sought to argue with him about stranding eight passengers, the Rover showed his teeth. The crewman backed away, his hands offering placatory gestures, and came to Bandar's cart.

  "I am sorry,” he said. “There is nothing to be done."

  Abbas had risen. “We cannot stay here,” he said. “Right now, a ravenous fand might be slavering over the prospect of tender human flesh. Or a woollyclaw might amble by, bundle us all into a ball of crushed limbs and torsos, then roll us off to gratify its whelps."

  "The air hangs heavy with the scent of angry Rover,” said the chief steward. “That will deter predators. But here is an energy pistol.” He produced the weapon from a pouch at his waist. “I advise you to remain in the cart until the Orgulon's gig arrives."

  "How long will that be?” Bandar asked.

  "It will rendezvous with the Rover carts at a place east of here, bringing a luncheon. I will summon it on my communicator, and instruct it to come and pick you up as soon as supplies have been unloaded. You will not be here long."

  Abbas said, “Can you leave a communicator with us?"

  "I have but the one,” the man said. Waving away further protestations and trailing assurances that all would soon be well, he went to where the impatient Rover leader waited, mounted the cart, and was gone.

  The stranded passengers reacted as their individual natures dictated: Ule Gazz was fatalistic, Pollus Ermatage cheerful, Abbas affecting a breezy unconcern beneath which Bandar thought to see a cool mind calculating risks and options. Flix's black mood darkened to become stygian. The lassitude sufferers were as inert as ever. It was only after cataloging these impressions that Bandar thought to take notice of the still sleeping Phlevas Wasselthorpe.

  "With all the fuss, he should have awakened,” he said to Abbas.

  The fat man knelt and shook the sleeper, turned him over on his back and lightly slapped one cheek. He thumbed up one eyelid and saw nothing but white, the eyeball rolled up into the head. Abbas slapped him again, harder. There was no response.

  "He has lapsed beyond sleep,” he said. “I think he may be comatose."

  "Try to rouse him,” Bandar said. “I will see what I can do."

  He closed his eyes and summoned the portal, went through at record speed and was soon descending the staircase to the first level. The road was empty, except for scintillating flashes made by passing dreamers. Bandar knew he would not find Wasselthorpe among them.

  He summoned up a nonaut mentalism that he had not used in all the years since he had been an undergraduate learning his portfolio of techniques. But before he exercised the procedure, he paused and took thought for a moment. In the Commons, it is always best to be quite clear as to what one is about, he reminded himself. If this brings me to Wasselthorpe, then it means that he and I are linked at some level below the obvious. And I must deal with that reality, whatever it portends.

  He focused his mind, chanted five rising tones, then two descenders, holding the last note. A ripple appeared in the air before him and he stepped through into a terrifying scene: the young man, clad again in his ancient Hero's garb, sword in hand, stood beside the great white Wall that marked the limit of the human commons. At his feet was a scar in the virtual earth, a scar that must have been a large gash shortly before, because even as Bandar took note of it the wound was healing.

  But none of those sights were what frightened Bandar. Grouped around Wasselthorpe, close enough to touch, were several pure archetypes—the Hero, the Wise Man, the Father, Mother and Child, the Destroyer, the Fool, and more—a jostling crowd of characteristic entities, any one of which, at this range, should have drawn the young man's consciousness into permanent, psychotic thralldom.

  Yet Wasselthorpe stood there, talking with them, uninsulated by thran, untouched by raw psychic power. Bandar immediately chanted the three, three and seven, seized Wasselthorpe by the arm, and pulled him through the gate. They arrived back in the first level of the Commons, where Bandar opened an emergency gate and brought them directly back to the waking world.

  Bandar felt a wave of dizziness come over him, but he fought it down and opened his eyes. Abbas was still kneeling over his student, methodically slapping his cheeks and calling upon him to come forth from whatever corner of his psyche he had tumbled into.

  Bandar reached down and restrained the fat man's hand. “It's all right,” he said, “I have brought him back."

  Wasselthorpe was sitting up, putting a hand to his reddened cheek.

  When Abbas told him that he had been deep in coma, the young man said, “I was in the Commons of the Rovers. I entered Yaffak's dream."

  "That cannot be so,” Bandar said. “They would have attacked you.” But even as he said it, he felt his innards chill and turn over.

  "I believe they perceived me as the Good Man, just as we sometimes encounter a friendly beast when we dream."

  "Nonsense!” Bandar said, though he knew it was not. “How could you get through the Wall? It cannot be breached."

  "I went by way of the Old Sea."

  Bandar vehemently denied Wasselthorpe's assertion. “Only death awaits the consciousness that enters the utoposphere. It hangs there, incapable of motion, until the Worm comes to devour it."

  But Wasselthorpe insisted. He said terrible things: that the archetypes had approached and had helped him, that they had given him power to cut through the floor of the Commons, swim through the gray nothingness then cut his way up into the Rover Commons. He had found Yaffak suffering, bound by some leash that went up into the sky. He had cut the tether with his Hero's sword and the Rover had raced off, free and joyous. Then he had swum back through the sea, had even seen the Worm coming, but had made it back through the opening before it could take him.

  "You are lying!” Bandar muttered through clenched teeth, even as a part of him said, He speaks the truth.

  Wasselthorpe casually mentioned that, from the Rover's side, the Wall appeared to be a hedge of black thorn bushes. Bandar wanted to clap his hands over his ears. That was a prime secret of the Institute, which no one outside its cloisters could know.

  Wasselthorpe burbled on: the Wise Man had shown the way; he had used the Hero's sword to cut a gash in the earth. Bandar knew it must be true; he had seen the healing wound.

  The nonaut felt as if his head might burst. The Commons was governed by rules. Thousands of nonauts had died, and tens of thousands had suffered, to delineate those rules. Then along came Wasselthorpe to pull the foundation stones from beneath a hundred millennia of established procedure. And yet, some part of Bandar said, This is how it must be.

  The events of the morning had left him no choice but to face the grim facts: Guth Bandar was bound to Phlevas Wasselthorpe, and together their fates were entwined with the history of the Dree. What any of this meant, he did not yet know, but when he had encountered the young man at the Wall, he had seen in his face the unmistakable expression of a Hero. And if the two of them were linked, Bandar must play the Helper. Yet Helpers frequently failed to survive the Hero's catharsis.

  "I have more to tell,” Wasselthorpe said.

  "Well, you would, wouldn't you?” Bandar snapped. “Spare me."

  "I believe we must hear him,” Abbas said. “It might illuminate the events that happened while he was wandering in dreams."

  "What happened?” Wasselthorpe said.

  Abbas drew his attention to the absence of the Rover carts and their passengers and stewards. He briefly recounted Y
affak's flight and the abandonment of their party. “The steward left us a weapon to defend ourselves against wild beasts.

  "Or against Yaffak,” said Bandar, “who seems to have gone insane."

  "Yaffak will not do us harm,” Wasselthorpe said, rising to his feet. “I freed him from a hateful bondage."

  He told again the tale of how he had sawed through the leash that tied the dreaming Rover and wanted Bandar to tell him its meaning. But Bandar was beyond answering questions. He wished he had never heard of Phlevas Wasselthorpe and his catalog of impossibilities, so innocently recounted.

  Bandar turned his back and looked away. But his outward composure belied his inner turmoil. Somewhere inside him a voice was speaking softly, telling him to be of help. He sought to close his mind against it.

  Abbas took charge. “We must pull the cart into the center of the clearing and get aboard. Right now we are an easy meal for any passing fand.” He summoned the chanters and Flix, now glowering ever more deeply, and they did as he directed.

  Once aboard, the fat man flourished the energy pistol and asked if anyone was competent in its use. Bandar was surprised when Wasselthorpe took the weapon, expertly stripped and reassembled it, then placed it under the seat for safety's sake. The nonaut would not have thought that a provincial lordling, for all his interest in criminology, could have handled a weapon with such aplomb.

  In the close confines of the stationary cart, the passengers fell to squabbling. Ule Gazz wished all to chant; she felt her chuffe swelling. Wasselthorpe rejected the concept of chuffe and sought to explore his alleged meeting with Yaffak in the Rover Commons, but Bandar refused to be drawn. Nor would he chant. His rebuff to Gazz caused her to disparage the relevance of the nosphere compared to the Lho-tso enlightenment. That caused Bandar to snap at her. Tempers were heating when Wasselthorpe suddenly made a startling announcement.

  "Chuffe is entirely an illusion,” he said. “Father Olwyn is in reality the notorious confidence trickster Horslan Gebbling, who will be taken into custody the moment my partner and I encounter him."

  Ule Gazz greeted this assertion with disdain, at which Wasselthorpe declared that he and Abbas were not what they appeared to be. Instead, they were undercover agents of the Bureau of Scrutiny, sent on the cruise to apprehend Gebbling.

  The others demanded proof. Wasselthorpe and Abbas dug within their clothing and produced official scroot plaques. Bandar squinted at each and learned that Wasselthorpe's true name was Baro Harkless, while Abbas was named Luff Imbry. Both held the rank of agent-ordinary.

  Hence the fascination with criminal investigation, thought Bandar. Several more thoughts flitted rapidly through his mind, but the one he seized in passing was: “Your plaques allow you to call for assistance."

  "We are ordered to remain incommunicado until we secure an arrest,” said Harkless/Wasselthorpe.

  His answer set off a new round of altercation that ended only when Flix spoke up from her corner seat to alert them to the imminent arrival of the Orgulon's gig, flying in from the east.

  * * * *

  The sight of their rescue should have brought Bandar relief. Instead he dismounted from the cart with a glum sense of foreboding. His nonaut's sensibilities were aroused and he felt as if he were not in the waking world but in a high-classification Event. Worse, it was that part of an Event's cycle when the action begins to flow rapidly toward the climax.

  The gig dropped down, piloted by the landship's first officer, whose name Bandar had not acquired. Beside him was Raina Haj. The vehicle settled at the edge of the clearing and the passengers rushed from the cart to greet it, the lassitude sufferers towed on their come-alongs. Flix came last, her hands clasped behind her back.

  Haj dismounted and lowered the aircraft's rear gate while the first officer remained at the controls. Bandar saw Harkless (he supposed he might as well adjust to the fellow's name) go to confer with the security officer, who seemed to be unimpressed with whatever the agent-ordinary told her.

  Haj waved the stranded party to board the gig. Something was moving out in the grass, she said. The passengers lined up, with Flix at the tail of the queue.

  "Are we going back to the Orgulon?” she asked.

  Haj said they were not. They would be taken to a temporary camp just beyond the immense stone plateau known as the Monument, where tents and tables were laid on for a luncheon. Father Olwyn was expected to appear and offer something called “the inculcation.” The Orgulon had been delivering equipment to the brillion mines at nearby Victor and would rendezvous with the passengers by nightfall.

  Flix now advanced another agenda. She demanded to bypass the ceremony and be flown to Victor so she could arrange passage home.

  "That is not a matter for you to decide,” Haj told her.

  Again Flix differed, but instead of offering a fresh argument, she produced the energy pistol Harkless had left in the cart. She pointed it in an unsteady two-handed grip at Raina Haj.

  Now Flix looked to the first officer, who had remained in the gig's operator's seat. She addressed him by his given name and said, “Get her weapon."

  The man did as he was ordered, but the smirk on his face told Bandar that there was more of a relationship between him and the young woman than they had hitherto revealed. The officer came at Haj from the rear and relieved her of her sidearm. Then he circled around the passengers to stand beside Flix, his pistol leveled at all and sundry.

  "Move away from the aircraft,” he told them.

  Raina Haj spoke up, addressing Flix. “This is not necessary,” she said.

  The first officer told her to shut up, but Haj spoke on, telling Flix, “I know you didn't kill him."

  "I told you it was an accident,” Flix said.

  "No, not an accident,” Haj said.

  "Shut up,” the first officer repeated, aiming his weapon at Haj. Bandar saw his thumb extend toward the discharge stud, but Flix laid a hand on his arm and pushed it down.

  "What are you trying to say?” she asked Haj.

  "Lies,” the man with the weapon said.

  But Flix wanted to hear what the security officer had to say. She moved off a couple of steps and now her energy weapon swung halfway from Haj to the other officer.

  The man did not delay a moment. A bright flash dazzled Bandar's eyes and when his vision cleared Flix was face down on the grass, a smoking hole burned through her torso.

  Someone screamed and Bandar stared with both fascination and fright at the young woman's corpse. It took him a long moment to recover his equilibrium. But the murderer had remained calm; the energy pistol did not waver in his hand as he stepped back to give himself room should they try to rush him. Bandar was bemused to think that he had seen just such a look on the faces of villains many times in the Commons, though he had always done so from within the protection of a thran.

  "So you know,” the officer said, addressing Haj.

  "Yes."

  The pistol swung toward her. “Well, then."

  Now Harkless spoke up. “How are you going to explain it?"

  Bandar could have predicted it. The Hero would always seek to engage the villain in talk, delaying the killing stroke while he worked out some tactic to save the day. But the man with the weapon barely glanced at Harkless, and instead spoke to Haj: he would blame the killings on the unstable Flix's having gone berserk when the gig landed, even wounding him before he was able to seize Haj's pistol and dispatch her.

  Bandar watched Harkless as the killer spoke. Some silent signal passed between the young agent and his plump partner. The undercover scroots were going to try something. Bandar felt a rising urge to help. He wanted to fight it, but found that his will to do so was fading. He gauged the distance between him and the man with the gun, wondering how fast his old legs would allow him to close the distance.

  Now the young agent was saying something about a forgotten witness. The officer was still keeping his eye on Haj, the known danger. Bandar realized that the killer must see
Harkless as only a feckless young lordling, afflicted by the lassitude. This might work, he thought, then realized with an inner start that the opinion had come not from his usual inner critic, but from a new source: the Helper was rising in him.

  Bandar was struck by a sense of irreality, as if he were observing an Event or Situation in the nosphere. He saw again the Hero in the young agent's stark expression and now it came to him the particular myth that featured a Hero in a wolf pelt and winged helmet: it told of a dawn-time Hero who, after defeating a man-devouring monster, dove deep into a frigid lake to confront the troll's even more powerful mother. And in that lake, the Hero died.

  He is not the Hero Triumphant, Bandar thought. He is the Hero Sacrificial. His dynamic ends with his dying to save those he protects.

  Harkless was telling the man that Yaffak had not gone far, that the Rover was what they had seen moving in the grass as they brought the gig down, and was hearing and seeing all.

  Not bad, Bandar thought. Simple, believable. Enough to make the man stop and think.

  But when Harkless pointed to draw the officer's attention, the man did not fall for the ruse. Bandar sighed. In real life, I suppose these things don't work as well, he thought. He saw Harkless's muscles tense for whatever he was going to try and readied himself to join in the rush.

  Harkless was at least partially in thrall to the Hero Sacrificial, but Bandar did not see in his aspect the look of one who expects to die. His face wore the assurance of one who intends to defeat an enemy, then march on to fresh challenges.

  The murderer showed the same confidence. But his conviction was fortified by his possession of an energy pistol and a demonstrated capacity to use it.

  His thumb slid toward the firing stud.

  —Continued next issue.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Plumage From Pegasus: Our Feynman Who Art in Heaven... by Paul Di Filippo

  "[Ettore Majorana's] promising career was cut short with his sudden disappearance at the age of 31 during a boat trip between Palermo and Naples in Italy. His body was never found despite several investigations, and opinion is divided on whether he committed suicide, was kidnapped, or changed his identity and started a new life.