FSF Magazine, February 2007 Page 9

  Close up, the Orgulon was enormous. The side that lay by the dock was a wall of lustrous wood, pierced by windows large and small, each bordered by polished metal. The vessel's body was a great oblong with rounded ends, resting on a network of shock-absorbing cylinders that connected it to an eight-axled chassis from which extended a score of huge rubber wheels. Bandar presented his invitation to a security officer who stood at the base of the gangplank that sloped up to an upper deck. She consulted a list and found his name, then gave him a searching look.

  "The passengers are all traveling in pairs,” she said, “one suffering from the lassitude and one to help the afflicted. Why are you alone?"

  Bandar had prepared a story. “My brother has the disease but is too ill to travel. I came to evaluate the alleged cure."

  She made a noncommittal noise and named a deck and cabin number. He went aboard and followed signs to his appointed quarters. There he stowed his bag before reposing upon the sleeping pallet and allowing its systems to restore his energies. After a while, he felt motion as the Orgulon left the dock and slowly moved out onto the Swept. A little later a steward tapped on his door and announced that the passengers were summoned to dinner.

  The easiest route to the dining salon took Bandar across a spacious promenade deck that covered most of the landship's upper surface, except for raised platforms fore and aft on which stood the great vertical pylons whose rotating vanes stole from the ever-blowing wind the ship's motive power. He would have stopped to watch their operation and to look out across the prairie to where great cloud formations moved in the far distance like mobile mountains, but he noticed Abbas and Wasselthorpe near the railing to one side. The older man's appearance had altered—his face had taken on a different shape and his skin had noticeably darkened. Unconventionality was not uncommon among the aristocracy, Bandar knew. He wondered if the pair were competing in one of those odd contests that members of the upper strata indulged in as recreation, questing after some list of unlikely objects which might include a landship captain's cap. He decided that the two were, at least, strange, and resolved to stay clear of them.

  Immediately below the promenade deck, the Orgulon's dining area echoed the Swept in giving an impression of vast openness. It stretched from one side of the vessel to the other, its paneled walls broken by great round windows that looked out on the now night-shaded grasslands and its glistening wooden floor covered by large circular tables draped in snowy cloth and aglitter with crystal and cutlery. Bandar found that he was assigned to a certain seat and was relieved to discover that it was a good distance from Abbas and Wasselthorpe.

  Others were already seated at his table and Bandar made appropriate gestures of head and hands to acknowledge them. They seemed a heterogeneous mix, varied in ages, social ranks and genders, their only commonality that they came in pairs and one member of each couple was in some stage of the lassitude.

  Across from Bandar a large woman exercised unchallenged control of whatever conversation had preceded his arrival. She wore swathes of some frilled material, with a braided necklace of precious metal around her wattled neck and a thick scattering of blue-fire gems in her upswept white hair. Her tone bespoke a habit of being listened to. Her apparent spouse, a stocky fellow with neck and cheeks discolored by a dark birthmark, sat dull-eyed to her left. His face was frozen by the lassitude's paralysis but Bandar suspected that even in his prime he would seldom have dared to interrupt the ceaseless torrent of her opinions.

  "We will see wonders,” she declared as Bandar took his seat. “I am sure of it.” She fixed the nonaut with a bellicose glare and continued, “You have the look of a skeptic. Don't trouble to deny it. I never err in my assessments of character. It is a gift."

  "A gift you are clearly happy to share,” Bandar said, “even with complete strangers who have demonstrated no desire to receive it."

  "An aptitude for seeing the truth obliges one to speak it,” the woman said. “I am Brond Halorn,” she said. “This is my spouse, Bleban."

  Bandar named himself.

  "Why are you unaccompanied?"

  He told her the tale of a brother.

  "So there it is,” she said, looking around the table. “He is indeed a skeptic, else he would have brought his poor brother along to receive Father Olwyn's blessing.” She concluded her remark with a wave of a beringed hand that signified that all had turned out precisely as she had predicted. Bandar recognized a habitual gesture.

  He defended himself. “I am no more skeptical than most,” he said. “I can be convinced of the unlikely, even the seemingly impossible, though the proof need be unequivocal."

  A motion of her hand indicated that his arguments were too vapid to merit an answer. This movement Bandar also took as part of her characteristic repertoire.

  "You will see,” she said, then resumed her address to the table in general. Bandar offered a gesture of his own, though he did so beneath the lip of the table, out of her line of sight. A few moments later, stewards began to bring in the first course: a jellied salad studded with morsels of fungus that had a unique flavor, like aromatic smoke. Bandar enjoyed the dish but the several more that followed were all built around the same unusual ingredient, and the taste began to cloy. A steward informed him that it was a delicacy called “truffles of the Swept."

  When the last course was eaten and the servers were clearing away, Brond Halorn favored the table with more of her opinions. Bandar chose not to listen and instead ruminated on his plans to measure gravitational fluxes. But her voice and his thoughts were both soon interrupted by the sound of a gong that drew all attention to a dais at one end of the salon where a cone of light now shone down from the ceiling. A moment of expectation passed, then the beam of illumination filled with swirls of moving color that resolved into a projection of a slight man with a beatific expression.

  The simulacrum introduced himself as Father Olwyn and welcomed the passengers. He announced a program that recommended study and action as the Orgulon traveled the Swept, preparing the travelers for a “ceremony of inculcation” leading to “a wondrous transformation."

  Bandar sighed and lowered his eyes, placing the fingertips of one hand to the center of his brow. The fellow's discourse rang of a fraudster's patter. He looked away from the projected image, to find himself the object of a glare from Brond Halorn that would doubtless have wondrously transformed him into some species of small, squeaking vermin, had she but the power. He blinked and turned his gaze back to the simulacrum.

  Father Olwyn's unseeing eyes were now raised to the ceiling and he was assuring the passengers that he knew what it was to suffer the lassitude; he had borne the affliction himself. After a suitably dramatic pause, he then announced, “But I was healed."

  A great hush, that of an expectant crowd that dares not even breathe, filled the salon. Then the image said, “As you will be healed,” and Bandar heard a mass sigh of released breath, and a low moan from Brond Halorn.

  Olwyn finished by instructing the passengers in a four-syllable mantra—fah, sey, opah—that he assured them would “open the first door” in the process of healing. Bandar knew more than most about the effects of chants and mantras, and was confident that this one would do no more than exercise the jaws of those passengers, unaffected by the lassitude, who could still move theirs.

  The room took up the chant. The white-haired woman's voice rose above the rest and her loud conviction drew her table mates—though not Bandar—into the sound. Their volume encouraged others and soon the mantra filled the room, accompanied by hands slapping tables and heels thudding against the floor.

  Bandar looked about him and saw a wide range of emotions—hope, resignation, embarrassment, cynicism, fervor—as the passengers responded to the dynamics of their own psyches. He saw Phlevas Wasselthorpe regarding him with interest; then the young man's eyes moved away.

  The chanting went on and on, and Bandar saw many whose eyes glazed and lost focus, though when he looked to Halorn he saw
that she had been waiting for his gaze to come her way. She continued to chant “fah, sey, opah!” in an emphatic voice, while her hand made peremptory motions, palm up and fingers tight against each other, that summoned Bandar to join the chorus. He frowned, just as the projected Olwyn lifted his hands and cried, “Enough!"

  Silence fell, broken only by Brond Halorn's throaty voice, edging on the hysterical, chanting the mantra twice more before a man seated to her right nudged her. Olwyn declared that he expected some of them to feel already the effect of the mantra, which he claimed would generate in them a numinous attribute he called “chuffe."

  "Yes!” said Brond Halorn, eyes afire. She could indeed feel chuffe rising within her.

  Olwyn made some final remarks about the gravitational peculiarities of the Swept being conducive to the generating of chuffe and recommended more chanting and meditation. Then his image disappeared.

  A hubbub of voices rose as the passengers responded as their natures dictated to the message and its bearer. At Bandar's table, Brond Halorn again took up the chant and a few others around the room did likewise. Bandar avoided her accusatory gaze by turning in his seat to survey the salon. Then someone shouted, “Look!” and he glanced about until he saw that all eyes in the room had been drawn to the table where Erenti Abbas and Phlevas Wasselthorpe sat.

  But it was not the pair from the balloon-tram who were the object of the crowd's attention. Instead it was a slim young woman whose rigidity of expression argued that she was in the grip of the lassitude. She had risen to her feet, while her apparent companion, a ruddy-faced man with dark hair in a complex coiffure, looked up at her, astonished.

  Her face was stiff with early-stage lassitude, but her slight body was quivering. She leaned forward, both hands on the tablecloth, looking down at the dark-haired man; then Bandar saw her mouth open as if to yawn. Her shivering stopped as she raised both hands to her cheeks and kneaded the muscles of her jaw.

  "I can talk,” she said.

  Her companion rose and took her in his arms, his eyes glistening. They sat down together and held each other as the room filled with a rising tide of voices, one current of which was the chant of fah, sey, opah!

  Bandar lost his view of the objects of all this attention as people rose to their feet, some standing on their chairs, to see what would happen next. Moments later, he heard the booming voice of a ship's officer restoring order. Stewards urged passengers to retake their seats, then produced a selection of liqueurs and essences.

  Bandar chose a tincture of Red Abandon, a fiery liquor that had been a favorite in his long-ago days as an Institute undergraduate. He sipped it and avoided eye contact with anyone as the room settled. The circumstances were too pat, the timing highly suspect: the afflicted and those who cared for them had been presented with a meaningless mantra, then moments after it was chanted someone was visited by a miraculous cure. As a nonaut, he had seen at first hand the power of myth and supposition, and he had no doubt that he had just witnessed a contrived performance.

  Now the dark-haired man was making some kind of speech that Bandar couldn't have heard, even if he'd cared to listen, because the white-haired virago across the table was chanting fah, sey, opah in a guttural undertone. Then the young woman's companion escorted her out of the salon through a passageway that led to the promenade deck.

  Some of the passengers were enthused by what they had seen. Others expressed doubts. Bandar sipped his liqueur, then ordered another. He took no part in the debates that now broke out around him, though to himself he thought, The sick should not be subjected to such hard-hearted shenanigans. He did not know how Father Olwyn would gain from flim-flammery, but Bandar would have bet a month's emporium receipts that this entire expedition was aimed at transferring the contents of someone's coffers to someone else's.

  "Well, skeptic,” said the white-haired woman, “what do you make of that?"

  Bandar's only answer was a slight lift and subsidence of one shoulder, which earned him a single syllable delivered in a harsh tone followed by Brond Halorn's observations, addressed to no one in particular, concerning rock-headedness and narrow-mindedness among those whose cerebral equipment was obviously not well connected to their visual apparatus. “They cannot see what they will not understand,” she concluded.

  Bandar was irked, and two Red Abandons had now done their work. “I saw and I understood all too well,” he said. “Indeed, better than those who see only what they hope to see."

  His show of resistance provoked a tirade of invective. When Bandar tried to correct her, his efforts were met with a renewed chant of fah, sey, opah, accompanied by rhythmic hand clapping. His glass empty, he turned away to seek a steward and while his third installment of Red Abandon was being poured, he saw Phlevas Wasselthorpe making his way among the tables. Bandar downed the liqueur in one gulp, and when his eyes stopped watering he noticed that the fellow was now quite near. Relieved of any trepidation by the effects of the drink, he rose and greeted him, but instead of answering, the young man gestured to his lips and jaw and made wordless sounds.

  "You have the lassitude?” Bandar said and felt an inchoate urge to help the odd young fellow.

  Wasselthorpe spread his hands in a fatalistic gesture. His mentor, Abbas, now joined them, and told Bandar that the disease was in its early stage. “It comes and goes."

  Bandar offered his sympathy.

  The young man grunted something that his older companion apparently understood. Abbas relayed the information to Bandar. “My young friend wonders if you would tell him more about the Commons. It has piqued his interest."

  Bandar saw no reason not to. If Wasselthorpe was destined to be imprisoned in his own paralyzed flesh until released by an early death, it would be a kindness to show him the Commons, providing Bandar guided him only to its gentler Locations. He offered to meet them out on deck after he had changed his garments; Brond Halorn's manner of countering opposition had left his shirt front dampened by her saliva.

  A short time later he joined them on the lighted promenade deck and they strolled toward the forecastle where the windvanes rotated. Abbas asked him what he thought of Father Olwyn's promises.

  Bandar was blunt. “Even if I suffered from the lassitude, I would be deeply skeptical of any who claimed a mystic cure."

  The conversation turned to the Commons. Now that the immediate effects of Red Abandon were fading, Bandar found himself divided about taking Wasselthorpe into the Commons. Either the young man possessed an uncanny ability to focus his mind or he was a latent psychotic. Bandar expressed his concerns in candid language. Erenti Abbas vouched for the young man's sanity and declared him to be a prodigy when it came to intensity of concentration.

  Bandar acceded to the request. In his first years at the Institute, he had been counted a rare talent. Perhaps he was about to assist one who would become a renowned nonaut—if the lassitude didn't kill him. He led the pair to where the promenade deck met the raised forecastle. He had Wasselthorpe sit cross-legged, back against the bulkhead, hands folded in his lap. Bandar sat opposite him, knee to knee, the traditional teaching posture.

  The lassitude had stilled Wasselthorpe's lips and tongue but he could make pure notes. Bandar bade him close his eyes and voice the tones with him. “When the portal appears, tell me. I will talk you through it."

  They began with the thran they had used on the balloon-tram. Scarcely more than a moment passed before Wasselthorpe grunted to show that he had achieved a vision of the door behind which shone a golden light. Bandar spoke softly, guiding him through the tones that opened the door, warning him to wait beyond the threshold.

  Wasselthorpe sang the tones, pitch perfect, then grunted again. Bandar had to exert his maximum effort to form his own portal and open it. “Wait,” he said, “for the light to fade. More important, allow me to catch up."

  The young man had gone through like a fourth-level adept. Bandar sought for him in the glow and soon had a sense of his nearness. Here the lass
itude did not affect Wasselthorpe's speech, and his voice came to the nonaut clearly. “Where am I?"

  "Nowhere yet,” said Bandar. “Just wait."

  After a while, he asked Wasselthorpe, “Now where are you?"

  The young man said he was in his boyhood home, looking out a window. Something about the scene outside disturbed him, so Bandar told him to think instead of the place where he had been most secure and happy. Wasselthorpe immediately announced that the scene had shifted to the room where he had spent much of his youth. When Bandar had him describe the setting, they soon found the anomaly: a dark mirror that should not have been in the back of the wardrobe. In its depths was a reflection that troubled the young man.

  Bandar urged him not to fear his Shadow and to step boldly through it. Here was the moment when their expedition might easily have ended; it took discipline acquired through rigorous practice before most apprentice nonauts could face their own rejected attributes; some never could manage it and left the Institute for other pursuits. Yet it did not surprise Bandar that, moments later, Wasselthorpe announced he was through the mirror and descending a hillside path that led to a tarn of dark water.

  "Go down the path,” Bandar said, and when he reached the water, the nonaut told him to dive in. Then he hurried to descend his own staircase down to the road that led into the outer arrondisement of the Commons. He found an almost transparent, two-dimensional version of Wasselthorpe standing between the walls, looking about with wonder.

  He wanted to know where he had come to. Bandar explained, then he touched Wasselthorpe's arm, performing a nonaut mentalism, and the young man's image solidified into three dimensions. Now they were linked for the duration of their stay in the Commons, so Bandar did not have to worry about losing him among the thousands of dreamers that invisibly surrounded them. He was shocked when the young man said that he was aware of others passing by, seeing them as motes of light in the corners of his vision. That was an ability that nonauts worked years to acquire.