Black Brillion

by Matthew Hughes

  “What do you think that something might be?” Bandar was asking him. The historian had backed away a small distance.

  Baro let the answer come of its own. “I must search.”

  “Search for what? Something nice, like treasure? Or something with teeth and an insatiable appetite?”

  This time no answer came. “I will know it when I see it,” was all Baro could say.

  “Oh, my,” said Bandar. He put his hands up to cover his eyes for a moment, then said, “All right. One thing I know is that it does no good to argue with a Hero. But please allow me to shape this adventure so that we stand the best chance of surviving it.”

  “I will follow your advice,” Baro said.

  The historian said, “Look around and tell me if there is anything that draws your attention.”

  Baro did so and immediately found that he was interested in the woods beyond the field.

  “Very well,” said Bandar, “we will approach them. But let me lead.”

  The stone wall had become a low hedge and as they crossed the field between them and the woods the vegetation could not seem to settle on a fixed type. They passed under the trees that began as trembling birches but soon became dark evergreens then blasted oaks, their branches sooty and torn. “Stop,” Bandar said.

  Baro wanted to press on. He knew that there was something nearby he needed to see, but the fear apparent in every line of the historian’s body persuaded him to stand still.

  “The Commons,” the man said, “is a construct of the common mind. The laws of space and time do not apply here. The space you think you see is not space, and the time you think is passing is not time.

  “Locations that seem far apart may in fact be adjacent, and places that seem contiguous are continents apart. Times are also interposed and intraposed upon and within themselves, and the complexity of these phenomena is also compounded by the fact that many times are self-contained.”

  “I do not understand,” said Baro.

  “I know,” said Bandar. “This is what frightens me. Let me put it this way: if you turn left and take three steps you will be in the midst of the Battle of Uddra’s Marsh, which is an archetypical massacre. Once in the battle, it would be very difficult for you to find the way out before you were ‘killed’ although every time you ‘died’ you would come back again for the next iteration of the battle, it being continuous and—since its time duration is confined to a single day—eternal.”

  “You’re saying I would be trapped forever.”

  “Just like the brave explorers who became stuck there during the many thousands of years it took to establish the definitive map of the noösphere.”

  “You mean they are still there?”

  “There is nowhere else for them to be,” Bandar said. “By the time the ingresses and exits were reliably located, their corporeal bodies were dust. In any case, the explorers were absorbed into archetypical figures peculiar to that battle—idiomatic entities, we call them—and are now inseparable.”

  “Left and three steps,” said Baro. He was standing very still now. “What happens if I go three paces to my right?”

  “I am not sure,” said the historian. “Let me check.” He hummed a sequence of tones and a sphere twice the size of his head appeared in the air before him. The globe was densely packed with spots of light of varying diameters and intensities, interconnected by solid, dotted, and wavy lines of different colors and thicknesses. Bandar traced one with a finger and said, “You would be at the building of the Tomb of Han-ratt, in other words a slave under an autocrat’s lash.”

  Baro stood even more still.

  “However,” said the historian, “I could get you out of that.”

  Baro let out a relieved breath, but then the man said, “Of course, the two seconds it would take me to follow you in would be”—he calculated on his nngers—“eighteen years, four months, and a fortnight from your perspective.”

  Baro consulted his inner self and found, to his surprise, that he nonetheless needed to go farther into the wood, which was now a towering stand of fragrant deodars. He communicated his finding to Bandar.

  “All right,” said the historian, in a tone that contradicted the literal meaning of the words, “indicate the direction you want to travel.”

  Baro closed his eyes and let his sword arm rise. When he opened them he saw that the point of the weapon was indicating a direction just over the other man’s left shoulder. Bandar turned to follow the line of the blade, then consulted the sphere. “How far, do you think?” he said.

  “Not far,” said Baro. “It seems very close.”

  The noönaut examined the globe from another angle, then squinted along the indicated line of travel again. “Two steps and a stumble will have us at the adit of a Class Three Event.”

  The historian examined the glowing spots and lines further and said, “Curious.”

  Baro waited, but the man continued to regard the display. Finally the agent said, “What is curious?”

  Bandar spoke three descending tones and the sphere imploded to a pinpoint and disappeared. “Just that here we are out on the Swept, which originated in the war to repel the Dree, and you have a sudden strong urge to visit the corresponding Event that that conflict created in the Commons.”

  “Is it perhaps a coincidence?” Baro said.

  “Well of course it’s a coincidence,” said the historian.

  Baro sighed in relief once more. “Then there’s no need to worry.”

  “There is every need to worry,” said the noönaut. “In the waking world a coincidence is by definition a random, meaningless juxtaposition of events. In the Commons, the coincidence is the most meaningful of occurrences. It is the vastly powerful force that ties one thing to another. Indeed, coincidences connect everything to everything.”

  “I understand that I should be frightened,” said Baro, “yet I am not. I must go there.” He pointed the sword again. “Will I die?”

  Bandar shook his head. “No,” he said. “In truth, I am somewhat relieved. There are much worse Events. But you must let me direct you.”

  “I will.”

  The historian pushed down the young man’s sword arm and took a grip on the elbow. “We will move forward while sounding these tones”—he voiced the notes, then listened to hear Baro repeat them; again it was a song that reminded Baro of a childhood ditty, about a farmer and some cheese—“which will keep us undetected by the idiomatic entities. Stay beside me at all times and do not cease the sounds. If the id-iomatics become aware of us they will treat us as themselves.”

  “How bad would that be?” Baro said.

  “It was a particularly horrid war,” Bandar said. “The Dree were a hive species. Each hive was one entity, telepathically and pheromonically connected. They also used cognitive force to compel other species to slave for them, both as workers and as warriors.”

  “Warriors?”

  “Fighting was what they lived for. It was one of the key determinants of status among the hives, and status was of overreaching importance to the Dree. Each entity would regularly send out its members and its slaves to engage in ritual combat with those of other hives. Fortunately, their style of battle undid them in the end.”

  “How so?” said Baro.

  “The sole purpose of Dree combat was to capture members of the enemy forces. These would be trussed and taken back to their captors’ hive where they would be subjected to tortures both subtle and gross. The Dree were able to experience the emotions and sensory experiences of others, as you and I are able to taste food or scent essences.

  “So when they deployed for battle, their strategy was always to surround and isolate small groups and individuals that could be taken home. This was not a useful battle plan against forces that were organized to exterminate them.”

  “I am surprised they ever developed the means for traveling space,” Baro said. “They do not sound very imaginative.”

  “They left their home world by ac
cident,” Bandar said. He explained that the Dree inhabited a minor planet in an isolated system, a great distance past the last few stars of the Spray, way out in the Back Beyond. They were discovered late and the first xenologists who arrived to study them did not know how intensely telepathic they were.

  The scientists were a mixed group comprising several ultraterrene species as well as a human. They wore devices that were intended to mask them from detection by sight, sound, or scent and even by most telepathic receptors, but the Dree had a remarkable acuity. The team ventured into an underground warren and were immediately taken. Their captors treated them as rare delicacies, wringing novel “tastes” from their terror and agony.

  When telepaths are involved, secrets are not secrets for long. The Dree discovered the location of the team’s hidden ship and forced the scientists to take a raiding party to the nearest world, where they not only captured more “delicacies,” but more ships.

  Besides battle, the other test of status among the Dree was the honor to be won by giving away rich gifts to other hives. The recipients of the largesse were not grateful, but shamed. Their dishonor motivated them to give even greater wealth in return. Back from the first raid, the Dree hive gave away ships and captives who could fly them; the recipients swarmed into space to find new ships, these having now become the currency of respect among the hives.

  Horror descended upon the scattered worlds at the end of the Spray, horror that touched down only to multiply exponentially. The Dree had been bottled up on their own planet for so long that they had quite filled it. Finding whole worlds of virgin territory—to the Dree mind that was any territory that did not already have a Dree hive in residence—the invaders followed up the initial raids by sending ships laden with eggs and slaves to tend them. Fortunately, some of the species along the galactic arm, including humans on a number of planets, had not yet given up the arts of conflict. Fleets formed and armies mobilized. First the Dree were stopped, then they were rolled back, then they were expunged.

  It was not a long war, as galactic wars go. The enemy, with no aim of combat other than to capture opponents for later enjoyment, had no strategies for wars of extermination and no weapons for comprehensive eradication. The Dree were fast breeders, but not fast enough to replace their losses.

  Earth was one of the last worlds invaded. The Dree and their slaves were confined to their beachhead, then the pocket closed in on them and they were slaughtered.

  “No one wanted to go into the labyrinth of tunnels the invaders had dug for themselves,” Bandar told Baro. “In confined quarters, telepathic warriors with short-range weapons can be devastating. A gravitational device originally designed for aggregating asteroids into useful sizes was brought down from space and its energies directed at the Dree redoubt.

  “The Swept and its gravitational anomalies are the result. Beneath our feet are the compressed and corpse-choked tunnels of the Dree. That is, beneath our feet in the waking world; here in the noösphere, there is nothing beneath us but the Old Sea.”

  “The Old Sea?” said Baro.

  “I told you to think of the Commons as a sphere. At the core of the sphere is the age-old nothingness that prevailed before consciousness emerged on our world. It is a featureless expanse through which a great blind worm swims across eternity, endlessly seeking its own tail and swallowing anything that falls into its path.”

  Even in the tranquility of the ever-changing Commons forest, Baro shivered.

  “Are you sure you want to go on with this?” asked Bandar. “For myself, I had planned a perfectly ordinary dream.”

  The urge had not left Baro. He was still called in the direction he had identified.

  “Very well,” said the noönaut, “but do not stop chanting. If you need to speak to me, hold up your hand and I will increase the volume of my intoning to cover us both. But be brief. If I need to speak to you, I will move my fingers thus and so to signal you to become louder. Is this clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then begin.”

  Baro voiced the first notes and Bandar joined him. There were two sequences of twelve notes each; as they completed the first sequence and went on to the second, something like a vertical ripple appeared in the air in the direction he had pointed. They walked toward it at a measured pace, Bandar’s grip firm on Baro’s arm. The ripple became a wave that opened into a fissure and Baro found himself stepping into a dark land under a sky bright with stars.

  Over their heads a wind suffled through cottonwoods. They emerged from the trees to hear the sound of a stream not far away. They were on a gentle swell of land and below them Baro made out the shape of a darkened house. As he looked at it, the building exploded in a flash of purple light and there were shouts and a rush of many booted feet, thudding through the darkness.

  From the left, Baro heard other sounds, a dry chittering accompanied by a creaking that put him in mind of leather garments on a cold day. Without thinking, he stopped intoning to listen more closely. Immediately, a bolt of green energy sizzled from their left and struck the ground at their feet. Acrid smoke stung Baro’s eyes and nose and he sneezed. Guth Bandar made a squeaking noise and began to chant more loudly, his fingers digging into Baro’s arm. The young man swiftly took up his part of the song.

  The historian waggled his fingers before Baro’s eyes and the agent sang louder. “I told you, we are entering an Event that exemplifies a horrific war—not the war itself, where you might expect long periods of inaction punctuated by frenzies of violence, but the essence of the conflict. So do not expect to find yourself in a lull—there are no such intervals. Whatever happens, you must keep chanting.”

  They moved down the slope, crossed the stream, and went out onto a wide pasture. Over the tones, Baro heard a distant rumble and saw coming toward them a squadron of dark, bulky shapes that resolved into squat machines cushioned by gravity obviators, their upper surfaces bulging with the snouts of intensifiers and tumble-thrusts that hurled beams and fields of destructive energies at the slope. Above them something immense thrummed through the upper air, disgorging flights of slim, fast-moving aircraft that darted down, then up again, leaving thunder and blinding flashes of white and blue light at the lowest points of their arcs.

  Bandar pulled Baro farther out onto the flat, dodging a monstrous battle-car that rumbled past them. When it was gone, the historian indicated that Baro should increase his volume.

  “This is the part of the final battle they called the ‘hemming,”’ Bandar said. “The Dree have been thrust back into a range of hills, the stumps of extinct volcanoes, which they have dug out and fortified. Around it is a wide wasteland of lifeless cities, towns, and farms, their inhabitants dead or enslaved.

  “Soon it will be decided that to go in after the invaders will cost countless more lives, with no guarantee that all the enemy will be expunged. The aggregator will be deployed, crushing Dree and captives alike in the underground combs. It will be more effective than anticipated, as is so often the case with novel means of destruction, and the result will be the vastness of the Swept and its gravitational cysts.”

  He resumed chanting and they watched the assault on the Dree’s redoubt. The sky grew lighter, though no sun was to be seen, and the bolts and sheets of energy paled with the passing of the end of darkness. Baro could see that the pockets of resistance in the hills were being systematically eliminated, the Dree either dying where they fought or retreating into tunnel mouths that they sealed after them with a grayish concrete exuded from abdominal pores.

  Bandar signaled again that he wished to speak. “Do you feel an impulse to go farther? Is there something more you are to see?”

  Baro consulted whatever part of him responded to urges from the noösphere and shook his head. He looked about him. The armor had moved on and had joined the aircraft in pounding the upper slopes of the hills and the blocked tunnel mouths. The giant flying machine in the high atmosphere was striking the crests of the hills with coruscating be
ams of blue-white power, but it seemed that the battle was winding down. Out on the plain, nothing moved.

  Baro’s attention was caught by a nearby irregularity in the ground. He indicated to Bandar that they should cross to it. Singing the tones, which the young man was finding increasingly monotonous, they walked across the charred grass to find a shallow trench dug into the sod. Huddled in the bottom, heaped around a weapon that was now a lump of melted stuff, were the charred remains of four Dree.

  Now came an impulse. Baro took his arm out of Bandar’s grasp and stepped down into the trench. The carbonized hind legs of one of the Dree crackled and fragmented under his boots as he bent to examine the corpses. He used the sword to pry two of the corpses apart and found that the bottommost seemed to have been killed by shock rather than incineration. Its upper half was complete.

  Baro looked up at Bandar and gestured toward his own eyes, increasing the volume of his chant so that the historian could reply to the wordless question.

  “They had no eyes,” Bandar said, looking down at the smooth curve of brown chitinous stuff that approximated a head. “The feathery things stood upright in life and detected odor with exquisite refinement. Nerve patches on the torso and head translated vibration into sound and it could detect electrical fields at close range.”

  Baro nodded and stared at the creature, waiting for some indication as to why he had been impelled to this Event. But nothing came. Finally, he shrugged and climbed out of the trench. Bandar had resumed chanting and now gave him a look that asked, Now, what? Baro shrugged in return.

  The historian again had the young man sing more loudly so that he could ask, “Do you feel any counterurge against our leaving?”

  Baro shook his head and Bandar brought out the noösphere map and studied it for a moment. “We’ll need to take a shortcut,” he said. He collapsed the globe and pulled Baro a few steps to one side, chanting a different sequence. A rift appeared in the air and they went through it.

  The other side of the rift was all bright sun and tropical foliage, with terraced buildings of pastel stone grouped around a wide plaza in which a throng of gaily dressed celebrants threw their arms into the air and wriggled their fingers ecstatically. In the center of the open space an emaciated young man in flowing vestments and a tall cylindrical hat flexed his own fingers in response to shrieks from the crowd. But whether he was witnessing a religious ceremony, political rally, or entertainment event would never be clear to Baro because the chanting historian immediately pulled him into a side street and through a curtained door.