Black Brillion

by Matthew Hughes

  Baro was taken aback. “That is contrary to the spirit of the Bureau,” he said.

  “Uh huh,” she said. “When one is certain of the suspect’s guilt, a minor shortcut on the way to conclusive proof can be overlooked. It is not like pulling innocents from their beds and fitting them into whatever crimes remain inconveniently uncleared.”

  Baro was not sure he agreed, but he was also not sure of his motives. Partially, he did not want to believe that his father would have taken part in such “shortcuts”; more important, he did not want to have to admit that Luff Imbry knew more about the way scroots really worked than did Baro Harkless.

  He mentally set the issue aside. “Can we cooperate?” he asked the security officer.

  “I don’t see that there will be much opportunity,” she said. “You are going with the Rovers, while I will remain on the Orgulon.”

  “But Flix is going with us.”

  “Yes, but Kosmir is staying with the landship.”

  “Ah,” said Baro. “I see.”

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “And please keep it to yourself. We are carrying a cargo of mining machinery consigned to Victor, a day’s sail to the northeast. Kosmir’s duties require him to be present when it is off-loaded. The gig will ferry supplies to you and the other passengers.”

  A whistle sounded from the deck above them. “I must go,” she said. “The gig will rendezvous with you at noon.” She patted his arm again. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Often an investigation makes sense only when you view it backward from its conclusion.”

  Baro said, “You could say the same thing about life.”

  She went aboard and the gangplank was pulled up. Stewards were marshaling the passengers into a circle surrounding the device that projected Gebbling’s image and voice. The restlessness of the ambulatory passengers made a contrast with the motionlessness of the lassitude sufferers, stiffly upright on their come-alongs.

  Baro joined Imbry and Bandar in the crowd just before Gebbling’s image appeared. It hovered in the air until a steward adjusted the mechanism to bring the simulacrum down to earth. At first Gebbling’s voice was lost in the unceasing rush of the wind, then the steward made another adjustment and the sound came louder.

  “You have made good progress with the bom, bom ala bom,” the image said. “I sense the rising of collective chuffe. I can even detect that some have generated a stronger, purer chuffe than others.

  “This is all to the good, and today you will have an opportunity to strengthen and refine your chuffe as we approach the moment of our encounter. You will travel across the quiet of the Swept, a landscape that has always encouraged contemplation and spiritual discipline. Your chuffe will soar!

  “Hear now the new mantra to carry you through this crucial second stage of the cleansing journey. It is ta-tumpa, ta-tey. Say it now.”

  The white-haired woman who had browbeaten Guth Bandar led the chant, her voice rising thin and hard over the wind that now struck them full as the landship rumbled off. The others followed her lead, Baro and Imbry joining in too, though the historian only yawned, which drew a harsh look from the chant leader.

  Baro broke off the chant and spoke to the historian from the side of his mouth. “I thought you planned to avoid me.”

  “I planned to escape you,” said Bandar. “That not being possible, I will stay close to you and seek your cooperation in assuring that we do not sleep at the same time.”

  Baro shrugged. “You shall have it,” he said.

  Now Gebbling’s voice came again and the chanting stopped. “You will journey the unbounded face of the world, simply and at a leisurely pace. Here the constant wind symbolizes the power of swelling chuffe. As it blows away all that is not fixed and rooted to the ground, so it will carry away the wisps of preconceptions and unfounded assurances that confine you.

  “You shall emerge from this passage refined and purified, prepared to receive the revelation of new life. I bid you travel not in hope but in the certitude that at the end of this path lies deliverance. Ta-tumpa, ta-tey.”

  The chant rose again over the rippling prairie grass and Gebbling’s image wavered, then winked out. The stewards waited politely while the chanting continued, then began to nudge the passengers toward the Rover carts.

  There were seven of the vehicles, grouped around the edge of a wide circle of trampled grass not far away. They were tall, two-wheeled affairs, the bodies of bamboo plaited and lashed together, the wheels of metal and rubber, the spokes thin, and the tires fat. The walls of the carts went as high as the tops of the wheels, then were surmounted by a cover of woven grass mats supported by curved ribs.

  Each was harnessed to a team of eight animals that stood a little over waist high to a tall man, covered in short, dense fur that ranged from light brown to solid black, their rounded ears naked and pink, and each whiskered snout ending in a twitching nose above broad incisors. They crouched at rest on long, muscular legs that ended in broad, hairless feet with spatulate toes. Their constant guttural mutter that sounded almost like speech came from every direction.

  “What are they?” Baro asked.

  “Oversized vermin,” said Imbry, watching one of the draft animals raise a hind limb to scratch indolently at a parasite behind one ear.

  It was Guth Bandar who answered more fully. “They are shuggra. Stay clear of them. Their appetite is indiscriminate and their cunning as sharp as their teeth. They will attack anything except their own siblings. Notice how the teams are spread apart, to keep them from savaging each other.”

  The Rovers themselves were lying under the carts resting, but when the throng of passengers and stewards approached, they stood up. Each went to a cart and yanked on its rear panel so that it unfolded and became a step.

  Baro got his first clear look at the Rovers now. “They’re ultraterrenes,” said Baro, “but I don’t recognize the type.”

  Imbry did not respond. He was eyeing the vehicles with a sour expression. Bandar was regarding all about him with interest and delight, and again delivered a response. “No,” he said, “they are of Earth, though not human.”

  He urged them toward one of the carts and its owner, who seemed the youngest of the seven Rovers. He was a tall, long-limbed individual with bunched shoulder muscles, a deep chest, and a concave belly. He was obviously male. As they got closer, Baro examined the Rover’s face, which though narrow was almost jowly, the cheeks hanging loose from a nose so prominent as to be tantamount to a muzzle. The skull bulged in odd directions at the top and rear.

  Bandar nudged Baro’s ribs. “Prolonged eye contact unsettles them. Sidelong glances are better tolerated.”

  Baro complied and made a more guarded inspection. The Rover’s eyes were large and brown, the whites almost invisible, the lips loose and dark in color, the ears flaplike but obviously connected to the head by muscles and tendons that let them move independently. The limbs were long and roped with muscle, the hands and feet elongated, and the digits tipped with vestigial claws. The whole head and body was covered in short, blond fur and there seemed to be the vestige of a tail. None wore any clothing.

  “Are they dogs?” Baro asked Bandar.

  Imbry spoke. “Shh,” he warned. “They find that word even more unsettling. Fortunately, they pay little attention to humans except when they are guiding, and then only the necessary minimum.”

  “What do they guide people to?”

  “To hunt, of course. There is much game on the Swept—the fand, the lesser and greater garm, not to mention woollyclaw and pronghorned skippit. Of course, the regulations deter many prospective trophy seekers. For a fand, for example, you may bring one fellow hunter. Each of you is allowed a sturdy spear and a long knife.”

  “It sounds perilous,” said Baro. A full-grown fand was half again the weight of a man. It feared nothing and ate anything it could kill.

  “It is a very good way of determining who is your truest friend,” said Bandar. “The Rover will guide you to the fan
d, then bring back either you and your trophy, or whichever of your bones remain to be collected. They are also prodigious miners—they love to dig. Come, let us board the carriage.”

  Careful not to let their gazes connect, Baro stepped past the Rover and climbed into the cart, feeling it bounce on creaking leather springs as he moved. There were four forward facing seats along each side, woven wicker topped by cushions of woven grass. The two agents and Bandar went to the front where they were soon joined by Ule Gazz and Olleg Ebersol, the Lho-tso practitioners.

  Ebersol stepped from the come-along directly into the car, moving even more stiffly than he had the evening before, Baro noted. The lassitude gave his every step a hesitant quality, as if he were a stick insect negotiating a sagging stalk. Once seated, he became inert, even his breathing so shallow as to be almost undetectable. Ule Gazz did not speak to the others but closed her eyes and undertook the full morning proa, a series of breaths and postures that occupied her for some time.

  The cart bobbed again as another couple boarded, a pair of robust young women dressed with the careful indifference of students. Guth Bandar introduced himself, then the two agents gave their assumed names and occupations. The newcomers were Corje Sooke and Pollus Ermatage. The latter spoke for both, the former being rendered speechless by the affliction.

  “Sooke and I are cohorts,” she said, using a term with a particular meaning in their home county, Fasfallia. There, infants were paired for life, the juxtaposing being decided after a careful weighing of heredity, certain social factors, and an indefinable quality known to the Fasfallians as grims.

  Baro was familiar with the institution. There was a detailed description of Fasfallian society in the Bureau manual on cultural factors related to crime and derangement. Fasfallian friends normally lived every moment of their lives within sight and sound of each other. Other relationships—even mating and child rearing—took a secondary importance, and the life partners usually died in old age scarcely hours apart. If a member of a cohort lost his opposite number earlier in life he would be shunned by all; most bereaved survivors withdrew to a life of contemplation, out of which they produced works of art redolent of sweet melancholy, but some fell into an obsessive mania known as the champfarr and became dangerous.

  Gazz and Ebersol were too immersed in their individual solitudes to participate in the formalities of greeting. They also paid no attention to the person who took the last seat in the cart. This was Flix, wearing a face full of thunder.

  “There is a portrait of unhappiness,” Imbry whispered to Baro.

  “Indeed,” said Baro, but further conversation was cut off as the Rover closed the cart’s tailboard with a clatter and made a sound intended to catch their attention.

  “Yaffak,” he said, followed by a string of syllables that were less clear. There was a strange wobbling quality to the vowels while some of the consonants were more implied than apparent. The brown eyes flicked from one face to another, never settling for more than a moment and ended up cast downward at the bamboo floor of the cart.

  “He says his name is Yaffak,” Bandar translated.

  The Rover had nothing else to communicate. Instead he sprang into motion, as did the other Rovers who were slamming shut the tailboards of their carts, then rushing to the fronts, where there was an open air seat and a footrest. Yaffak took up a whip with a long, rigid handle and a frayed tassel at its tip and touched it to the sides of the lead shuggras. Muttering and keening, the animals rose and leaned into the padded shoulder collars of their harnesses. Baro felt the cart jerk, then roll smoothly forward into the unbroken grass, straight toward the old orange sun now balanced on the dead-level eastern horizon.

  The Rovers put their carts into a line-abreast formation and they moved forward together. Guth Bandar watched the maneuver with evident anticipation that was just as evidently not rewarded.

  “I don’t understand,” the small man said after a while. “Rovers are supposed to engage in constant competition for status within the pack. They are reputed to have a fierce sense of hierarchy, based on athleticism and speed, with each individual feeling a continuing urge to press the limits of his status, to see if he might overtake and supplant the occupant of the next highest rung.”

  “That seems a pointless struggle,” said Ule Gazz, who had emerged from her meditations. “The young will inevitably overpower the old, only to become aged themselves and be left behind. All status is fleeting.”

  “Everything is transient,” said Luff Imbry. “But what of it? Life is lived now, whatever the turn of the wheel may bring tomorrow or next century. An eighteen-course feast is but a temporary phase in its ingredients’ cycle from nature back to nature, a cycle which happens to take it through the hands of a master chef. Yet I wouldn’t hesitate to seize some of it as it passes by in the form of rum-and-sugared-egg and five-fowl terrine.”

  “It is all in the perspective,” said Pollus Ermatage. “From manure’s point of view, the entire circle of fertilization, growth, harvest, processing, and consumption is but a complicated means of producing more manure.” She stroked her chin and said, “There may be a song in that.”

  “Some things are eternal,” said Guth Bandar, “or as near as. The Commons, for one. It reaches back to the dim years when we gnawed gritty roots fresh dug from the earth and warm flesh still dripping with blood, and it stretches ahead until the sun billows out to encompass Old Earth in its troposphere.”

  “But you said the Commons grew from single cells into aggregates,” Baro said. “New cells must constantly be added as lives are lived and experiences remembered. Does the Commons not evolve as these new cells are encountered?”

  “No,” said Bandar. “You must reckon on the age of the world and the myriads who have lived. Granted, there are vast permutations in the number of ways a single life can be lived, especially in combination with trillions of other lives that come before, during, and after the individual existence. But, given enough time, enough lives, the sum total of all that can be done is done. Everything significant, that is—what remains is trivia.”

  “My life is not trivial, nor is it an exact duplicate of anyone’s,” said Baro. “No one has ever been me doing what I’m doing, in the way I’m doing it, and for the reasons I’m doing it.”

  “True,” said Bandar. “But whatever your life’s quest may be, it differs only slightly from those of a trillion young men who have come before you. What do you seek: power, passion, wealth, enlightenment? Each has been sought and won—or lost—a hundred billion times. The best you can hope for is to create some minor embellishment on the pattern. It is no more significant than repositioning an individual grain of sand in a desert.”

  The historian’s perspective sent a wave of sadness through Baro, or perhaps it was the dawn wind blowing against his face as the open carts raced across the Swept. He thought of his father and wondered if he was repeating elements of the man’s truncated life, if he had let himself be pressed into a pattern that need not have shaped his existence.

  It was a thought that had never occurred to him before—he had always been destined for the Bureau—but now he found that not only was the thought surprising, but even more startling was the realization that this was the first time he had ever stopped to consider whether the course of his life was what he wanted it to be.

  He shivered again. It was an unsettling chain of thought. He decided that he would put it aside until a more tranquil time.

  During Baro’s brief introspection the conversation in the cart had moved on. Ule Gazz was discoursing on the philosophical underpinnings of the Lho-tso movement, which appeared to be that nothing much mattered except discipline of mind and spirit. The world, with all its permutations, was essentially only a good trick and “one eventually grows tired of tricks,” she said. Her tone was somewhat assertive for a devotee of a discipline that preached detachment, Baro thought.

  Luff Imbry must have had a similar impression, for he said, “If all that matters
can be found within the confines of a meditation mat, why aren’t you at home breathing and positioning? Why have you brought Olleg Ebersol in pursuit of a ghostly image across an endless prairie?”

  Ule Gazz looked at her partner, whose eyes stared emptily at the unchanging horizon. “We are none of us perfect,” she said. “There are some tricks one longs to see done again.”

  Imbry made a face like that of a repentant bully and turned away from the others. The conversation lapsed.

  “Perhaps we should sing the new chant,” said Pollus Ermatage. In a soft but musical voice she began to intone the ta-tumpa, ta-tey. Ule Gazz took it up after her, and Baro saw a rhythmic quaver in the throat of her paralyzed partner, Olleg Ebersol. The lassitude sufferer was trying to join in. It seemed polite to cooperate so Baro voiced the ta-tumpa, ta-tey with the others. Even Bandar sang along, though with an occasional quirk of his eyebrows. Luff Imbry kept silent, and turned to look out onto the prairie, as did Flix, her face still sullen.

  After a while the historian’s voice trailed off and so did Baro’s. The agent tried to open a discussion on the noösphere—he had begun to wonder whether the Rovers shared the Commons with their human creators, or did they have one of their own?—but Bandar declined to enter into a colloquy. Instead, he folded his arms and leaned against one of the curved ribs that supported the roof of the cart, saying he intended to try to recover some of the sleep lost the night before.

  “Please ensure that our young friend here does not also sleep before I awaken,” he asked the company in general. “I prefer my dreams unmolested.”

  Imbry came out of the study into which he had slumped and promised he would keep an eye on Baro. The other passengers also agreed, except for Flix who offered no commitments. The chant resumed and soon Bandar was snoring.

  Baro lapsed into a curious state. A portion of his mind told him he should concentrate his faculties on the Gebbling case, reassess what he knew in the light of what he had learned from Raina Haj. But his mind, until now always disciplined, refused to cooperate. It was throwing up random images: scenes from his youth and childhood, the vision of his Shadow blowing on its fingertips in the darkness of the glass, Raina Haj’s turquoise-flecked violet irises, the Hero with the winged helmet, the dead Dree in the trench.