Gaudeamus

by John Barnes

  “Then you pop it into reverse—which is now the direction you’re going—for about a second or two, with your foot off the gas. In a front-wheel-drive car, that straightens it out and gives you back your control. Hit the brakes one more time to get to zero speed, while you’re slapping it into first, and then stand on it. I handshifted my way up through the 1 and 2 on that automatic, giving me more acceleration than it was ever supposed to have, and when I popped it back to D, it wailed. All that was a couple of seconds.

  “So now we were accelerating towards each other. I was probably doing fifty, back the way I had come, and he was coming on at seventy or so, in a good old-fashioned game of chicken.

  “I had to hope he didn’t want to collide with me, and luckily I was right. I got over to my side of the road and crouched down, driving Florida-style—”

  “Which is?”

  “Hands over my head and looking through the wheel. Scared shitless might be part of it too, come to think of it. Anyway, there were no shots, and they didn’t swerve to collide.

  “Now, my plan was to take advantage of the head start I would get from the time they took to turn around, run back a long enough ways to get the horizon between me and them, look for one of the little crossroads-gas-station-church-and-bar towns that show up every twenty miles or so, and see if I could find a road off 285 that went somewhere over the mountains, either way, and get out of the San Luis Valley, since trying to hide there, especially when the other side has a helicopter, is kind of like a tarantula trying to hide on a birthday cake.

  “But I was watching that Cherokee in the rearview, and son of a bitch if the poor stupid idiot didn’t try to U-turn to come after me. SUVs do not U-turn in two lanes at seventy miles per hour. They do about a third of a U and then they tumble.

  “My road to Alamosa had just reopened, so I slid into the next pullout for a ranch gate, three-pointed out, and floored it back towards them. Two old boys all dressed up like Mormon missionaries with sunglasses were just climbing out of the overturned Cherokee, in the ditch, when I went by. I managed to refrain from shooting them the finger, but I did notice that I was in reach of a cell-phone tower—must’ve been up on one of the distant mountains, you get spotty moments of beautiful reception every now and then—so I phoned up the staties and reported a wrecked Cherokee there, said they had been weaving and driving real fast and I thought maybe they were drunk, and that they had shouted and waved guns at me as I went by. Just trying to make sure my friends in the bear hats would arrive with a trunk full of questions, a back seat full of unpleasant attitude, and a roof rack carrier full of red tape to go with it, and therefore those particular mibs would stay out of the game for a while.”

  “Mibs—Men in Black?”

  “Yeah. Commoner than deer out there in the San Luis Valley. There’s so much weird shit for them to keep hushed up—so many experimental aircraft tests and operations rehearsals and all that, and maybe other stuff that ain’t all ours, as well. They never say who they work for, but I’ve never thought they were all government. So those old boys could’ve been Negon, or working for the same outfit as Elvis and Lena and that giant ass-kicking Indian (whatever outfit that was), or any old third player in the game you want. My thought was that they were probably some third player; Negon and Lena’s boys both knew I didn’t have the Gaudeamus box anymore, and I don’t think I could possibly have had any information they wanted. So it had to be someone who wanted the box, or wanted to hurt Xegon, and didn’t know that I was out of the game myself.

  “Which might also be why they haven’t followed me since I dumped that renter in Alamosa, bought a ticket to Denver, went into the secure area with one long line and came back out in a crowd of arriving passengers, and then hitched this way. The home office might have called them and told them that the Gaudeamus box was elsewhere, anyway.”

  The strangest thought was beginning to creep up on me. “Tell me, one more time, what the Gaudeamus box looks like,” I said. “I’m thinking of something.”

  “All right, it’s just a white enameled-metal case, like you used to get from Heathkit or Edmund for do-it-yourself projects. Maybe a bit bigger than a cable box. On the front there’s an Edison socket, three-pronged, one-ten comes out of that. Three LED readouts, each with a cycler button under it. A button all by itself marked ACT. XYZ axes marked with red Sharpie, coming off little laserdrilled pinholes. Little rubber feet. Eight USB and two serial jacks on the back. Why, you got one in your basement?”

  “I couldn’t tell you about the back side,” I said, “but I bet you didn’t see Gaudeamus today—the web animation thingie, I mean—being busy fleeing for your life and so forth.”

  “Thingie,” he said. “You’ve been around college students too much, John. You’re not going to tell me that—”

  “Maybe you’d better look for yourself.”

  So a few minutes later Trav was standing over my shoulder next to that old orange throne I used to write on. A very long time back, I’d worked for the U-City Children’s Theatre in St. Louis, and there had been a rummage sale/junk dump for Halloween, and I’d needed a desk chair. What I got, for three dollars, was a vis-orange throne, from god knows what long-forgotten children’s show, which happened to be exactly the right height and shape for my slightly dinged-up back, ass, and legs to sit in for many hours comfortably. At one time or another, as a joke (I hope one without too much point), each of my wives, and one girlfriend, had given me a crown to go with it, but I never found a comfortable crown. Eventually, nineteen or twenty books wore that throne to pieces, and toward the end it was at least as much made up of angle iron, t-plates, and corner braces as it was of its original materials. I still have my collection of crowns in a box somewhere.

  I don’t think sitting in that relic of a kid’s show ever really affected the writing, though now and then, especially when working late, I would look around for my henchsquirrels, intending to stand up and sing about controlling all the acorns in the forest.

  Okay, not really, but it makes a better story. I’ll take it out in later revisions. I did promise Travis, and some other people, that I’d try to stick to facts.

  Anyway, Travis was leaning on my orange throne, and I popped up the day’s unpacked Gaudeamus—I usually let them hang on my hard drive for a few days before erasing them—and connected to the web, since sometimes a link was updated after the original main cartoon was posted.

  He watched in silence until he saw the Gaudeamus machine on Ower Gyro’s nightstand; then he reached over my shoulder, grabbed the mouse, and stopped it. “That’s the machine, John, no question about it at all.” He clicked on the picture of the device.

  Before, I had found myself facing a computer screen asking for a password. This time, there was a connection to a picture of a very pretty brunette woman in red see-through lingerie. Below it, in blue letters:

  Wanna fuck Wendy? It’s cheap, and you better do it soon, before somebody shoots her right through her pretty left tit.

  Fuck you, Lena, it’s always been about you. But now it’s not. You’re not fucking up the best thing that has ever happened in my life.

  Huggies for my mostest special-est buddy-boo, Susan.

  Travis said, “That’s Lena Logan, all right.” He swung the cursor arrow around the screen, but only the photograph indicated a link. He clicked on it, and we were at “Fun in Albuquerque! Meet Wendy for the time of your life!” a perfectly ordinary escort’s webpage that doesn’t quite mention prostitution, and has a small-print disclaimer saying that it’s not about prostitution. There were several more pictures of Lena Logan.

  “Uh, I don’t remember a ‘Susan’ from your story,” I said.

  “Me either,” Travis agreed. “Okay, maybe I’m not all the way to the weird part, either.”

  “Am I too late for the weird part?” Kara asked, coming in. She was in the usual array of jeans, sweater, slightly blurry expression, and huge coffee mug, indicating that it was 10:30 in the morning. “Hey,
Travis. When am I going to dump John and run off to France with you?”

  “I gotta work this week.”

  “Yeah, and I’m playing a gig at a roadhouse up in Almont. I guess some other time.”

  “Hey,” I said, which was at least not as feeble a retort as “ummm” would have been.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “So who’s this chick you’re trying to set me up with?” Travis asked as we walked downtown, about an hour and a half later.

  “You can only be a chick up through ABD, and Melody finished her dissertation, accepted and all, last month,” I pointed out. “She’s Doctor Chick. Especially to a college dropout like you.”

  It was one of those gorgeous days when even I could sort of understand the attractions of Gunnison; big white fluffy clouds drifting below a deep blue dome, bright sunlight that made everything stand out in sharp detail, nothing moving on the wide, quiet streets. “Nice little town, isn’t it?” Travis commented.

  “Be sure to tell ’em you’re a Texan and you want to move here,” Kara said. “That always delights the locals.”

  Travis chuckled. “I was just noticing that it must be a pleasant place for a guy who likes the outdoors and has the time and money to enjoy it.”

  “It takes more time than money,” Kara said. “If you’re going to be around a couple of days, I could take you hiking—John never wants to go. It’s great up in the mountains right now. And we have a week to go till regular hunting season—the bow hunters are out, but they don’t shoot hikers.”

  “It’s an old joke here that bow hunters are the smart ones,” I explained to Travis. “One, they don’t shoot hikers, two, they don’t shoot cows, three, when was the last time you heard about a guy getting killed because he was cleaning his bow and didn’t realize it was loaded?”

  “And I can guess just what part of the country contributes the old boys that do shoot cows and hikers and each other, which is why my accent is so popular locally,” Travis said. “Never said my home state was perfect. That’s why I was required to go into exile. To live there you’re required to think that. Anyway, I’d love to go hiking around here—even though a certain out-of-shape guy who likes to live in the basement tells me there’s nothing to see—but unfortunately I’m catching a ride with John into Denver this evening.”

  “Always assuming he goes,” Kara said. “John has a gift for missing cons.”

  “I have to meet with my co-author,” I said. That’s how you get used to referring to them when they’re celebrities; it doesn’t sound like you’re dropping a name, and it doesn’t cause people who don’t know you to burst into silly questions. “So I’m at least going to get to Denver tonight. I was only going to make it to the convention for a couple hours tomorrow morning and on Sunday afternoon.”

  “And just incidentally and by the way, Melody is nice, Travis,” Kara said. “You’ll like her. We’re not fixing her up with you, we have a standing Friday lunch date with her to eat white trash cookin’ at the W anyway, and you’re just joining the fun.”

  The W Café is a Gunnison institution; for whatever reason, location or food or its various owners, practically everyone eats there, even people who say they hate it. For not much, you can get a big plate of just about anything that’s vaguely Tex Mex, sort of Oklahoma Truck Stop, or approximately Down Home. Something about the place just feels comfortable and homey—the naugahyde booths, or the old-style glass case counter at the register station, or the odd artifacts of the past hanging from the walls (farm implements, a toy Howdy Doody, a Boy Scout uniform shirt of the type that they had back before I was a scout, various wise sayings carved onto wood).

  When Melody Wallace had come out to Western State, in my department, a year before, she’d quickly become friends with both me and Kara; she had now been here long enough to stop telling us how “authentic” the W was, so we no longer had to swat her with a rolled-up newspaper every few minutes. I suppose that anyone with a masters in pop culture was doomed to use expressions like “authentic,” but she was now almost trained and could be allowed out in public, even around authentic-looking people, with hardly any danger at all.

  I was just explaining all that to Travis when we walked from the bright glare of the street into the cool dim of the W and there was Melody, already at the corner booth. “And here she is,” I said.

  She was thirty-six and had hit her peak of attractiveness so late that she wasn’t exactly used to it. She was thick-thighed, busty, big-assed, firm and muscular. She could hike most people into the ground; she still had puppy fat in her round, unlined face. She had fabulous long thick chestnut hair that she usually clipped to the top of her head in a pile, big vivid green eyes that she hid behind horn-rims, and a goofy grin that she couldn’t conceal. She was much given to slightly ridiculous hats and to bright-colored vests; she and Kara could talk vests for at least twenty-six minutes at a time (I timed it once).

  I could practically hear Travis’s “charm module” activating beside me as I introduced them. Once Melody got a good look at him and found out he did something romantic for a living, Kara and I were pretty much spectators for a while. As practiced professional writers, we read and write upside down pretty easily, so we spent a while scribbling notes on napkins and grinning at each other as Melody and Travis conversed—for some weird reason I still have both napkins, and I can still trace the progression, my handwriting alternating with Kara’s, from “Cute …” to “Way too cute …” to “Cute enough to make me heave …” to “Okay, let’s heave together.”

  We didn’t actually heave. I’d never waste the chicken-fried steak and eggs breakfast plate (served all day, with a gallon or two of fresh coffee—when you pass through Gunnison remember you want the home fries, not the hash browns, and you want gravy on them) at the W. You can gain about a pound and a half at lunch there, without even thinking about dessert.

  After a while, though, since Melody was especially fascinated with this being a real private eye, she got onto the question of his current case, about which he couldn’t talk much, which just seemed to add to the charm, but also put a shaft or two into the spokes of the conversation wheel, so Kara and I began to be invited into the conversation peripherally, mainly Kara supplying footnotes to Melody’s stories about playing bar gigs (now and then they did folk duos, since Melody played banjo, and they enjoyed singing old-timey close harmony), and me supplying corroboration for Travis’s stories of his younger days. (I’ve never ceased being grateful to Kara for not being the sort of spouse subject to retroactive jealousy.)

  Sometime after the plates had been cleared, well before we’d all had enough coffee or Melody had to run back for the Friday afternoon office hours that no one ever came to, Travis’s cell phone rang. “Yeah … Hey! You’re not dead! Are you okay? … Well, that sucks … I was going to be there anyway, getting there tonight … cool. Hey, did you look at this morning’s Gaudeamus online—no, the webtoon. I’d say Xegon has more security problems even than either of us thought—so you did see it. Cool. Okay, talk in Denver, bye.”

  He looked up at me as he holstered his cell phone. “Hale. Alive. Meeting him early tomorrow.”

  “Did you say ‘gaudeamus’?” Melody asked.

  “Yeah, a little Latin word that just keeps showing up all over my current case,” Travis said, his voice touching the words “my current case” with the same caress that other guys administer to “my BMW,” “my med school days,” or “my horses,” when talking to a pretty woman. (I guess you use what you have.) “I don’t know why but that word shows up in all sorts of ways that don’t quite seem like they should be connected, but always turn out to be.”

  Melody sat up as if Travis had groped her thigh. Kara and I both glared at him. Then my colleague said, “Gee, I might actually, sort of, know why. How many different things are called ‘gaudeamus’ that you’ve encountered?”

  “Well, the webtoon, a physical effect, an experimental machine, and a probably-soon-to-be-illegal drug,”
Travis said.

  “Hmm.” She pulled out one of those spiral-bound packs of notecards from her purse. “Can you tell me anything about any of those? It happens I’m doing a project about ‘gaudeamus,’ aiming toward a paper.”

  “Which one is your paper about?” I asked.

  “About the word, or the idea.” She pushed her glasses up her nose and did what all professors do—and resent when others do it—in conversation: launched into a lecture. Like most experienced professors, and especially communications professors who have had to make up lots of ex temp examples while teaching public speaking, she laid it out quickly and efficiently. (Kara always said that when Melody got rolling you knew exactly what was going to be on the quiz.) “Every now and then, a few times a decade, a word goes from ordinary or occasional use, in a dictionary sense, to universal use to mean ‘good’ or just ‘extremely positive,’ to cliché and datedness. No one knows why, but it happens. I’m spending a good deal of my time online, scanning everything I can, because I’m trying to get a handle on the word fad for ‘gaudeamus.’ Because I think, while it’s happening, I might be able to observe some things that I think happened previous times.”

  “Such as?” Travis asked. If the answer had been in Melody’s eyes, he’d already have had it.