Gaudeamus

by John Barnes

  Anyway, she’d done transcriptions for me many times—she understood tech terms, spelled well, and got stuff done fast—and this time, she’d just finished transcribing on the first pass and gone for a weekend visit to her boyfriend over in the Springs. Tammy’s new roommate threw a party, which received three separate visits from sheriff’s deputies, and when Tammy came back, the tape of Travis had been erased, her backup floppy was in an ashtray melted into a puddle, and her hard drive had been wiped, except they didn’t realize that she was far better at this stuff than they were, and she managed an almost full recovery.

  But she had only gotten as far as doing a first pass. First passes contain great swaths of gibberish and confusion that has to get corrected in the second and third pass transcription, and it never got the additional passes. This is what I could assemble from my beer-sozzled memory, Tammy’s first pass transcription, and some phone calls to Travis, who doesn’t like to talk about this stuff over the phone and gets cryptic right when I need clarification. So, if it makes no sense, well, it makes no sense.

  Once upon a time, in 1987, there were seven women, and they all were at Moloch College in southern Indiana, in a lab which they had formed by pooling the laboratoire du chair funds for three of them. Moloch was one of those little places that the Midwest is littered with, well-endowed experimental colleges that contain a mixture of bright and talented kids with rich eccentric kids. They’re good places to find yourself if you’re eighteen and mentally or emotionally missing; interesting places to party if you like smart people and if your idea of partying isn’t standing around in an alcoholic haze and wishing you were attractive to people more attractive than yourself; and every so often they are just what they were intended to be, incubators of wild and interesting talents. There are maybe a hundred of them—Kenyon, Oberlin, Hillsdale, Ringlebury, Earlham, Carleton, Waverly, Chatham, Otterbein … each with its odd mix of missionary zeal, eccentric joy, and obsessive focus on something or other that noplace else is interested in … they’re among the best things in American education and they’re also where many “crazy professor” stories in the tabloids come out of. They were among the first fully coeducational colleges, among the first to admit black students, among the first to drop the Jewish quota … the cradles of every extremist political movement in American politics, right and left, for a century … places about which many American academics, hearing a story of some craziness at one or another, say, “Go figure,” and shake our heads, and secretly wish that we were there.

  Every so often I let myself think about applying for a faculty position at one of them. I’m afraid I might not be crazy enough, and I’m also afraid that I might be, after teaching at one of them for a while.

  Now, Moloch was no more and no less eccentric than all the others. It had started out liberal Congregationalist, as the Quid Volumus Scriptural College. In 1889, a family of Tidewater tobacco barons had bought it and renamed it Moloch, setting it up with a mission to preach free market capitalism to young men in all fields. It flourished in the thirties and forties, supplying the country with young male Republicans, but by the 1960s, the bottom was falling out of free market poetics and free market chemistry, or at least the market was collapsing for colleges with five required economics courses in all majors, and no girls. The college had been taken co-ed, co-op, and co-curricular (with various programs at neighboring colleges) in 1972, and after most of the old faculty voted to sell their stock to new, incoming faculty, Moloch had redefined its mission, setting itself to train students in a “New Magickality for the Aquarian Age.”

  In practice that meant it was a place for every real scientist who wigged out and got interested in crystals, astrology, homeopathy, pyramid power, and all the rest of that sorry lot, and for every religious studies-semiotics-ethnic-studies-comp-litter who got fascinated with the language of science. It was where people with doctorates who had come a little loose from their intellectual moorings—or perhaps floated right down the intellectual river and over the intellectual falls—went to get all cosmic, and they’d do all these strange experiments that didn’t work too terribly well, and argue about whether they worked or not and what it would mean for them to work and whether “worked” meant “worked,” or only “like it worked,” or whether “it worked” and “it was like it worked” were the same thing, and like that.

  They’d had the idea that one thing that was wrong with “non-Aquarian” science was the German laboratory system in which faculty scientists had to apply for lab time and convince other scientists that their use of resources would be productive; they decided that they would set things up as laboratoires des chairs, which is the old French system (now abandoned even in France) where you give every scientist a tiny little lab and a tiny little budget and a couple of assistants and tell them to go play. “It’s the system that enabled the French to invent penicillin and computers, create the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, and of course to land on the moon,” Travis remarked. “I’m sorry, John, but you got to understand this lame-ass laboratoire du chair system that Moloch College had, or you’re not going to understand how all this happened.”

  “I do understand it,” I said. “Because of what I do I read history of science. And, hey, it was common in English institutions a hundred years ago, too. And people like Pasteur and Darwin, Madame Curie, Lord Kelvin, they all had laboratoires des chairs.”

  “Unhhunh. And the Wright brothers had a bicycle shop, but I don’t think we’d speed up the pace of aerospace research if we disbanded all the big labs and gave every engineer his own bicycle shop. For that matter I don’t think we’d find more new continents if we started looking for them with sailing ships. Anyway, there’s one thing, and just one thing, that that system has going for it; every idea that can be investigated cheaply—no matter how stupid—eventually gets investigated.”

  And, according to Travis, just that once, in the pooled lab space of Doctors Susan Glasgow, Brenda Johnston, and Annabeth Trinidad, something had actually worked, and it had worked in a spectacular fashion; they had accidentally created the first Gaudeamus machine, sometime around 1987. Those women had had two senior assistants, Candy Peggoty and Melinda Belgrade, basically work-study students doing what would be done by low-level grad students in a place that had a grad program, and also two typists, Heart Reno and her work-study helper, a freshman girl named Lena Logan.

  If I remember right, that was the point where I was floundering in the alcoholic haze—I drank too fast and was starting my third beer when the pizza got there—trying to remember where I’d heard those names before.

  “The Hardware Store Killer,” Travis said. “That’s why some of the papers are now calling him the Moloch College killer.”

  “Oh, yeah, you’re right,” I said. “Except of course Lena Logan is still in your stories, and the Hardware Store Killer has only had five victims, so one of them—”

  “Susan Glasgow. She’s about to get into the story here. She’s the other one that’s still alive.”

  “Do you ever worry about Stacy and Traci, I mean, did you, once the papers realized that everyone who had been killed by the Hardware Store Killer was connected somehow to Moloch College in the late seventies or early eighties?”

  Stacy and Traci had been two witches, or witches-in-training, roommates at Moloch College; I could never remember which one was which, but one was short and pixieish and the other was huge, and Travis had known Traci (I think)’s brother in MP school, and Trav had set us up for some glorious weekends at Moloch, some real trips to Redneck Paradise.

  During those weekends, we’d gotten hooked on Richard Reno’s Gaudeamus panel in the Moloch student paper, and for about a year afterwards either Stacy or Traci—the fat one, anyway—had faithfully mailed a copy of it every week to Travis, who had then photocopied it and sent me one, making us among the elite few who had read it before it was on the web, people who knew all about the mutual vow of battle to the death between O. B. Joyful an
d Merle the Killer Squirrel back while Reagan was president and paisley was hip and hip was non-ironic.

  One little detail made me sad, when Travis told me. Heart Reno was Richard’s older sister. Considering she’d been the third victim of the Hardware Store Killer, this certainly explained why Gaudeamus so often contained pointers to the ongoing investigation. I wondered why Richard Reno didn’t just post an explanation somewhere—many fans just hated the constant references to the Hardware Store Killer case, and perhaps if they knew of his personal connection, they’d cut him more slack on the point.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s sad, but I’m not as sad about it as you are,” Travis said, “and I’m getting to why.”

  “So the Hardware Store Killer isn’t just the Moloch College Killer,” I said. “He’s the Gaudeamus Effect killer. Jeez, I can see why Lena Logan is sort of desperate and crazy. Does anyone know what’s happening to Susan—Glasgow, was it?”

  “Well, yeah. We know a fuckload. And we wish we knew more. Remember that nasty message that you got by clicking on the Gaudeamus machine on Ower Gyro’s shelf, in that episode of Gaudeamus on the day I turned up here? That nasty message was from Susan and that’s about as nice as she gets. And incidentally all those mibs that were chasing me were hers too. I’m getting to this. Let me continue the story. Here’s the hard part to accept, and I might as well get it over with.”

  I so wish I hadn’t been drunk. I know in the middle of it the pizza arrived, delivered by a former student who thought it was very entertaining that Professor Barnes was very drunk, and kept looking at Travis funny until I realized it was because I was a theatre teacher and Travis was good-looking.

  I know that as he explained and I objected, Travis had to repeat some of the same evidence three and four times. I know I don’t remember large parts of the evidence. But I do remember, eventually, being forced to concede that I had to agree, that yes, that was what it added up to, that if Travis (frequently accompanied by Hale, who didn’t sound the least bit like a man inclined to stretch the truth) had seen and heard what he said he had seen and heard, then he was right to believe what he did.

  I just wish I remembered enough of it.

  Our voices slurred, and we interrupted each other and argued constantly, and talked over each other. Poor Tammy only got scattered words of it; she might not have been able to recover much more even if she had had a chance to go over it a couple more times, and as it was she did her best, probably the best anyone could have done.

  But here’s as much as I remember of what Travis tried to persuade me of:

  Gaudeamus technology is one of the eight basic technologies for all intelligent species in the universe. The others are cutting edges, fire, boats, agriculture, heat engines, electricity, and recombinant DNA. And that’s pretty much the order that most civilizations get them in, with minor variations.

  Once you have Gaudeamus, you need almost nothing else. Gaudeamus translates any basic physical property into any other—temperature into distance, charge into mass, time into energy, whatever you like—in a way that is outside space and time. It’s an unlimited power source and a starship drive and for that matter it allows you to always hang wallpaper correctly on the first try. Every civilization in all the galaxies that finds it, within a generation, uses almost nothing else.

  Gaudeamus puts out a characteristic signature, a pulse or a beep or whatever you want to call it, that is easily modulated—Travis was pretty sure it wasn’t usually a wave so it couldn’t very well be amplitude or frequency modulated, but whatever it was that it was, whatever characteristics that had, they are easy to modulate. And modulated Gaudeamus pulses are the basic communications media for every advanced civilization in the universe.

  There is no such thing as natural Gaudeamus. Not the least trace of it happens in any exploding star, or in the tiniest reaches within a neutron, or to a single particle of dark matter, unless some process—designed by an intelligent being and caused deliberately—makes it happen.

  And thus, when a new civilization first discovers Gaudeamus, it’s as conspicuous as dropping an anvil into a punch bowl. It’s as if everyone in a dark forest first learns to make light, and only later discovers they have eyes. So that first Gaudeamus experiment at Moloch College had lighted up the galaxy, and beyond, with the news that there was a new species on the block—which also had to mean that there was a new habitable planet out here. And from that had come all our sorrows.

  The code name used among the seven women who first found Gaudeamus was “Experiment 198 phenomenon.” Which was one of those understated phrases that scientists seem to be so fond of.

  While they were performing Experiment 198, the block of steel that they were heating to incandescence, to demonstrate how much power Gaudeamus could draw from the universe, began to pulsate, alternating between white-hot and liquid-helium cold at intervals of exactly one second, then two seconds, then four. Then it began to pulse in dots and dashes; Lena Logan and Heart Reno had both been Girl Scouts, and they read the message:

  pulse machine on off

  acknowledge please

  request permission make contact

  The aliens had popped stealthed satellites into Earth orbit, probably putting them in decades before, maybe listening to all the radio traffic since the 1930s radar experiments, analyzed it, gotten the hang of our languages, spotted Moloch College’s lab as being in an English-speaking area … it’s remarkable what you can do when you have time travel, especially what a computer can do when it can have its conclusion before computing it.

  The seven women took a quick vote, and agreed unanimously. They invited the aliens to make contact. And one second after sending that message (which they had carefully worked out by referring to the Morse code chart in the back of an old desk dictionary), they had jumped back from a glowing golden square above the lab table. A rope ladder had fallen through the square, and down it had climbed something that Lena Logan, much later, had said looked like a four-foot-tall cricket, walking on its hind legs, with a lobster’s legs and a raccoon’s head (if you imagine a cyclops raccoon), covered with pink shag carpet—except that it all worked together, somehow, so that the thing looked natural.

  In Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Earth is visited by aliens who look like Christian devils; it turns out that they are the end of our species, not because they are our enemies, but because they are here to help us fulfill our destiny, and the image of the devil was a kind of sense of the collective unconscious of what the end of the world would look like. Well, if ever there were a species that ought to have looked like Satan, the pTh’tong n’Wi—as close as Travis could get to pronouncing them—should have been it, for they arrived contracts in hand, with a deal for human souls that would be almost impossible for us to resist.

  Basically, Travis said, the deal was twenty-four dollars in beads and blankets.

  “Melody Wallace would give you a dissertation on that one,” I said.

  “Thought she was a semiotician or a sosh-of-com type, not a historian.”

  “Twenty-four. It’s amazing how often that number shows up in legends and stories. Doctor Faustus gets twenty-four years of unlimited power. The Indians sell Manhattan for twenty-four dollars in beads and blankets. She’d have ten more examples.”

  “Wednesday morning three A.M.” Travis nodded solemnly.

  “What?”

  “Early Paul Simon song. Or was that twenty-five?”

  “Never mind, there’s twenty-four beers in one of those cases in my basement—”

  “Good, that’s twenty-four too.” Travis raised his bottle; when had we given up on the glasses? I raised mine in return, we both drank, and then he asked, “Uh, so why does twenty-four come up so often?”

  “It’s your story.”

  “No, I mean … Melody Wallace had some idea about how so many twenty-fours come up in stories?”

  “Oh, yeah. Twenty-four hours in a day. So it stands for ‘a single day.’ Or brings up t
he idea. So the idea is that people always sell out too cheap, see? They’d hand over everything really worthwhile in their lives to get twenty-four hours or years or whatever—one little day—of everything they want, and the twenty-four is over too soon and then they have nothing. Like that. So whatever the actual value of the trade goods that were used to buy Manhattan, once somebody came up with a way that it worked out to twenty-four dollars, bingo! That stuck. Because it was such a good symbol.”

  “Jesus, it sure is,” he said, leaning back and staring at the ceiling.

  According to Travis, the seven women at Moloch College had been confronted with a blunt, straightforward deal: in exchange for signing over the rights to the entire planet, each of them would receive seven metric tons per year of pure platinum. It took them a few days to confirm that there were ways of selling it without drawing attention, and to confirm that the samples they had been given were pure platinum. But once they knew those two things for sure, they jumped at the deal. After all, who wouldn’t? Clearly the silly aliens didn’t know that the Earth had no single owner and no one had the power to sell it.

  “Remember that old frat brother of yours, John, the one that used to say that he figured the Indians that sold Manhattan probably thought buying land was like buying the sky or the ocean? So these guys in funny clothes with cool stuff, which they obviously have plenty of, and don’t know the value of, show up and offer to—giggle!—buy land. ‘No shit, man, they wanted to—snort—buy land. So, we go, oh yeah, buddy, we’re all like, we’ll take all those blankets and stuff. Oh yeah. You ever want to—giggle some more—buy more land, you get in touch, know what I mean? Hey, watch your funny hats, going back through the trees there. Buh-bye. Boy, did we take them for a ride …’ As I recall the point of the story was, you can’t cheat an honest man, and a dishonest one will cheat himself, eh? Well, it happened again.”