Black Brillion

by Matthew Hughes

Bandar confessed to being equally perplexed. “That is a question I would like to resolve. All I know for certain is that it was in that region that the Dree established their power, to the great discomfort of the inhabitants. They seem to have made very poor neighbors and rapidly overran a large territory.

  “In the end, the place was evacuated of all humans and friendly ultraterrenes, the Dree were isolated in a fortress, and a terrible weapon was deployed to eradicate the invaders. The flatness of the land was a side effect.”

  “A terrible weapon, indeed,” said Baro. “What was it?”

  “A gravitational aggregator, used in space to assemble asteroids into useful configurations,” Bandar said. “It is said to have created long-lasting aftereffects: gravitational cysts or bubbles that form in the planet’s core and slowly rise to the surface. It is one of the things I would like to study.”

  “How can you do so from aboard the landship?”

  “We may stop occasionally so that I may descend to the prairie and take readings with an apparatus I have brought. Failing that, I will ask to borrow one of the ship’s launches.”

  “Beyond your particular interest in the battle, are you generally well informed as to the Swept?” Baro asked.

  “As well as anyone,” said Bandar.

  “What do you know about brillion mines?”

  Bandar brightened and Baro realized that here was a man who loved to discourse on the things that interested him. “It is not one of my primary interests,” the historian said, “but there has been speculation that gravitational anomalies may also have contributed to the creation of large brillion deposits in the deep substrata. Some people say that the bubbles are responsible for creating deposits of black brillion, if you believe in that sort of thing.”

  “You do not?” asked Baro.

  “I have been a commerciant and now I am a historian. I bought and sold, now I dig and I delve. I concern myself with what is and what was, not with what has almost surely never been.”

  Baro said, “I have never before met a historian. What is it about the past that draws you? It is not as if there is anything useful to be learned from it.”

  Bandar sighed. “Too true,” he said. “We pass across an old, old world. Everything that could ever have been done has been done. All the lessons have been learned, forgotten, learned anew, and finally filed away. Now we content ourselves with familiar forms and well-worn procedures. We will go on repeating the same inconsequential actions until the sun turns from orange to red. Then it will bloat and consume the world and who will care whether this cinder ever had a history?”

  Luff Imbry spoke. “My young friend has a liking for forms and procedures. He believes they give a structure to life. He is in favor of structure.”

  “I envy him,” said the historian. “For my part, I would like to travel back to the times of yore, when no one knew what the next year would bring. Imagine our distant ancestors, blithely making it up as they went along, contending with each other over faiths and ideologies as if any of it mattered. What an adventure life must have been.”

  “You are a romantic,” said Imbry.

  Bandar raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps,” he said. “In any case, I have the next best thing. For my researches, I travel the Commons.”

  Imbry said, “Ah,” in a knowledgeable manner, but the term was one that Baro did not know.

  “What is the Commons?” he said.

  “Its proper name is the noösphere,” said Bandar. “It is nothing less than the essence of all human experience: everything ever felt or seen or done by humankind, back even to the days when we prospected the hair on each other’s backs for edible parasites. All of it is in all of us and each of us is a portal to that all, though some of us—we call ourselves noönauts—find it easier than others to open the way. Yet the techniques are not difficult; with a little training anyone can peek through the door. Of course, the true adept requires a muscular memory and a flair for detail.”

  “I’m sure my friend would hear more,” Imbry said. “He has a prodigious memory and detail is his closest friend.”

  In truth, Baro found himself oddly drawn to what the historian was saying. Beneath the bubbling rhetoric about the “all in all of us,” he sensed that here was something he wanted to learn. It was like seeing a jewel shining through layers of cloth and wanting—no, almost needing—to see the treasure laid bare. Perhaps, he thought, there is an unrecognized tool for investigators in this man’s hobby. I might develop it and place it at the Bureau’s service.

  But when Bandar spoke again, he went off at a tangent, pursuing a thought that was of more interest to himself than to Baro. “It has long been known that the existence of the Commons is in some way connected to gravity,” he said. “It is difficult to access in space, for example, and some have said that human experiences that have taken place beyond gravity wells do not register strongly and are lost to the common memory.”

  Imbry said, “Might the effects of the Swept’s gravitational anomalies enhance your ability to ‘travel the Commons’?”

  The historian’s face brightened. “Exactly,” he said. “You can imagine why I had to make this trip. If my theory is correct, some remarkable research might be possible. I might establish a small retreat on the Swept, the seed of an institute.”

  “The Bandar Institute,” Imbry said, and Baro saw a light gleam for a moment in the historian’s eyes. But Baro’s interest in the noönaut’s dreams was focused on how this Commons he spoke of might figure as an investigator’s tool and he acted to steer the conversation along that heading.

  But when Bandar heard Baro’s question he coupled gentle amusement to a negative response. “No, no,” he said. “The Commons can’t tell you who stole the cheese. Its essence is the commonality of experience. Take, for example, a well-known period of history—say, the opening of the Twelve Eon.”

  Baro knew that the historian referred to the repopulating of Old Earth—indeed, that was when the “Old” had been added—by descendants of the ancients of earlier eons who had gone out to the worlds of the Spray, where they founded civilizations that first grew rich and vast before growing old and exquisite. At the end of the First Effloration, as the trek out to the stars was known, an echo of the great outward wave rippled back to its starting point. Earth, which had long been considered a place of hopeless gaucherie, then became Old Earth and fashionable again. Left fallow through more ages than anyone quite remembered, it had developed some novel flora and fauna, which the returning humans found either quaint or horrific.

  The great return was such a distinct occurrence in the long story of the species that, unlike most other times and happenings, it had largely been remembered by ensuing generations and had figured prominently in the formulation of calendars. It was thus possible for a historian like Guth Bandar to speak of significant events of the period, like the relocation of the Eriune Sea or the thinning of the global forest without a glaze of incomprehension coming over the faces of his listeners.

  “Since almost all human inhabitants of the planet today are descended from Twelfth Eon returnees,” Bandar said, “it is not difficult to find one’s way through the Commons to specific memorable events of the period and delineate them in some detail. Whereas the memory of a recent murder might be solely in the cell of the murderer and thus not amenable to the techniques by which a historian shapes the past.”

  “‘Cell’? ‘Shapes the past’?” Baro said, and the historian was only too glad to pour out more of his learning.

  “An event happens,” he said, “and the person to whom it happens remembers it. That person’s memory becomes what we call a cell or an engram. On its own, a single cell drifts away on the currents of the Commons and is unremarked.

  “But suppose the same event happens to a thousand people. Or if not the same event, then a similar event—say, death on a particular battlefield—happens individually to tens of thousands. Each of those cells is so like unto the others that they do not drift sep
arately: they cohere and join, reinforcing each other’s existence. They then become what we call a corpuscle.

  “A very large and potent corpuscle may become active, as if it were possessed of a will,” Bandar continued, “though I and other members of the Predilective School maintain that a corpuscle can only have a tendency, never a true will. The rigid thinkers of the Volition Faction may mock us but our reasoning cannot be unseated and will eventually prevail.”

  “But you digress,” said Imbry.

  “I do,” said the historian. “I have been preparing a paper on the issue and it has inflamed my academic tissues. My apologies.”

  Imbry indicated the Fezzani insignia pinned to his gown. “I understand entirely,” he said. “Please go on. My young friend is fascinated.”

  Bandar peered at Baro. “Really? Usually I soon exhaust a listener’s patience. My children would roll their eyes and put out their tongues when they thought I could not see them.”

  The image touched a soft point in Baro. “Please,” he said.

  “A willful—or as we say, tendentious—corpuscle may begin to move about,” Bandar said, “attracting and absorbing other, less potent corpuscles, though it will only do so to corpuscles made of cells that are similar in content. So the combined engrams of major victories will encompass corpuscles of less celebrated triumphs. But the corpuscle of a victory can never devour that of a defeat.

  “It can, however, develop in potency and breadth, allying itself to corpuscles that are similar in content. So the collective memory of a great victory can adhere to the common engram of a great hero or a significant noble sacrifice. When such adhesions take place, the aggregates are known as entities. They build and solidify and take up specific Locations in the Commons, where they can be found and examined by the trained historian.”

  Baro was unclear on one point. “But where is this Commons, this noösphere? Where do these engrams and entities do their devouring and aggregating?”

  Imbry and the historian gave each other the shared look of the cognoscenti confronted by the noddy. Bandar reached around the back of Baro’s head and tapped the bone. “In there,” he said, then tapped his own head and Imbry’s, “and in here. And in all of us.”

  Baro understood. “You are talking of species memory,” he said. “I had thought the collective unconscious was a myth.”

  “Well, of course it is,” said Bandar. “And like all myths, it partakes of fundamental truth. The final and highest stage of any engram’s development is to become an archetypal myth, so that anyone who falls asleep finds himself being threatened by the beast or seduced by the damsel, being pursued through the labyrinth or swimming through the green-lit sea.

  “But those that do not become myths remain as entities. Events, persons, even whole landscapes are preserved and may be visited and examined.”

  Baro scratched his head. “But surely they are not accurate records of what really happened on a specific day in a certain place.”

  Bandar laughed. “There are never any ‘accurate’ records. Register whatever sounds and images you choose and put them in a vault for ten thousand years. When you bring them out and reveal them, those who see and hear will hand you back a dozen, a score of impressions and interpretations. In history, what actually happens is much less important than what it means. And what it means is what people say it means.”

  Baro wanted to argue the point but was not sure where to start. He switched focus. “You said that a good memory and a knack for detail were required. I have both,” he said.

  Bandar stroked his chin. “How many doors were in the waiting room at the balloon-tram station, in which walls were they set, and what was written on each?”

  Baro consulted his memory and told him, adding, “The stationmaster’s door had a scratch in the paint above the handle.”

  He knew from the historian’s expression that the man was impressed. Bandar proposed an experiment to test the young man’s aptitude. “If you’re interested,” he said.

  Baro confessed that he was. He now accepted that the discipline could not become an investigatory aid but he still felt an urge to know more about the Commons.

  “It’s up to you how you wish to picture the way in to the noösphere,” Bandar said. “Some see it as a door, others a mirror, some as a cave or as a hollow in a tree. It might be a dark closet or the space under a porch. The great Tumreth Ialgephalios used to envision his own right nostril.”

  “I will see a door,” Baro said. He did not know why, but he had no doubt how that portal would look when he encountered it. “What will lie beyond it?”

  “Let us not skip before we can hop,” said Bandar. “The Commons is a dangerous place for anyone, and indescribably perilous for some.”

  The warning was delivered in a dry tone. Baro sensed that Bandar was no blustering impresario, out to make a mouse a monster by sheer force of rhetoric. The man struck Baro as sincere; therefore the peril was genuine. Yet Baro felt only a heightened desire to know more.

  “I do not doubt you,” he said. “Still, I am greatly curious.”

  “Immediately through the portal,” the historian said, “you meet only your own memories, that is the contents of your personal unconscious. But if you sifted through those familiar retrospectants you would sooner or later notice something that is unfamiliar. The thing that is out of place is the key that opens the way to the great wide noösphere. For now, I think we should go no farther than up to the first door. If you can manage to hold it in your mind’s eye for a few moments, that will show an aptitude for training as a noönaut.”

  “Very well,” said Baro. “Let us find the door.”

  Bandar proceeded to instruct Baro in the elementary approach. This involved a regulation of breathing with eyes closed and a stillness of the limbs, followed by an affirmation of willingness to visualize the symbolic entrance. Then came the sounding of certain combinations of tones, called thrans, which must be rendered exactly.

  Baro performed as he was instructed. He had a musical ear and found the tones not difficult to make and sustain. Within a short time the image of a closed door appeared on the screen of his inner vision. He continued to intone the sonorous sounds in concert with Guth Bandar, and soon it seemed that the door’s image somehow grew more immediate and the tones overpowered the background clatter from the balloon-tram’s tiny galley and the deep humming of the cable that secured them to the dolly far below.

  Once the door was well fixed in his mind, he saw that around its edges a light began to glimmer. Now Baro found that he was able to intone the prescribed sounds with more energy, as if they came not from his respiratory apparatus but from some deeper source closer to the core of him. The light grew brighter and hotter, with a golden base tinged with crimson blush. Bandar’s voice faded from his ears. There were only the tones and the bright ringed door.

  In his mind’s eye he created a hand and reached for the handle that would open the door. He felt his fingers close on the smooth warmth of the handle.

  “Enough!” came the historian’s voice. “Come back!” Baro felt himself being shaken. In his mind’s eye, the door with its limning of light diminished in size, rushing away from him as if at great speed. He returned to his surroundings with a jolt like a man descending a staircase who, thinking there is one more step, thrusts his foot against unyielding floor.

  He opened his eyes to find Bandar standing over him, a worried look on the small man’s face and his delicate hands gripping Baro’s shoulders. Imbry was regarding him with mild perplexity.

  “You went much too fast!” the noönaut was saying. “I almost lost you.”

  “I saw a light surrounding the door,” Baro said. “And I saw my own hand reaching for the handle.”

  Bandar’s face paled. “You truly saw the light and made a hand to open the door? And you had never heard of these things before today?”

  “I am not one to tease,” said Baro.

  “I can vouch for that,” said his partne
r. “He is no bubbling spring of merriment.”

  Bandar passed a hand across his well-wrinkled forehead. “I have not seen such an aptitude before,” he said. “It took weeks of guided application before I could reliably reify my portal and call forth the light, and yet more weeks before I could open the way for more than a twinkling.”

  “It seemed only natural to me,” said Baro.

  A quiver struck the small man. “That is not a word to use lightly in connection to the Commons,” he said. “If I thought you were a natural, I would never let you near the place.”

  “Why?” Baro said.

  “Because among noönauts, the word ‘natural’ is a close synonym for ‘irredeemable psychotic.’” The small man put his hands to his cheeks and drew them down and inward until they caused his lips to purse. Then he blew out a breath and said, “If you will excuse me, I believe I will sit quietly by myself for a while. This has been a shock.”

  “I would like to know more about all of this,” said Baro.

  “As would I,” said Imbry. “If my young companion is no more than half a hoot from full-blown psychosis, it would be useful to know the signs that he is about to slip into the yabba-dabbas.”

  “He is in no peril if he forbears to call up the vision of the portal again.” Bandar looked sternly at Baro. “I strongly urge you not to do so. Once in too far, there is no way out.”

  “I would know more,” said Baro.

  “Then let it be later,” said the noönaut. “I must think on the matter.” With that he returned to his seat and gazed out the window at the landscape unrolling far below.

  Luff Imbry regarded Baro with a considering look. “It appears you have unsuspected depths,” he said, then again composed himself for sleep.

  Baro was not sure how to respond. He shrugged and turned to regard the view from his side of the balloon-tram. They were skirting Ektop, its unbroken sweep of primeval forest stretching off into the farthest distance. Somewhere off to the north-west the horizon was smeared by a yellowy cloud of airborne pollutants, signifying that the enclave of Zeel continued its consuming quest for industrial innovation. But the balloon-tram’s course went east and south through rolling farmland and bucolic villages toward a line of weatherworn hills that, once surmounted, would ease them down to Farflung on the edge of the Swept.