Black Brillion

by Matthew Hughes

  They were the underpinnings of every mind, he explained, each of us being an amalgam of several of these entities acting in consort and conflict with each other. Over an individual’s lifetime, the various archetypes waxed and waned, assuming greater or less significant roles as the person faced the different challenges existence offered.

  “So the Hero was just a dislodged fragment of Wasselthorpe’s own psyche,” Haj said, “something that might be encountered in a dream. Wherein lay the danger?”

  “This was not a dream,” said Bandar. “In dreams the entities come to the sleeping consciousness much as Father Olwyn has appeared to us, as a representation only. But when the consciousness descends fully awake to the Commons, as we did, the archetypes stand forth in full. In dreams they are a whisper; when we come into their own world they are a shout, the kind of shout to buckle walls and topple towers. This one came looking for him.”

  “The Hero would have attacked him?” Imbry asked.

  “No.” The historian shook his head. “Worse. It would have absorbed him. The complex inner crowd that makes up Phlevas Wasselthorpe would have been pushed to the farthest edge of his being. The person you know ceases to be, and then comes the Hero into his own. The pure and fated warrior replaces Wasselthorpe; thus he becomes permanently psychotic.”

  There was a brief silence, then Haj said, “And you venture into this hell as a pastime? Poking about among deadly forces to pluck scraps of forgotten lore that only a few nincompoops like you would give the hairs off a termie’s rump for?”

  “For the adept, it is quite safe,” said Bandar. “Early venturers into the Commons discovered that certain combinations of tones act as controls and keys upon the psyche. The clues were in a dawn myth about a singer who charms the king of the dead into releasing the musician’s true love.

  “Once having mastered the tones—and learned the ways and portals—an adept can wander the Commons in almost complete safety. My colleagues and I slip unseen past the stark entities of the outer arrondisements. We delve deep into the inner rings to explore archetypical Landscapes, Events, and Situations. It is quite fascinating.”

  “Uh huh,” said Haj. She rose and put her hands on hips. “I cannot forbid you to do it again,” she said to Bandar, “but …”

  “No need,” the historian said. “I have no intention.”

  Baro was struggling to his feet. He still felt not quite returned from the noösphere. It was as if he wore his body like an ill-fitted garment. He leaned for support against the bulkhead of the foredeck, wanting to say something that would encourage Raina Haj to see him in a more advantageous light. But as he tried to shake a pithy remark from his still disordered brain, there came a scream from behind him, a scream that was abruptly silenced.

  From the darkness that shrouded the raised forecastle a slim figure emerged. Baro saw Flix, trembling again as she had when the affliction had lifted from her, her mouth opening and closing without sound.

  First Officer Kosmir appeared from somewhere and seized the artist’s companion by both shoulders. “What is it?” he cried.

  Flix found her voice. “Monlaurion has fallen from the prow. I fear he has been crushed beneath the wheels.”

  Kosmir raised his voice. “All stop! Send word for the captain! Gig crew close up!”

  Even with her wind pylons disengaged, it was minutes before the Orgulon rumbled to a halt. The ambulatory passengers meanwhile rushed to the stern rail and peered through the darkness to where a lighter shade of black marked where Monlaurion lay.

  Discussion among the crowd was muted but vigorous and soon came to the conclusion that if the landship’s weight had indeed passed over the artist, what remained of him must be scarcely less flat than the Swept itself.

  The captain came on deck while a handful of the crew mustered on the forward promenade deck and extracted the landship’s gig, a snub-nosed flying platform, from its nesting place under a cover by the rail. The utilitarian craft soon lifted off and slid astern. A beam of light reached from the platform to a spot on the prairie and seemed to pull the flyer to where the victim lay.

  Baro watched as a cloth was spread over the body and it was lifted onto the platform, which then returned to the landship’s open deck. An officer who wore the insignia of a ship’s physician peeled back a flap of the cover and passed an instrument over what was beneath, with the air of someone performing a purely symbolic function, and pronounced the artist dead. Flix stood, ashen and trembling, until the official words were said, then buried her face in her hands.

  Raina Haj now approached the aircraft and looked under the cover. Baro thought she must have possessed a stronger constitution than most because she did not flinch at what must have been an unpleasant sight although her face went almost as pale as Flix’s.

  Kosmir and the captain were standing nearby, exhibiting an air of official calm as the former relayed the latter’s orders to get the landship under way again. The security officer crossed the deck to the captain and spoke quietly. The first officer listened with head bent and face composed, but Baro saw a flash of some emotion briefly escape Kosmir’s control of his features as she spoke. Then she was finished and the captain nodded and drew himself erect.

  The captain was a small, precise man with ribbons on his chest that attested to a lengthy career. His immaculate uniform fitted him exactly. “Honorables and distinctions,” he addressed the passengers, “there has been an unfortunate incident. Was anyone here a witness to what happened?”

  The captain waited, but no one spoke up. “We will defer consideration of the matter until we reach port,” he said.

  Raina Haj spoke earnestly in a whisper that none but the captain and Kosmir heard. The captain shook his head in rejection of whatever Haj was proposing and Baro again saw a brief flare of emotion on the first officer’s face.

  “My security officer believes that a grievous crime may have been committed. On her recommendation, the passenger Flix will be confined to her quarters and a guard posted at the door.”

  Flix had been watching the gig crew enclose Monlaurion’s body in a temporary coffin in preparation for transferring it belowdecks. Now she looked up in puzzlement. “He fell,” she said. Raina Haj came and took her by the arm and led her to the companionway. Baro heard her voice again as she descended the stairs. “It was an accident.”

  “I wonder,” said Baro.

  Bandar had an opinion. “He may have encountered a gravitational cyst, overbalanced, and tumbled overboard. I’ve heard of it happening.”

  “The rail is more than waist high,” said Imbry. “He would have had to transfer his center of gravity to somewhere around his shoulders.”

  “That can happen out here,” the small man said. “Gravitational cysts filter up from the planet’s core to burst above the surface. The smaller ones are usually globular, the larger tend toward a lens shape. An object the size of a human being, encompassed by a cyst’s internal gravitation flux, can experience several different gravities simultaneously.

  “If a globular anomaly briefly formed as the Orgulon moved forward, and if Monlaurion was carried through it, his equilibrium would be affected. For example, his left side might suddenly weigh four times as much as his right, or his head might outweigh his feet by a factor of ten. His center of gravity could be instantly repositioned and he might very well fall.”

  “Do such things happen often?” Baro asked.

  “No, but they do happen,” Bandar said. “It’s another one of the things that drew me to the Swept. These gravitational anomalies may have effects on the noösphere.”

  While the historian had been speaking the captain and Kosmir had left the deck. The white-haired woman with the birth-marked husband was marshaling many of the passengers into a group chant of fah, sey, opah.

  “I think I will go below and get my measuring equipment,” said Bandar.

  Imbry and Baro bid him a restful night and retired to their cabin. A plump and stubby steward was preparing the
sleeping accommodations. As she was about to leave, Baro detained her and asked a question. “What can you tell me about Security Officer Haj?”

  The steward appeared shocked. “Nothing,” she said. “The captain does not encourage prying.”

  A coin appeared in Luff Imbry’s hand and swiftly made its way to the steward’s pocket as the fat man said, “My young friend is smitten,” he said. “Why not indulge him in a harmless infatuation?”

  The woman regarded Baro with an appraising look and he could not help feeling that she thought poorly of his chances if he sought Haj’s interest. Then she shrugged and said, “She joined us only for this cruise and at the last moment. I don’t think she’s served on landships before. Some said …” She bit her lip.

  “Yes?” Imbry said.

  “It’s only gossip.”

  A second coin traveled to join the first. “We enjoy gossip,” Imbry said.

  “Well, some said she was foisted on the captain, that she isn’t a proper officer at all.”

  “Might she have been sent by the charterer?”

  “Might have. It takes a fair degree of influence to press our captain.”

  “Hmm,” said Imbry.

  “What about First Officer Kosmir?” Baro said.

  The steward looked him up and down. “Have you a yen for him also? You are liberal in your tastes.”

  Imbry said, “He fears that the first officer might be a formidable rival for the object of his interest.”

  The woman snorted. “Kosmir and Haj?” she said. “They are Ambion and Dearie.”

  Baro recognized the reference to the legendary couple whose bitter lifelong enmity made them a byword for self-wounding through an inability to forgo retribution and revenge. The two end up struggling to deny each other a single blanket during a blizzard and freeze to death rather than share each other’s body heat.

  “They are not warm to each other?” he said.

  “You have nothing to fear,” the steward said.

  When she was gone Baro said to Imbry, “Perhaps we should assist Haj in her investigation.”

  “We have not yet determined whether she is working for Gebbling,” Imbry said.

  “I feel that she is not.”

  “Perhaps the story I gave the steward was the truth.”

  “I am not interested in her,” Baro said, though he realized as he said it that his statement was only partly true. “I am interested in solving a murder, if a murder has been committed.”

  “You have already wandered away from our own assignment to explore the noösphere,” Imbry pointed out. “Now you want to thrust yourself into the way of a young woman who seems to have her business firmly in hand. Besides, we are supposed to remain undercover.”

  “True, but if Monlaurion and Flix were shills for Gebbling and had a falling out, we might exploit the situation to gather evidence. But we would have to go through Haj to get to Flix.”

  Imbry yawned. “It might be a useful strategy if we could turn one against the other, but that is a difficult trick when one of them is dead.”

  “I want to recover the clingfast. It could tell us much.”

  “If it wasn’t crushed beyond use or dislodged and left out on the Swept.”

  “We should do something,” Baro said. He was conscious of an inner urge to take action; what that action ought to be was not clear, but the urge was growing, like an unscratchable itch in the back of his mind.

  “I am sure there must be a Bureau motto about watching before doing,” Imbry said.

  “Observe, deduce, act, reflect,” Baro quoted.

  “At this point, we do not have enough information to make rational deductions. So we cannot move on to action.”

  “But agents are expected to use their initiative.”

  “Fine. I now use my initiative to take the upper bunk,” Imbry said, climbing the ladder the steward had deployed for them. At the top he paused and said, “Here’s an idea: why don’t you contact Directing Agent Arboghast and discuss your planned diversion from the investigation that the Archon personally assigned you to?”

  Baro’s enthusiasm waned. “I will sleep on it,” he said and crawled into the lower bunk.

  “Good idea,” said Imbry. “Perhaps in the morning someone will confess and everything will be cleared up.”

  Baro expressed a number of opinions on his partner’s attitude, but before he was finished he was interrupted by a loud snore from above.

  He thought that sleep might avoid him. Instead it swallowed him within minutes. He found himself once again in his boyhood room, though the details were not as sharp as when he had entered by intoning the historian’s thran. Still, when he opened the wardrobe, there was the mirror and in it the shadowed image of his disdainful alter ego.

  Baro stepped boldly toward his Shadow, but this time before he could touch it the figure spoke. “Destiny,” it said, then mimed the actions of someone whose fingertips have come in contact with an object hot enough to sear them.

  Baro ignored the cryptic warning and passed through the glass, but the single word echoed in his dream-mind as he descended to the dark pool. He dove in and soared down to the land of clear luminescence, alighting on the same road in the same spot as before. But this time the sharpness of detail and clarity of form were missing: objects would not hold a shape; instead they changed—the wall became a fence became a hedge—even as he regarded them. He took a step down the road and noticed that the white stone pavement was now a dusty path; in a moment he was wading along the course of a shallow brook.

  “It does not matter,” he told himself. “Essence is essence, form only form.” The words made sense to his dreaming self.

  Now he saw a figure ahead of him on the road—it had become a road again—and he hurried to catch up. It was a man striding forcefully forward, and when he laid a hand on the figure’s shoulder, the startled face that turned to him was that of Guth Bandar.

  “What are you doing?” the historian said. He seemed very frightened.

  “I am dreaming,” said Baro.

  “This is very wrong,” said the historian. “You should not be here.”

  “Do not be concerned,” Baro said. “It is only a dream.”

  “Yes,” said Bandar, “but it is my dream.”

  “No, it is mine,” said Baro. “You are a figment.”

  Bandar did not look reassured. “Tell me,” he said, “when you look at me do I seem to change in any way? Or is my form constant?”

  Baro took stock of the man. “It is peculiar, but you do seem to remain unchanged whereas the woods behind you have been several different kinds of forest even as we speak.”

  “What does that tell you?”

  “What should it tell me?”

  “A hundred things, none of them good. I will open us a gate.” Bandar began to hum a series of tones.

  Before he had time to think about it, Baro put his hand over the man’s mouth and said, “No.”

  With a desperate struggle, Bandar wrestled himself free. “Oh, this is much worse than not good,” he said. “I should appear to you as at best a shifting image. Instead you not only see me but can lay hands on me and prevent my following my own will.”

  “I am sorry,” said Baro. “I do not want to depart.”

  “I want nothing but. Do you not understand that you frighten me?”

  “I do not wish to.” Baro looked around at the shifting landscape. “Do you not sense that somehow all of this is as it is meant to be?”

  “That is precisely what frightens me,” said Bandar. “Neither of us is experiencing an ordinary dream. Some force is shaping us to its own ends. In the Commons, the only such force is that of an archetype intent on absorbing a consciousness. As I have explained, that way lies madness.”

  “I do not feel irrational,” said Baro. “My mind seems unusually clear, considering that I am dreaming.”

  “Again, a worrying sign,” said Bandar. “My sense of things tells me that you are being drawn i
nto the role of Hero and that I am being pressed into the part of the Helper.”

  “I want from you only a few words of advice,” Baro said.

  “Let us be exact,” said Bandar. “You feel compelled to enter more deeply into the Commons and you want me to be your guide.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I refuse.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there you will be absorbed by whatever entity is summoning you and then you will certainly become insane and die. Innocent, helpful Bandar, pulled along will-I or nill-I in your wake, will suffer an equally horrid fate.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Baro said.

  “Only because your ignorance serves as an impenetrable shield. My knowledge leaves me naked.”

  Baro knew that he ought to heed the historian’s warning, but he was possessed of a certainty that all would be well. Yet when he communicated this assurance to Guth Bandar the historian’s fear only increased.

  “The Hero always thinks everything will turn out fine,” the man said, “right up until the dragon’s jaws close upon his soft parts.”

  “Perhaps I am not a hero,” Baro said. “I might be merely a blend of several entities, like you and most people.”

  “Look at yourself,” Bandar said.

  Baro looked down. A shirt made of linked metal hung from his pelt-clad shoulders. His feet were enclosed in scuffed leather boots whose straps crisscrossed each other up his trouser-clad legs. He was holding a sword.

  “Does that look familiar?” said the historian.

  Baro admitted that it did. Still, he was not concerned.

  Bandar said, “Let me open a gate. We will talk about this while our waking selves can resist any inclinations to madness.”

  Baro was tempted to agree, but the certainty overruled caution. “I am here to do something,” he said. “I feel that I must do it.”

  Bandar trembled, and it was only then that Baro realized he had been gesturing for emphasis with the hand that held the sword. He laid it down on the road beside him, but when he looked down a moment later it was unaccountably back in his hand.