Gaudeamus

by John Barnes

  Jake was again shouting about how he was an Indian and he was mad. It occurred to me that there was an interesting feedback problem in that Kermit’s guitar was getting more out of tune, so a wider range of noises coming out of it were generating thirds, fourths, and fifths on Esau’s wired percussion system, which meant that the melody (if any) must be vanishing more and more. Jake didn’t seem like the guy to track it down and find it, either.

  “What are you doing here?” I hollered to Melody.

  “Bored, nothing in Gunny, and doing research officially,” she shouted back.

  “On what?”

  “You didn’t know? This is an abductee bar.”

  It took me a moment to process that; once I did, I shook my head in admiration. “So everyone here has been abducted on a UFO? Or thinks they have?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got an interest in the narratology of the abduction construct. I think there’s a potential way to deconstruct it with respect to the urban-rural power relation.”

  Which is what a semiotician says when she means she’s looking for patterns in the way people put together stories about being kidnapped by flying saucers, and she thinks that if you remove the elements from the structure, and look at how they were fitted into it, you’ll see something that reveals how people in rural areas feel about being under the political domination of cities. One thing I liked about Melody, when you got to the bottom of her short pronouncements, there were long pronouncements that meant something.

  “What’s Travis doing here?”

  “He’s got a major thing for Jenapha,” I said, seeing no way to soften it. “By the way, he’s an idiot.”

  “You said that about him before. Are they serious?”

  “He is. I doubt she’s ever serious about anything.”

  We sat and watched the band for a while, and they maintained a pretty constant level; nothing was any worse or any better. I visualized them as following an isosuckage plane in suck space. I leaned forward and said, “Hey, let’s go out in the parking lot for a second. I have an idea for how I can be a treacherous bastard.”

  Melody followed me out, and I said, “You know, I’ve enjoyed about as much of this band as I can stand. And I got up at five freakin’ thirty to put Kara on a plane, and then sat and drank with Trav all afternoon, and drove over the mountains, and you know what? I’m really tired. And they have another set after this one. And then Travis will want to spend some more time following Jenapha Lee around. So here’s my idea. Let me give you his pack to put in your car. Then I’m going to take off and drive home while I can still do it awake; there’s cliffs, turns, and dropoffs that I’d rather be able to react to. And then his way back to Gunnison is either you, or else he’ll have to stick with the band.”

  “You are a treacherous bastard,” Melody said. “I’m nominating you to go back on Faculty Senate when you get back from sabbatical.”

  “I’m just betraying a friend,” I said, “it’s not like I’m fixing up roast baby sandwiches or anything.”

  “But you’re betraying a friend with such style. It’s the essence of faculty self-governance. Okay, let’s do it.”

  I handed her his pack, gingerly because with Travis you never know what might be in there, and said, “Careful with that—you never know what that maniac may be toting around.”

  “Hey, John?”

  “Yeah.”

  She gave me a hug; there was a lot of Melody, though she carried it all well, and my hands didn’t quite touch comfortably as they closed over the rough red wool of the back of her coat. Into my shoulder, she said, “From the way he’s looking at her, I don’t think I really have a chance, but thanks for trying to give me one, okay?”

  “You’re welcome. I should start driving before the set finishes out—it’ll spare some awkward explaining, and leave your story more credible.”

  I watched her go back into the Mutilated Cow, and felt like I might be missing something, but I turned the engine over, flipped up the headlights, and pulled out. The 4Runner’s lights swept over a long row of huge battered pickups and tiny even more battered granolamobiles; one old Land Cruiser had a bumper sticker I liked: “Carpe Callosum.”

  Really, it had probably been better than staying at home and being depressed, but it was time to go home now. I spent most of that long winding drive, up and over the pass, explaining that to myself repeatedly, and when I finally got home at two in the morning, I just took out my contacts, fed the cats, and fell into bed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “It’s really not your fault,” Kara said, as we sat in the W and waited for Melody. “And you weren’t there—you worked hard not to be there—and you don’t even know what happened. The Gunnison paper isn’t very good for finding out what happened, you know?”

  “I just can’t believe I left no more than an hour before it happened,” I said. “I have such a talent for not being there.”

  “Don’t worry, Travis will show up when it’s most inconvenient, and he’ll tell you something better than what really happened.” She had that silly crooked grin that had probably induced me to propose in the first place, and as always, as soon as I saw it, I felt worlds better.

  I glanced down at the Gunnison paper in front of me. Normally it was a very thin paper anyway, about the size of a college paper at a medium-sized college with no j-school. The first issue of the New Year was even thinner than usual, since pretty much everybody was either down somewhere sunny, up the mountain skiing, or at least at home doing as little as possible.

  “Nowadays I get all my news from reading Gaudeamus on the web,” I said. “I think I believe in Ower Gyro more than I do in our mayor. Did you see it this morning? There was an icon of a pill, with a glass of water, on O. B. Joyful’s desk, and if you clicked on the pill, you got a magnifying glass to look at it, and on the pill it said ‘Thinkenfuk.’ And the glass of water said ‘From Saguache Springs.’ You know, I’ve told you that Travis and I have some connections with Richard Reno—”

  “Often,” Kara said.

  “Okay, but it’s a cool story.”

  “Even in reruns. Which always dwell on Traci and Stacy.”

  “Okay. I’ll skip all the stuff you’ve heard. I’m just wondering if maybe Travis hasn’t told me but is still in touch with Richard Reno, and is telling him the same stories he’s been telling me. It would explain how Gaudeamus keeps referring to things in Travis’s stories, and it would also mean that Travis’s stories didn’t necessarily have to be true.”

  “I would think you’d want your friend to be telling you the truth.”

  “If he is, I’m an old fat lazy coward, passing up the best chance I’ll ever have to see something, and write about it, that could make me rich and famous. If he’s just a crazy liar with a taste for tall tales, and really bad timing, then I can feel okay about myself.”

  “Uh,” she said, “uh.” She was doing her little double-take thing that meant she thought I’d stopped making sense. “And exactly how does that follow logically?”

  “I’m on sabbatical. I don’t have to think logically till I go back.”

  “Is that it?”

  There was an edge in Kara’s voice that made me nervous, like we might have one of the fights we rarely had, or like she wanted to talk about something more serious than I wanted to talk about, so I looked down at the paper in front of me again, a bad choice for somewhere to hide.

  Kara’s finger pointed to the headline that had started the conversation: DRUG BUST IS TOTAL BUST.

  About an hour after I’d left the Mutilated Cow, the Saguache County sheriffs department had raided the place, confiscating large quantities of a pill variously called “God” and “good moss.” Which I suspected was the Times reporters doing their usual job of writing what they thought they heard and not checking afterwards. On various occasions I had been reported as the author of Original Residence, One Four Morning Glory (presumably the address of the Original Residence), and Encounter with Fiber, about whi
ch I refused to think. It was probably unrelated to my being introduced as the writer of Encounter with Timber on local radio.

  “So Travis Bismarck dropped by the Timely and told them the same outrageous story and got them to corroborate it?” Kara asked. “Is that really what you think?”

  “All right,” I said. “Point taken. But like you just said, given where the story is running, there’s really no telling what actually happened. And even if it’s miraculously accurate, the whole point of the story is that no one was arrested or charged and the whole thing was a big mistake. But, okay, okay, okay, you’re right, it’s the closest thing to a confirmation that I’ve had that any of this wild stuff Travis is telling me is true. And I have the strangest feeling about the other headline—the giant sinkhole.”

  “Oh, according to the news this morning, they’ve definitely ruled out a sinkhole, which means it’s really unexplained,” Kara said. “It’s going to be in all the Ripley’s and Strange and Unknown books for decades to come. And it made the national news, anyway, and the Denver stations sent camera crews down there. Though how you can get footage of one million cubic meters of sand not being there is beyond me.”

  The other above-the-fold headline in the paper was the freakish event at Great Sand Dunes National Monument, at the foot of the mountains on the eastern side of the San Luis Valley. It’s one of those awe-inspiring places that the West abounds in that seem to get no press or public awareness even a few hundred miles away—an immense high-altitude dune field piled up against the western face of the Sangre de Cristos. Satellites and survey crews had confirmed that sometime during Christmas night, in an area exactly one kilometer square, a meter of top sand had disappeared from all the dunes. As Kara pointed out, it was a very exact one million cubic meters, and round numbers are naturally suspicious. (Trust a mathematician’s daughter to notice that.)

  Now, the dunes shift all the time, but the sand goes somewhere, and the scientists are used to being able to figure out where. This time, a million cubic meters had vanished, and there was no evidence that it had blown, washed, or sunk anywhere. That, plus the exactitude of the kilometer square by one meter deep—its sides lined up perfectly north, south, east, and west—had brought many of the strange-phenomena people out, and they in turn had drawn the news media with them, because any good station manager knows that a Bigfoot sighting or a UFO is ten times easier to cover than foreign policy or biotechnology. So the TV screens in Colorado and the neighboring states had been filled with images of people with rigid hair and huge teeth standing in front of sand dunes with high, snow-covered peaks in the background, reporting that before the mysterious incident, this place had looked just like this but a meter higher.

  “Betcha dinner at the Cattlemen’s that Travis works that one into his story,” Kara said.

  “The sand dunes story? No bet. I’m just wondering if he’ll work in ‘First Graders Make Giant Christmas Tree from All Recycled Materials.’” That was the other front-page story.

  Melody still wasn’t there, so we flagged down the waitress and got coffee. “Take your time and wait for your friend,” she said. “Without idle people sitting around it’ll look like my job is unnecessary.”

  After she’d gone, Kara said, “You know, somewhere back there, you made a good point—I’ll try not to faint. The drug story is the closest thing to confirmation you’ve had for any of this wild stuff Travis has been telling you. At least the name sounds like ‘gaudeamus’, and it was a drug, and then a ‘Mr. Hale from a federal agency’ showed up and revealed that all the drugs were part of some mysterious government project and in fact it was fine for them to be in that pickup truck. Can you imagine someone getting a local cop, out here where they’re used to being authority and making decisions, to back off on half a ton of pills, especially when he’s busting a bunch of strange people that the neighbors don’t like, and the primary is only a few months away? Hale must have really had weight to throw around. Which gives me the feeling that Travis must be telling some approximation to the truth, doesn’t it you?”

  “If Travis Bismarck is telling the truth about anything, I’ll eat both my boots, composite soles first, without A-1,” Melody said, sliding into the booth beside Kara. “Sorry I’m late. So you guys saw the paper too.”

  “Did you get caught in that?” I asked.

  “Naw. The instant that Travis realized you had gone and left his backpack with me, he suddenly remembered he had to go somewhere, with that rich nitwit, right after the show. So he got his bag from my car and that was the last I saw of him, except catching a glimpse, now and then, of him out on the dance floor grinding with the Former Debutante Most Likely To Have Been Dropped On Her Head.”

  “She doesn’t impress me much, either,” I said. “Pure poser. It’s funny how even the worst bands have one or two of those around. And the worse the band, the more likely it is that their hanger-on is going to be somebody rich.”

  “Sure, they’ll never make the money to pay her. She has to do it out of charity. On the other hand, she gets that band all to herself—poor thing. So over time the successful bands get beautiful hangers-on, and the sucky bands get rich hangers-on. Pure market-driven evolution.” Melody sighed. “Okay, I’m bitter. And I’m not over it. Damn it, John, your old friend is hot. A jackass and a deep-seated loser, but hot. And cool. And I could so use to have someone cool come through town to see me now and then. I’m starting to think about looking for love in all the wrong places.”

  Kara sighed. “When you start quoting country songs, you’re pretty far gone already.”

  Melody nodded. “Well, that song in particular.”

  “I always wondered—if you’re looking for love, what are the wrong places?” Kara asked.

  “Under cowboy hats, above cowboy boots, and behind cowboy belt buckles,” our waitress said, coming up behind me. “Shit, Professor Wallace, I’ve been single in this town for ten years, and I’ve already done the research. Don’t you start. We don’t gotta verify or confirm no results.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Hey, thanks for letting me ride along with you,” Melody said, as we roared across Kansas in the bright noon of early January. Wheat stubble, broken here and there by a fencerow or ditchrow of trees, stretched right out to the soft white sky at the horizon. We’d been going steadily since leaving at five-thirty in the morning, and the whole way we’d had the Western State van in front of us. “I couldn’t quite believe it. Three hours in the van and I wanted to scream. But those two actually seem to enjoy it.”

  “They like theatre students,” I said, “and they’re used to coping with a two-year-old, which is very valuable experience if you’re going to deal with theatre students. And the students can tell they like them—which is part of why they’re such fun people to have as faculty, but also why all kinds of against-the-rules stuff tends to erupt around them. I like theatre students too, actually, but for some reason they behave fairly well around me.”

  “Because you’re gruff and mean and a brutal hard case?” Melody suggested.

  “Must be. I find if I kill and eat the dumbest kid in each class, right on the table at the front of the room, at the beginning of the term, the rest of them behave pretty well afterwards.”

  Melody snorted. “Yeah. Right. Doctor Teddy Bear.”

  I shrugged. “Well, half of them think that, the other half think Doctor Ogre, and they all think I’m strange. Which is probably the real reason why so many of them behave—they can’t predict how I’ll react. Anyway, compared to past years, this trip is a breeze. It’s only maybe eleven or twelve hours, total, to Kansas City. You should see what it’s like when the regionals are in Minnesota.”

  As a science fiction writer, creating fictional societies, I find it very hard to capture one observation about real societies—that a big, free, rich society will have hundreds or thousands of interesting things going on that no one outside each little world has ever heard of. Science fiction conventions, which might
not interest me but obviously amuse thousands of people. Limerick championships. Minor league baseball. Bar stool races. Recaptioning The Family Circus. The Burning Man. Bloomsday.

  And in this particular case, KC-ACTF Regionals. The KC in question is the Kennedy Center, in Washington, the national headquarters of the whole thing. The ACTF is the American College Theatre Festival, which is an immense competition in, and celebration of, all the dozens of crafts that go into theatre production and therefore must be learned and practiced at the college level. I’ve been a volunteer respondent (the politest and most nonthreatening word for “judge”) for it for many years, and it’s one of the most interesting things going on in either American academia or American theatre. And of all the aspects of it, the most charming and interesting is the regional festival—six days during which students compete in acting, directing, all forms of design, playwriting, and technical areas; every theatre faculty member who can get there gets a chance to schmooze about every aspect of college theatre programs (and about what jobs might be opening up and who got into what kind of censorship trouble how and so on); and several of the best college productions from the past year in the region are remounted for everyone to see. (I’ve always admired the courage of anyone taking a show to regionals—imagine reviving a show that has been mothballed for months in order to perform it in front of an entire audience that is sitting there muttering, “Why didn’t our show get invited instead of this?”)

  While I was at Western, it was also an occasion for finding out why I was glad I didn’t have teenage children, since temporarily I had anywhere from four to fourteen of them, in an environment where there were also several hundred temptations in the form of other theatre students.

  I had talked Melody into coming along because over in her end of communications, she’d never seen anything like this, and it was the kind of place where her keen eye might pick up fifty or a hundred ideas and observations for papers and books. Also because I knew the noise in the van would swiftly drive her crazy, she’d move over to my truck, none of the students would want to go to a vehicle where they’d be outnumbered by faculty, and thus I’d get either pleasant conversation or comfortable, friendly silent company for that eternal drive across Kansas.