Gaudeamus

by John Barnes

  He hung a left. Even at about ten miles an hour, with all-wheel drive, the Range Rover’s back end fishtailed a little. Hale turned off the lights; with the reflection of the town lights and the starlight off the snow-covered hillside above us, we didn’t really need them anyway.

  Half a mile further, and we were at the top of a ridge, looking at a typical Colorado sight: a long, steep-roofed log cabin (which had probably been modular to begin with), with a sheet metal addition on each end, and three satellite dishes in the yard. Hale pulled to a stop.

  “Well,” he said. “We’re both wearing ducks, so walking shouldn’t be uncomfortable, but that stuff is deep, so it will be hard work. Should I try to get closer, risk getting stuck but possibly make our getaway quicker, or should I leave the car sort-of concealed up here, so that we take a long slog both ways?”

  I was looking it over with binoculars, and finally I said, “Hmm. I see no tracks—zero—anywhere near that place. Not even old lumpy fallen in ones. But the porch is swept. Nobody’s gone in or out of there since the last big snowfall, but there’s a good chance somebody’s in there. Even if Lena Logan did vanish from there a few days ago, the snow must have fallen since. Which means the going will be extra hard, and no matter what, our tracks will give away that we were there, and anyway whoever’s in there is going to hear us and see us coming if they’re at all on alert, so there’s no chance we’ll surprise anybody. I vote we drive up and bang on the front door. There’s two of us to rock the truck out of the snow if we get into something too deep.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Hale said, put it in gear, and started us down the hill. As it turned out it was no worse than bad, and we got right up to that porch, which (now that we were close) was very obviously swept with the big push broom leaning against the wall. Tracks led back and forth to the woodpile at one side of the porch, clearly visible in the light of our headlights.

  “Well,” Hale said, “here goes. Stick your hand out to Beeper.”

  I did; Hale said, “Friend, Beeper. Guard.”

  We got out and I said, “So that means he’ll let me back in?”

  “You or me or anyone that seems to be with us and okay. Anybody else is in real deep shit. Like I said, he’s smart.” He gestured toward the house, now just a few feet away. “Don’t you hate that prickly about-to-be-shot feeling? I always get it when I knock on a front door on business.”

  “Yeah, I get it too.”

  We stood at the front door and knocked loudly. No sound came from inside. Peering in the windows revealed the usual clunky fake-Southwest furniture that’s perfect if your friends routinely bring their plow horses on visits with them and insist on having them in their laps. There was a large woodstove along one wall; it was clearly completely out. From another window on the porch we could see into a small kitchen. Rough-cut door frames with cheap steel doors, the kind that institutions put on closets, led into the sheet-metal additions. Power must be coming from an underground line, because we didn’t hear a generator and indicator lights were on all over the big computer rig sitting next to the woodstove by the back window. After a moment I realized, and said to Hale, “Hey, look. Either that’s the world’s highest tech refrigerator, or else that’s another Beowulf like Lena’s.”

  The heavy data and power cables ran up to the big old refrigerator, and a plywood box with a window fan mounted in it sat on top. A smaller, more modern refrigerator in the kitchen probably really was a refrigerator.

  Then I banged my face on that hard plastic outer window—they don’t break and they do bend, but not enough, trust me John. I did that because a voice behind me had said “Travis Bismarck,” and it hadn’t been Hale.

  I wiped my face and turned around, trying to get combobulated enough to see, and the helpful voice said, “Don’t do that. It hurts.”

  Blinking to clear my eyes, I recognized the figure in the multiple sweaters, old Army wool pants, and red hi-tops. “Hale,” I said, “this fellow, holding the gun on us, is Brown Pierre, my old classmate, so I think we found part of what we’re looking for, or it found us.”

  “In the circumstances, I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Hale, and I’ve known quite a lot about you for quite a long time,” Brown Pierre said, “I think I’m going to have to keep the gun on you gentlemen while we have a conversation. The door is not locked. Travis, turn the knob slowly.”

  I did and the door swung a few inches inwards.

  “Just put your hands above your heads, and walk in slowly.”

  We did. He got us cuffed to that big old monster of a log-frame sofa, and frisked us thoroughly pretty quickly, and I didn’t think a pro could have done a better job, though I didn’t think it would be wise to discuss it with Hale, the other pro in the room.

  Then Brown Pierre piled a few full-sized logs into the woodstove, opened the damper, and pulled out an industrial welding laser and plugged it into a little metal box beside him. “Amazing what you can do with enough power,” he said. “Can you imagine the hash that the Gaudeamus power source is going to make for the energy companies?”

  With the bright spot of the laser he drew a slow line along each log, and flames billowed up from the laser spot. “Ever read Jerry Oltion’s Frame of Reference?” Pierre asked. “‘Primitive man discovers fire.’ Well, it will be warm in here shortly. Let me know when you want to take your coats off, or take a pee. I’ll have coffee shortly.”

  He went into the kitchen, and then I heard him open another door and say “Get up and get dressed, we’ve got company,” and then there was the sort of crashing and banging around in the kitchen that indicated he was throwing together a sizable breakfast. “You guys eaten yet?” he asked.

  “No,” Hale said, “what are you going to do with us?”

  “You know that part of the story where the arch-villain explains his whole nefarious plan to the tied-up hero? We’re at that part.” He went back into the kitchen, whistling “When the Red Red Robin Goes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along,” with about twice the volume and half the pitch control that would have been optimal.

  “Please, God, let that be a joke,” I muttered. Hale whispered an “Amen” next to me that couldn’t have sounded more sincere if he’d been raised Baptist. It was looking like being a long, long morning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  While Brown Pierre cooked, and Hale seemed to be catching a nap, and whoever it was back there presumably was getting up and dressed, I looked around the room. If a big, elaborate house that’s still a suburban tract house is a McMansion, this was a McLoghome. It had that high ceiling, due to the steep-pitched roof, that sensible people would use for attic space instead of somewhere to throw the heat away. I guessed if I needed to twit Brown Pierre, that would be the thing to twit a serious enviro about; then I thought that if the whole place was running on Gaudeamus power, that wouldn’t be much of a twitting. So much for that; if I needed to twit the boy, I’d have to remind him about that blonde art student from New Orleans who wouldn’t go out with him, back in college. I wished I could remember her name.

  Below the high ceiling there were exposed log trusses big enough to hold up a four-lane highway bridge, though all they were really holding up was a regular steel roof; I guess they were supposed to make it look more antique-y, since the old-style log roofs were massive and really did need that kind of trussing, and thus having them in your house would imply that your house was old enough to have once had a log roof. I think that’s how that works, John, we might need a semiotician in on the case.

  The logs of the walls had all been covered with that clear plastic coating so you could clean them with a dust rag if you wanted, and the floor looked like they’d stolen a basketball court, and the furniture and rugs appeared to have been stolen from a Southwest-themed DoubleTree Inn.

  It wasn’t quite perfectly Colorado cliché. There were no stuffed animal heads on the walls, but then Brown Pierre was very enviro. No made-in-Taiwan Indian artifacts, but if he was the same guy he was in college, he
was probably still an atheist and anti-spiritual. And no skis, snowboards, mountain bikes, or other grownup-toys, but maybe he just worked here, and he was a serious kind of guy, anyway.

  While I had been thinking all of this, I’d been working away steadily, but with no effect at all. I couldn’t get any grip on the locks of the handcuffs that held me on to one end of the couch, and Hale was cuffed to the other end, so we couldn’t have helped each other much, even if he had been awake. I had to envy him his ability to catch a nap in the circumstances, because it was way more productive than anything I could do.

  The sun came up further and I really hoped no one was doing an early-morning XC trip up that dirt road, because I just had a feeling that if they found a flying saucer and called the pigs or something, Hale and me’d be the ones to get blamed for it, on top of everything else that was going wrong. “Hale, old bud,” I said, more to have something to say than anything else, “this really sucks.”

  He snored, John. The sonofabitch snored. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you ain’t gonna have many friends after a while, you know?

  After a few thousand years (that took only about fifteen minutes to pass, by the clock on the wall), things started to smell kind of wonderful from the kitchen, and Brown Pierre stuck his head out and said, “Hope you all can stand vegan food for a while. It’s what there’s going to be. I’m a good cook but you’re going to be here for a long time.”

  Another eon, of about ten minutes, went by, and the room reeked of good Mexican food; I guess if you’re avoiding eggs, meat, and milk, that’s about as good a cuisine to approximate as any, since the one big change that you got to make is you do it without the cheese, and there’s lots of bean-and-grain dishes to give you protein. Then a female voice hollered something, and Brown Pierre said, “Okay, just a sec, got to take this off the burner,” and I heard a door creak again.

  In another minute, he led Lena Logan in; she was wearing a sweatsuit that was a bit too big for her slim body. She wasn’t handcuffed and she was holding his hand. I did my best to look all jealous and furious, figuring that it wouldn’t have any effect if she was really with him, but it would help her cover if she was with us. “I’m afraid you’re going to hear the whole explanation again,” he told her. “Of course I do like giving the explanation. But it seems courteous of me to apologize.”

  “Right idea,” she said, “but don’t explain your apologies so much. Feeling bad about inconveniencing other people doesn’t require explanation.”

  He grinned like a boy with his first crush, which, of course, was exactly what he was, and said, “Just keep coaching.”

  She sat down on the couch between me and Hale. Hale woke up, blinked sleepily, and said, “I’m getting warm, if you have a minute to get me out of this coat.”

  “Sure.” Brown Pierre worked all the cuff exchange things you do to make that work, and if Hale got a chance where he could have slugged our captor and started us on breaking out, I didn’t see it.

  Then Pierre did the same process to me, and I still didn’t see a chance to wallop him and make a break. For an amateur, Brown Pierre sure had a gift.

  After about ten minutes of maddeningly good smells, Brown Pierre came out with a big pot of tofu-in-tomato-sauce and a load of tortillas, and put much longer chains on us, so we could eat and have some coffee, and he sat there with the gun right to hand and watched us eat. Which, I should say, we managed to do—it had been a while since any of us had eaten, and Pierre wasn’t lying about being a good cook.

  Then he sat down and told us his whole lunatic story.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “This is the part that nobody ever believes in a book or a movie. If there really were any evil villains out there, they’d never tie up the good guys and explain things to them. That would make no sense at all. Because if you got away—I guess you did, considering you’re sitting there in a chair in my hotel room, having a beer—”

  “Well, knowing what he’s up to, so far, has done us no good at all,” Travis said. “So it really didn’t matter that he explained it to us. And he might have been able to figure out that it wouldn’t do us any good, before he did it.” He reached over and pulled his third beer from my fridge. I noticed that he had bags under his eyes and a certain haunted look; his skin was a little gray and seemed not quite to wrinkle yet, but to just fit him looser, and the blue of his eyes was more slate, less beryl, than it had ever been before. For the first time ever, my old friend looked tired, even, maybe, old. “It’s really just made everything more complicated, bud. And besides, evil bastards do try to explain themselves, to one kind of captive audience or another. All the time. Think about serial killers that send taunting letters to the police. Mein Kampf. The Unabomber Manifesto. De Sade’s books—”

  “Satire.”

  “Unhhunh. He still liked to beat the fuck out of young boys and girls whenever he got the chance, didn’t he?”

  Reluctantly, I shrugged, and trying to be a fair-minded academic, even added an example. “Okay, sure, and there’s a great little work of feminist criticism—a feminist attack on the whole last generation of Marxism—called Why Althhusser Killed His Wife, which makes a good case that he’d been getting ready to, in his writing and ideas, long before he ever did it, which is to say he explained his evil to the whole world before going on to do it to his wife. Yeah, evil likes to explain itself, I’ll grant you that. So Brown Pierre sat down and said to you, ‘So now, Frash Gawdon, temble at da briyyant scheme of Ming Da Mercaress’ …”

  “Damn near. Look, Hale and me and Lena all pooled our memories and resources later, to figure out what the sonofabitch was up to. And we went back over all the notes he made for the Gaudeamus webtoon, which was another piece of amazing alien tech. Plus we did grab some of his private diary off his computer eventually. So between and among all that, we came up with a lot fuller story than he told us, and I’m not sure what he actually said while we were all chained to that couch, and what we put together later. But I can promise you it will be a fuckload shorter when I tell it than it was when I heard it. Because I’m not going to rant and repeat myself and argue with things you haven’t said every time you look disbelieving. It’s really pretty simple, and if you pee now, you won’t need to again before I get done giving it to you, whereas me and Lena and Hale needed three potty breaks and most of three pots of fresh coffee to get through his whole goddam deal. So be glad this is how you’re getting it.”

  “I’m so grateful.”

  “You’ve never learned to do irony well, bud. Now go pee and when you get back, Uncle Travis will tell you the story of The Nut Who Is Secretly Ruling the World.”

  I took care of business, got a big glass of orange juice from the fridge, and said, “Travis, I’ve known you all these years, and I’m still never sure when you tell me the truth.”

  “I know, bud, that’s why I rehearse on you.”

  “Does that mean you don’t tell the truth?”

  “It means I want to be believed, John.” He took another long swallow. “And there can be several reasons for wanting to be believed. One of them, strangely enough, can be that you are telling the exact god’s-honest-truth, and you want other people to believe that truth. Now, about this particular case, I’m going to give it to you short, sweet, and as coherent as I can make it, given what the starting material is like.

  “But if you’re doing your fictiony thing, and you’re really trying to picture what it was like the first time I heard this, you have to picture three smart, tough people, in a real bad spot, chained to a couch, listening to a loon as he paces back and forth and argues with everybody since the dawn of time, using a nine-millimeter as his favorite gesturing device. You’re getting this without Thomas Aquinas, Coco Chanel, Elton John, or Peter Ramus—all of them came up several times in Brown Pierre’s rant, and as far as I can tell they were all working on one side. The other side was Corax of Syracuse, Duns Scotus, Hugh Hefner, and Aldo Leopold. And Wal
t Disney and Carl Jung stood over all of them, quoting from the I Ching. With Brown Pierre, looking like Moses and dressed like the homeless, waving his arms, gesturing with a loaded pistol, and shouting at all of them, for maybe four and a half hours.

  “So that’s how I first got it. Picture that before you ask too many questions. I couldn’t possibly make this shit up, John, I don’t even have your imagination, and I don’t think you could make it up either. Now listen.”

  Brown Pierre’s strange name had come about because his father, James Pierre, had been a conscientious objector in World War Two, and had therefore carried a stretcher across most of France and Germany, running back and forth fetching the wounded. This had given him time enough to think about how unpleasant his life was and how much things might be better. By 1944 he had arrived at a conclusion and made up his mind. The older Pierre had decided to live a life that would never require him to move, stand up, or do a lick of work again, and a life he could spend entirely on talk and books, which had been his solaces through all his time with the stretcher.

  He’d inherited some money—the Pierre family was old and had had many industrial investments at one time—and with it he had bought a small café in Lyons, married a nice local girl who jumped at the chance to marry a rich American, and set himself up to spend the rest of his days sitting in the corner of his café reading Marx and Mill, Ernest Thomson Seton and Heidegger, Sabatini and James Joyce, Dorothy Day and Ralph Waldo Emerson, sipping at the good cheap wine, while the people he hired ran his café and his customers dropped by to argue.

  James Pierre was firm about maintaining the single-syllable pronunciation of Pierre, which had been in the family for many generations, and about the importance of remembering and quoting and comparing everything you read, and about doing what you set out to do. He had promised himself that he would name any children after the last few men who had died while he was carrying them, going in reverse order so that his firstborn would be named after the very last man to have died on a stretcher carried by James Pierre.