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The Helper and His Hero
by Matthew Hughes
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Science Fiction

Fictionwise, Inc.
www.Fictionwise.com

Copyright ©2007 by Matthew Hughes

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Feb-March 2007

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

Guth Bandar was adrift in a formless, limitless, gray nothing. Above him was nothing, ahead and to all sides was nothing, and below was nothing. But no, far down (an arbitrary direction—it was simply the view between his feet), something moved. Something tiny that, as he watched, grew larger as it came toward him.

Now Bandar felt a shiver of fear. For this no-place could be only one place. He was adrift in the Old Sea of preconsciousness, the inert and timeless realm that underlay the collective unconscious of humanity. Only one thing moved in the Old Sea: the great blind Worm that endlessly swam its “waters” in search of its own tail. And only one thing could divert the Worm from its eternal, futile quest. As early nonauts had discovered when they had hacked their way through the floor of the Commons and dipped into the pearl gray nothingness beneath, the Worm sensed any consciousness that entered the Old Sea—and inerrantly swam to devour it.

It is a dream, of course, Bandar told himself. He applied the nonaut techniques that would allow him to take charge of the dream, to change its dynamic, or to wake from it.

But nothing happened. He floated in nothingness, and the Worm came on. Now it seemed as long as his hand. In moments it looked to be the length of his forearm, its undulating motion hypnotically compelling his gaze. Bandar looked away, sought to concentrate on the techniques of lucid dreaming, but when he looked again, the Worm was as long as his leg. Its great dark circle of a mouth, rimmed with triangular teeth, grew larger as he watched.

A wave of panic swept through him. He flailed against the nothingness, as if he could swim away. But there was nothing to push against, nowhere to go even if he could somehow achieve motion. And still the Worm rose beneath him, its gaping maw now as wide as a housefront and still relentlessly enlarging.

“What do you want?” Bandar called into the void. There could be only one agent behind this: the Multifacet, the entity that was the collective unconscious paradoxically become conscious of itself, that for its own obscure ends had ruined Bandar's career only to abandon him. Was it now back, with some new demand? Or had it, as he had often feared, simply gone mad and tossed him into the Old Sea, for no other reason than that it had the awful power to do so?

The mouth of the Worm loomed beneath him now like a black moon, still rising. “Tell me what you want!” Bandar screamed, while a part of his mind offered him the obvious answer: maybe it just wants you eaten.

“I did everything you asked!” he cried. “What do you want now?”

And as the Worm rose to swallow him a voice from the nothingness said, “More.”

* * * *

Bandar awoke in his comfortable seat in the well-appointed gondola of the midafternoon balloon-tram, the dream-fear fading along with all memory of the Worm. He discovered that, while he had been dozing, two late arrivals must have boarded just before the conveyance lifted off from the terminal in the heart of Olkney.

One of the two would have drawn attention wherever he went, for he was quite possibly the fattest person Bandar had ever seen, although he was light enough on his feet as he made his way among the scattered armchairs in which passengers disposed themselves for the trip to Farflung, at the edge of the Swept, the great, unnaturally flat sea of grass that Bandar had always longed to travel.

The fat one's companion was a young man in nondescript garb wearing a slightly soiled cravat that identified him as a third-tier graduate of the Archon's Institute for Instructive Improvement, where the great and the titled had sent their children from time immemorial; its history faculty was tangentially connected to Bandar's alma mater, the Institute for Historical Inquiry.

But it was not the possibility of academic connection that gave the nonaut a start; rather, it was a fixity of expression and a fierceness about the eyes that gave Bandar the impression that the young man's features might never have arranged themselves into the full complement of expressions that a normal human visage displays over a lifetime, even a short one. Bandar allowed this initial impression to linger in his mind while he sought to see what associations it might conjure up from his unconscious. Moments later, a series of images floated onto his inner screen, and he was surprised to note that all of them were faces he had encountered in the Commons; he realized that the stranger, who was now seating himself across the gondola's wide aisle and engaging in low-voiced argument with the fat man, showed the same simplicity of character as that of an idiomatic entity.

When the steward brought round a tray of wine and delicacies, the nonaut used the distraction to sneak another glance at the two men. He now saw a definite contrast between them. Across the plump one's multi-chinned face a succession of micro-expressions chased each other: mild irritation, bemusement, curiosity, and the indulgence shown toward a child whose behavior straddles the narrow line between amusing and aggravating. But the young man's face showed nothing but righteous anger, unalloyed by doubt or even self-consciousness, and with an intensity that Bandar found unnerving.

Fortunately, whatever concerns motivated the strange young man were none of Bandar's. He turned away and looked out the gondola's wide window. The spires and terraces of Olkney were dropping below him as the balloon from which the gondola hung was allowed to rise to its cruising height. Soon he felt the slight tug of the umbilicus that connected the balloon to its dolly, now far below. The gondola rocked gently then settled as the operator engaged the system that brought the materials of which the dolly was formed into contact with the track into which it was slotted. A collaboration of energies moved the dolly forward, at first slowly, then with increasing speed, towing the tapered cylinder of the balloon and its underslung gondola in a smooth and silent passage.

Bandar's ambition to travel the Swept had long been frustrated. It was a vast, wild land, almost entirely unpopulated except for some brillion miners. The great flatness, with its shoulder-high grass, was prowled by dangerous wildlife: omnivorous garm, both the lesser and greater species; sinewy fand, with needle teeth and ravenous appetite; and the huge but cunning woollyclaw, its well concealed burrows often full of hungry whelps.

The Swept had never been repopulated after its artificial creation eons before, during a desperate effort to repel the last aggressive invasion of Old Earth by a vicious predatory hive species known as the Dree. A gravitational aggregator, normally used to assemble asteroids into convenient conglomerations, was brought down to crush the invaders and their legions of hapless human mind-slaves in their warren of tunnels. But the immense gravitational waves had created resonances deep in the planet's core; even today cysts and bubbles of various sizes and intensities rose to the surface, though no one could predict where or when. A building that happened to be in the path of a rising anomaly could find the weight of its components drastically and suddenly reordered, leading to a collapse. Persons traveling on foot faced the same peril, and flying was advisable only in emergencies.

There were two safe ways to travel the Swept. One was to take passage on a landship, a great-wheeled wind-driven vessel built with enough flexibility to withstand minor anomalies and capable of steering clear of major ones. But landships catered to the truly affluent; Bandar had never been able to afford a cruise lasting weeks and the landships did not offer day trips. The less costly option was to hire a Rover to take him out onto the Swept in a two-wheeled cart drawn by shuggra. The Rovers were a fabricated species, developed from canines during a past age when trifling with life's elementary constituents was approved of. They lived as hunters and guides on the Swept, served by their innate ability to sense gravitational fluxions.

That ability would have made the Rovers ideal for Bandar's purposes—he wished to study the effects of gravity on the formulation of nospheric corpuscles, and the anomalies offered unique experimental conditions—but Rovers disliked gravitational fluctuations. They used their senses to avoid the phenomena Bandar sought.

He had taken the balloon-tram to Farflung twice before, during rare vacations from the housewares emporium, and each time he had tried to engage Rover guides. For his second trip, he had even learned the odd, gobbling sounds of their speech. But the moment he made his request, any Rover he approached looked down and away and professed to know nothing of anomalies, or declared himself already engaged, or under some nebulous obligation that prevented him from accommodating Bandar.

The balloon-tram was now passing the Institute for Historical Inquiry, and Bandar looked down upon the cloisters in which he had never again been allowed to set foot after the Institute's dons judged him responsible for plunging Didrick Gabbris into permanent psychosis. That was now decades ago, and Bandar no longer let his powerful memory take him to that painful time. But the nonaut's heart still harbored a desire to return to the Institute in triumph. He would present the Grand Colloquiam with irrefutable new facts. If that meant overturning dogmas grown dusty over millennia, then so be it. And now that he was able at last to travel the Swept, Bandar saw victory as a glimmering prospect.

It bothered him only slightly that he had connived, and indeed had probably broken a statute or two, in order to gain passage on the landship Orgulon. The cruise was offered free to persons suffering from the lassitude, the first new disease to strike the human population of Old Earth. Bandar did not have the lassitude; indeed, he knew no one who did. Astonishing himself by his own boldness, he had invented an afflicted brother and offered forged documents to the organizers. A few days later, a pair of tickets had arrived. Bandar threw one away. The other was in an inner pocket of his traveling mantle.

He turned back from the window to take another glass of wine from the steward and found that the fat man had fallen asleep in his chair while the young one was staring at Bandar with an almost palpable intensity. Again, the nonaut was startled, but it soon became apparent that the fellow hardly noticed him, that his stare was merely the outer sign of a deep introspection. Again, too, he was struck by the quality of otherness in the young man's eyes: they would not have looked out of place in the skull of some mad prophet.

Now the strange eyes blinked and focused on Bandar. The nonaut made the gestures appropriate between travelers whose ranks were unknown to each other and said, “By your scarf, may I take you for a graduate of the Archon's Institute?”

The young man fingered his neck cloth. “Yes,” he said.

“May I ask if you studied history?”

“No. Criminology.” He had a brusque manner of speech, but Bandar sensed that it was not intended to offend. He began to speak his name, then seemed to catch himself before declaring himself one Phlevas Wasselthorpe, of the minor aristocracy. The man snoring beside him was his mentor, Erenti Abbas.

Bandar introduced himself and said, “It would have been a convenient coincidence if you had studied history. I, myself, have spent most of my life dealing in housewares. I am now retired and taking a full-time interest in my longstanding avocation: the study of history, specifically the history of the Swept.”

Bandar turned the conversation toward a discussion of what was on his mind: the Dree invasion. Wasselthorpe, surprising for an Institute graduate, even third-tier, had never heard of it. He asked questions, and Bandar sketched the outline of events and mentioned his intent to study the gravitational residues.

It was clear from the young man's face that the Dree did not interest him. He abruptly turned to another issue for which the Swept was famous, asking what Bandar knew about brillion mining. Bandar knew what everyone knew: brillion was a catch-all name for substances formed in the depths of the Earth from waste products deposited by the dawn-time's wastrel civilizations. Old Earth's original inhabitants, scarcely out of the caves, had fashioned many materials, natural and artificial, to use but once, then throw away. This ancient detritus was dumped into depressions, plowed under, and capped by layers of earth. Most was eventually dug up to become fodder for mass-conversion systems; however, some of the societies that had created these deposits being later destroyed or relocated, the whereabouts of many dumps were forgotten. Over geological time, the shallow deposits were gradually buried beneath accumulated rock. Some were drawn even deeper into the planet by tectonic motions, and then the same forces that make diamond from coal worked upon the rich variety of substances that paleohumans had promiscuously mixed together. The result was brillion, and it came in several varieties: blue, red, and white were the main types, though they could be found in some interesting blends. Each had its properties and uses.

And then there was the rarest of all: black brillion, a substance so rare and precious that those who found it never advertised the news. Or so it was said. It was also said the stuff could work wonders. Bandar reserved his opinion, though Wasselthorpe pressed for a definitive answer.

Their voices awoke the fat man, Abbas. He joined the conversation and his contributions made it less an interrogation and more the kind of amiable chat engaged in by travelers with persons they were unlikely to encounter again. At some point, Bandar revealed his true vocation. Abbas said, “Ah,” in a manner that implied both knowledge and interest, but his companion had never heard of the Commons and thus began a new interrogation.

Bandar was always happy to talk about the nosphere. But as he did so now he saw the young man seize upon the subject with an intensity that Bandar found unsettling. He sought to redirect the conversation back to the Swept.

“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.”

Abbas responded to the diversion, wondering if the gravitational anomalies might enhance Bandar's abilities as a nonaut. It was a pertinent question and Bandar now noticed that attached to the lapel of his robe were the pin and pendant of a runner-up for the Fezzani Prize, a notable academic achievement. He responded as if he were addressing a colleague. “Indeed,” he said. “I am hopeful of conducting some remarkable research. Out of it may come the seed of a small institute.”

“The Bandar Institute,” Abbas said, and the words voiced an idea Bandar had never put so bluntly. But now the other one was boring in with a question about how the Commons might figure in the field of criminal investigation. It struck Bandar that criminology was an odd pursuit for a member of the aristocracy, even a rustic. He did not want to go off on a monomaniac's tangent and answered lightly, then followed with a brief dissertation on the formation and activities of engrammatic cells, corpuscles, and archetypical entities, knowing from experience that technical language would swiftly chase away casual interest. But Wasselthorpe's eyes failed to glaze and he continued to regard Bandar with an unsettling intensity.

“But where is this nosphere?” he said. “Where do your engrams and archetypes do their work?”

Bandar tapped the back of the Wasselthorpe's skull, then his own head and Abbas's. “In all of us.”

He saw comprehension dawn in the young man's face, then puzzlement. Wasselthorpe said he thought the collective unconscious was mere myth.

To Bandar, myth was never “mere.” Myth was always an expression of fundamental truth. He would have led the discussion along other paths but again the young fellow demonstrated his unnerving literal-mindedness. He quoted Bandar from a few moments ago, when the nonaut had told him that a traveler of the Commons needed a good memory and a knack for detail. He declared that he had both.

Bandar decided it was time to ease this peculiar young man out of an apparent enthusiasm that might lead to obsession. To test Wasselthorpe's memory, he said, “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?”

Wasselthorpe paused only a moment before saying, “Four doors, two in the west wall, one each in the north and south. The two in the west wall advertised ablutories for males and females, the one in the north wall was for a closet holding supplies, and the southern door led to the station master's office.” He added, “That door had a scratch in the paint above the handle.”

Bandar was as impressed by the power of Wasselthorpe's eidetic memory as he was concerned by the intensity with which he had answered the challenge. But it was a violation of his nonaut's oath not to respond to a potential candidate for training. With some trepidation, he offered to test the young fellow's aptitude.

Wasselthorpe declared himself keen. Bandar threw a querying glance Abbas's way, but receiving only the facial equivalent of a shrug, he explained the different mental images that a traveler might envision as the initial portal to the Commons.

“I will see a door,” Wasselthorpe said, with complete certainty. Then he wanted to know what would be behind it.

“Let us not skip before we can hop,” said Bandar, and was amused to hear in his own voice the dry tone of Preceptor Huffley, who had said the same words to him, long years ago. The Commons was dangerous for anyone; for some, it was indescribably perilous.

The warning did nothing to blunt the young man's interest. The gleam in the eyes that were now locked upon his made Bandar uncomfortable. The nonaut lowered his gaze to his hands as he briefly sketched the arrangement of the psyche.

“For now, I think we should go no farther than up to the first door,” Bandar said. “If you can hold it in your mind's eye for a few moments, that will show an aptitude.”

Wasselthorpe was eager to make the attempt.

Bandar bade the young man close his eyes and still his limbs, then instructed him on the regulation of his breathing. The nonaut was surprised that, within moments, Wasselthorpe appeared well settled.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“I am,” said Wasselthorpe, and Bandar heard in the undertones of his voice nothing that bespoke unwillingness among any of the less obvious components of the fellow's psyche. It was yet another unusual response from a complete beginner.

“I will teach you the introductory thran,” he said. He sounded a sequence of tones and asked Wasselthorpe to copy him. The thran came back note-perfect and again Bandar heard no microquavers to indicate that some element of the young man's psyche opposed what they were about to do. How rare, he thought.

They continued to intone the thran for a few moments, then Bandar broke off to say, “When you see anything that might be a door, raise one finger.”

He resumed the chant, expecting some time to go by before he saw a response. Instead, scarcely had he sounded the first few notes before Wasselthorpe was holding a digit almost beneath Bandar's nose. The deep conviction in the young man's chanting voice strengthened even further.

It came to Bandar that he might be in the presence of a seriously unbalanced mind. The young stranger's intensity of focus could be the mark of a natural. If so, to plunge his consciousness into the Commons would have immediate and disastrous results: he would be sharing the confined space of a balloon-tram gondola with a full-blown psychotic.

Even as he followed his thought to its frightening conclusion, Bandar saw Wasselthorpe's still elevated hand move forward, fingers curling as if to grasp. He not only sees the portal but reaches to open it, Bandar thought. He immediately ceased chanting and called in a peremptory voice: “Enough! Come back!”

Wasselthorpe gave a start. The hand that had been reaching out now subsided to the arm of the young man's chair. Bandar rose to stand over him and shook his shoulder. Abbas sat forward in his chair, concern on his many-chinned face.

The young man's eyes opened, blinking, and Bandar was relieved to see them fill with awareness. He let out a pent breath and said, “You were too fast! I almost lost you.”

Wasselthorpe seemed unfazed. “I saw a light shining from behind the door,” he said. “And my own hand was reaching to open it.”

A shock went through Bandar. “You saw light and made a hand, though you had never heard of any of this before?”

Wasselthorpe said that he was not inclined to tease. Abbas vouched for the truth of the statement, describing his companion as “no bubbling fount of mirth.”

Bandar passed a hand across his brow, felt cold moisture. He had never seen nor heard of such aptitude. Bandar had been talented, but it had taken weeks of instruction and practice before he could call up his own portal and discern the light beyond it, and weeks more before he could open the way for more than a twinkling.

Wasselthorpe said it had seemed only natural, a term that caused Bandar to shudder. He explained its technical meaning among Institute scholars and found that his voice was trembling. He asked to be allowed a few moments to reflect upon what had happened. But Wasselthorpe was undeterred and wanted to know more.

So did his mentor. “If my young charge is no more than a skip and a jump from a serious bout of the hoo-hahs, I would appreciate knowing the warning signs.”

“He is in no danger if he does not call up the vision of the door.” Bandar looked sternly at Wasselthorpe and strongly urged him not to attempt the exercise again. Once into the Commons, he might never find a way out.

But still the young man said, “I would know more.”

Again Bandar found the hard fixity of Wasselthorpe's gaze difficult to bear. He wondered that such an unnaturally concentrated mind had achieved only a third-tier degree, or that he should have come from an aristocracy that frequently showed the less fortunate effects of inbreeding.

“Then let it be later,” said the nonaut. “I must think on the matter.”

By “later,” he meant, “never.” But from what the two men said to each other after Bandar returned to his seat, it appeared that they were also bound for the Orgulon. He turned and gazed out at the landscape unrolling far beneath them as the old orange sun eased itself down to the horizon. He had been looking forward to the vast openness of the Swept. Now a cloud of foreboding seemed to have risen before him.

* * * *

At Farflung, Bandar disembarked from the balloon-tram without speaking again to the two other passengers. He hurried through the terminal to find a ground car he could hire to take him to where the Orgulon docked. Frugality would ordinarily have inspired him to suggest that the three of them share transportation, but he wanted to put distance between himself and Wasselthorpe. The young man's unusual facility for entering the Commons disturbed him.

As the sun slipped behind the hills at whose feet stood Farflung, the car brought him to a stretch of docks. Beyond lay the Swept. The long grass that covered the flatlands to the far horizon rippled under a constant breeze like waves on a straw-colored sea. Bandar paused to look out at the immensity and the unsettled emotions that his encounter with Wasselthorpe had evoked now gave way to a feeling that he was where he was supposed to be. It was not a sense of contentment, rather it was a sentiment of being in the right place, doing the right thing. He drew in, then released a deep breath and strode toward the landship.

Close up, the Orgulon was enormous. The side that lay by the dock was a wall of lustrous wood, pierced by windows large and small, each bordered by polished metal. The vessel's body was a great oblong with rounded ends, resting on a network of shock-absorbing cylinders that connected it to an eight-axled chassis from which extended a score of huge rubber wheels. Bandar presented his invitation to a security officer who stood at the base of the gangplank that sloped up to an upper deck. She consulted a list and found his name, then gave him a searching look.

“The passengers are all traveling in pairs,” she said, “one suffering from the lassitude and one to help the afflicted. Why are you alone?”

Bandar had prepared a story. “My brother has the disease but is too ill to travel. I came to evaluate the alleged cure.”

She made a noncommittal noise and named a deck and cabin number. He went aboard and followed signs to his appointed quarters. There he stowed his bag before reposing upon the sleeping pallet and allowing its systems to restore his energies. After a while, he felt motion as the Orgulon left the dock and slowly moved out onto the Swept. A little later a steward tapped on his door and announced that the passengers were summoned to dinner.

The easiest route to the dining salon took Bandar across a spacious promenade deck that covered most of the landship's upper surface, except for raised platforms fore and aft on which stood the great vertical pylons whose rotating vanes stole from the ever-blowing wind the ship's motive power. He would have stopped to watch their operation and to look out across the prairie to where great cloud formations moved in the far distance like mobile mountains, but he noticed Abbas and Wasselthorpe near the railing to one side. The older man's appearance had altered—his face had taken on a different shape and his skin had noticeably darkened. Unconventionality was not uncommon among the aristocracy, Bandar knew. He wondered if the pair were competing in one of those odd contests that members of the upper strata indulged in as recreation, questing after some list of unlikely objects which might include a landship captain's cap. He decided that the two were, at least, strange, and resolved to stay clear of them.

Immediately below the promenade deck, the Orgulon's dining area echoed the Swept in giving an impression of vast openness. It stretched from one side of the vessel to the other, its paneled walls broken by great round windows that looked out on the now night-shaded grasslands and its glistening wooden floor covered by large circular tables draped in snowy cloth and aglitter with crystal and cutlery. Bandar found that he was assigned to a certain seat and was relieved to discover that it was a good distance from Abbas and Wasselthorpe.

Others were already seated at his table and Bandar made appropriate gestures of head and hands to acknowledge them. They seemed a heterogeneous mix, varied in ages, social ranks and genders, their only commonality that they came in pairs and one member of each couple was in some stage of the lassitude.

Across from Bandar a large woman exercised unchallenged control of whatever conversation had preceded his arrival. She wore swathes of some frilled material, with a braided necklace of precious metal around her wattled neck and a thick scattering of blue-fire gems in her upswept white hair. Her tone bespoke a habit of being listened to. Her apparent spouse, a stocky fellow with neck and cheeks discolored by a dark birthmark, sat dull-eyed to her left. His face was frozen by the lassitude's paralysis but Bandar suspected that even in his prime he would seldom have dared to interrupt the ceaseless torrent of her opinions.

“We will see wonders,” she declared as Bandar took his seat. “I am sure of it.” She fixed the nonaut with a bellicose glare and continued, “You have the look of a skeptic. Don't trouble to deny it. I never err in my assessments of character. It is a gift.”

“A gift you are clearly happy to share,” Bandar said, “even with complete strangers who have demonstrated no desire to receive it.”

“An aptitude for seeing the truth obliges one to speak it,” the woman said. “I am Brond Halorn,” she said. “This is my spouse, Bleban.”

Bandar named himself.

“Why are you unaccompanied?”

He told her the tale of a brother.

“So there it is,” she said, looking around the table. “He is indeed a skeptic, else he would have brought his poor brother along to receive Father Olwyn's blessing.” She concluded her remark with a wave of a beringed hand that signified that all had turned out precisely as she had predicted. Bandar recognized a habitual gesture.

He defended himself. “I am no more skeptical than most,” he said. “I can be convinced of the unlikely, even the seemingly impossible, though the proof need be unequivocal.”

A motion of her hand indicated that his arguments were too vapid to merit an answer. This movement Bandar also took as part of her characteristic repertoire.

“You will see,” she said, then resumed her address to the table in general. Bandar offered a gesture of his own, though he did so beneath the lip of the table, out of her line of sight. A few moments later, stewards began to bring in the first course: a jellied salad studded with morsels of fungus that had a unique flavor, like aromatic smoke. Bandar enjoyed the dish but the several more that followed were all built around the same unusual ingredient, and the taste began to cloy. A steward informed him that it was a delicacy called “truffles of the Swept.”

When the last course was eaten and the servers were clearing away, Brond Halorn favored the table with more of her opinions. Bandar chose not to listen and instead ruminated on his plans to measure gravitational fluxes. But her voice and his thoughts were both soon interrupted by the sound of a gong that drew all attention to a dais at one end of the salon where a cone of light now shone down from the ceiling. A moment of expectation passed, then the beam of illumination filled with swirls of moving color that resolved into a projection of a slight man with a beatific expression.

The simulacrum introduced himself as Father Olwyn and welcomed the passengers. He announced a program that recommended study and action as the Orgulon traveled the Swept, preparing the travelers for a “ceremony of inculcation” leading to “a wondrous transformation.”

Bandar sighed and lowered his eyes, placing the fingertips of one hand to the center of his brow. The fellow's discourse rang of a fraudster's patter. He looked away from the projected image, to find himself the object of a glare from Brond Halorn that would doubtless have wondrously transformed him into some species of small, squeaking vermin, had she but the power. He blinked and turned his gaze back to the simulacrum.

Father Olwyn's unseeing eyes were now raised to the ceiling and he was assuring the passengers that he knew what it was to suffer the lassitude; he had borne the affliction himself. After a suitably dramatic pause, he then announced, “But I was healed.”

A great hush, that of an expectant crowd that dares not even breathe, filled the salon. Then the image said, “As you will be healed,” and Bandar heard a mass sigh of released breath, and a low moan from Brond Halorn.

Olwyn finished by instructing the passengers in a four-syllable mantra—fah, sey, opah—that he assured them would “open the first door” in the process of healing. Bandar knew more than most about the effects of chants and mantras, and was confident that this one would do no more than exercise the jaws of those passengers, unaffected by the lassitude, who could still move theirs.

The room took up the chant. The white-haired woman's voice rose above the rest and her loud conviction drew her table mates—though not Bandar—into the sound. Their volume encouraged others and soon the mantra filled the room, accompanied by hands slapping tables and heels thudding against the floor.

Bandar looked about him and saw a wide range of emotions—hope, resignation, embarrassment, cynicism, fervor—as the passengers responded to the dynamics of their own psyches. He saw Phlevas Wasselthorpe regarding him with interest; then the young man's eyes moved away.

The chanting went on and on, and Bandar saw many whose eyes glazed and lost focus, though when he looked to Halorn he saw that she had been waiting for his gaze to come her way. She continued to chant “fah, sey, opah!” in an emphatic voice, while her hand made peremptory motions, palm up and fingers tight against each other, that summoned Bandar to join the chorus. He frowned, just as the projected Olwyn lifted his hands and cried, “Enough!”

Silence fell, broken only by Brond Halorn's throaty voice, edging on the hysterical, chanting the mantra twice more before a man seated to her right nudged her. Olwyn declared that he expected some of them to feel already the effect of the mantra, which he claimed would generate in them a numinous attribute he called “chuffe.”

“Yes!” said Brond Halorn, eyes afire. She could indeed feel chuffe rising within her.

Olwyn made some final remarks about the gravitational peculiarities of the Swept being conducive to the generating of chuffe and recommended more chanting and meditation. Then his image disappeared.

A hubbub of voices rose as the passengers responded as their natures dictated to the message and its bearer. At Bandar's table, Brond Halorn again took up the chant and a few others around the room did likewise. Bandar avoided her accusatory gaze by turning in his seat to survey the salon. Then someone shouted, “Look!” and he glanced about until he saw that all eyes in the room had been drawn to the table where Erenti Abbas and Phlevas Wasselthorpe sat.

But it was not the pair from the balloon-tram who were the object of the crowd's attention. Instead it was a slim young woman whose rigidity of expression argued that she was in the grip of the lassitude. She had risen to her feet, while her apparent companion, a ruddy-faced man with dark hair in a complex coiffure, looked up at her, astonished.

Her face was stiff with early-stage lassitude, but her slight body was quivering. She leaned forward, both hands on the tablecloth, looking down at the dark-haired man; then Bandar saw her mouth open as if to yawn. Her shivering stopped as she raised both hands to her cheeks and kneaded the muscles of her jaw.

“I can talk,” she said.

Her companion rose and took her in his arms, his eyes glistening. They sat down together and held each other as the room filled with a rising tide of voices, one current of which was the chant of fah, sey, opah!

Bandar lost his view of the objects of all this attention as people rose to their feet, some standing on their chairs, to see what would happen next. Moments later, he heard the booming voice of a ship's officer restoring order. Stewards urged passengers to retake their seats, then produced a selection of liqueurs and essences.

Bandar chose a tincture of Red Abandon, a fiery liquor that had been a favorite in his long-ago days as an Institute undergraduate. He sipped it and avoided eye contact with anyone as the room settled. The circumstances were too pat, the timing highly suspect: the afflicted and those who cared for them had been presented with a meaningless mantra, then moments after it was chanted someone was visited by a miraculous cure. As a nonaut, he had seen at first hand the power of myth and supposition, and he had no doubt that he had just witnessed a contrived performance.

Now the dark-haired man was making some kind of speech that Bandar couldn't have heard, even if he'd cared to listen, because the white-haired virago across the table was chanting fah, sey, opah in a guttural undertone. Then the young woman's companion escorted her out of the salon through a passageway that led to the promenade deck.

Some of the passengers were enthused by what they had seen. Others expressed doubts. Bandar sipped his liqueur, then ordered another. He took no part in the debates that now broke out around him, though to himself he thought, The sick should not be subjected to such hard-hearted shenanigans. He did not know how Father Olwyn would gain from flim-flammery, but Bandar would have bet a month's emporium receipts that this entire expedition was aimed at transferring the contents of someone's coffers to someone else's.

“Well, skeptic,” said the white-haired woman, “what do you make of that?”

Bandar's only answer was a slight lift and subsidence of one shoulder, which earned him a single syllable delivered in a harsh tone followed by Brond Halorn's observations, addressed to no one in particular, concerning rock-headedness and narrow-mindedness among those whose cerebral equipment was obviously not well connected to their visual apparatus. “They cannot see what they will not understand,” she concluded.

Bandar was irked, and two Red Abandons had now done their work. “I saw and I understood all too well,” he said. “Indeed, better than those who see only what they hope to see.”

His show of resistance provoked a tirade of invective. When Bandar tried to correct her, his efforts were met with a renewed chant of fah, sey, opah, accompanied by rhythmic hand clapping. His glass empty, he turned away to seek a steward and while his third installment of Red Abandon was being poured, he saw Phlevas Wasselthorpe making his way among the tables. Bandar downed the liqueur in one gulp, and when his eyes stopped watering he noticed that the fellow was now quite near. Relieved of any trepidation by the effects of the drink, he rose and greeted him, but instead of answering, the young man gestured to his lips and jaw and made wordless sounds.

“You have the lassitude?” Bandar said and felt an inchoate urge to help the odd young fellow.

Wasselthorpe spread his hands in a fatalistic gesture. His mentor, Abbas, now joined them, and told Bandar that the disease was in its early stage. “It comes and goes.”

Bandar offered his sympathy.

The young man grunted something that his older companion apparently understood. Abbas relayed the information to Bandar. “My young friend wonders if you would tell him more about the Commons. It has piqued his interest.”

Bandar saw no reason not to. If Wasselthorpe was destined to be imprisoned in his own paralyzed flesh until released by an early death, it would be a kindness to show him the Commons, providing Bandar guided him only to its gentler Locations. He offered to meet them out on deck after he had changed his garments; Brond Halorn's manner of countering opposition had left his shirt front dampened by her saliva.

A short time later he joined them on the lighted promenade deck and they strolled toward the forecastle where the windvanes rotated. Abbas asked him what he thought of Father Olwyn's promises.

Bandar was blunt. “Even if I suffered from the lassitude, I would be deeply skeptical of any who claimed a mystic cure.”

The conversation turned to the Commons. Now that the immediate effects of Red Abandon were fading, Bandar found himself divided about taking Wasselthorpe into the Commons. Either the young man possessed an uncanny ability to focus his mind or he was a latent psychotic. Bandar expressed his concerns in candid language. Erenti Abbas vouched for the young man's sanity and declared him to be a prodigy when it came to intensity of concentration.

Bandar acceded to the request. In his first years at the Institute, he had been counted a rare talent. Perhaps he was about to assist one who would become a renowned nonaut—if the lassitude didn't kill him. He led the pair to where the promenade deck met the raised forecastle. He had Wasselthorpe sit cross-legged, back against the bulkhead, hands folded in his lap. Bandar sat opposite him, knee to knee, the traditional teaching posture.

The lassitude had stilled Wasselthorpe's lips and tongue but he could make pure notes. Bandar bade him close his eyes and voice the tones with him. “When the portal appears, tell me. I will talk you through it.”

They began with the thran they had used on the balloon-tram. Scarcely more than a moment passed before Wasselthorpe grunted to show that he had achieved a vision of the door behind which shone a golden light. Bandar spoke softly, guiding him through the tones that opened the door, warning him to wait beyond the threshold.

Wasselthorpe sang the tones, pitch perfect, then grunted again. Bandar had to exert his maximum effort to form his own portal and open it. “Wait,” he said, “for the light to fade. More important, allow me to catch up.”

The young man had gone through like a fourth-level adept. Bandar sought for him in the glow and soon had a sense of his nearness. Here the lassitude did not affect Wasselthorpe's speech, and his voice came to the nonaut clearly. “Where am I?”

“Nowhere yet,” said Bandar. “Just wait.”

After a while, he asked Wasselthorpe, “Now where are you?”

The young man said he was in his boyhood home, looking out a window. Something about the scene outside disturbed him, so Bandar told him to think instead of the place where he had been most secure and happy. Wasselthorpe immediately announced that the scene had shifted to the room where he had spent much of his youth. When Bandar had him describe the setting, they soon found the anomaly: a dark mirror that should not have been in the back of the wardrobe. In its depths was a reflection that troubled the young man.

Bandar urged him not to fear his Shadow and to step boldly through it. Here was the moment when their expedition might easily have ended; it took discipline acquired through rigorous practice before most apprentice nonauts could face their own rejected attributes; some never could manage it and left the Institute for other pursuits. Yet it did not surprise Bandar that, moments later, Wasselthorpe announced he was through the mirror and descending a hillside path that led to a tarn of dark water.

“Go down the path,” Bandar said, and when he reached the water, the nonaut told him to dive in. Then he hurried to descend his own staircase down to the road that led into the outer arrondisement of the Commons. He found an almost transparent, two-dimensional version of Wasselthorpe standing between the walls, looking about with wonder.

He wanted to know where he had come to. Bandar explained, then he touched Wasselthorpe's arm, performing a nonaut mentalism, and the young man's image solidified into three dimensions. Now they were linked for the duration of their stay in the Commons, so Bandar did not have to worry about losing him among the thousands of dreamers that invisibly surrounded them. He was shocked when the young man said that he was aware of others passing by, seeing them as motes of light in the corners of his vision. That was an ability that nonauts worked years to acquire.

Bandar thought it wise to remove themselves from the bare threshold of the Commons, so close to the prime arrondisement where the characteristic entities were to be found in their purest form. He was about to suggest that they visit one or two of the more benign Locations, but Wasselthorpe was now peering down the road, his virtual body slightly leaning in that direction as if pulled by magnetism. He said, “I wish to explore.”

“A little, no more,” Bandar said. “I grow concerned.”

“But I am fine.”

Bandar explained that before they had come here he had been willing to take Wasselthorpe for one of those rarities with unusually biddable memories who find it easy to enter the Commons. But now he did not know what to think. Wasselthorpe was apparently not a natural, yet he could effortlessly detect the presence of the dreamers around them when even Bandar must work to catch a glimmer.

Wasselthorpe said, “I feel no fear. I am where I should be.”

The phrase troubled Bandar. “As if you were called here?” he said.

“Yes,” Wasselthorpe said.

“We should go back,” Bandar said.

The young man looked around. “Are we in danger?”

“Not I,” said Bandar, “but you may be in great danger.”

But Wasselthorpe perceived no threat. “Why should we return?”

“To see if you can,” Bandar said. To be called into the Commons presupposed an entity that did the calling, a powerful archetype that Wasselthorpe, lacking an arsenal of thrans and mentalist techniques, could not withstand.

“I sense no ill intent here,” Wasselthorpe said. He begged to be allowed at least to look about and promised that at the first sign of danger, Bandar could lead him back.

Perhaps it was the lingering confidence of Red Abandon, but Bandar acceded, at which point Wasselthorpe said, “I have an inclination to go down the road,” adding, when Bandar let his anxiety show, “It is only a mild inclination.”

“In the Commons, nothing is ‘only’ anything,” Bandar said.

“What could happen?”

“I cannot name any of the particular menaces because to name is to summon.”

Wasselthorpe found the concept hard to encompass.

“It is not a laughing matter,” said Bandar. “Naturals who find their way into the Commons almost never find their way out. The unprotected consciousness is soon absorbed by a pure archetype.”

Apprentice nonauts, hearing of these things, always showed some degree of fear. Yet Wasselthorpe displayed no concern and Bandar felt a rising curiosity about this odd young man.

He offered a bargain: they would go down the road together, but Bandar's commands must be instantly heeded. Wasselthorpe agreed and made to set off, but Bandar delayed their going to teach the young man the strongest of the thrans: the three, three, and seven, whose tones would hide them from the characteristic entities. He bade the young man sing it loudly and without cease, then linked his arm in Wasselthorpe's and led him down the road.

They soon reached the divide that separated the threshold from the first level of the Commons. Because Bandar was conducting the journey, it presented as an old stone bridge across a black river. On the other side was an open space in which the “usual suspects” sat or stood or milled about.

Bandar was surprised to note that near the far end of the bridge sat the Hero. His Helper, as always, was nearby. That the Hero appeared in such proximity meant that that archetype must be the entity whose influence was most dominant in Wasselthorpe's personality. Odd, he thought, I would have predicted the Fool for naivete and the Seeker for his exaggerated interest in unraveling mysteries. The Fool was indeed nearby, but although the Seeker was Bandar's own dominant archetype, it was wandering far back in the crowd.

They had meanwhile reached the middle of the bridge. Bandar, his arm still linked with Wasselthorpe's, sought to restrain his further progress. The young man continued to chant the thran but his face was taut. He pulled against Bandar's grip.

Now a curious thing happened: the Hero's head came up as if something had attracted its attention. The Helper, too, showed increased alertness. Bandar saw that many of the other archetypes had stopped their characteristic activities and had turned toward the bridge.

That shouldn't happen, was his first thought. To Wasselthorpe, he said, “Louder.”

The young man increased his volume but still his body seemed to yearn toward the archetypes.

“This is wrong,” Bandar said, “as if they sense us.”

The Hero had turned to face them, even though the insulating thran should have denied it any perception of their presence. Now it took a step toward them. The Helper followed, as did some of the other entities, including the Wise Man. The Father left the Mother and Child and moved toward the bridge.

Wasselthorpe was still chanting, but his volume had decreased. Bandar hauled on his arm, trying to pull him back. But he felt the young man's virtual flesh resisting with unexpected strength.

Bandar now added his voice to the thran. The Hero stopped and stood still, its head turning this way and that as if listening for an elusive sound. The other entities also paused.

The nonaut had, with difficulty, returned Wasselthorpe to the top of the arched span. Now the young man exerted himself and would go no farther back. Worse, he stopped chanting the thran to half-turn toward Bandar and say, “Wait!”

Bandar recognized the look on Wasselthorpe's face; it was the “wild surmise” that gripped apprentice nonauts when they first felt a resonance between their own psyches and the pure entities that blended within them to make them who they were. It was not a look he wanted to see on the face of an uninstructed beginner.

“Listen,” the young man said.

Listening was the last thing Bandar intended. He chanted more loudly, almost straining the throat of his virtual body. He dragged at Wasselthorpe's arm with both hands but could not budge the resisting young man.

A frisson of horror went through the nonaut as he saw the Hero step forward again. It set the heel of one boot onto the stones of the bridge. Impossible! thought Bandar. It can't do that!

The stones of the bridge moved beneath his feet, grating against each other. Wasselthorpe stood as if entranced. The Hero raised its foot to take another step. Bandar had no doubt that the entity was somehow aware of them, despite the thran, that it was drawn to them by an attraction so powerful that it could suppress the elemental forces that separated Locations in the Commons.

He yanked on Wasselthorpe's arm, spinning the young man around to face him. He could not speak while intoning the thran, but he let his terror show in his face and raised one hand in a gesture that said, What are you waiting for?

To his great relief, he saw understanding dawn. Wasselthorpe rejoined him in chanting the thran. The Hero's second foot did not step onto the bridge.

Bandar signaled Wasselthorpe to sing louder and when the young man did as he was bid, Bandar pulled him back to the road that was the threshold of the nosphere. Without delay, he sang the tones that opened an emergency gate and thrust Wasselthorpe through the rift the moment it appeared. Moments later, Bandar came back to the deck of the Orgulon. He leaped to his feet and leaned over the still-seated form of the young man, shaking his shoulders until the eyes opened and focused on him.

Wasselthorpe mumbled something and Bandar sat down again. “I believe he is all right.”

“He has also regained the power of speech,” said a female voice. The security officer was standing over them.

Abbas explained about Wasselthorpe's intermittent bouts of rigor. The woman showed a professional's unwillingness to accept second-hand testimony. She squatted before Wasselthorpe and said, “What happened?”

The young man was still dazed. Bandar stepped in. “We encountered an archetype,” he said. “More significant, it encountered us.”

“A man with a sword. His helmet had wings,” said Wasselthorpe, his gaze turned inward.

Bandar found the detail interesting. “That's one of its earliest forms.”

Wasselthorpe added more specifics of his view of the entity. He had seen a dawn-time barbarian wearing chain mail and the skin of an extinct canine predator. Then he lapsed back into introspection.

The security officer glowered. “What have you done to him?”

“Nothing,” said Bandar. He gave a short explanation of what had happened on the lip of the prime arrondisement. “But he is fine.”

The security officer expressed surprise and distaste that anyone would venture into such a hell for a pastime. Bandar assured her he had no intention of accompanying Wasselthorpe into the Commons again.

She seemed to want to take the discussion further and Bandar was conscious of not having made a good impression. But her next words were never uttered because there came a panicked scream from the darkness that shrouded the foredeck.

* * * *

The ensuing few minutes were full of shouts and action. It appeared that a passenger—indeed it was the dark-haired man whose female companion had been miraculously cured of the lassitude—had fallen from the foredeck. The landship's great wheels had crushed him. The captain, a small, precise man, came on deck and ordered the vessel stopped, then dispatched a flying gig to retrieve the corpse. The security officer held a whispered consultation with the captain, who then announced that the passenger's death might have involved a criminal offense. The slim young woman became hysterical. Protesting that it had been an accident, she was led below by the security officer.

The passengers had crowded around in the way that bystanders at horrific events often do. Bandar sought solitude by the landship's rail and reflected on what had transpired in the Commons. He was deeply troubled by the Hero's seeming awareness of them despite the thran, and especially its determination to come for them directly across the bridge. That should have been impossible.

When he refocused his powerful memory on the events, he was struck by a detail that had eluded him at the time. While the Hero had blindly sought Wasselthorpe, Bandar now realized that the Helper had not just been following its master. Its eyes had not lacked focus, nor were they directed at Wasselthorpe. They had been aimed straight at Guth Bandar. It sensed me, he thought. Thran or no thran, it knew I was there.

It was a worrisome thought. Bandar did not care to be absorbed and tipped into permanent psychosis. But even if he were willing to go mad, his choice would not have been the Helper, insanely serving some blustering hero. He shuddered and knew that he was not just responding to the chill breeze off the night prairie.

Abbas and Wasselthorpe joined him after the body had been removed and the crowd cleared. They speculated on how the poor fellow might have come to fall overboard. Bandar offered the opinion that the landship might have encountered a transient gravitational cyst, causing the man to unbalance and tumble over the rail. The conversation reminded him that it was just such anomalies he had come to investigate, and he excused himself, then hurried below to fetch his measuring equipment. But when he came back on deck and activated his device, he detected nothing out of the ordinary.

The security officer approached him as he adjusted settings and calibrated norms. “Now what are you up to?” she wanted to know.

Bandar told her. His explanation earned him a look that let him know that he was becoming one of her least favorite passengers. Deciding it would be best to retire, he pocketed his equipment and went to his cabin.

* * * *

It had been a tiring day, so Bandar decided to combine his concern about Wasselthorpe and the Hero with his need for rest. He fell asleep, allowed himself to slip into a dream, then took control. He transported himself to the threshold and set off for the prime arrondisement with the intention of examining the bridge and the archetypes—especially the Hero and Helper—beyond the barrier.

He had scarcely taken three strides, however, before he felt a grip on his shoulder that sent a cold shock through his virtual torso. Startled, he turned to see what had accosted him and found himself looking up into the pleased face of Phlevas Wasselthorpe.

“What are you doing?” Bandar said.

“I am dreaming.”

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

The young man counseled him to be unconcerned. “It is only a dream.”

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

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

“Tell me,” Bandar said, “when you look at me, do I seem to change in any way? Or is my form constant?”

The other looked him up and down. “It is peculiar, but you do seem to remain unchanged, whereas the woods behind you have been several different kinds of forest.”

“What does that tell you?”

“What should it tell me?”

“A hundred things, none of them good. I will open us a gate.” Bandar sounded the first few notes of the emergency exit thran. He was astonished to find himself silenced. Wasselthorpe had placed a hand over Bandar's mouth. The hand felt very real.

This time the shock of contact was strongly colored by a bolt of fear. Bandar struggled and with a great effort managed to wrench himself free. He backed away, saying, “Oh, this is much worse than not good. 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 Wasselthorpe. “I do not want to depart.”

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

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

That was precisely what frightened Bandar. “Neither of us is experiencing an ordinary dream,” he said. “Some force is shaping us to its own ends. In the Commons, the only such force is an archetype intent on absorbing a consciousness. That way lies madness.”

“I do not feel irrational,” said Wasselthorpe. “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 into the role of Hero and that I am being pressed into the part of the Helper.”

“I want from you only advice,” Wasselthorpe 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 the end of this is your absorption into the entity that summons you, followed by insanity and certain death. And poor Bandar, towed along helpless in your train, suffers a comparable doom.”

Wasselthorpe found the warning hard to believe. “All will be well,” he said. “I am certain of it.”

Bandar informed him that that was always the Hero's sure belief, right up until the moment the dragon's teeth closed upon his tender parts.

Now Wasselthorpe disputed the contention that he was ruled by the Hero. “Why can I not be a blend of several archetypical entities, like you and anyone else?”

Bandar told him to look at himself.

The young man looked down and Bandar saw mild surprise take possession of his face. Wasselthorpe was clad in chain mail, scuffed boots, and rough trousers bound up by criss-crossing straps. A shaggy gray pelt covered his shoulders, its paws tied across his chest. In one hand was a sword of iron. Bandar gestured and Wasselthorpe raised a hand and touched the wings that sprouted from the helmet on his head.

“Does that seem familiar?”

The young man had to admit that it did. Yet, he was as thoroughly unconcerned as a Hero would be.

Bandar suggested that he ought to open a gate so they could discuss the situation in the waking world, where it was easier to resist an inclination to madness. He was chagrined to see the other's face fill with heroic resolve.

“No,” Wasselthorpe said. He was here to do something, and felt that he must do it.

Bandar had backed a little farther away; Wasselthorpe was accompanying his declaration with sweeping gestures, and only now noticed that he was doing so with the hand that held a sword. Considerately, he laid the weapon down on the road. Instantly, it disappeared from there and reappeared in his grasp.

“What do you think the ‘something’ you are here to do might be?” Bandar said.

The other spoke without reflection. “I must search.”

“Search for what? Something nice, like treasure? Or something with fangs and an insatiable appetite?”

A blank look came over Wasselthorpe. He did not know, he said, but he would know it when he saw it.

“Oh, my.” Bandar put his hands over his eyes and shook his head. “All right,” he said. It did no good to argue with a Hero. But he begged to be allowed to shape the adventure. That way they stood some chance of surviving it.

The young man agreed to follow his advice.

The nonaut said, “Look around and tell me if there is anything that draws your attention.”

Wasselthorpe immediately found that something about the woods beyond the field interested him.

“Very well,” said Bandar, “let us approach them. But I must lead.”

Wasselthorpe agreed.

“All right,” said the nonaut, though the situation was far from it, and asked the young man to indicate the direction in which he wanted to travel. Wasselthorpe closed his eyes and let his sword hand rise to point the way. When the nonaut asked how far he thought they should go, the answer was, “Not far.”

Bandar turned the globe and regarded the proposed line of travel. A short distance away was the entrance to a Class Three Event. “Curious,” he said. He put away the globe. He would have liked to call an end to the expedition here and now so that he could mull the coincidence: here they were traveling the Swept, a legacy of the War Against the Dree, and now a strange young man who was powerfully influenced by the Hero had a strong urge to enter the Event that the war had carved out in the Commons.

“Just a coincidence?” Wasselthorpe suggested.

Of course it was a coincidence, Bandar said, and that worried him even more. In the waking world a coincidence was just a random juxtaposition of events, devoid of meaning. But in the Commons, coincidence was the most meaningful circumstance of all, the immensely potent force that tied one thing to another. “Indeed,” he said, “it is coincidence that connects everything to everything else.”

Wasselthorpe's reaction troubled him further. The young man ought to be afraid, yet he was not. He pointed the sword once more. “I must go there,” he said. “Does it mean I will die?”

Bandar did not think so. The choice of that particular Event was less worrisome than many another he might have chosen. But he warned again that Wasselthorpe must let him be their guide.

“I will.”

The nonaut took a firm grip on the young man's sword arm. He taught Wasselthorpe a thran and when the rendition was perfect, Bandar cautioned him to continue the chant. It would keep the Location's idiomats from detecting their presence and reacting to them as if they were part of the Event.

“How bad would that be?”

“The Dree were appalling,” Bandar said, “and the war to resist them was particularly horrid.” The invaders had been a hive species, each hive telepathically and pheromonically connected among all its members into one entity. They used their concentrated mental powers to enslave other species and force them to work and fight for the hive—especially the latter, because ritual combat was the basis of what passed for culture among the Dree. Status among the competing hives was everything, and status was gained and held by a hive's success on the battlefield.

Dree fighting style was mainly devoted to capturing prisoners that could be carried back to the captor's hive and tortured. The telepathic Dree relished the anguish, fear, and despair of their victims, just as humans savored the flavors and textures of foods and essences. Fortunately, this strategic imperative meant that all their battle tactics centered on surrounding small groups of enemies for capture. Faced with a well-organized army determined to massacre them, the Dree were heavily outclassed.

After the initial surprise of the invasion, the Dree were soon rolled up and confined to the territory now known as the Swept. No one wanted to dig them out of their warren of tunnels, so the gravitational aggregator was brought down from space to crush and bury the invaders, along with their unfortunate mind-slaves, beneath the flattened landscape.

Wasselthorpe appeared to be affected by the tale. “Are you sure you want to go on with this?” Bandar asked.

“I am somehow called to go this way,” the young man said. “I must see what there is to see.”

Bandar was still weighing his curiosity against his apprehension, though it could do no harm to visit the Event. But he reminded Wasselthorpe not to break off the chant. If either needed to speak, he would use hand signals to warn the other to increase the volume of the thran to keep them both covered.

He led them to the node, opened the gate, and led them through. They stepped into open land beneath a sky splashed with stars. A wind whispered through tall trees and a stream chuckled not far away. Bandar took quick stock of the scene: they were near the base of a long slope leading out onto flat land where armored war vehicles and assault infantry were converging on the range of hills behind them where the Dree had consolidated their forces. He could hear the clicking and creaking of Dree warriors.

The sound must have piqued Wasselthorpe's interest because he abruptly ceased chanting. At once, a concentrated beam of energy lit up the area with green light and the ground at their feet bubbled and smoked. Bandar raised his voice and yanked at the young man's arm, bringing him back to an appreciation of where they were.

They waited briefly until the armored assault had passed them by, then moved downslope and across the stream into a pasture. The hemming was almost complete, and Bandar saw the massive aggregator above the horizon, blotting out the stars.

Bandar motioned Wasselthorpe to increase his volume again and asked: did he feel any impulse to go this way or that? The fellow looked about him and his attention was caught by something a little way off and he moved toward it. Bandar followed and found a shallow trench that contained the melted remains of some heavy weapon and four carbonized Dree.

Wasselthorpe stepped down into the declivity and pried the corpses apart with his sword, revealing the intact upper half of one of the invaders. The young man stared at the dead thing until Bandar gestured for him to increase his volume again so the nonaut could speak.

“No eyes,” he said, looking down at the rounded oblong of brown chitin that was something like a head. It had feathery antennae that, in life, stood upright to detect odor with fine precision. Nerve-rich regions on the torso and head detected vibration and rendered it as sound. At close range it could also detect bioelectrical fields.

Wasselthorpe regarded the dead Dree without reaction. Bandar questioned him and learned that the young man felt no more urges. Apparently they had done whatever Wasselthorpe's motivating entity wanted done. The nonaut examined the other man closely and was interested to see the trappings of the Hero fade, leaving the young man clad in unremarkable attire.

He considered summoning an emergency exit again, but departing from the Commons by that route twice in one day could cause disorientation even to the experienced traveler. Instead, he brought out his map and navigated a path through a series of innocuous Locations where they would not even need to hide behind thrans. A short while later, he was able to ease Wasselthorpe through a conduit that would lead him back into normal sleep.

But Bandar did not then wake himself. Nor did he return to the mission Wasselthorpe's arrival had interrupted. There was no point going to the bridge to study the usual suspects. He had had a good close-up look at the pure archetype that was governing the strange young man. The nonaut wanted to think about what he had seen and so he made his way to a quiet Landscape that consisted of little more than a tiny patch of sand-colored rock, set in an endless ocean and shaded by a single Sincere/Approximate palm tree. No idiomat ever came there, and Bandar had often wondered what role the simple setting could have played in human history.

But he did not pursue that idle chain of thought now. He wanted to reflect on the unprecedented sequence of events that had occurred since he had introduced Phlevas Wasselthorpe to the Commons. First, the young man had demonstrated an unheard-of ability to enter the nosphere. Bandar had studied naturals who could slip easily into the nosphere, but they did so at the sacrifice of their own identities. They became the archetypes that summoned them, disappearing into them so utterly that they no longer had any individual consciousness: there was only an archetype psychotically stalking the waking world, usually dealing out misery and horror until the authorities intervened.

But Wasselthorpe had gone in and come out unaffected, as if he merely stepped from one room to another. More shocking still, he had been able to enter Guth Bandar's dream and physically dominate the nonaut's virtual flesh. Most disturbing of all, the young man's consciousness had clearly made a connection with the Hero, yet he had not been absorbed by it. Wasselthorpe's accomplishments represented two highly unlikely results and one that was simply impossible. There had never been, to Bandar's expert knowledge, anyone remotely like him.

Another worrisome thought occurred as Bandar sat beneath the palm tree. The Hero never went anywhere without the Helper. Bandar had played that role, indeed had slipped into it so readily that it was as if he had himself been suborned by that characteristic entity. Yet here was Bandar, thinking rational thoughts, when he should have been drowned in the soup of psychosis.

A half-fashioned memory nudged at the edge of his awareness. He reached for it with a nonaut's casual skill but was disturbed to feel it somehow slip away. He sought for it in earnest, focusing a great deal of his trained power, yet still it eluded him. Another attempted grasp, and then it was gone.

The experience left Bandar troubled. It was bad enough that something impossible was going on inside Phlevas Wasselthorpe. But for a lifelong adept of the nosphere to find that elements of his own psyche could deftly avoid his grip brought the strangeness far too close to the essential core of Guth Bandar. Something was going on within him that he was unable to bring to the surface of his mind. To a nonaut, such a state of affairs must be deeply troubling.

He awakened himself and made his way to the cabin Wasselthorpe shared with Erenti Abbas. He knocked and was admitted by the young man. Bandar inspected him and was satisfied he had sustained no harm from his experiences of the night.

Wasselthorpe apologized for having overborne Bandar's objections to the mission he had felt compelled to fulfill and for forcing Bandar to guide him.

Bandar waved away the sentiment. The events were over and he had no intention of repeating them.

Now Wasselthorpe was wondering if he might someday take up the exploration of the nosphere. He even asked if he might study under Bandar.

The nonaut felt the skin of his face cool and knew he must have gone pale. He informed Wasselthorpe that it would be kinder if he simply killed Bandar on the spot. “Be assured, I will never again go willingly with you into the Commons.”

Indeed, he meant to ask the Orgulon's captain for the use of his gig to take him away forthwith so that he could never be pressed into the Hero's service again.

“But what of your research?” Wasselthorpe asked.

Bandar told him that he could take scant pleasure in it while constantly at risk of being dragooned to his death.

The danger seemed remote to Wasselthorpe.

“To me,” said Bandar, “it is inescapable. I am in grave peril if I remain within range of you, and since I do not know what that range is, I shall set the greatest possible distance between us.”

He ended with a mollifying gesture and assured Wasselthorpe that he meant no offense.

The young man said none had been taken. The matter mystified him.

Bandar looked up into the young fellow's mildly troubled face and again felt an urge to be of assistance to him. He fought it down and went in search of the captain. That interview was not a success: the captain called in the security officer, whose name Bandar now learned was Raina Haj, and she refused to let anyone leave the ship until the questions regarding the death of the passenger were cleared up.

“It was no accident,” she said.

“But how can I be a suspect?” he protested. “I had just emerged from a trance and was under your direct view when it happened.”

“Perhaps you were there to distract me,” Haj said.

* * * *

Breakfast had been served and eaten by the time Bandar entered the dining salon. Apparently, Father Olwyn had also come and gone again, leaving the lassitude sufferers and their companions with a new mantra—bom, ala, bom—that would further elevate their chuffe. Brond Halorn, her hair still asparkle with blue-fire gems, was leading the most fervent group of chanters. When she saw Bandar enter and make his way to the remains of the buffet, she threw a challenging stare his way.

Bandar declined to return her gaze and looked for an empty seat away from her devoted chorus. The only available spaces were within too close a range to Abbas and Wasselthorpe; it would be rude to sit near them without speaking to them. He filled a plate with items from the chafing dishes—all, it turned out, featured variant renderings of the truffles of the Swept—and took it along with a steaming pot of punge back to his cabin.

He slept for a while, allowing himself an ordinary dream cycle, and awoke feeling refreshed and more cheerful. He went on deck where he found the security officer. Again he offered reasoned arguments; again they were rebuffed.

“It is not some mere whim that prompts me to seek to depart,” he said. “My psyche is in danger as long as I am in proximity to that young man.” He unobtrusively indicated Abbas and Wasselthorpe, who were standing by the rail.

An even deeper suspicion crept into Haj's already dubious expression. “What exactly is your relationship to those two?” she said.

“I have no relationship. I encountered them on the balloon-tram on the way here.”

“Do you often encounter strangers who threaten your sanity?”

“No, but there is something odd about Wasselthorpe. He is able to do things he should not be capable of.”

The security officer tilted her head to regard Bandar. “Both you and they stand out from the rest of the passengers,” she said. “You arrived claiming a lassitude-affected brother. His illness comes and goes.”

“I am in danger. Last night Wasselthorpe invaded my dream.”

Haj's skepticism visibly intensified. “Uh huh,” she said.

Bandar concluded there was no point in further argument. He went below and sat in his cabin until boredom made him take up his measurement equipment and go back on deck. If he could not escape, he might as well do something useful.

He was taking readings from various points of the compass when Wasselthorpe approached him.

“I have been thinking about what happened last night,” the young man said.

“I do not wish to be impolite,” said Bandar, squinting at a read-out, “but I must refuse to discuss the matter with you. I would not still be here but Raina Haj will not let me depart.”

“I am sorry you are troubled,” the other said. “For myself, I feel as if a door has opened on a world whose existence I'd never heard of. Yet I grow increasingly sure that there is something for me there.”

“A destiny, perhaps?” said Bandar.

Wasselthorpe's normally serious expression broke under a sudden surge of excitement. “Yes, exactly! A destiny!”

“You cannot imagine how frightening that is,” said Bandar. “I do not know what you are or how you can do what you do. But such abilities, yoked to a sense of destiny, then coupled to the power to draw me, of all people, helplessly into your wake, are enough to give me the abdabs.”

“I sense no harm in my fascination.”

Bandar sighed. “Of course you don't. But the Commons is full of surprises, many of them hideously final.” He begged the young man to let him be and told him that he resolved to sleep at odd times so that his dreams might be unviolated, and asked Wasselthorpe not to meddle with any other dreamers he might encounter in his sleep.

The day wore on. Bandar would again have taken dinner in his cabin, but when he summoned a steward the fellow told him that Raina Haj had decreed that all passengers must dine together. Apparently the security officer had installed surveillance systems in the salon that could read and assess subliminal reactions among the passengers. She hoped some investigatory leads would develop from throwing them all together.

Bandar decided he would demonstrate that he had no ties to Abbas and Wasselthorpe by dining at their table and making no attempt to hide his face. Two seats had been left empty—the dead man's and his companion's, who was confined to her quarters under guard. The ship's first officer, who had sat there the previous night, was also missing, so that Bandar, Wasselthorpe and Abbas were joined only by a retired couple from the Isle of Cyc, who were introduced as Ule Gazz and her spouse, Olleg Ebersol. He was paralyzed by the lassitude, while her face showed enough animation for both of them. They were enthusiasts of the Lho-tso school of practical enlightenment and she spoke glowingly of mantras and rising chuffe and the cure she expected. Ebersol's opinions on these matters were impossible to determine but Bandar saw genuine suffering in the man's eyes.

The cuisine was again entirely built around truffles—Bandar wondered if the cruise might be some ploy to market the fungus, though how the lassitude and truffles might commercially intersect was beyond him. After the meal, Father Olwyn again appeared in simulacrum and offered a sermon that Bandar found all too vague, along with an exhortation for all to chant bom, bom ala bom.

The chant rose throughout the room as Olwyn disappeared. Bandar dismissed the sermon as, “A pile of piety and platitudes,” at which Ule Gazz took offense. The couple went to the other side of the salon, where Brond Halorn was vigorously conducting more than half the passengers in a mass chant. The slap of dozens of hands on tables and feet on floorboards shook the room.

Phlevas Wasselthorpe once more tried to draw Bandar into a discussion of their mutual experience in the Commons. Bandar again had to fight down an initial urge to help the young man, but he transformed the impulse into a brief lecture: “For your own good, don't go there. And if you find yourself wandering the Commons, please do not seek my company.”

He extracted a promise that Wasselthorpe would not sleep until later in the evening, then retired to his cabin to snatch as much rest as he could before their dreams might again overlap. He dreamt lucidly and the moment his nonaut's senses detected the presence of Wasselthorpe in the Commons, he promptly woke himself and spent the rest of the night in meditation.

* * * *

With the tired old sun barely creeping above the horizon, the passengers were summoned to breakfast. Bandar had had enough of the truffles of the Swept—the flavor, though rich, soon cloyed. He took plain cakes and punge and carried them again to the table where Abbas and Wasselthorpe sat, tendered the basic formalities, then ate without offering conversation.

As he was finishing his second mug of punge Bandar noted that the landship was slowing. The other two men did likewise and turned in their seats to peer out of one of the great round windows. Something attracted their attention and Bandar rose to look over their shoulders. For the first time since he had boarded the Orgulon he experienced a thrill of pleasure.

“Those are Rover carts,” he said.

The landship came to a halt near a place where a wide circle of the long grass had been trampled flat. Gangplanks extended themselves and the passengers debarked, the lassitude sufferers in whom the disease was most advanced being transported on come-alongs, small platforms fitted with gravity obviators and normally used to tow heavy baggage.

Bandar came down onto the Swept, looking about avidly. The projector that allowed Father Olwyn to address the passengers was deployed and he heard some more blather about chuffe and mantras. But the nonaut's attention was drawn to the Rovers and their vehicles. Seven of the lightweight, high-wheeled carts were spread around the rim of the flattened area. Made of plaited bamboo withes, each rode on two tall metal-and-rubber wheels, thin-spoked and fat-tired. Bamboo ribs curved from one side to the other, surmounted by a canopy of tightly woven grass to shade passengers from sun and rain.

Each cart was drawn by a team of eight shuggras, round-eared, sharp-incisored, oversized rodents bred up long ago from vermin. Their legs were long and powerful, ending in splayed hairless feet with spoon-shaped leathery digits. At the moment they crouched, resting but keeping up a constant muttering.

Wasselthorpe also seemed to lack interest in Olwyn's sermonizing. He was clearly curious about the Rovers and drifted in the direction of the nearest team. Bandar felt a strong impulse to warn him away. Shuggras were intensely social, but only amongst themselves; any creature outside their own clan or their Rover master's family might suffer an unprovoked attack.

The Rovers had been lying beneath the carts until the passengers came down from the Orgulon. Now they emerged and each went to his vehicle and pulled down a tailboard that unfolded into steps.

Wasselthorpe was clearly surprised by the Rovers’ nonhuman appearance. He asked Bandar if they were of ultraterrene origin. Now it was Bandar's turn to be surprised: even a provincial lordling ought to have heard of Rovers. They had been sharing the planet with humans for eons. The nonaut wondered about the young man's education. Much commonplace knowledge seemed to have eluded him.

His plump mentor made a remark that revealed his unhappiness about exchanging the landship's comforts for the more austere conditions of a Rover cart. Still, Abbas assumed a look of resignation and steered Wasselthorpe toward one of the vehicles. The young man was staring at the nearest Rover, a mature male who was showing his species’ usual discomfort at direct eye contact. Bandar stepped up beside Wasselthorpe and advised him to try a less direct inspection. He also briefly summarized the creatures’ origins.

“They are dogs?” Wasselthorpe said.

“That is not a word they like to hear,” Abbas said. They climbed into the cart, making its leather springs creak. On each side of the interior, four seats of woven wicker faced forward. Erenti Abbas expressed some relief that the seats were cushioned by pads of woven grass. He and Wasselthorpe took the foremost pair and Bandar sat behind the young man. The cart squeaked and bounced again as Ule Gazz and Olleg Ebersol boarded, the former helping her spouse into a seat behind Bandar. Despite the efforts they had made to elevate their chuffe, Bandar thought that Ebersol showed signs of sinking deeper into the lassitude.

Two more passengers climbed in, a pair of sturdy young women who had the look of students. Bandar had seen them on the Orgulon but had not met them. The new arrivals named themselves as Corje Sooke and Pollus Ermatage, though in fact Ermatage did all the speaking, Sooke having been rendered mute by the disease. They identified themselves as cohorts, a lifelong relationship of intense closeness practiced by citizens of the county of Fasfallia.

The remaining seat was soon filled by the slim young woman whose companion had been crushed beneath the landship. She was escorted to the cart by Raina Haj, demanding all the way to be allowed to leave and return home. Haj said something to her that Bandar didn't catch but which clearly did not please its hearer. She flung herself onto the seat cushion, crossed her arms and glowered at all of them before turning to glare at the Swept.

Bandar overheard Abbas and Wasselthorpe discussing the new arrival—he learned that her name was Flix—but their low voiced conversation was interrupted by their Rover's securing of the cart's tailboard, accompanied by a yelp that Bandar knew meant “Important information follows.”

“Yaffak I am called,” the Rover said in his species’ odd way of speaking, that always sounded to Bandar like a modified howl. Seeing incomprehension on the faces of the other passengers, the nonaut translated the statement for them.

Yaffak went around to the front of the cart and leaped into the driver's uncovered seat. He seized the reins and flourished a whip, and in a moment eight whining shuggras pressed powerful shoulders against the padded harness. The cart jerked forward but settled into a smooth passage across the unnaturally level ground. They picked up speed, racing straight into the sunrise, leaving a cart-wide track through the long grass.

Bandar watched the other carts with interest. He had learned from his studies that Rovers were intensely competitive, with a strong instinct for hierarchy. A pack of Rovers driving their carts across the Swept should be, he thought, a kind of race, each driver struggling to be the leader. He was disappointed, therefore, to see the carts take up a line-abreast formation.

“I don't understand,” he said.

“Don't understand what?” said Erenti Abbas.

Bandar explained about the Rovers’ supposed competitive spirit. That brought a dismissal of the usefulness of competition from Ule Gazz. She extolled the Lho-tso philosophy of fatalism.

Erenti Abbas engaged her from an epicurean's point of view, using his enjoyment of food as a metaphor for seizing pleasure from the passing transience of life. Then Pollus Ermatage weighed in with an observation that, from the perspective of manure, the whole cycle of fertilization, growth, harvest, processing, and consumption was just a complex way of producing fresh manure.

It was the kind of discussion Bandar remembered from his early years at the Institute, when undergraduates would sit around a tavern table and regale each other with beery perspectives on the meaning of life. Now he offered the view that some things were effectively eternal, and cited the nosphere as an example of permanence, whereas individual human lives tended to be repetitions of generic themes, with minor embellishments.

Wasselthorpe protested that his life was not a trivium. No one had ever been him, doing what he was doing, in the way he was doing it, and for the reasons that moved him.

Viewed from within that life, Bandar replied, all that was indubitably correct. But from a wider scope, whatever the shape of Wasselthorpe's life might be, it differed only marginally from those of the billions upon billions of young men who had come before him.

“What is your quest: power, passion, riches, spiritual insight? Each has been looked for and found—or not found—countless times. At best you might add some slight variation to the grand scheme. But the effort is ultimately no more important than to have shifted one grain of a desert's sand.”

Bandar saw forlorn sadness wash across the young man's face. There was pain somewhere in his history, pain and loss. And Bandar's glib words had somehow evoked a memory of it. Now something else stirred in the back of the nonaut's mind: a vague sense that what he had said to Phlevas Wasselthorpe was completely untrue; that this young man's quest might be more than a minor variation on a theme.

It is fatigue, Bandar told himself. I have not slept well. And perhaps a disappointment brought on by the failure of the Rovers to live up to my romantic expectations.

While he was immersed in his own thoughts, the discussion had moved on, but only to spread a glum mood over the other passengers. Conversation dwindled, then stopped. After a lengthening silence, Pollus Ermatage suggested singing the new chuffe-raising chant that Father Olwyn had taught the believers while Bandar had been inspecting the Rover carts. More nonsense, Bandar thought, but this one's rhythm—ta-tumpa, ta-tey, repeated endlessly—matched the rocking of the cart as they drove across the grass.

He joined in for a while, out of politeness, but soon the chanting and the growing heat of the advancing day made him sleepy. He broke off to enjoy a capacious yawn. Wasselthorpe also ceased to chant and wanted again to ply him with questions about the Commons.

“The Commons is not for you,” the nonaut said. “Find another interest.”

“But I am called there,” Wasselthorpe said.

“All the more reason not to go. Now I mean to make good some of the sleep I did not get last night.” He folded his arms across his small chest and leaned one shoulder against the upcurving rib that supported the cart's plaited roof. He elicited a promise from Abbas to ensure that Wasselthorpe remained awake while Bandar slept.

* * * *

Bandar slipped into dream. His first impulse was to exert his nonaut ability to control its direction, but some other part of him counseled letting it unroll under its own dynamic.

He was in a garden, with neatly ordered lawn and well-tended but unremarkable flower beds. Wasselthorpe appeared and Bandar felt a frisson of fear before he realized that this was not an incursion of the other's consciousness but merely a rendering of the young man created by Bandar's own mind.

He was in the Hero's guise and, as Bandar regarded him, now memory filtered up from somewhere. He vaguely recalled the variant that wore mail, winged helmet, and wolf pelt. It was a Hero who slew a foul monster that had preyed upon ordinary men, tearing its arm off so that it ran away and died. But then a worse threat loomed, though he couldn't remember exactly what it was; the information dated from his undergraduate years, before he had fully developed his memory. Besides, nonauts worked to remember categories, not individual incidents—the totality of the Commons was far more than any mind could encompass.

Bandar observed Wasselthorpe-as-Hero cross the garden, sword held low and positioned for a coming thrust. Then the man shimmered and became just a sad-faced boy at play. He held a wooden sword and wore a toy helmet, but the way he thrust at empty air with the rough weapon showed a man's determination. And the young face showed the same serious cast of expression that governed the mature man.

Bandar sensed an unbearable poignancy in the scene and turned away. But now his gaze fell upon the Rover Yaffak. The creature stood disconsolate, ears drooping and black lips drawn downward. The nonaut took control of the dream and addressed the Rover. “What is wrong? Why do you grieve?”

Yaffak opened his mouth to answer but the only sound that emerged was an odd creaking.

* * * *

Bandar awoke to the creaking of the carts. They had slowed and the Rovers were driving them in a circle to create another broad area of trampled grass. Erenti Abbas rubbed his substantial stomach, expressing optimism that lunch was imminent. Bandar informed him that it was too soon for the passengers to be fed. They would be stopping to rest the shuggras, which were not built for the long haul and required frequent pauses.

When the grass was flattened, the Rovers positioned the carts in a small circle at the center of the larger one, with the teams of shuggras facing outward. They lowered the tailboards that the passengers might dismount. Yaffak indicated the tall grass and said, “Empty your bodies.”

Bandar translated the words into a more seemly phrase then asked, “How long will we stay?”

“Small time,” Yaffak answered. “Rest shuggras. Also Rovers rest, eat little before big heat comes.”

Bandar relayed the sense of this to his fellow passengers, then watched with interest as Yaffak went to join the other Rovers in the center of the circled carts where one of them had piled up jerked meat and some kind of hard biscuits. He would have liked to see a display of Rover dominance-and-submission behavior, with the junior members of the pack shouldering each other aside to eat a larger share. Instead, the Rovers took their rations without ceremony and squatted down to chew. None looked at the others or demonstrated any of the displays Bandar's studies had told him should be natural to them.

After a while, Bandar shook his head and turned away. Wasselthorpe had wandered over and now asked if something disturbed him. Bandar revealed his puzzlement at the Rovers’ uncharacteristic behavior. Wasselthorpe proposed that the Rovers might have changed their ways, but Bandar dismissed the idea as not possible. Rover consciousness was a thin layer over a deep-set mass of instinct.

“They do not change,” he said.

“Disease, perhaps?” the other suggested. “Perhaps this is how the lassitude affects them.”

“No,” Bandar said. He explained the Rovers’ reaction to illness, which was for the sick one to go away and either return cured or die alone. It was an instinct that protected the pack.

They walked back to where Abbas sat in the shade of one of the carts. “You know a great deal about Rovers,” Wasselthorpe said.

“Not much more than what is common knowledge.”

The young man showed a puzzled countenance. “Not common to me,” he said.

Bandar wondered aloud about what other commonplaces were unknown to Wasselthorpe. Abbas pointed out that the question was a tautology; the young man could not be expected to know what else he didn't know.

Bandar conceded the point. Provincial gentlemen were not required to know much beyond the folderols of fashion and the intricacies of social rank that separated one from one's neighbors. “Yet he wears the scarf of an Institute graduate.”

He saw a look pass between Abbas and Wasselthorpe. “Though only third-tier,” said the fat man.

Bandar shrugged. Third-tier matriculates from country aristocracy could not be expected to shine. Still, his ignorance was sometimes startling. “What was your field of study again?” he asked.

“Criminology.”

“A curious pursuit for an aristocrat,” Bandar said.

Abbas chimed in with a fresh note: Wasselthorpe could quote lengthy passages from Bureau of Scrutiny manuals.

Bandar thought this a peculiar distinction. “I am sure the ability would be useful to a Bureau employee, but even the most dedicated scroot needs to encompass a wider field of knowledge than official manuals and standing orders.”

Bandar saw Abbas give his student an odd look. “Perhaps the most dedicated scroot might not be aware of the need.”

“A troubling thought,” said Bandar, “for it would mean the man was narrow and strange, like those too tightly wound types who know everything about some limited pursuit but cannot manage a conversation about the weather.”

Wasselthorpe seemed stung. “What is wrong with feeling that one has a calling?” he said.

The term gave Bandar a slight shiver. A call from the Commons was a summons that offered no return. “I remember a tale about a man who pursued a bright star. His eyes on its brilliance, he did not notice that his feet were leading him over a cliff.”

Wasselthorpe said that he was not familiar with that story. Bandar was not surprised, since it was unlikely to be found in a scroot manual.

They had walked back to their cart. “I believe I must sleep,” Wasselthorpe said. Indeed, he seemed to Bandar to be almost weaving on his feet. The nonaut felt an upwelling of concern: a sudden, unaccountable need for sleep could indicate that the unconscious was exerting its influence.

“I will be sure to remain awake until you are done,” he told the young man. Indeed, he meant to keep an eye on Wasselthorpe and rouse him back to consciousness if he showed signs of distressed dreaming.

The young man thanked him and laid himself down in the shade of the cart. After a moment he rolled onto his stomach and regarded the Rovers who, their meal finished, were now lying asleep. He drew Bandar's attention to Yaffak, whose legs were twitching as if he dreamed of running, and wondered if there was any danger of his intruding into the Rover's dream, as he had into Bandar's.

Bandar complimented him on his ambition, but assured him of the impenetrable Wall between Commonses of different species—though even as he said the words he thought about the Bololo and the hydromants of Gamza. There had been attempts to educate Rovers enough to have them explore their own Commons, but though some of the creatures had managed to get to the entry level of the Rover nosphere and even to view the archetypes in the prime arrondisement, they were too easily captured by the characteristic entities, and none made more than a few visits to the Rover Commons before being absorbed and lost.

“Their psyches are too much closed around by instinct,” Bandar said, “nor are their upper and lower brains well separated. Not far beneath Rover consciousness lies the Old Sea of presapience, where the great blind Worm swims eternally in pursuit of its own tail.”

Abbas opined that the young man might be a visionary. His offhand tone annoyed Bandar who snapped back that Wasselthorpe might also be a full-tilt loon, the terms being all too often interchangeable.

While they argued, Wasselthorpe slipped into slumber, his cheek pressed against the trampled grass. Bandar sat with his back against the cartwheel and engaged in a desultory conversation with Erenti Abbas. But he found the fat man's cynicism difficult to take in sustained doses, and after a while their conversation lapsed and Abbas reposed himself to sleep, as had many of the passengers. A group of others, including the two couples from Bandar's cart, had gathered to chant ta-tumpa, ta-tey, Brond Halorn's voice rising above the common chorus. The handful of stewards who were accompanying the passengers on this leg of the journey sat in a ring, engaged in some game of chance that brought occasional shouts and hoots of celebration or schadenfreude.

Time went by. Suddenly, Bandar saw the sleeping Yaffak give a mighty kick of one leg. The Rover's eyes flew open, so wide that Bandar could see a rim of white around each great brown iris. Yaffak sprang into a crouch, growling something Bandar could not make out. The sound awoke the other Rovers, who gazed at their enraged fellow without visible emotion.

The behavior went against everything Bandar knew about the Rovers. Yaffak's display should have earned him either growls and bristling manes or lowered heads and turned-away eyes. The one reaction it shouldn't have brought was no reaction. But the rest still looked back at the snarling Rover with cold indifference, even as Yaffak stood erect, his ruff standing straight up and his teeth bared. He barked something that Bandar thought was, “Wrong!” before he suddenly turned and raced toward his team of shuggras. He leapt onto the back of one, yanked a strap that freed the eight from the wagon, and dug his heels into his mount and raced the whole team out into the long grass.

The other Rovers had risen and for a moment Bandar thought they might go in pursuit. Then, as one, they visibly lost interest in the incident. They yelped at the stewards, who left their game and began to rouse the passengers to reboard the carts.

“What of these?” the chief steward called to the Rovers in their own language, indicating Bandar's cart.

“No seats,” said the largest of the Rovers, the one who ought to have been pack leader, by Bandar's lights, but who showed none of the traits of a dominant male. Still, when the chief steward sought to argue with him about stranding eight passengers, the Rover showed his teeth. The crewman backed away, his hands offering placatory gestures, and came to Bandar's cart.

“I am sorry,” he said. “There is nothing to be done.”

Abbas had risen. “We cannot stay here,” he said. “Right now, a ravenous fand might be slavering over the prospect of tender human flesh. Or a woollyclaw might amble by, bundle us all into a ball of crushed limbs and torsos, then roll us off to gratify its whelps.”

“The air hangs heavy with the scent of angry Rover,” said the chief steward. “That will deter predators. But here is an energy pistol.” He produced the weapon from a pouch at his waist. “I advise you to remain in the cart until the Orgulon's gig arrives.”

“How long will that be?” Bandar asked.

“It will rendezvous with the Rover carts at a place east of here, bringing a luncheon. I will summon it on my communicator, and instruct it to come and pick you up as soon as supplies have been unloaded. You will not be here long.”

Abbas said, “Can you leave a communicator with us?”

“I have but the one,” the man said. Waving away further protestations and trailing assurances that all would soon be well, he went to where the impatient Rover leader waited, mounted the cart, and was gone.

The stranded passengers reacted as their individual natures dictated: Ule Gazz was fatalistic, Pollus Ermatage cheerful, Abbas affecting a breezy unconcern beneath which Bandar thought to see a cool mind calculating risks and options. Flix's black mood darkened to become stygian. The lassitude sufferers were as inert as ever. It was only after cataloging these impressions that Bandar thought to take notice of the still sleeping Phlevas Wasselthorpe.

“With all the fuss, he should have awakened,” he said to Abbas.

The fat man knelt and shook the sleeper, turned him over on his back and lightly slapped one cheek. He thumbed up one eyelid and saw nothing but white, the eyeball rolled up into the head. Abbas slapped him again, harder. There was no response.

“He has lapsed beyond sleep,” he said. “I think he may be comatose.”

“Try to rouse him,” Bandar said. “I will see what I can do.”

He closed his eyes and summoned the portal, went through at record speed and was soon descending the staircase to the first level. The road was empty, except for scintillating flashes made by passing dreamers. Bandar knew he would not find Wasselthorpe among them.

He summoned up a nonaut mentalism that he had not used in all the years since he had been an undergraduate learning his portfolio of techniques. But before he exercised the procedure, he paused and took thought for a moment. In the Commons, it is always best to be quite clear as to what one is about, he reminded himself. If this brings me to Wasselthorpe, then it means that he and I are linked at some level below the obvious. And I must deal with that reality, whatever it portends.

He focused his mind, chanted five rising tones, then two descenders, holding the last note. A ripple appeared in the air before him and he stepped through into a terrifying scene: the young man, clad again in his ancient Hero's garb, sword in hand, stood beside the great white Wall that marked the limit of the human commons. At his feet was a scar in the virtual earth, a scar that must have been a large gash shortly before, because even as Bandar took note of it the wound was healing.

But none of those sights were what frightened Bandar. Grouped around Wasselthorpe, close enough to touch, were several pure archetypes—the Hero, the Wise Man, the Father, Mother and Child, the Destroyer, the Fool, and more—a jostling crowd of characteristic entities, any one of which, at this range, should have drawn the young man's consciousness into permanent, psychotic thralldom.

Yet Wasselthorpe stood there, talking with them, uninsulated by thran, untouched by raw psychic power. Bandar immediately chanted the three, three and seven, seized Wasselthorpe by the arm, and pulled him through the gate. They arrived back in the first level of the Commons, where Bandar opened an emergency gate and brought them directly back to the waking world.

Bandar felt a wave of dizziness come over him, but he fought it down and opened his eyes. Abbas was still kneeling over his student, methodically slapping his cheeks and calling upon him to come forth from whatever corner of his psyche he had tumbled into.

Bandar reached down and restrained the fat man's hand. “It's all right,” he said, “I have brought him back.”

Wasselthorpe was sitting up, putting a hand to his reddened cheek.

When Abbas told him that he had been deep in coma, the young man said, “I was in the Commons of the Rovers. I entered Yaffak's dream.”

“That cannot be so,” Bandar said. “They would have attacked you.” But even as he said it, he felt his innards chill and turn over.

“I believe they perceived me as the Good Man, just as we sometimes encounter a friendly beast when we dream.”

“Nonsense!” Bandar said, though he knew it was not. “How could you get through the Wall? It cannot be breached.”

“I went by way of the Old Sea.”

Bandar vehemently denied Wasselthorpe's assertion. “Only death awaits the consciousness that enters the utoposphere. It hangs there, incapable of motion, until the Worm comes to devour it.”

But Wasselthorpe insisted. He said terrible things: that the archetypes had approached and had helped him, that they had given him power to cut through the floor of the Commons, swim through the gray nothingness then cut his way up into the Rover Commons. He had found Yaffak suffering, bound by some leash that went up into the sky. He had cut the tether with his Hero's sword and the Rover had raced off, free and joyous. Then he had swum back through the sea, had even seen the Worm coming, but had made it back through the opening before it could take him.

“You are lying!” Bandar muttered through clenched teeth, even as a part of him said, He speaks the truth.

Wasselthorpe casually mentioned that, from the Rover's side, the Wall appeared to be a hedge of black thorn bushes. Bandar wanted to clap his hands over his ears. That was a prime secret of the Institute, which no one outside its cloisters could know.

Wasselthorpe burbled on: the Wise Man had shown the way; he had used the Hero's sword to cut a gash in the earth. Bandar knew it must be true; he had seen the healing wound.

The nonaut felt as if his head might burst. The Commons was governed by rules. Thousands of nonauts had died, and tens of thousands had suffered, to delineate those rules. Then along came Wasselthorpe to pull the foundation stones from beneath a hundred millennia of established procedure. And yet, some part of Bandar said, This is how it must be.

The events of the morning had left him no choice but to face the grim facts: Guth Bandar was bound to Phlevas Wasselthorpe, and together their fates were entwined with the history of the Dree. What any of this meant, he did not yet know, but when he had encountered the young man at the Wall, he had seen in his face the unmistakable expression of a Hero. And if the two of them were linked, Bandar must play the Helper. Yet Helpers frequently failed to survive the Hero's catharsis.

“I have more to tell,” Wasselthorpe said.

“Well, you would, wouldn't you?” Bandar snapped. “Spare me.”

“I believe we must hear him,” Abbas said. “It might illuminate the events that happened while he was wandering in dreams.”

“What happened?” Wasselthorpe said.

Abbas drew his attention to the absence of the Rover carts and their passengers and stewards. He briefly recounted Yaffak's flight and the abandonment of their party. “The steward left us a weapon to defend ourselves against wild beasts.

“Or against Yaffak,” said Bandar, “who seems to have gone insane.”

“Yaffak will not do us harm,” Wasselthorpe said, rising to his feet. “I freed him from a hateful bondage.”

He told again the tale of how he had sawed through the leash that tied the dreaming Rover and wanted Bandar to tell him its meaning. But Bandar was beyond answering questions. He wished he had never heard of Phlevas Wasselthorpe and his catalog of impossibilities, so innocently recounted.

Bandar turned his back and looked away. But his outward composure belied his inner turmoil. Somewhere inside him a voice was speaking softly, telling him to be of help. He sought to close his mind against it.

Abbas took charge. “We must pull the cart into the center of the clearing and get aboard. Right now we are an easy meal for any passing fand.” He summoned the chanters and Flix, now glowering ever more deeply, and they did as he directed.

Once aboard, the fat man flourished the energy pistol and asked if anyone was competent in its use. Bandar was surprised when Wasselthorpe took the weapon, expertly stripped and reassembled it, then placed it under the seat for safety's sake. The nonaut would not have thought that a provincial lordling, for all his interest in criminology, could have handled a weapon with such aplomb.

In the close confines of the stationary cart, the passengers fell to squabbling. Ule Gazz wished all to chant; she felt her chuffe swelling. Wasselthorpe rejected the concept of chuffe and sought to explore his alleged meeting with Yaffak in the Rover Commons, but Bandar refused to be drawn. Nor would he chant. His rebuff to Gazz caused her to disparage the relevance of the nosphere compared to the Lho-tso enlightenment. That caused Bandar to snap at her. Tempers were heating when Wasselthorpe suddenly made a startling announcement.

“Chuffe is entirely an illusion,” he said. “Father Olwyn is in reality the notorious confidence trickster Horslan Gebbling, who will be taken into custody the moment my partner and I encounter him.”

Ule Gazz greeted this assertion with disdain, at which Wasselthorpe declared that he and Abbas were not what they appeared to be. Instead, they were undercover agents of the Bureau of Scrutiny, sent on the cruise to apprehend Gebbling.

The others demanded proof. Wasselthorpe and Abbas dug within their clothing and produced official scroot plaques. Bandar squinted at each and learned that Wasselthorpe's true name was Baro Harkless, while Abbas was named Luff Imbry. Both held the rank of agent-ordinary.

Hence the fascination with criminal investigation, thought Bandar. Several more thoughts flitted rapidly through his mind, but the one he seized in passing was: “Your plaques allow you to call for assistance.”

“We are ordered to remain incommunicado until we secure an arrest,” said Harkless/Wasselthorpe.

His answer set off a new round of altercation that ended only when Flix spoke up from her corner seat to alert them to the imminent arrival of the Orgulon's gig, flying in from the east.

* * * *

The sight of their rescue should have brought Bandar relief. Instead he dismounted from the cart with a glum sense of foreboding. His nonaut's sensibilities were aroused and he felt as if he were not in the waking world but in a high-classification Event. Worse, it was that part of an Event's cycle when the action begins to flow rapidly toward the climax.

The gig dropped down, piloted by the landship's first officer, whose name Bandar had not acquired. Beside him was Raina Haj. The vehicle settled at the edge of the clearing and the passengers rushed from the cart to greet it, the lassitude sufferers towed on their come-alongs. Flix came last, her hands clasped behind her back.

Haj dismounted and lowered the aircraft's rear gate while the first officer remained at the controls. Bandar saw Harkless (he supposed he might as well adjust to the fellow's name) go to confer with the security officer, who seemed to be unimpressed with whatever the agent-ordinary told her.

Haj waved the stranded party to board the gig. Something was moving out in the grass, she said. The passengers lined up, with Flix at the tail of the queue.

“Are we going back to the Orgulon?” she asked.

Haj said they were not. They would be taken to a temporary camp just beyond the immense stone plateau known as the Monument, where tents and tables were laid on for a luncheon. Father Olwyn was expected to appear and offer something called “the inculcation.” The Orgulon had been delivering equipment to the brillion mines at nearby Victor and would rendezvous with the passengers by nightfall.

Flix now advanced another agenda. She demanded to bypass the ceremony and be flown to Victor so she could arrange passage home.

“That is not a matter for you to decide,” Haj told her.

Again Flix differed, but instead of offering a fresh argument, she produced the energy pistol Harkless had left in the cart. She pointed it in an unsteady two-handed grip at Raina Haj.

Now Flix looked to the first officer, who had remained in the gig's operator's seat. She addressed him by his given name and said, “Get her weapon.”

The man did as he was ordered, but the smirk on his face told Bandar that there was more of a relationship between him and the young woman than they had hitherto revealed. The officer came at Haj from the rear and relieved her of her sidearm. Then he circled around the passengers to stand beside Flix, his pistol leveled at all and sundry.

“Move away from the aircraft,” he told them.

Raina Haj spoke up, addressing Flix. “This is not necessary,” she said.

The first officer told her to shut up, but Haj spoke on, telling Flix, “I know you didn't kill him.”

“I told you it was an accident,” Flix said.

“No, not an accident,” Haj said.

“Shut up,” the first officer repeated, aiming his weapon at Haj. Bandar saw his thumb extend toward the discharge stud, but Flix laid a hand on his arm and pushed it down.

“What are you trying to say?” she asked Haj.

“Lies,” the man with the weapon said.

But Flix wanted to hear what the security officer had to say. She moved off a couple of steps and now her energy weapon swung halfway from Haj to the other officer.

The man did not delay a moment. A bright flash dazzled Bandar's eyes and when his vision cleared Flix was face down on the grass, a smoking hole burned through her torso.

Someone screamed and Bandar stared with both fascination and fright at the young woman's corpse. It took him a long moment to recover his equilibrium. But the murderer had remained calm; the energy pistol did not waver in his hand as he stepped back to give himself room should they try to rush him. Bandar was bemused to think that he had seen just such a look on the faces of villains many times in the Commons, though he had always done so from within the protection of a thran.

“So you know,” the officer said, addressing Haj.

“Yes.”

The pistol swung toward her. “Well, then.”

Now Harkless spoke up. “How are you going to explain it?”

Bandar could have predicted it. The Hero would always seek to engage the villain in talk, delaying the killing stroke while he worked out some tactic to save the day. But the man with the weapon barely glanced at Harkless, and instead spoke to Haj: he would blame the killings on the unstable Flix's having gone berserk when the gig landed, even wounding him before he was able to seize Haj's pistol and dispatch her.

Bandar watched Harkless as the killer spoke. Some silent signal passed between the young agent and his plump partner. The undercover scroots were going to try something. Bandar felt a rising urge to help. He wanted to fight it, but found that his will to do so was fading. He gauged the distance between him and the man with the gun, wondering how fast his old legs would allow him to close the distance.

Now the young agent was saying something about a forgotten witness. The officer was still keeping his eye on Haj, the known danger. Bandar realized that the killer must see Harkless as only a feckless young lordling, afflicted by the lassitude. This might work, he thought, then realized with an inner start that the opinion had come not from his usual inner critic, but from a new source: the Helper was rising in him.

Bandar was struck by a sense of irreality, as if he were observing an Event or Situation in the nosphere. He saw again the Hero in the young agent's stark expression and now it came to him the particular myth that featured a Hero in a wolf pelt and winged helmet: it told of a dawn-time Hero who, after defeating a man-devouring monster, dove deep into a frigid lake to confront the troll's even more powerful mother. And in that lake, the Hero died.

He is not the Hero Triumphant, Bandar thought. He is the Hero Sacrificial. His dynamic ends with his dying to save those he protects.

Harkless was telling the man that Yaffak had not gone far, that the Rover was what they had seen moving in the grass as they brought the gig down, and was hearing and seeing all.

Not bad, Bandar thought. Simple, believable. Enough to make the man stop and think.

But when Harkless pointed to draw the officer's attention, the man did not fall for the ruse. Bandar sighed. In real life, I suppose these things don't work as well, he thought. He saw Harkless's muscles tense for whatever he was going to try and readied himself to join in the rush.

Harkless was at least partially in thrall to the Hero Sacrificial, but Bandar did not see in his aspect the look of one who expects to die. His face wore the assurance of one who intends to defeat an enemy, then march on to fresh challenges.

The murderer showed the same confidence. But his conviction was fortified by his possession of an energy pistol and a demonstrated capacity to use it.

His thumb slid toward the firing stud.

As the murderer's thumb touched the control, the grass behind him opened and the missing Rover burst into the clearing, running at a four-legged gallop low to the ground. He rose to his hind legs and leapt to smash bodily into the officer's back, sending him sprawling. Then Yaffak rolled clear and came smoothly to his hind feet, ready to strike again.

Harkless and Imbry, the two undercover Bureau of Scrutiny agents, sprang forward. So did Haj. But the villain had the almost admirable concentration Bandar had seen before in persons with psyches dominated by darker elements. He was already levering himself to his knees and aiming the energy pistol. It discharged just as Harkless struck him with a flying tackle, and its concentrated beam of force sliced the air like a long thin blade.

Then it was over. The man was face down on the ground, his wrists pinioned by a restraint, and Haj had secured both pistols. Yaffak took a brief look at the defeated prisoner, then, Rover-like, walked unconcernedly away to summon his team of shuggras from where they crouched in the long grass. He quickly rehitched their harness to the cart.

They pulled the killer to his feet. He gave them a look that expressed no apology. They prepared to board the gig but the fat agent—Imbry, Bandar recalled, was his name—had discovered that the long discharge of the energy pistol had disabled its controls. They would have to press on by Rover cart.

Haj enlisted Bandar to translate as she asked the Rover to take them east to where the day camp was set up.

“No,” said Yaffak.

Now Imbry had a question. He pointed to the bound man and wanted to know why Yaffak had attacked him.

“For the Good Man,” Yaffak said, his eyes going to Harkless.

Harkless said, “Why for me?”

Yaffak struggled to express his thoughts. “In the other place, the bad thing, the bad rope. Good Man come, cut rope, make me free.”

Bandar asked, “How did you know he was the Good Man?”

Yaffak sniffed loudly and described Harkless's odor in terms that only a Rover truly understood. Bandar translated for the others.

The young agent wanted to know what Yaffak thought had restrained him in the dream. The Rover did not want to talk about it. The loose skin on his shoulders shook and his ruff rose in agitation.

“He lacks the words,” Bandar said. “To him it was just a bad dream.”

Harkless asked if the Rover would take him where the other Rovers had carried the other passengers.

Yaffak looked down and to the side. Bandar translated the posture as one of the Rovers’ ways of saying no. Then Yaffak said to Harkless, “Come west, hunt skippit. Big food. Good fun.”

“I must go to the others,” Harkless said.

Bandar was amazed to see the Rover's face take on a look of unwilling resolution. “For you, Yaffak goes east. Take people not sick. Leave wrong, leave dead.” He looked at the bound prisoner. “Leave killer, let eaters find.”

Bandar translated.

Ule Gazz began to protest but Harkless cut her off. Bandar saw the Hero's determination glowing in the young man's eyes as he told Yaffak that the sick must go with them.

“Not sick,” Yaffak said. “Sick is belly pain, food comes up. These not sick. Smell wrong.”

Harkless asked the others if Rovers got the lassitude. No one knew. He spoke again to Yaffak. “Did your pack smell like these?”

Yaffak struggled to express himself. “Rovers smell like Rovers, not do like Rovers. Yaffak see them wrong but not feel them wrong. Then Yaffak in bad place, Good Man come, free Yaffak. Then see and feel Rovers wrong. Yaffak angry-scared, run to grass.”

Bandar translated as best he could, then added his view that Yaffak had had a traumatic experience and did not want to meet the “wrong” Rovers again.

Harkless suggested a compromise: if the Rover would take them to within sight of the mining town of Victor, he would not ask him to go near his packmates.

Yaffak said, “For Good Man, will do.”

And he must take the sick, the young agent insisted.

“Not sick, wrong,” Yaffak insisted, but then lowered his head.

“He agrees to take them, too,” Bandar said.

Flix's body went into the gig, secure from predators under a locked canopy. The rest reboarded the cart, laying the first officer face down in the aisle between the seats. Bandar sat in his former seat near the front so that he could translate if required. The two agents sat nearby and soon fell into a discussion with Raina Haj regarding their pursuit of the confidence trickster posing as Father Olwyn. The conversation led nowhere, since none could envision how the fraudster stood to gain from mounting an expensive cruise for lassitude sufferers who were, for the most part, not wealthy. They thought it might have something to do with black brillion.

Bandar also learned that Haj was herself an undercover agent of the Bureau of Scrutiny who had been in pursuit of the man lying on the floor. The Orgulon's first officer—his name was Kosmir—had been involved in some complex scheme to murder Flix's companion, once a celebrated artist but whose reputation had faded, in order to drive up the value of the man's works. Flix, it seemed, had been his unwitting dupe.

None of this meant much to Bandar. He focused not on the back-and-forth between the officers, nor on Ule Gazz's futile attempts to defend Olwyn, but on Baro Harkless. Earlier, he had called him narrow and strange, and had formed the impression that the young man had grown up peculiar. He seemed to be missing not only common knowledge, but certain elements of a normal personality. His being a Bureau agent explained nothing.

He is too simple, the noonaut thought. His psyche is not the subtle blend of tints and shades that emerge from the interaction of a varied mix of elements. It is as if he has been painted only in primary colors.

Bandar had studied naturals in his undergraduate years at the Institute. This Harkless was not quite like those loons, even though it was obvious to a noonaut's eye that the Hero archetype was growing increasingly dominant within him. It was there to be seen in the gleam of the eye and the set of the jaw.

No, not a natural. But not quite a fully rendered human, either. He was hypothesizing rare neuronic disorders caused by accidents in the womb, when the picture suddenly fell into focus. He played back in his memory the young man's interaction with the other agents and the passengers, and particularly how he had behaved with Bandar himself.

Now he remembered his first impression of Harkless, when he and Imbry had come aboard the balloon-tram: he had reminded Bandar of the idiomatic entities that populated the Locations of the Commons. If that were so, it meant that where normal human beings had complex structures, Baro Harkless had empty spaces, where humans had personalities, he had only a selection of interconnected characteristics. It was debatable whether the young man was a person at all, or just a facsimile of one.

Bandar had never felt empathy for idiomats he had encountered in the Commons. But for an idiomat loose in the waking world, Bandar had to feel sympathy. What a strange growing up it must have been, like being able to see only black and white while navigating a world whose directional signs were all color coded.

After a while, the cart left the Swept and drove up a sloping ramp of stone onto the Monument. This was a vast assemblage of close-fitted blocks of gray rock that formed the image of a man's helmeted head and neck, so large that it was easily visible from near orbit. It was said to be the likeness of the commander whose strategy had defeated the Dree. The mining town of Victor, near the Monument's southeast extremity, was also believed to have been named for him.

The immense platform of stone was ten times a man's height. Travelers who ascended to its upper surface found a great plain of featureless rock, with here and there a growth of hardy grass or thorny brush sprouting from cracks and fissures opened by the alternation over eons of winter cold and summer heat.

They were crossing at the Monument's narrowest stretch, the neck, and Yaffak was whipping his shuggras along. Soon they would reach the down-ramp that sloped back onto the prairie, and shortly thereafter they should come to the day camp where the Orgulon would meet them. The mystery of the murder being concluded, Bandar intended to make strong representations to be allowed to leave immediately.

Harkless touched his shoulder and he turned. “I offended you and I am sorry,” the young agent said. “I am surprised that I have attracted the Hero, since I have surely spent my life playing the Fool.”

Bandar felt a upsurge of feeling for the unhappy youth. “You did nothing that was ill-meant,” he said. “Perhaps I have been too proud of my learning.”

Harkless then made an unexpected proposal. “When this business is done, might you consider taking me as a student noonaut? The Commons does draw me.”

“You would leave the Bureau of Scrutiny?”

Harkless referred to a conversation he had had with his partner, Imbry. “He believes that, in life, some are called, and some are driven. Until now, it appears that I have been one of the driven. Now I have found something that calls me.”

Again, Bandar felt an urge to help the young man and his first instinct was to fight it. But when he looked into the unhappy face he saw no glint of the Hero, just a lost and lonely child. And then a thought occurred: a noonaut with the power to move between Commonses would be an unparalleled innovation. Whole new schools might open. Bandar imagined returning to the Institute like a thunderclap.

His attention was drawn to a faint sound from the rear of the cart. Ule Gazz's hands were palpating her throat. Open mouthed, she struggled to chant the ta-tumpa, ta-tey, but could produce only a dry croaking. Across the aisle from her, Pollus Ermatage had also fallen silent. She reached to touch Gazz's jaw, then felt her own throat. When she spoke, her voice was weak: “Ule Gazz has the lassitude. As do I.”

Bandar raised his fingers to his own neck and jaw. Nothing seemed amiss, but his determination to leave grew stronger.

* * * *

They reached the far side of the Monument's neck and saw the town of Victor out on the Swept. It was a small, unpretentious mining town, with a scattering of buildings linked by a few paved roads beneath the elevated structures that marked where the shafts of two almost-played-out brillion mines descended into the Earth. Beyond the town, at a flattened berm of tailings that served as a landship wharf, stood the Orgulon. Just south of the wharf, Rovertown began, a sprawl of unpretentious habitations where the Rovers lived in close proximity to their shuggras.

A wave of relief went through Bandar, and even the newly stricken lassitude sufferers seemed to show hope. But from his seat at the front of the cart, Yaffak snuffled the air and pointed with his nose. “Dead eaters,” he said.

Bandar told the others that the Rover had spotted a flock of stingwhiffles between them and Victor. A congregation of the leathery-winged carrion eaters meant something lay dead on the prairie.

They found a ramp leading down onto the Swept and descended. The stingwhiffles were contending over something in the grass not far off the cart trail that went toward Victor.

Haj's voice took on a worried note. “The tents and tables were set up there. Olwyn was about to go into his act when I left to find you people.”

They came to a place where the grass was flattened. Upturned folding tables and shreds of fabric lay scattered about, the buffet table and its heaps of truffle cuisine tipped over. Yaffak pulled up and the three agents dismounted.

Bandar followed them but paused to ask Yaffak, “Do you smell fand or woollyclaw?”

The Rover's nose winnowed the air and he turned to scan in every direction. The muscles of his neck twitched and his ruff stood erect, but he said, “No.”

Haj set her pistol for wide dispersal and swept a beam of yellow energy through the circling stingwhiffles. The gaggle that had been squabbling over whatever was on the ground burst into the air in a squawking cloud of leather.

Bandar hung back and said, “What is there?”

“It is that white-haired woman from the landship,” Harkless said.

He knelt to examine the remains. Bandar came up behind him. Brand Halorn's flesh was torn by long, deep wounds and her head was half-severed from her neck. “That is not the work of stingwhiffles,” he said.

Haj thought it might have been a woollyclaw, but if so, the people of nearby Victor would be out in force.

“And what of this?” said Imbry. He had found nearby what looked to be a discarded garment of cloth and leather. He held it up then almost retched as he realized what it was: a human skin, split open along the spine and with ribbons of flesh where the hands and feet should have been.

Bandar recognized its owner. “The birthmark,” he said. “It is her husband.”

“This is not a woollyclaw's doing,” said Haj. She searched the grass. “His clothes are here, torn to pieces, and his skin. But where is the body? Where is the blood?”

Harkless said, “We should go into town. This place is not safe.” But Imbry counseled against it. The town was silent when its inhabitants should have been astir.

Haj exerted her seniority. She had one of the landships’ short-range communicators and now sought to contact the Orgulon. But the signal could not get through. She tried her Bureau of Scrutiny plaque, a more sophisticated instrument, but again it was as if the frequency was blocked.

She then gave her second pistol to Harkless and declared that she would walk to the Orgulon, circling around the town. The captain was a capable man and would be able to tell her the situation.

Someone was shouting, back where Yaffak had remained with his cart. Bandar and the agents hurried there to find that the noise came from the prisoner Kosmir. The Rover was hauling him from the vehicle. The two couples who had succumbed to the lassitude were lying in a row in the grass. Ule Gazz was struggling to get her feet under her, but the disease was rapidly stealing her mobility; the other three lay motionless, and Bandar saw that Ebersol and Sooke, who had caught the disease first, had reached the stage of stark rigidity and polished skin, as if they had been waxed. Their eyes were as stone.

Yaffak set Kosmir upright, then turned back to the cart to bring out the two come-alongs. He closed and locked the tailboard.

Raina Haj confronted the Rover and demanded to know his intent. Yaffak dropped his eyes and said, “No more. Wrong smell, all over. Town, these.” He gestured at the lassitude victims. “Yaffak goes.”

Bandar translated. Haj told the Rover they would skirt the town and go to the landship.

Yaffak said, “Yaffak goes.”

Haj looked grim and drew her energy pistol.

Yaffak did not flinch. “Shooting bad. Some things more bad. Yaffak goes.”

Haj reholstered the weapon. The Rover made to climb into the driver's seat, but instead he turned toward Harkless. “Good Man come with Yaffak. Safe.”

Bandar translated and saw in the agent's eyes a response to the Rover's obvious affection. But then the noonaut saw the Hero harden Harkless's young face.

“I cannot,” Harkless said. “Something else calls me.”

Yaffak mounted the cart, turned the team back toward the Monument, and with one backward regretful glance, he was gone.

The three agents now fell into a procedural argument about who had authority to decide what to do next. Harkless quoted from manuals while Haj looked uncomfortable and made remarks about risking her career. Bandar paid no attention. He studied the four lassitude victims. All the chanting and chuffe raising had done nothing to address the conditions of those who boarded the Orgulon already in the clutch of the disease; if anything, it seemed to have hurried them to the crisis; worse, those who had not had the disease to begin with had developed galloping cases.

He wondered if that result, rather than a cure, had been the intent of the cruise. Was Father Olwyn, or Horslan Gebbling, actively promoting the spread of the disease, possibly out of some apocalyptic motive? Bandar had seen many versions of the Mad Messiah preserved in the Locations of the Commons. Could Olwyn be psychically captive to such a dangerous archetype? Might a cult have sprung up around his charismatic presence, a millennial sect out to bring on the end of the world through pestilence?

If so, the chanting would not have had any effect. But perhaps bringing many sufferers together in close quarters amplified the disease's onslaught, as if they transferred spores back and forth to each other and.... And then it struck him: the other common factor had been the truffles of the Swept; they had been the main ingredient in almost every dish that had come out of the landship's galley, even the gruel fed to the ill.

Bandar had not cared for the taste and had eaten little of it. He was, as much as he could tell, unvisited by the lassitude. He was pursuing this line of inquiry when he heard Harkless speak his name.

“Bandar and I will tend to the sick,” the agent had said. The noonaut regarded the earnest young face and saw more than mere traces of the Hero in his expression of stern resolve. And the cavalier way he had included Bandar in his plan was exactly the manner in which a Hero assumed decisions for his Helper.

Still, Bandar would be of no use in an expedition to the town or the landship. If a death cult had sprung up—Might the Rovers have succumbed? he thought; he knew little of whatever piety they might practice—Bandar would rather stay on the Monument.

That was where they carried the paralyzed, Harkless and Haj slinging the still bendable Gazz and Ermatage over their shoulders while Imbry and Bandar towed Ebersol and Sooke on their come-alongs. Kosmir walked ahead of the party, with Harkless's energy pistol trained on him.

Back atop the Monument, they laid the four paralytics on the sun-warmed stone. The three agents used their plaques to inspect the deserted streets of Victor and Rovertown. They saw evidence of violence and the discharge of energy weapons, conferring about these matters in low voices. But Bandar could hear enough; he would stay out of the town.

Haj left to make her way to the landship. Harkless ordered the prisoner to sit apart from the sick. “If you try to stand I will shoot you in the leg,” he said, then turned to Bandar. “Shout if he moves.”

Bandar said he would, but once again the order was clearly from the Hero to the Helper.

Harkless and Imbry went to look at the four lassitude victims. Imbry thought the crisis would soon be upon them. Harkless knelt beside Ule Gazz, then expressed surprise that apparently she continued to try to chant Olwyn's last mantra. He took off his Institute scarf and folded it to make a pad under Pollus Ermatage's head.

The two agents left the sick and returned to where Bandar watched Kosmir.

“If whatever attacked that loud woman comes for us,” the prisoner said, “I would be more use without this restraint.”

Harkless would not hear of it. “You will take your chances as you are,” he said, reminding the prisoner that he had seen him kill Flix after murdering her companion for financial gain.

Kosmir quoted an unflattering saying about the likelihood of securing mercy from a scroot.

Harkless sighted along his pistol and said, “In an emergency, you would be even more hampered by the loss of some toes.”

“You wouldn't,” said Kosmir.

“I'm increasingly sure that I will if you do not stop talking.”

Bandar heard the tone even stronger now. The young man was slipping ever more firmly into the grip of the Hero.

They sat without talking, Harkless watching the town while Bandar watched Harkless. After a while, the noonaut sought to probe the extent to which the agent was affected.

He chose an indirect line of inquiry. “The call you said you felt, might it be a vocation to explore the Commons?”

Harkless mulled the question then said that something about the nosphere called to him. A moment later, he clarified his answer: something in the nosphere was calling him, though he knew not what called nor what he was called to do.

Bandar admitted to being conflicted. It delighted him that Harkless's strange facility for the Commons might open up new avenues of research. But he did not like to think that he had been an instrument to put the young man in peril of being absorbed.

Harkless told him not to worry. “The instrument is never responsible, only the hand that employs it.” Besides, if it was his fate to be where he was, then perhaps it was also Bandar's.

The calm with which he accepted the possibility of imminent doom was quintessentially that of the Hero Sacrificial, Bandar saw. Moment by moment, there was less and less of Baro Harkless, and more and more of the archetype.

Bandar said, “It would pain me to think that my life-long love of the nosphere has been not truly of my own will but just a part of some grand plot.”

Harkless paid no attention. The noonaut watched as an intense stillness came over the young man's face. He sat staring at nothing for a long while and Bandar saw the grim certitude of the Hero gain a stronger hold.

Suddenly the young man's eyes went wide and he said, “What?” and looked at Kosmir as if he thought the prisoner had spoken, though Bandar knew that whatever voice Harkless had heard had come from deep within.

The agent now turned to Bandar and said, “Did you speak to me?”

“No.” Bandar kept his voice even, but it worried him that the young fellow was now hearing a voice. That was a long step beyond merely being influenced by an archetype. He sought to plant an antidote to the growing poisoning of the young man's psyche by the Hero by offering another archetype as a focus for Harkless's thoughts. Because to name was to summon, Bandar deliberately chose the most effective counter to the Hero, saying, “The voice probably came from the Wise Man.”

Bandar saw speculation in the agent's eyes. Good, he thought, Heroes do not speculate. He was searching for a way to keep the process rolling when Kosmir announced that he had something important to say. Immediately, Bandar saw the Hero resurge within the young man.

Harkless pointed the pistol at Kosmir's foot and said, “I do not care to be interrupted when I am thinking.”

The prisoner squirmed but pressed on. “It is something the scroots need to know.”

The Hero looked out through Harkless's eyes with characteristic disdain for a villain. He heard the Hero's voice tell Kosmir he had other concerns.

The prisoner said he had information about a serious crime.

The Hero's mouth set in a skeptical sneer. “More serious than a double murder?”

“Yes.”

Bandar saw Harkless dismiss the subject. The Hero was now back in control and had larger issues to occupy him. Bandar was growing increasingly frightened. They were stranded up here on the bare rock with an armed man who was visibly sinking into the clutches of an archetype. And who was certain to look upon the noonaut as his fated Helper.

“You are Haj's prisoner,” the agent told Kosmir. “Reveal all to her when she comes back.”

Kosmir had a villain's cunning and knew the right thing to say to the Hero. “She may not be coming back. She has likely walked into peril.”

Bandar saw a jolt pass through Harkless at the mention of a damsel in distress. Harkless leapt to his feet and brought out his plaque, trying to reach Haj through the short-range emergency frequency. A few undecipherable squawks overlaid by static was all the answer he received.

The agent turned back to Kosmir and Bandar saw the Hero's single-mindedness plain in his young face and heard the Hero's uncompromising voice say, “Tell me.”

Kosmir made the mistake of trying to bargain. He wanted the charges dropped and to keep his ill-gotten gains.

But a Hero did not haggle and the prisoner now compounded his error by assuming that he was dealing with a sane scroot. He made demands. The Hero simply discharged the energy pistol into the rock immediately in front of Kosmir's crossed legs. Instantly, the prisoner's calves were splattered with white-hot molten rock. The man shrieked and fell back onto his pinioned arms, frantically rubbing his legs against each other, trying to remove the lava from his smoldering flesh.

Harkless calmly aimed the pistol at Kosmir's feet and asked if he found the terms satisfactory.

Bandar said, “That was unnecessarily cruel.”

Typical of a Hero approaching the crisis, Harkless paid the Helper no heed. He put his thumb on the weapon's activation stud and said, “Well?”

Kosmir announced that he would tell all. Harkless gestured with the pistol to suggest that he do so quickly.

Kosmir began to talk, telling an involved tale about having overheard one side of a conversation involving Gebbling. He had not been able to hear the other communicant's voice, but he had heard enough to make out the elements of a plot to spread the lassitude, which was apparently somehow caused by eating truffles of the Swept. Bandar did not pay close attention; he was more concerned with the obvious transformation that was overcoming young Baro Harkless. There was less and less of Harkless left to see in the face that confronted Kosmir, and the hand that held the pistol did not waver.

Bandar said, “Ask the Wise Man to evaluate this information.”

The Hero pressed on with his interrogation. Bandar repeated his words, but now he was sure that no one was there to hear them.

Kosmir tried to hold back some crucial element of what he knew, to keep something he might trade to his advantage. The Hero aimed the pistol and offered to burn off his feet.

Kosmir talked on. Finally the Hero that had filled Harkless was satisfied. It had Harkless take out his Bureau of Scrutiny plaque and again try to contact Haj. This time, there was a reply, but not from the missing sergeant. Instead, a new voice spoke from the air, announcing that this was a restricted frequency and demanding to know who was using it.

“Baro Harkless, agent ordinary.” The words came from the agent's mouth, but Bandar could hear the Hero speaking them.

The voice from the air identified itself as that of Directing Agent Ardmander Arboghast of the Bureau of Scrutiny. Harkless reported to him that he believed Raina Haj was in danger. He also told his superior that he had discovered the source of the lassitude.

Arboghast told him that everything was now secure and asked for his location. Harkless told him where he and the others were and that they had four people critically ill with the disease. Arboghast ordered him to remain where he was; help was on the way.

Harkless looked down at Kosmir with the uncompromising stare of the Hero. “The Bureau knows everything,” he said. “You have nothing to bargain with.”

A sly look had crept over Kosmir. He said, “I have something now.”

Harkless said he could try it on the senior scroot when he got there.

The prisoner said, “This is something you need to know, and before he arrives.”

Baro took out the pistol again. “Shall I burn off a toe?”

Kosmir affected an air of unconcern and told Harkless he could shoot if he wished. The pain would not last long.

Bandar saw puzzlement in the Hero's face. “What makes you say that?” Harkless said.

Kosmir mocked him with a simpering expression. “I say it because none of us here has long to live, not me, not you, nor those sick lumps, unless you listen to what I can tell you.”

Harkless looked over at where the lassitude sufferers lay inert. Olleg Ebersol was having trouble breathing. Imbry struggled up from where he was sitting and went over to him.

Bandar saw Harkless's face reflect the pity that the Hero reflexively showed toward helpless victims. Then he saw it harden back into a grim mask as the Hero turned back to Kosmir. The pistol did not waver as it came to bear on the prisoner's feet.

“Tell me, or die one piece at a time.”

Bandar tried to reason with the archetype. “It is evil to torture a prisoner.”

The Hero turned toward the noonaut and in the glitter of his eyes Bandar saw only the faintest trace of the young man Harkless, and heard almost nothing but pure archetype in the voice that answered him. “It is he who is evil. I do what is necessary.”

Some of Harkless was still there, but what little was left of him was sinking rapidly. Bandar made an attempt to reach him. “You are allowing yourself to be absorbed by an archetype, to be made into a simple-minded monster. Fight it.”

The noonaut saw a gleam of a response deep in the unblinking eyes, but then the Hero's voice said, “I do not wish to fight it.” He looked back at Kosmir with casual coldness and aimed the weapon.

Bandar stood up and sang eight notes. It was a subthran that interfered with the perceptions of a specific subset of the Hero archetype that included the Hero Sacrificial—interfered with them in the Commons, that is. He had no idea if the sequence would have any effect in the waking world, but he could think of nothing else to do.

He continued to sing the eight notes, over and over again. The Hero looked at him curiously, then the hardness in the eyes softened and Bandar saw Baro Harkless re-emerge. The young man blinked and said, “I have broken through. Thank you.”

“You must continue to fight its influence,” said Bandar.

Harkless said he would try. He bent and helped Kosmir sit upright. “Whatever you were holding back, tell me now,” he said.

“I will if you first free me,” Kosmir said, his eyes searching the sky to the east over Victor and the Rovers’ town. “But there is no time to waste.”

“If the information is truly important, I promise to free you.”

But Kosmir was not a man to trust a scroot, especially one who had moments before given him a convincing display of madness.

Nor did Harkless have cause to trust the prisoner.

“We have reached an impasse,” Harkless said.

“An impasse that will not last,” said Kosmir. He pointed with his chin to the vehicle that had risen above the town. “Free me before that aircar gets here. After will be too late.”

Bandar looked and saw an official scroot volante. Harkless saw it too.

Now Kosmir was pleading, scootching around on his buttocks to present his restrained arms to Harkless.

“You are trying to trick me,” Harkless said.

“I think he is not,” Bandar said. “His fear seems genuine.”

“He has reason to be afraid. That aircar will take him on a journey that ends in the contemplarium.”

Kosmir was frantic. “No, the aircar brings death to all of us!”

The thrum of the aircar's gravity obviators grew louder. Harkless chewed his lip as he regarded the prisoner, then Bandar saw that the scroot had made his decision. The agent reset the weapon's controls. He aimed it at the holdtight.

The gargling noise from Ebersol was growing louder. It drew Harkless's attention to where the four inert sufferers lay, tended by Luff Imbry.

“They are coming to the catharsis,” Bandar said. “Death will soon end their suffering.”

“Ignore them!” Kosmir said. “Release me!”

Harkless directed a pulse of energy into the restraint's control center. The holdtight broke open and clattered onto the rock. Kosmir leapt to his feet, swinging his arms to bring the blood back into his hands. “Set your pistol on maximum!” he said. “When the aircar tries to land, shoot it down!”

Harkless gave him a skeptical look and made no move to adjust the weapon's setting. Kosmir spoke frantically—"No time!” and sought to seize the pistol.

Harkless pushed him back, and the man stumbled and fell. “Now who is mad?” the young man said. “It is a Bureau of Scrutiny aircar and its operator is Ardmander Arboghast, my section chief!”

Kosmir put his hands together in the posture of the Reformed Penitent. Bandar had seen the archetype in many a Class Two Situation and believed the man's emotion to be genuine.

“I lied when I said I'd told you everything!” Kosmir said. “I was holding back something to bargain with—that I did hear the voice of the man who was the mastermind behind the lassitude. I did not know his name but I know that his voice was the same as that of the man you spoke with on your commuicator. Whoever he is, he is responsible for scores of deaths, and he will surely kill us all!”

“No!” Harkless said, “you are trying to trick us!”

Bandar was only half aware of what was going on between the scroot and the pleading prisoner. His eyes were on the four lassitude sufferers. He tugged on the young agent's sleeve. “Baro!” he cried.

The young man swung around and looked to the sky behind them, where the noise of the aircar grew louder.

“No,” said Bandar, “look there!” A cold wave of horror crept up his back and he pointed at where the four bodies lay.

Olleg Ebersol was sitting up. Corje Sooke's torso was also rising from the rock. But it was all wrong. Human beings don't move that way, Bandar thought. Nor do they bend that way.

Neither the man nor the woman had bent at the waist, but their upper torsos had levered themselves upright at the point where ribs met diaphragm, the small of the back staying flat on the ground. It shouldn't have happened without bones snapping, but the only sound was a sighing intake and release of breath, remarkably calm.

Now Olleg Ebersol's head turned left then right, rotating almost until his chin went past each shoulder. His arms rose and extended straight out, as if he were reaching for something in the air before him. The man's hands seemed to elongate, the fingers stretching to an impossible length. Then the skin at the fingertips burst, falling back in strips like ribbons, and from them emerged a bundle of dark green sticks, jointed in several places, that unrolled and flexed themselves.

Now the arms with their spiky appendages reached up toward Ebersol's head. Bandar saw the man's skin slide down his arms like loose cuffs, but where bones and flesh should have been exposed was a thick length of the same dark green material, shiny and hard-surfaced as an arthropod's limb. The stick-like digits dug into the flesh at the back of the neck and with a sound like the tearing of coarse cloth the skin of the head was torn away. Where Ebersol's face had been was a featureless rounded oblong of the same dark green, glistening like a beetle's wingcase. Two fern-like antennae unrolled themselves and began to turn as if sampling the air.

Now the claws went again to the skin at the back of the neck and the jointed arms exerted a great strength. Ebersol's clothing split down the back, and with it the skin along his spine also parted. A hard-shelled thorax emerged, then a segmented abdomen, long and cylindrical, finally a pair of lower limbs from which thorn-like spikes sprouted.

Bandar's first thought was, I have seen that before. Aloud, he said, “That is a Dree.”

The sound of his voice caused the eyeless head to rotate toward him. The tendrils quivered and leaned in his direction. The thing's multi-digited hands and feet underwent a transformation, the spiky appendages suddenly clicking together, each fitting tightly into its neighbors to form solid, curved claws. Bandar looked at those wicked edges and remembered the wounds on Brond Halorn's body.

This is a coincidence, he thought, and the word brought with it all of its terrifying import to a noonaut. All of this—the lassitude, the Dree, the strange young man called to the Commons—they were all part of one great story, a story being acted out not in the theater of the nosphere, but in the waking world. And, for this story, Guth Bandar could not be a detached observer; he must be an active participant.

A second Dree had already torn its way out of what had been Corje Sooke. It stood, its clawed feet rasping on the rock, kicking its legs to free their spikes of the woman's hampering skin. Its antennae questioned the air. Between it and the creature that had come out of Olleg Ebersol, Luff Imbry still knelt where he had been ministering to what they had thought were the dying. Now, as the creatures loomed over him, he scrambled to his feet but stumbled as he tried to put distance between himself and the Dree.

Harkless shouted to him to stand clear and aimed the energy pistol at the one that was already on its feet. But now the first Dree also sprang up, its tendrils quivering toward the sound of the young man's voice. Its hind legs flexed and it flung itself at Harkless. The zivv of the energy pistol was accompanied by a beam of focused force that caught the Dree in the air, burning a hole the size of a fist through its thorax. The thing fell clattering to the rock, its momentum carrying it skidding almost to Harkless's feet.

The second Dree was still seeking to disengage itself from Sooke's skin, but its clawed forelimb had already reached out to snag Imbry's robe, jerking him back as he tried to flee. The fat man twisted around, frantically pulling at the fasteners, trying to free himself from the garment. The cloth enveloped his head.

Bandar looked to Harkless and saw that the Hero had come back into the young man's face. Well, if there ever was a time for a Hero..., the noonaut thought. The young agent calmly aimed the pistol at the Dree that was attacking his partner. But as his thumb moved to the discharge control, Bandar heard him gasp in agony and looked down to see that the first Dree, though dying, had sunk a talon into the flesh of the young man's calf and was raising a second clawed limb to open his belly.

Harkless's pierced leg collapsed under him, but even as he fell he placed the weapon against the Dree's faceless head and fired. The green smoothness blackened, then exploded. Harkless yanked its claw from his flesh and aimed at the one that had seized Imbry.

The fat agent had not been able to pull free of his garment before the Dree had disentangled itself from Corje Sooke's shed skin. The man had fallen heavily onto his face, and now the creature was upon him, its powerful hind legs ready to rip him apart.

Harkless fired the pistol into the Dree in a sustained discharge that obliterated its head and upper body. But Imbry did not stir.

“I will tend to him,” Bandar said. “You must deal with the other two.” The lumps that had been Ule Gazz and Pollus Ermatage were twitching the way the first two had just before the emergence.

The Hero looked at him through Harkless's eyes. “You opposed me,” it said.

A chill went through Bandar, but he thought fast. “I am your Helper. It is my duty to oppose you when I see you go the wrong way.”

The eyes held on him for a long moment, then the Hero nodded. It rose and limped on Harkless's injured leg to where Imbry lay, pulled back the cloth from the head. Bandar came with him. “See, he lives,” the noonaut said. “Now kill the other Dree before they emerge.”

The Hero knelt, adjusting the weapon to maximum discharge and aimed at the jerking chrysalises that had been Gazz and Ermatage.

The thrumming of a powerful aircar was suddenly loud all round them, and the wind of its bowfront wave swept over the scene. Bandar turned to see a Bureau of Scrutiny volante alighting almost upon them. A man of mature years stepped from the vehicle. He wore the green and black uniform of a Bureau officer and a face that made Bandar's heart sink. This one, too, is fully in the grip of an archetype, he thought. And it looked to be one of the worst: the Tyrant.

The Hero glanced back at the new arrival as the scroot officer took from a belt holster the standard Bureau sidearm: a shocker. The Hero turned back to the Dree and said, “I do not think your weapon will do more than subdue them temporarily. They are a deadly offworld species.”

“I know,” said the Tyrant in black and green. Then it raised the shocker and shot the young man.

The Hero fell senseless to the ground and the Tyrant stepped nimbly forward and seized the energy pistol. It aimed the weapon at Bandar and said, “If you want to live, do as I say.”

Bandar indicated that he would accept the suggestion, but first indicated the prone Luff Imbry. “I think this man is only stunned,” he said.

“Leave him, but bring the young one.” Bandar knew better than to argue and went to where Harkless lay.

The Tyrant turned to where Kosmir had stood, frozen with fear, during the violence. “You, help him.”

But the landship officer was in the grip of terror. He said something unintelligible then turned and ran, heading west out onto the expanse of the Monument. The Tyrant in the Bureau uniform raised the pistol, then lowered it. It turned a cruel face toward Bandar and said, “Hurry, they will soon emerge,” then helped the noonaut drag Harkless's unconscious form to the aircar. They manhandled him into the prisoner's compartment; then the Tyrant ordered Bandar in after him. “There are bandages and restorative in the first-aid kit,” it said, before climbing into the operator's position and lifting the volante into the air. They hovered at a low height in silent mode.

Bandar watched through the transparent canopy as the last two Dree ripped themselves free. They stood, digits opening and closing into claws, their tendrils straining toward the two charred corpses. Then a distant sound caught their attention and, as one, their faceless heads and questing antennae turned west.

Far out on the Monument the tiny figure of the landship officer ran. Kosmir's legs pumped with fear-fueled energy, his arms pistoning tight against his sides.

Bandar saw the Dree tense and crouch. Then each sprang forward in a prodigious leap that carried them at least twice their body length. They landed on limbs like springs and the second leap carried them even farther than their first. They bounded across the flat rock, hardly seeming to touch the surface before they were in the air again.

Kosmir might as well have been standing still for all the good that running did him. The Tyrant eased the volante forward, cruising above and behind the leaping Dree, so that Bandar was an eyewitness to what happened when they caught the man.

One sprang onto the officer's back, sinking the claws of its forelimbs into the muscles of his shoulders while its heavy hind legs, with their great curved claws, shredded the flesh from Kosmir's legs.

The second Dree had leaped neatly over its sibling and its prize, turning in the air so that it landed on its back right in front of Kosmir, its claws raised to receive him. Sandwiched between the two of them, he screamed for a long time before they tore something vital.

“Instinctive behavior,” said the Tyrant. “First they hunt, then they feed.”

Bandar thought it was talking to itself, then remembered that this archetype always enjoyed seeing its self-worth reflected in the awe of another. “You're right,” he said.

Bandar looked down and saw that a ventral slit had opened in the abdomen of each Dree. Their claws were ripping free pieces of Kosmir and cramming them into the openings. Something like teeth flashed as they shredded the raw meat.

“Now they rest,” said the Tyrant when the feeding was done. It landed the volante near the Dree, unlocked the prisoners’ compartment, and beckoned Bandar out. The noonaut was frightened but the creatures seemed to have become dormant.

The Tyrant adjusted the shocker's setting and turned it on the Dree. They toppled over and lay on their backs like dead insects.

“We'll put them in the cargo bay,” the Tyrant said.

* * * *

They overflew Victor at rooftop height. Bodies lay in the streets—mostly human, though Bandar saw one Rover. The noonaut was piecing together a picture of what must have happened: the Rovers, with their less complex minds, would have been the first to be mentally enslaved. The Dree would have made them get their hunting weapons and come up from Rovertown at night in a coordinated strike. Victor had no Bureau of Scrutiny detachment; it would have been quickly overrun, its population captured and put under guard.

But how could there be a Dree to enslave anyone? They had been wiped out eons before, traced back to their home world and brutally expunged. Bandar believed he knew how: the Swept was home to extreme gravitational anomalies; gravity was necessary for the formation of nospheres; was it possible that the Dree equivalent of a collective unconscious had been captured by the aggregator that had crushed the invaders, had been carried intact down to the core of Old Earth and been reflected back in a process that occurred over geological time?

Bandar had to assume it was possible because that was the only way it could have happened. And now the anomaly and its nospheric cargo had reached the surface and come within range of humans and Rovers.

But how had the lassitude sufferers been transformed into Dree? It appeared that the original invaders had had a secret: they had not bred, as had been assumed, by laying eggs to be tended by enslaved species. So powerful was the Dree hive mind that it could alter the very gene plasm of its captives, with a chemical assist from a particular fungus grown in the hives. The Dree fed its captives truffles of the Swept, then exerted its immense psychic powers against the most intimate constituents of their cells, transforming them into replicas of itself.

Those who did not eat the fungus but came under the spell of the Dree fell into the lassitude. When the transformative crisis arrived, they died. Those who met the crisis with the truffles in their systems became Dree.

But what of Arboghast, the scroot officer? He was neither Dree in the making nor a mind-slave. But he was unquestionably psychotic, a mind absorbed completely by the Tyrant archetype. That opened an interesting avenue of speculation: would Harkless's possession by the Hero (or Bandar's by the Helper if he gave in to it), protect him from mind slavery, or even from the lassitude? The noonaut automatically began examining the question as if he might begin drafting a paper. Then it struck him that, if the Dree were truly resurgent on an Old Earth that no longer possessed substantial military forces, there would be no one to publish his thoughts, nor any to read them.

The Bureau volante slid down toward the south end of Victor, passed over Rovertown, and alighted on the open promenade deck of the Orgulon. A forward hatch gaped, guarded by two Rovers with pulse rifles. Arboghast summoned them to haul Harkless's still unconscious body from the vehicle. The guards responded immediately, and Bandar deduced that the psychotic scroot must be a willing ally of the Dree.

The relationship was not too far-fetched. Typically, all the Tyrant ever wanted was to stand atop a heap of humanity. The greater the heap, the greater the archetype's satisfaction. To Arboghast, the nonhuman Dree would be just another natural force to be worked with to produce the desired end.

The renegade gestured for Bandar to precede them as the Rovers dragged the inert young agent to the hatch. Below the deck began a stairway guarded by two more armed Rovers. Bandar was directed downward to a great open space, one of the landship's cargo holds, where a number of people sat or lay upon the floor. Some wore the uniforms of the Orgulon's crew, others were in sleeping attire and must have been brought here from their homes in Victor.

The guards laid Harkless on his back on a pile of rough sacking on the floor of the hold. Bandar sat beside the young man and examined him, finding his breathing regular and his pulse steady and strong. Physically, the agent was fine, although too strong a dose from a shocker could permanently disrupt neural processes essential to personality and memory.

A man sitting nearby rose and came to take a look at the unconscious young man as Bandar tried gently tapping Harkless's cheek. The noonaut looked up, thought the man's face was familiar, then realized that he had been seeing that saintly visage regularly projected to the passengers on the cruise: Father Olwyn, more commonly known as Horslan Gebbling, fraudster.

“How is he?” the man said.

Harkless's eyes fluttered and opened. “We'll know in a moment,” Bandar said.

“He'll be fine,” said another voice, and Bandar turned to see that Raina Haj was seated not far away, a grim look in her eyes and a dark bruise on her jaw. “Arboghast was eager to take him alive and aware. It seems they have a history.”

The young man was swimming back up into consciousness now. “He's coming to,” Gebbling said. “That futterer didn't turn his brain to jelly.”

Grunting with pain, Harkless sat up and his hands went first to his bandaged leg. Then he looked about him, registering faces before asking, “Where is Imbry?”

Bandar told him his partner was still up on the Monument. The noonaut watched the young man's eyes as he delivered the news and was sure he saw no evidence there of the Hero. That was not unexpected—shockers grievously overstimulated the body's own electrochemistry, generating a powerful internal surge of electrical current that had the same mind-clearing effect as a shock delivered from an external source. But now, after all his efforts to deliver the young man from the archetype's grasp, Bandar was coming to believe that a Hero was precisely what the situation called for.

“Imbry will die out there,” the young man was saying.

“We will all die, in one manner or another,” Bandar said. Nothing summoned a Hero like an expression of despair, and the noonaut looked to see if the provocative comment had raised a glimmer behind the agent's eyes, but saw nothing.

“And Kosmir?” the scroot said.

Bandar described the gory end of the prisoner and again sought for the Hero, but again saw no sign of his return.

Harkless's voice was a croak. He asked for water. Bandar had seen people dipping from a barrel not far away. He pointed it out to the young man, leaving him to rise and get his own drink. Pain could help bring up the Hero. Before Harkless took his first limping step toward the barrel, the noonaut warned him that the Rover guards would shoot without warning. An imminent threat can also summon the Hero, he thought.

But when Harkless came to sit with them again, his face remained his own. He watched as two Rovers descended the steps from the deck above, carrying between them a man in a landship uniform whose legs would not support him. They laid the crewman moaning on the deck.

The young agent watched as the Rovers chose a plump female in the attire of a steward and led her away. He stared at the armed guards at the top of the stairs. “Those are not hunting weapons,” he said. “They are pulse rifles.”

“They came in the ‘mining machinery’ that the Orgulon delivered,” Gebbling said. He had also seen heavy weapons and some kind of armor that would convert the gig and Arboghast's volante into fighting vehicles.

“Where do they take the people?” Harkless asked.

“To be tested,” Gebbling said. “Only the ones who fail are returned here. Most pass the test and are consigned to the crches.”

“Test? Crches?” Harkless's face hardened and Bandar saw the first spark of the archetype in his eyes. He fanned it into flame, offering a lurid account of how the Dree transformed their captives into copies of themselves. The threat of losing a sense of identity could always outrage a pure archetype. He watched as the madness rose steadily in the young scroot. Eventually the power of the psychosis would overcome the residual effects of the shocker, and Harkless would become a potent weapon to use against their captors—determined, superbly coordinated in the arts of violence, and completely ruthless.

When he was finished, there was an almost luminous glow to the young man's face. Its youthful features now looked as if carved from old wood. “So some become Dree,” Harkless said, “and the rest are slaves?”

“Except for the tiny few who go mad,” Bandar told him.

“I would rather die fighting the guards,” the Hero said. The transition had been made.

The conversation turned to Arboghast and how, as the scroot pursued Gebbling into a played-out brillion mine that the fraudster was salting with high-grade ore samples, they had both encountered the Dree entity imprisoned within a gravitational cyst. The Dree had easily enslaved Gebbling, but Arboghast's psychosis had armored his mind against its power. Instead, they had struck a bargain to spread the lassitude and create a new Dree hive. The forgotten enemy would secretly burrow beneath the population centers of Old Earth, capturing humans and converting them into legions of hive-mates, until they burst onto a defenseless world.

Having sketched this dark vision of despair, Bandar now offered that most powerful stimulus to the Hero: a small ray of hope. He speculated that the only missing step between the Dree and its victory was that the Dree archetype had not yet been able to create enough actual Dree for the hive mind to coalesce.

Harkless had been staring at his feet. His head jerked up and he looked sharply at the noonaut. “It has not coalesced?”

Bandar recalled the feral manner in which the new-made Dree had savaged Kosmir. He said he believed that there was probably a need for a critical mass of Dree brains before their behavior rose above the instinctual and a unified consciousness emerged.

Bandar could see the Hero was strong in Harkless, though the young agent's body remained weak from the effect of the shocker. Still, he would soon be fully restored. The noonaut looked around the cargo hold, counting guards and noting their dispositions. Not too long and the moment would be right for the Helper to outline a desperate plan that the Hero would soon come to think of as its own.

But as he regarded the young man, sitting with his knees drawn up, absently rubbing the spot on his calf where the Dree had punctured the muscle, Bandar felt a pang of misgiving. The young scroot would almost certainly die in the coming violence, and Bandar would be complicit in his death.

Yet, if nothing is done, Bandar thought, we will all die, one way or another: transmogrified into Dree, worked to death by Dree, or excruciatingly tormented to death for the delectation of Dree. Besides, to die for the good of all is what the Hero Sacrificial is for. But somehow the voice did not sound like his own. Bandar wondered how much he, himself, was under the spell of the Helper archetype. Or is that what I am for? he wondered.

But he put aside these qualms and concentrated on the elements of the immediate situation, while keeping a close eye on the Hero.

The pair of Rovers who had taken away the plump steward now came back without her. She had either been sent to the crches or to toil in the fungus beds, Raina Haj said.

Bandar saw the Hero's resolve deepen further. “When they are taken, how are they tested?” the young man said, and the noonaut could hear a deeper note in his voice.

Gebbling explained that each captive was brought near to the gravitational anomaly where the Dree entity was encapsulated. In moments its mental powers ransacked the mind and decided the prisoner's fate.

“I will fight its power,” said the Hero.

Soon, Bandar thought. Very soon. He watched as the Rovers reached the bottom of the stairs. The ones who came for the testees carried no weapons that could be seized. But if a strong, highly coordinated Hero were to attack them, they might be battered unconscious—Rovers had thin skulls—then that powerful Hero might pick up one of their inert forms and, using him as a shield against the pulse rifles, rush up the stairs and disarm one of the guards before they could seal the hold.

And once the Hero had a pulse rifle, the balance of power in the confined space would soon shift in his favor.

Bandar looked at the young man, saw residual tremors in his legs and arms. Very well, he thought. A little while longer for him to recover. Then we'll see.

But the pair of Rovers did not take one of the landship's crew. Their strong fingers, set with thick, dark nails, closed upon the still trembling arms of Baro Harkless. They pulled him to his feet and hauled him to the stairs. The Hero struggled, but the strength was not there. In a few moments, Harkless was dragged protesting through the hatch.

And the Helper was left helpless.

* * * *

Guth Bandar made his way to where the great white Wall loomed. He approached it, searching with the corners of his eyes until he found the discoloration that marked where the Dree had broken through eons before. It tended to slip from the gaze when he looked at it directly so he employed an Institute mentalism that let him hold it in focus.

Gingerly, he raised a hand and touched a finger to the faint mark. It was solid, no different from any other stretch of the Wall. Bandar lowered his hand and considered what he had learned. The Dree of old had broken through into the human Commons, just as humans on Gamza had broken into the Bololo nosphere. Yet the surviving Dree entity had not done so this time. Or at least, not yet. Bandar could only assume that the entity itself, though it had the strength to enslave individual humans and even to break into the Rover Commons and seize them all, was not yet powerful enough to smash its way through the Wall. On Gamza, it had taken a mass of humans concentrating on the same archetypical material to make the Bololos cavort and dance. It must require a critical mass of Dree, unified into a hive-mind, to crash through the Wall. But soon that hive-mind would cohere, and when it did, the Dree would spread with the same virulence that had allowed the original invaders to overrun vast territories, even whole worlds down The Spray.

How this information could help, however, was an answer that eluded him. He was convinced that the situation was now beyond hope. The Rovers had taken away the Hero. Bandar presumed that Arboghast, at his leisure, had had the young scroot brought before him and had simply killed him, probably painfully and with maximum humiliation. It was what Tyrants invariably did with failed Heroes.

Not long after, the Rovers had come for Bandar. They had taken him from the landship, walked him to a nearby mine entrance, then down a series of interconnecting tunnels until a strong gravitational anomaly had pulled him to his knees.

He felt the Dree archetype touch his mind, and sought to defend himself with the three, three, seven thran. But the tones meant nothing to the alien entity. He felt it winnow the contents of his psyche with cold precision, brushing aside his individuality and disdaining the Institute mentalisms he tried to summon against it. He might as well have been the most ignorant loblolly on FirstDay.

In a moment it was over. The Dree did not tell him what fate had been assigned to him, but the Rovers soon made it clear by their actions. He was taken to a deeper part of the mine where row upon row of coffin-sized holes had been bored into the rock. Here he was handed over to humans from Victor, dull-eyed mind slaves in the garb of miners, who efficiently swaddled Bandar from head to toe in a shroud of semitransparent material that tightly bound his limbs to his body. One of them tore a hole in the stuff where it covered the noonaut's nose and mouth, allowing him to take a relieved breath, but the relief was shortlived: two of them tilted him back on his heels, then lifted him and shoved him feet-first into a waist-high hole. A moment later, calloused fingers pressed against his teeth, forced his mouth open so that a feeding tube could be inserted roughly into his gullet. Almost immediately, he felt a pulse of coldness pass down the tube and into his body. Truffles of the Swept, he thought, to speed the transformation.

Now Bandar's body lay in its crypt-like crche, alien fungus insinuating its substance into his tissues, while his consciousness wandered the Commons seeking a last desperate hope. But there was nothing he could do at the Wall and he turned away. As he did so, his eye noticed on the ground the long pale scar he had seen before. He remembered what Harkless has said about swimming through the Old Sea to the Rover Commons, how he had freed the dreaming Yaffak.

But Bandar had no means to cut through the floor of the Commons. He deployed his globular map and looked for a route to a Location where magical weapons were an important element of the dynamic. Might as well get the best, he thought. Then he dismissed the notion. He knew all too well what happened to noonauts who entered the Old Sea: they lost all volition, hanging helpless and inert in the pearly waters until the great Worm came like ponderous doom to swallow them.

A profound sadness washed over him, a true despair, for there was nothing he could do. This was work for a Hero, but even the Hero had been murdered before it could lift its sword.

A spot in the globe was blinking, yellow alternating with red. The map remembered the last Location its owner had been. It was reminding Bandar of his recent visit with Harkless to the Event that memorialized the hemming of the Dree. There was a quick route to it from where he now stood at the Wall, and Bandar made his way there. Perhaps whatever coincidence had brought him and the young scroot there would give Bandar an idea. If not, he could pass from the Event to one of the nicer Class One Heavens, walk without a thran, and let himself be absorbed into paradise—before the Dree robbed him of his essence.

He arrived in the Location when it was reaching just about the same point in its cycle as when he had left it. The armored assault had passed by and the aggregator was descending from space, blotting out the stars. Singing the insulating thran, Bandar went down onto the plain and sought the ditch where the Dree weapons crew had died. It was to this spot that the Commons had called Harkless. Perhaps there was something here that would make itself known to Bandar, now that he knew what the young man's strangeness had been all about.

But when he bent, chanting, over the charred Dree corpses, he found no revelation. He pulled at the carbonized chitin, looking for some object that would provide a clue. But there was nothing.

Something hard and cold touched his shoulder. Bandar leapt up, an unintentional shriek taking the place of the thran. He landed crookedly and fell back upon the dead Dree. Above him, against the splash of stars and near-space orbitals, limned by green and orange flashes of weapons fire in the hills above the plain, he saw the outline of a man wearing a winged helmet. The cold, hard thing that had touched his shoulder was a sword of iron.

The Hero bent over him, chanting in Baro Harkless's voice the thran that hid them from the battle.

“What are you doing?” Bandar said.

The Hero gestured at him and Bandar realized he must take over the thran while the other answered: “I have come for you. You are the Helper.”

“There is nothing to be done. I am sealed in a crche being transmogrified into a Dree. They are all taken: Gebbling, Haj, the last of the landship crew. It is too late.”

“Yet here you are prodding the Dree dead.”

“I had a faint hope there would be something here that would serve us,” Bandar said. “I found nothing.”

By the light of an explosion out on the plain he saw the expression on the Hero's face: assured, almost amused. Typical, he thought.

Harkless was suggesting they go somewhere where they could talk without having to switch the thran back and forth. Bandar consulted his map and sang the tones that opened a nearby gate. They went through into an Earnest/Realistic blizzard. Two steps in the direction his noonaut sense provided and he opened another gate that admitted them to the searing heat of a desert.

The sun above them was yellow, almost white, an early rendering. Sweat sprouted all over Bandar's body. Harkless, though in mail armor and animal pelt, showed no sign of discomfort. Indeed, he wore that characteristic look of excited anticipation that was so essentially the Hero's.

And yet there was something else there. It was impossible for a psychotic to be possessed by two archetypes—they would inevitably clash—yet there was a complexity to the Hero's aspect that Bandar couldn't account for. He even believed he still saw remnants of the strange young man.

“I thought you'd be dead,” he said.

“Arboghast taunted me, then sent me to be made into a Dree,” the other said, and it seemed to be Harkless who was speaking. “Now I am in a crche, awaiting transformation.”

The noonaut led them to a slope of sand ornamented by wind-scoured bones. “You said you had an idea?” he said.

“Out on the Swept, I entered the Rover Commons and freed Yaffak from his bonds,” Harkless said.

“I have come to accept that,” Bandar said. “I have even seen the scar in the floor beside the Wall.”

“I believe I could return by the same route and free the others. I would enter their dreams, cut the tethers, one by one. They would turn on the Dree and slaughter them before the hive mind consolidates. They could then free those who have been placed in the crches, including you and me.”

It did not seem practical to Bandar. He pointed out that when Yaffak had been freed the Rover had been physically far from where the Dree entity lay imprisoned in its gravitational anomaly. Here, the bonds were surely stronger. “And what of the Rovers that are not asleep and dreaming?”

As he spoke, the noonaut watched for a reaction. This late in its dynamic, a fully engaged Hero would show impatience, even anger, at any attempt by the Helper to divert it from the catharsis. But the figure in front of him maintained a cheerful equanimity.

“I hoped you would show more enthusiasm,” the Hero said. “It seems a good plan to me. I got it from the Wise Man, after all.”

“The Wise Man?” Bandar said, carefully keeping an even tone.

“Yes. The one with the long white beard and the staff.”

“And where did you encounter him?”

“At the Wall. Now he speaks within me.” The Hero's face turned uncharacteristically thoughtful, and Bandar was fairly sure he was hearing Baro Harkless. The shifting of faces and voices reminded him of something, but when he sought for it, it faded away.

Harkless was saying, “It works best if I don't try to get a direct answer, but his thoughts come into my mind.”

“Oh, really?” Bandar said. “And have you heard from any others?”

Harkless pulled at his chin. “The Father, I think. He doesn't speak directly to me, but I sense that he takes an interest. The others just watch.”

Bandar rested his forehead on his spread fingertips and addressed the Sincere/Approximate grains of sand on the slope before him. “You have come into close contact with several pure characteristic entities?”

“All of them, I believe. Though some kept their distance.”

“And none of them absorbed you?”

“I think the Hero has taken an interest.”

Bandar lifted his head and looked at the leather-belted leggings, the helmet and the shaggy paw-crossed pelt. “Taken an interest,” he said, as if talking to himself.

“Hmm,” said Harkless. “That's how it seems.”

Bandar stared out across the lone and level sands. “All of this is, of course, quite impossible,” he said after a moment. “Anyone approached by a characteristic entity is absorbed. The archetypical energy is immense, overpowering—a great wind encountering a tiny flame. Poof! And that is that.”

“I have not found it so,” said Harkless. “Perhaps it has something to do with the presence of the Dree entity, right next door, so to speak.”

“Well, of course it has something to do with the Dree!” Bandar snapped. “It has everything to do with the Dree! But that's not an explanation for the impossible.”

“Nonetheless, the Wise Man is very confident.”

“Archetypes,” Bandar said, “are always sure of their plans. That is why it is dangerous to listen solely to one of them. Even two can be mutually reinforcing in their madness. A prudent fellow samples a wide range of opinions and creates a consensus.”

“A prudent fellow would not end up wrapped snugly in a hole in a rock wall, awaiting transformation into a Dree.”

“I fail to see your point,” Bandar said.

“My point is that even if the Hero and the Wise Man are wrong, their plan is at least an attempt to resist. And even if its chances of success are minimal, they are still greater than if we lie passive in our crches waiting to be extinguished.”

Bandar looked off into the heat haze. “I had formed my own plan. The Dree may inherit my empty shell. I will have fled to Paradise.”

He saw a wistful look appear on the young man's face, but it was almost immediately supplanted by the Hero. “I would rather die doing all that I could to defeat the enemy.”

“I believe it to be a lost cause,” Bandar said.

The Hero Sacrificial solidified in Harkless's eyes. “That is the best kind of cause,” he said.

Bandar made it clear that he was not convinced, then grew concerned at the flash of anger that he saw in the Hero's face. An angry Hero within sword's length was an uncomfortable companion, even for a Helper. He decided to evoke the Wise Man. “Perhaps the one with the long beard could convince me,” he said.

He saw the shift take place behind the young man's eyes. A cool and level gaze now looked back at him. The voice that came out of Harkless's mouth had a different timbre. “I know what will move you.”

“Indeed? What would that be?”

The hand that did not hold a sword gestured to the emptiness around them and the eyes twinkled.

“What? The desert?” Bandar said.

“The Commons.”

Well played, thought Bandar, though he said nothing.

The Wise Man said, “You have devoted your life to the nosphere. Though there be only the slightest hope of saving this great and ancient work of humanity, would you not clutch at that hope even over the certainty of Paradise?”

Bandar sighed and rose to his feet. He called up his map and plotted a route back to the Wall. He swore softly under his breath then chanted the thran that opened a gate.

* * * *

The scar in the ground had faded to a faint scratch. The Hero had dimmed a little in Harkless's face and Bandar saw a trace of fear. He could understand the young man's trepidation. To swim once in the Old Sea and see the Worm coming would be hard enough. To do it twice was more than the noonaut cared to contemplate.

“If we had a rope to tie around one leg, you could pull me back. It would be faster than swimming.”

“But we have no rope.”

“Can you not bring one from some other part of the Commons?”

Bandar was not sure that an object purloined from a Location could survive in the Old Sea. He now found himself facing a Hero's impatience. “Why don't we find out?”

Bandar examined his map and sang a thran. He passed into a stone chamber where a white-bearded king sat upon a throne and watched as his young queen threw smoldering glances at a muscular young bravo in tunic and sandals, then entered a wasteland of shattered brick and broken glass, where the ground trembled to a violent aftershock. He slid down a pile of masonry, opened another gate, and stepped onto the planked deck of a ship powered by serried banks of oars. The vessel was tilted sharply to one side and Bandar heard the sound of inrushing water. Another galley was backing away, its bronze beak fouled with wreckage. Around him, cursing men in figured breastplates and shining grieves struggled to strip off their armor before sliding and tumbling into the sea. From below decks came screams.

Chanting a thran, Bandar traversed the slanting deck and scooped up a coiled rope. He examined it closely, finding it to be a densely fibered Earnest/Realistic type, as suited such a Class One Event as a Decisive Sea Battle. He slid the coil up his arm and over his shoulder, then made his way back, via a shortcut through a night forest, to where Harkless waited at the Wall.

The Hero was still ascendant. It took the cord and knotted it around one ankle, leaving the rest coiled upon the ground. Then it rose and pressed the sword's point into one end of the scar made by his earlier passage. The ground dimpled, then the sword went through, and the Hero's muscles bunched as it forced the edge along the thin line and then well beyond.

“I've made a bigger gap,” it said, “since I will surely be longer freeing many than I was freeing one. Try to keep the gap open. It will immediately begin to heal over.”

“I will,” Bandar said. “I am the Helper.”

“Then I go.” Bandar saw that the Hero was full in Harkless as it parted the lips of the wound and made a shallow dive into the Old Sea. The slit swallowed the mail-clad body like a lipless mouth. Immediately its edges pressed themselves back together around the rope, but Bandar was relieved to see the cord steadily sliding into the incision; the Hero was willing itself through nothingness toward the Rover Commons.

True to his promise, Bandar knelt and slipped his fingers into the gash to pull it apart and keep it from healing. The effort strained his virtual muscles and he used an Institute mentalism to pour more of his being into his reified hands and arms. The gap appeared again and he found himself looking into the ancient realm of presapience.

No noonaut had gazed upon the Old Sea in time out of mind. Bandar looked down into its seeming waters, suffused by a sourceless glow of pearly light, and marveled at its luminous mystery. Some early explorers had recorded a common reaction to the sight of the Unknowingness, as it was originally known: a strange yearning to sink into its depths, to be shed of the burden of self-awareness and become, as our prehuman ancestors were, one with the nothingness of pure being. Bandar stared into the endless depths and waited to see if there arose in him a desire not to be. After a while, he decided it was a quality he lacked. Being Bandar these many years has not been an unalloyed joy, he mused, but, all taken in all, I would rather have been Bandar than not have been anything.

His thoughts were interrupted by a flicker of motion at the edge of his vision. He angled his head to look down through the gap at a slant. A tiny creature appeared to undulate slowly toward him. But Bandar knew that it was neither tiny nor slow; it was the great Worm, and it was coming to devour Harkless and return the Old Sea to a population of one.

He watched in mingled fascination and dread as the mindless entity swam toward him. Gradually, it grew in apparent size from the length of the smallest segment on the smallest of Bandar's fingers to the length of the entire digit. From that change, Bandar tried to estimate how long it would take the Worm to reach the gap. But he abandoned the calculation; he had no idea how long it would take for the Hero to reach the Rover Commons, find and free a dreaming Rover, then repeat the process. And, besides, time was not time in the Commons nor in the Old Sea.

But even if the scheme worked, what use would be a few free Rovers against all their enslaved fellows and all the humans who were by now mind-thralls of the Dree? Bandar sighed and looked again at the Worm. It was the size of his longest finger and growing steadily. He could make out the circular orifice that was its face, opening and closing as it swam, revealing a rim of triangular teeth, flashing white against the blackness of its maw.

The rope had ceased to slide into the gap. Either Harkless had made it to the other side or he hung, helpless in the grip of the gray void, as emptied of all volition as had been its first explorers. After a moment, another length of the cord was jerked through and Bandar decided that the young man had yanked it from the other side of the Wall, creating some slack so that he could hang it coiled on the thorn hedge against his return.

The Worm was closer now, appearing as long as Bandar's hand from wrist to fingertip. Bandar looked up and away from it and was startled, then terrified, to find that he was not alone.

A crowd had gathered in the seeming field that led to the Wall, forming a demilune around a narrow crescent of space at the center of which was Bandar and the gap in the Common floor. The noonaut knew them all: there stood the Magus, behind him the Thing-in-the-Dark, and over there was the Bully and the trio of Maiden, Matron, and Crone, and beyond them the Seer and the Believer, and scores more, the entire throng of usual suspects from the prime arrondisement. Prominent in the center front of the crowd were the Father and the Fool, the Wise Man and the Hero and Helper. This last figure looked at Bandar, cocked its head, and winked.

Trembling, Bandar rose to his feet and sought an avenue of escape, but they surrounded him on every side except the unpassable Wall. Stark fear shook him; he fought to subdue it. But all of his training, since the day Preceptor Huffley had first led him to stand on the bridge and see the characteristic entities, had assured him that to be in the presence of a pure archetype without the protection of a thran meant certain absorption. Now it was as if he had crossed the bridge to gambol amongst them.

And yet ... nothing happened. He remained Bandar, and the thran that had wanted to spring to his lips got no further than the opening of his mouth.

The Wise Man made a small gesture of its gnarled hand and said, “You are in no more danger than we are.”

Bandar conquered his fear. “How can this be?” he said.

The answer came suddenly, in a burst of released memory. He remembered all of it, the smith and the mute, being laughed out of the Institute, his uncle's battle with the bull-headed monstrosity, the encounters with the Multifacet, the manipulation that had denied him everything that he had wished his life to be. He saw how they had used him, had even coerced him into reluctantly agreeing to be used. He wondered how much of his life had been bizarrely twisted, that he might fulfill this role he now played. Anger flooded him.

“It had to be a noonaut,” the Wise Man said.

“Did it have to be me? Why not Didrick Gabbris?”

“It required an exceptional mind, one that could accept innovation. The Helper must be able to help.”

And now they showed him more: the shape of Baro Harkless's life, the death of the boy's father by the conniving of Ardmander Arboghast, the years of obsession with becoming an agent of the Bureau of Scrutiny, a devotion that separated young Harkless from the ordinary run of humankind, walling him off, time and again, from the simple human experiences that ought to have been part of his growing up.

A welter of emotions surged and clashed in Bandar—anger, resentment, pity, even wonder. He looked into the eyes of the Wise Man, then into those of the Hero and Helper, the Father and the others, seeing their terrible simplicity that was at once both essentially human and inhuman, just the raw, rough bricks out of which real people were built.

They had shaped Baro Harkless into a kind of replica of themselves: a simplified facsimile of a human being; an instrument; a tool to do a job. They had shaped Guth Bandar as well, twisting and chopping the substance of his life so that he would answer to the purpose they would put him to. Still, the Helper could not be as simple as the Hero; he would have a subtler part to play, so they had left Bandar enough of a life for him to realize what had been done to him.

And enough to know what they intended for Baro Harkless. “You have sent him to die for you,” he said. “That is why you fashioned him to be the Hero Sacrificial—not the Conqueror, not the Reluctant Champion, not the Commoner Who Rises. There is no chance that he can free dreaming Rovers and set them on the Dree.”

The Wise Man returned his angry stare with equanimity. “He will do as he must, as we did what we must.”

“But he is not one of you! He is a real human being, for all that you have edited him into a cripple! He can no more survive in the waking world than a glove can function without a hand.”

“This is about survival,” said the archetype. “We could not defeat the Dree. We could not do it the first time, we cannot do it now that it returns. It is one where we are many, a fist against fingers.”

“But how can Harkless defeat that thing?”

The Wise Man's eyes showed no emotion, had none to show, Bandar realized. “He cannot defeat it,” the entity said. “There is only one force that can.” The archetype turned its affectless eyes toward the gap in the Commons floor.

Bandar understood. “The Dree entity is like the newly made Dree. If Harkless runs, it will pursue him. And you will have made sure that that stratagem will occur to him.”

“It will,” said the Wise Man, “for I am part of him.”

“So he will lead the Dree back to the gash in the ground on the Rovers’ side, and it will follow him into the Old Sea.”

“And there the Worm will take it.”

“And him,” said Bandar.

The Wise Man's gaze was unperturbed. “Perhaps.”

The Hero spoke. “Sometimes the one must die to save the many.”

And the Father said, “I believe he will not die.”

“And if he doesn't,” said Bandar, “then what?”

“Then he will live,” said the Wise Man.

“Yes, but live as what? He is not fit for this world. He is like one of you, a rough draft who strides about in his simplicity, constantly colliding with the disorderliness of real life, always bumping his nose against nuances and contradictions the rest of us easily avoid.”

The archetypes regarded him without comprehension, as if he were speaking a language they did not understand. Only the Father looked troubled.

There was nothing to do but wait, and hope. Bandar seated himself on the ground at the base of the slit and took the rope in his hands. The gash was still trying to close, and he put his heels to it, straining with his legs, forcing it open. He looked down and saw the Worm again, larger now, nearer. And swimming mindlessly toward the gap.

A tug on the rope drew a length of it through Bandar's hands and into the Old Sea. Bandar's fists closed on the rough Earnest/Realistic fibers. He leapt to his feet and pulled hard, felt weight.

“He is coming!” he called to the archetypes. “He has made it!”

“Unless,” said the Wise Man, “it is the Dree. Do not pull.”

Bandar addressed the archetype as no noonaut had ever done, using a phrase he had scarcely ever uttered since his student days. The Wise Man's bushy white eyebrows rose slightly, but it said nothing.

Bandar saw a shadow darken the lip of the incision, then a hand appeared pulling at the rope. Baro Harkless, mailed and helmeted, his sword in its scabbard, hauled himself from the Old Sea. Not a drop of its “waters” clung to him.

Harkless stood on legs that were none too steady. There was a blankness in his gaze, as if the Old Sea had leached some of the life from him. But he drew his sword and took a two-handed grip, raising it above his head, positioning himself over the closing hole.

He did not notice the crowd around them, Bandar saw. Pure archetypes were not aware of each other, and Harkless was now pure Hero.

“Stand clear,” it said. “It came after me. I doubt I can kill it, but if I can stop it from coming through the gap, the Worm will take it.”

Bandar backed away, giving him room to swing the weapon. “I doubt it, too,” he said. “But I would have had the same doubts about your being able to cross from one Commons to another by the Old Sea, yet twice have you done it.”

“Take the rope and pull,” the Hero said. “Draw it to me.”

Bandar did as he was asked, but gave the rope only the slightest tug. It came freely. He felt no weight, no Dree. Still, again he gave it only the smallest pull.

“Do it again.” Bandar heard the Hero rising high, and it called up the Helper in his own being. He did not resist. He gave the rope a strong yank, still felt no resistance. He drew it, hand over hand, and it came freely through the incision, until the end appeared.

He called to the Hero, standing with sword raised above the shrinking gap. “Can you see anything?”

“No. Perhaps the Worm has it.”

Or the Old Sea has stolen its will, Bandar thought. Either way, we are saved.

Aloud, he said, “Then, right now, the Rovers are turning on your renegade scroot officer. They will hunt him and likely kill him. The miners will be rescuing the captives from the crches.”

The gap in the ground was closing rapidly now. The crowd of archetypes stood silent but made no move to withdraw to their proper place. Bandar wanted to be away from them as swiftly as he could. He took out his globular map and said, “I will plot us a route to one of the Heavens. We can rest there until they come to free us from our niches.”

Harkless lowered his sword. The gap in the ground was now almost completely healed. Bandar saw that a node only a few steps away would take them to a benign Landscape from which there were several exits. He opened his mouth to sing the tones that would open the gate.

An astonishing pain tore through the back of his right knee, followed almost instantly by a chill of frigid cold, as if a claw of ice had been thrust into his virtual flesh. Bandar looked down and saw between his legs a gash in the floor of the Commons, wider than the one Harkless had made, ripped by the weapons at the ends of the Dree's forelimbs. Its hooked claw was sunk deep into Bandar.

Now the Dree tore the rent wider, forcing its thorax through from below. It reached up and sank a second talon into Bandar's thigh muscle and this time the noonaut screamed as it hooked itself into him to haul itself free of the Old Sea. It dug its scimitar-clawed feet into the floor of the human nosphere and lifted Bandar clear of the ground, then flung him at the Wall.

He struck with an impact that shook his virtual body and fell to the ground, stunned. His globular map, shaken from his grip at the first stab of pain, had rolled free. He saw the Dree notice the motion, its tendrils questing, then it scooped up the object, raised it to the eyeless face, and Bandar sensed an emotion radiating from the entity, a wave of cruel satisfaction.

He attempted to rise, but his torn legs would not respond. He looked toward the throng of archetypes and saw that they were all looking to the Dree. Then, as one, their eyes turned toward Harkless.

The young man was thoroughly in the grip of the Hero. He shouted defiance at the invader, rushing forward and swinging the iron sword in a lateral arc that knocked the map from its grip. The Dree reared back, its thoracic orifice opening and closing to emit a sound like fire in dry tinder. Then it joined the digits of one forelimb into a dirk-like talon, straight and pointed, and shot it toward Harkless's belly in a blur of speed.

The man backswung the blade, striking the claw and diverting it from his virtual flesh. But just barely, and Bandar could see that the clash of metal against chitin had sent a shock through Harkless. Still, the Hero blazed in the young man's eyes as he shifted his weight to his back foot, then lunged with the weapon's point against the Dree's eyeless head.

The invader batted the thrust away with an ease that bespoke contempt.

Harkless spoke aloud, in his own voice. “How do I defeat this?”

Bandar thought he was being asked, but then he realized that the answer had come from within Harkless's being, where the Hero and the Fool and the Wise Man had made spaces for themselves. A shifting array of emotions crossed the man's face and Bandar knew that Harkless was seeing the shape of his life, the forces that had molded him to bring him to this moment.

Now all was clear to him, and Harkless said, “So I am not the Hero. Rather, I am the Fool.”

He stood, listening to an answer that only he could hear, then said, “Why have you brought me to my destruction?”

The Dree had cocked its head and was regarding him. Bandar wondered if it eavesdropped on whatever conversation was going on between Harkless and the Multifacet. The noonaut had no doubt that all of the archetypes had cohered again for this moment, though to his eyes they remained a crowd. They're not talking to me this time, he thought. I've played my part.

The Dree was growing larger, was now half again the size it had been when it came through the floor of the nosphere. There must be enough new Dree for the hive mind to emerge, Bandar thought. We are defeated.

Harkless seemed lost in thought, but Bandar could imagine the colloquy that was going on between him and the Multifacet. The chosen one was being shown the true and final shape of things.

The Dree entity shook itself. Its digits clicked into curved claws and it moved toward Harkless.

“It will kill me,” Harkless said. He looked at the sword that had done no harm to the enemy, but there was no fear in his face. The Hero had him now.

Again, the noonaut struggled to rise. He knew it was because the Helper was reaching into him, willing him to aid the Hero in this last sacrifice. But he did not resist.

The Dree came at Harkless, jabbing a claw at his face. He warded it off with the sword, but Bandar saw again that contact with the thing's icy power sent a shock though him. The arm that held the sword drooped, the weapon perilously loose in his failing grip.

“I cannot kill it,” he said.

Bandar saw him receive the message, knew that the voice in Harkless's mind was telling him that this had never been about his killing the Dree—though it was surely about dying.

And it was about choosing.

“It is about sacrifice,” Harkless said. “And willingness.”

The Dree was fashioning a thrusting claw again, a poniard to pierce the Hero's chest. Harkless watched it, but his attention was focused within. Bandar saw him make the decision, offer the final acceptance.

“So it appears I am to be the Hero,” Harkless said. “Just not the kind of Hero I thought I was.” He turned his eyes for a moment to Bandar. “Look after my Helper,” he said. “He did not ask for this.”

He said something else, but Bandar could not hear it over the clicking of the Dree's claws against the ground as it set itself and sprang.

But the Hero did not raise his sword. Instead, Harkless thrust out his chest and stepped forward. The Dree's claw tore into his side to lance up and inward. Bandar saw pain blossom in the young man's face, followed by a shiver as the agony turned to an icy chill. For a moment he saw despair.

Then, with a shout, Harkless clamped his free arm around the Dree's neck, lifting his feet from the ground so that his full weight hung from its upper body. Now he wrapped his legs around it and the Dree was forced to bend toward the ground. Harkless swung with his sword hand, slashing again and again at the earth where the Dree had broken through. The light of the Old Sea glowed on the iron blade.

The Dree reacted, attempting to straighten. One forelimb was stuck in Harkless's virtual flesh, but it reached now to sink the other's claw into his back and rip him free. It gave off a rank odor that Bandar realized was the reek of fear.

Bandar saw the shape of the plan, and knew that the Helper must help. His legs still would not function but he dragged himself forward until he was beneath the Dree's feet. He sank his hands into the gap that the Hero's sword had torn and stretched it wider.

He looked up and saw the tip of the thing's claw touch Harkless's spine but at that moment the sword that had torn the ground sliced into the lowermost joint of one of the Dree's hind legs. The chitin was thinnest there. The green armor parted, spilling a yellow ichor, and the Dree emitted a hiss. Its stench became overpowering.

Harkless cut again, into the other leg. The Dree twisted, trying to throw him clear, but he held on. The thing's legs buckled and it pitched forward. Together, invader and Hero tumbled through the rent in the ground and into the Old Sea.

Bandar saw them sink. But the endless eerie gray luminescence of the realm below no longer dominated his view: instead, he saw the mindless Worm, its great lightless circle of a mouth as vast as a dark planet. Harkless and the Dree, the Hero still embracing the monster, were falling into the blackness that rose to engulf them.

Then the Dree gave a mighty spasm of its entire form, yanking its imprisoned claw free of Harkless's body. It kicked its hind legs and pushed with its forelimbs against the substance of the Old Sea, struggling to rise again to the gap where Bandar watched.

But as it pulled free of Harkless, the young man reached up after it. He grasped its legs. The cruel spikes that protruded from its limbs pierced his palms, but he held on, and Bandar saw the immense will in him not to let the creature win free and return to the Commons.

Then the Worm took them both. Bandar watched them sink into its cavernous mouth, the Dree still struggling to pull free of Harkless's grasp. The huge triangular teeth closed upon the Dree where abdomen met thorax and sliced it into two pieces. The mouth opened again to let the dead thing fall into its maw. Bandar saw Harkless free his hands of the creature's remnants then, its task completed, he saw the Hero leave the young man's face. Now there was only Baro Harkless, sinking forever into oblivion, wearing a look of hope mingled with apprehension.

“No!” The cry came from somewhere deep in Bandar. He looked up at the crowd of archetypes. Their faces were filling again with the monomanias that formed their intrinsic natures. They were drifting away. One of them—the Healer, he realized—had paused near him. The figure absently waved a hand and at once the pain in Bandar's legs was gone.

“That is not enough!” Bandar rose to his knees and called to the Wise Man who, with the Father, the Fool and the Hero and his Helper, were among the last to turn away. The graybeard turned toward him and for a moment Bandar quailed at what he saw in those wrinkle-framed eyes, but he rallied and said, “It is not right to leave him there! Not after he did all that you required of him!”

“It was what he was for,” said the Wise Man. “Now it is done.”

“You know it is not right!”

The Wise Man turned away. Yet the other three hesitated. But there was no time to argue and convince. Bandar seized the rope, and tossed one end of it to the Helper, saying, “You're the Helper. So help.”

Then he tied the other end to his ankle, and without looking to see what the archetype had done, and before his fear could stop him, he dove through the gap and went down into the Old Sea.

And into the mouth of the Worm.

It had risen almost to the roof of its world and now was sinking back down, its huge mouth still open but beginning to close. Bandar plunged straight into the darkness, then began to stroke with his arms like a diver in a pool. He passed the pieces of the Dree, saw that they were already half dissolved, then kept his eyes fixed on the grayish outline of Baro Harkless far down in the dimness of the Worm's gullet. The light was fading as the Worm's mouth slowly closed.

Bandar doubted that moving his arms could help; indeed, he was surprised he could move at all. It is an expression of will, he concluded. I do not accept this outcome and will make it different. It occurred to him that he had the seeds of a seminal paper for the Institute. Then he countered that thought with the consideration that his chances of preparing and presenting any paper, ever again, were highly dubious.

Harkless was closer now. Bandar could make out the young man's face. The Hero had left him. Instead, Bandar saw behind the young man's features the face of Baro as a young boy, full of innocence and simplicity. Then the man sank farther into the darkness.

Bandar dug with his hands and arms against the substance of what was supposed to be nothingness. Within the Worm, there is more than the void of the Old Sea, he thought, feeling something resisting his motions and thus letting them propel himself deeper. There's another great paper, he thought. He stretched out his arms for another double stroke and his palms smacked into something solid. A moment later, two strong hands seized his wrists.

I have him! he thought. Now, does anyone have me?

Then the rope jerked his ankle and together they rose toward the rent in the floor of the nosphere. The Worm was assisting by sinking back into the Old Sea. But when Bandar looked over his shoulder he saw the huge wedges of its teeth approaching each other, like gears about to mesh. He closed his eyes and willed that he and Harkless should rise faster, then opened them to see the serrated edge of one great pale triangle pass by him with barely a handsbreadth to spare. Then he was out of the mouth, with Harkless coming after him. Bandar gripped the animal pelt that the young man still wore and yanked Harkless toward him, pulling him free of the mouth just as the teeth came together. Moments later they were hauled through the rip and back into the Commons.

The red lips of the gash closed rapidly. Bandar and Harkless lay for a moment on the warm fleshy floor of the nosphere. Then the noonaut rolled over and sat up to untie the rope from his ankle. Not far away he saw the Father, the Fool, the Hero, and the Helper, lined up one behind the next, the cord still in their hands. They regarded him with understanding, but already he could see the blankness creeping back into their eyes.

He threw off the rope and shook Harkless. The young man turned to him a face that was still suffused with the acceptance of his own death. Bandar shook him again and said, “We must depart. They are reverting to their true natures.”

The noonaut sang the three, three, and seven thran and was gratified to hear Harkless chime in. The archetypes lost their perception of them and turned away, letting fall the rope. Last to go was the Helper, who cast a look back over his shoulder in the direction of Bandar and dropped one eyelid.

Bandar shuddered. Then he looked about and saw his map lying against the wall. He used a mentalism to summon it back to his hand then sang open a gate.

But Harkless held back, gesturing to the departing archetypes. Now that the Hero was fled from him, he could see them. “How did you get them to aid you?” he said.

“I called on them and they helped.”

“Were you not afraid one of them would absorb you?”

“They were not here for me,” Bandar said. “They were here for you.”

* * * *

They passed through a series of Locations until they came back to the Landscape of the Prairie. Bandar had not been back here since the episode with the pigs. He was glad to see that no trace of those events remained. He led Harkless over a roll of ground that sheltered them from the constant wind and they sat together.

“We should go back to our bodies,” the young man said. “I will arrest Ardmander Arboghast, if he lives.”

Bandar peered at him. “Is that a vestige of the Hero I hear?”

But the eyes that looked back at him held none of the archetype's elementary madness. “No,” Harkless said, “all that died in the Worm. You are hearing a man who wishes to bring to justice the killer of his father.”

“We will not lose much time here,” Bandar said. “And first I have to tell you a story.”

“I have had enough of stories. I wonder if I have had only stories, all these years, and never a real life.”

“That is what this story is about,” the noonaut said. “It began a long, long time ago, when I was a student...”

* * * *

Bandar reentered waking life to find that he was in a ward of the Victor infirmary and that Baro Harkless was engaged in an argument with Raina Haj. The young agent had risen from his bed and was determined to go after Arboghast, who had escaped when the Rovers had begun killing the Dree. She insisted that he must remain in Victor to testify at a Bureau of Scrutiny inquiry that was soon to convene. A bandaged Luff Imbry, rescued from the Monument, reposed on one of the beds, eating fruit and taking his partner's side.

The argument had reached the point where Harkless had resigned from the scroots and Haj had drawn her shocker to prevent his leaving. Now Bandar intervened.

“Let me offer a proposal,” he said.

Not long after, he and Harkless stood on the road that led into the Commons, watching the motes of light that were dreamers flitting past them. Bandar was gratified to see that the young man now manifested in his own guise, without the trappings of a dawn-time Hero.

“So you will not be a scroot,” Bandar said. “What will you do?”

“Study under you and become a noonaut,” the young man said.

Bandar had been considering the same prospect. In some way his life was still bound to that of Baro Harkless, but he was not sure he wholly welcomed the connection. The young man remained almost as dangerously simple as an archetype, and when seized by determination he was no less terrifying than he had been when they had stood on the bridge overlooking the prime arrondisement. At the same time, Harkless had opened doors that led to great shining territories of new research.

I am a trained noonaut with an unparalleled experience of the Commons, he told himself. He is a young man with unheard of abilities. I could spend years just delineating his capacities. It is not unthinkable that the two of us could found a new Institute that would soon rival....

He realized that Harkless was expecting an answer. “We may be able to work something out,” Bandar told him.

The young man started to speak but then something caught his attention and he pointed back down the road. “He is here,” he said.

Bandar approached the mote of light Harkless was following with his finger. He exerted a mentalism while chanting a complicated thran. A faint image of Ardmander Arboghast wavered before them, snatched from his dream, puzzlement vying in his face with fear. Bandar had the young man lay tight hold of the renegade scroot, while he employed the technique that drew more of the prisoner's being into the Commons, leaving only enough of him in the waking world to sustain minimal existence. It was a tense struggle—the Tyrant was strong in Arboghast—but Harkless's will was also unnaturally powerful and the issue was soon decided.

Bandar led them to a nearby gate. They stepped through into a Heaven that was familiar to the noonaut. He wondered if its cycle had renewed itself since last he was here, or whether one Principal was still laughing over the look of surprise on the Other's face.

Bandar sang the insulating thran loudly so that Harkless could conduct a conversation with his prisoner. He did not hear what was said, but gathered from Arboghast's increasing look of terror and dismay that the discussion was not going well from the Tyrant's point of view.

They marched across the lush grass, the prisoner squirming in Harkless's adamantine grasp, then descended a short slope that ended at the Abyss. Bandar, still singing, looked down and saw the great flat-topped tower just below and to one side, with black-armored demons swarming up ladders to battle a formation of angelic defenders. He motioned to Harkless to move along the edge away from the assault point and they came to a quiet sector. The only movement was that of a giant leather-winged demon, wheeling and gliding back and forth below them in intersecting double loops.

Harkless said something to Arboghast and now the Tyrant struggled in earnest. But the dynamic of this moment had been established long ago. The young man flung his father's killer out into the emptiness. The demon saw the plummeting man and indolently flapped its wings to bring itself under his descent.

It caught Arboghast with talons that pierced his virtual flesh then turned and dropped toward the smoking black pit below. Bandar heard its captive's screams dwindle to the faintest whine.

Harkless stood and watched until the thing was out of sight. Then Bandar put a hand on his shoulder. The man turned and Bandar saw on the young face an expression that had no name. “Now what do I do?” he said.

* * * *

“Wait here,” Bandar said. “You may play with the three maidens if you wish, but you should know that they are not equipped for anything but the most innocent of sport.”

The blonde, brunette, and redhead were splashing in the shallow surf, casting coquettish glances their way. Harkless stared at them in a manner that caused Bandar to think that his companion was as inexperienced as the three idiomats.

“Are you leaving me here?” Harkless asked.

“Only for a short time.” Bandar approached the Sincere/Approximate jungle beneath the palm trees that fringed the tropical beach. He used his Institute-trained memory to lead him to a spot, then stopped. He was reasonably sure that he had come the correct distance in the right direction. Now he exercised the noonaut's sense that could detect the presence of an inter-Locational node, and felt a tingle on his left side. He turned that way, inching forward until the sensation became so strong as to be unmistakable.

He opened his mouth and sang the most common gate-opening thran. No fissure appeared in the air, nor did he feel the quality that noonauts called “resonancy.” He chanted the next most common sequence of tones and again nothing happened. He continued to work his way down the thran ladder, chanting more than two score sequences, before he established that none of the gate-openers worked. But two of them had returned a resonancy: the five, eight, and two had produced a weak response, while the five, four, and six had won him a strong return.

From there it was a matter of trying all the possible combinations, which would have been a mathematically immense number except that Bandar was guided by the resonancy that increased the closer he came to the right sequence. In less than an hour, he chanted five ascending tones, followed by three descenders and completed by the same two notes an octave apart. The air rippled.

Bandar paused a moment to mark the occasion. For the first time in millennia upon millennia, an explorer of the Commons had found a new gate. To demonstrate this achievement to the scholars of the Institute for Historical Inquiry would be like ... but his mind could not achieve an appropriate equivalent. He put the thought aside and stepped through.

He found no mist, and hadn't expected to. The fog that had shrouded the Multifacet would have been merely for effect. He stood in a lighted space that seemed to have no limit, though there would be walls somewhere, probably of the same colorless substance as the floor beneath Bandar's feet. The place was neither hot nor cold, but warm enough for comfort, the light neither too bright nor too dim. The air was wholesome but carried no draft or breeze.

Bandar deployed his globular map. And now we'll see, he thought. He directed at the display the mentalism that would cause his present Location to show itself. A moment later, a new spot came into being within the matrix of lines and colored shapes: a white circle, connected only to the beach where the three nymphets frolicked.

Bandar put away the globe and surveyed the emptiness around him. This place had no dynamic. Nothing he did here could cause disharmony. He decided to try an experiment. He removed a garment and laid it on the floor, one finger still touching it to retain a connection. Then he concentrated and exerted a mentalism, holding in his mind an image of the red-cushioned, ornately carved seat of black wood on which the First Overdean sat during formal dinners in the Institute's refectory. After a moment, the air before him wavered, the garment faded and the chair appeared. Bandar sat upon it, finding it less comfortable than he had expected.

It will take time to build it all, he told himself, then came another thought: unless Harkless's exceptional talents extend in that direction too.

He reopened the gate and returned to the beach. The young man was high-stepping through the surf, giving the redhead a piggyback ride while the blonde and brunette chased them both. They were all laughing.

“Baro!” Bandar called. “Come away. I want to show you something.”

The young man let the girl slide from his back. “I'll be right back,” he said when she pouted. He followed Bandar off the beach and into the jungle.

Bandar called up the node and they passed through. “You wanted to show me a chair?” Harkless said.

“No,” said Bandar, “I wanted to show you the Bandar-Harkless Institute for Nospheric Innovation.”

“Where is it?”

“Well,” Bandar said, “I'd like you to sit in the chair. Now close your eyes and think about a very large, well-appointed building, with spacious rooms, quiet cloisters, a good library. Oh, and an excellent wine cellar.”

Harkless sat and closed his eyes. “All right,” he said, “I'm thinking of it. Now what?”

Bandar looked about him. “Oh, my,” he said.

—THE END—

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