The Gist Hunter (25 page)

The ripple appeared. Bandar jumped. He heard the click of canine teeth closing on empty air. Then he was through.

The Commons was the original fount of all myth and legend. Explored over tens of thousands of years, all of its terrors and wonders were long since identified and cataloged. Yet among undergraduates of the Institute, the noösphere had paradoxically become the subject of a myth of its own. Though senior fellows and tenured scholars derided the notion, students whispered to each other that they sometimes felt that humanity's collective unconscious was somehow
aware
of their presence—and worse, that their traipsing through Events and Situations was resented.

How else to explain the ill luck that too frequently accompanied sojourns among the idiomatic entities? It was understandable that the early explorers, groping their way from one uncharted Location to another, might fall afoul of an anthropophagic giant or a murderous worm. But with the Commons now as well mapped as any place in the waking world of Old Earth, why should noönauts so often blunder into lethal traps and snares? Why must the noösphere be so unforgiving?

As a youth, Bandar had shivered at the speculations of his classmates. In his maturity, his views were aligned with the establishment's. Only the day before this exploration, overhearing a callow underclassman named Chundlemars regaling his friends with some apocryphal tale of a sentient Commons, Bandar had spoken sharply.

"The Commons is an aggregate of contending forces. Disunity is its most salient characteristic. Fool contends against Wise Man, Hero confronts Villain, Anima opposes Animus. How can these contentious fragments unite behind a single program?"

Chundlemars had had the temerity to dispute the issue. "Yet a mob, however disparate its members' views on a host of issues, can cooperate to attack an inimical outsider."

Bandar bridled. "The key word in 'collective unconscious' is 'unconscious,' not 'collective,'" he said. "To become aware of intruders, the unconscious must first become self-aware. Self-awareness is by definition consciousness. Therefore it is a logical impossibility for the unconscious to become conscious."

The student had bent before Bandar's tirade but had still shown fight. "Perhaps not impossible, but merely difficult," he had said, "hence its efforts to capture our attention are diffuse and seem inconclusive."

Bandar had disdained to continue the argument and with a brusque gesture had sent the youths hustling off to another corner of the Institute's grounds.

But now as Bandar gazed at the view that had appeared before him the moment he had come through the gate and onto this grassy hilly, a
frisson
of fear caused the skin of his back to twitch. If this Location was the sunny realm of bards and troubadours that he had sought, he ought to be able to see at least one towered and turreted castle, its conical roofs aflutter with gay pennants and gonfalons. There ought to be a fountain or two on verdant lawns and gentle woods with trees as round and symmetrical as a child's drawing.

Instead the noönaut saw a tangled forest broken only by a narrow, unpaved track that wound its way past scattered clearings in which rude dwellings stood next to vegetable gardens. Farther off stood a sturdier edifice of red brick with a slate roof and a chimney from which gray smoke idled.

But nowhere to be seen were shaded bowers or romantic ruins. Bandar listened but heard no lutes or dulcimers, only the cawing of two ragged birds. His pig's nose brought him not the scent of flowers and fruited trees but a faint odor of carrion.

Not good
, he thought. He brought the map into existence again. He examined the symbolic representation of the node through which he had arrived and saw that it was even more multifarious than he had realized. The gate was identified by a yellow heptagon within a green circle, signifying that it led to seven destinations if sung to in one key, and yet another seven outcomes if the thran was dropped a full tone.

Yet Bandar had been sure the map had shown him a green pentagon in a yellow circle. He had carefully traced the outcomes. He should be in the land of song and story, on his way to the children's winter paradise. Instead, as he studied the map, he was not quite sure where he had landed. He tried to focus on the symbols identifying this present Location but the characters' lines kept wavering and blurring, as if seen through an intervening mist.

His impression, however, was that he was in one of the most obscure sites, a subsidiary of a tributary two steps removed from a minor whorl. That meant that there might be few gates out of this Location, perhaps even only one, and he would have no choice but to take it.

How had he misread the map? Accidents were always possible, but Bandar had planned his route with meticulous care. The adolescent fear of being surrounded by a malicious, resentful Commons crept out of the closet. Bandar resolutely thrust it back and mentally slammed the door. Perhaps his pig eyes did not resolve certain colors or shapes as well as his human orbs could. He would be more careful next time.

He raised the flaps of his ears and turned in a slow circle on the hilltop. Beyond the squawking of the birds he heard the sound of voices raised in argument. They were coming from a clearing some small way off.

The voices offered Bandar a means of discovering where he was. He would approach stealthily and observe and identify the idiomats, deducing from their characteristics the Situation or Event in which he had landed. Then he would find its precise position on the map and from there plot a route to safety.

The forest, when he entered it, was of the Sincere/Approximate classification: what the Institute called "forestlike" rather than a truly realistic mix of trees, underbrush and detritus. Its iconic characteristics told Bandar that he was almost certainly in a Class Four Situation: likely an archetypical joke or one of the lighter tales for children, possibly one so ancient that it had been superseded eons ago by new formulations. But nothing was ever lost in the Commons. Just as Bandar's essential gene plasm carried all the instructions necessary to build precursor species that had gone extinct a billion years before, so the collective unconscious preserved every Form and Type that the human brain had ever conceived.

Still, there were advantages to being stranded in a Class Four Situation: physical surroundings would count for little; the Situation's cycle would involve only indispensable interactions between the idiomatic inhabitants.

That would pose no difficulties if the situation revolved around, say, a sexual encounter between a lusty farmer's wife and a hired hand. The idiomats would be so intent upon each other that a pig would pass unnoticed. But if he was traversing a tale about a bridge-haunting troll that devoured talking livestock, Bandar might suddenly find himself added to the menu. He therefore made a light-hooved approach to the sound of voices.

He was hearing an argument; that much was clear from the tone even before he could make out the words. That it was a good-natured dispute, carried on without rancor, was a good sign: the disputants were unlikely to have weapons in their hands. Bandar stole closer, weaving stealthily through the generic underbrush. The arguers called each other "Brother," and seemed to be contradicting each other over the merits of construction methodologies—a pair of artisan monks was Bandar's first thought.

He eased his way through some cartoonishly rendered bushes, finding that his sharp hooves made no noise on the forest floor. The voices were quite clear now, the argument definitely about the strength of a wall. Apparently winds were a factor here, since one of the disputants was contending that the wall before them would collapse at the first breath. The other replied that its interwoven construction gave the barrier a resilient tensile strength, adding, "The willow bends where the oak falls."

Bandar moved closer. There were fewer leaves between him and the argument now. He could make out something blue. He pressed a little farther forward and saw that it was coarse cloth with yellow stitching, the leg of a utilitarian garment such as a workman or farmer might wear. He inched toward the leg and saw that it ended in a scuffed leather boot.

Not so bad
, he thought. He was in some Wisdom Story, perhaps a minor variant of the Flexibility versus Rigidity dichotomy. Its idiomats would be exclusively focused on their debate and soon would come a great wind to test one theory over another. Bandar was not worried about the wind, by the time it came he would have traversed what must surely be a very small Location, found an exit gate and been on his way.

He backed away from the arguing idiomats. But as he did so he found that his pig's ears were better designed for pressing forward through underbrush, even of the generic sort, than for rearward motion. One of his flaps caught on a twig, which scraped over the protruding cartilage before snapping free. Above Bandar's head one branch snapped against another and the bush trembled, swishing its broad and simple leaves against each other.

"What was that?" said the champion of flexible walls.

"It came from down there," said the advocate for solid masonry.

The first voice dropped to a whisper. "Is it, You Know Who?"

The branches above Bandar's head were swept away by a stout walking stick and he heard the second voice take on a tone of horror and disgust as it said, "No, it's some kind of ugly monster!"

"Oh, it's hideous!" cried the other.

Now all Bandar wanted was to back out of the bush, turn and run. But he could not help looking up toward the voices. He saw above him, their features contorted in horror, the faces of two anthropomorphically rendered pigs.

"Kill it!" said Flexibility with an idiomat's typical decisiveness, and Rigidity raised his heavy cane to put his brother's advice into action. Bandar squealed and tore himself loose from the bushes, but now the two pig-men were crashing through the undergrowth after him and showing that in addition to their murderous impulses their humanly formed legs and feet could sustain a considerable speed.

Bandar deked and jinked, circling tree trunks and leaping over fallen logs. The brothers pounded after him and soon displayed a dismaying intelligence: they spread out, one seeking to cut Bandar off and drive him toward the other. Both, he saw, were armed with heavy sticks.

The noönaut dodged a blow that could have snapped his spine, ducked through the legs of its deliverer and burst out of the bushes into the sunlit clearing. A structure was in his way, its walls an interlacing of withes and flexible canes bound by fibrous cords, its roof a dense mat of woven reeds. Bandar raced around a corner and galloped across the open space, hearing the thudding bootsteps of his pursuers and the rasp of their breathing. They were gaining.

His short pig's legs were trembling and his pig's lungs were burning. He looked toward the trees on the other side of the clearing, hoping for a thicker bush, perhaps a bramble, through which he could insinuate himself while his pursuers were deterred. But he saw nothing that would suit and the stick-wielding pig-men were almost on him.

Then from the woods ahead burst a third pig-man, attired like the others, but with an expression of sheer terror disfiguring its already distorted features. This one paid no attention to Bandar but called to the two others, "He's right behind me! He destroyed my house with a single blast!"

The third pig-man sped across the clearing and into the woods. Bandar's pursuers immediately abandoned the chase and ran in the same direction, cries of panic fading in their wake.

Bandar had skidded to a halt, his legs limp as boiled celery, his breath coming in pants. He heard the clatter of the pig-men diminishing as they fled through the woods behind him on the far side of the clearing. Then he heard a new sound, an engine-like chuffing growing louder. It came from beyond the nearer trees.

He remembered the discussion of wind and the fleeing pig-man's mention of a house destroyed by a single blast.
An archetypical Storm elemental
, he thought,
an elemental with a yen to destroy weakly constructed buildings—therefore no danger to a bystander pig
. He stood to catch his breath as the huffing and puffing grew louder.

From the darkness under the trees, not far from where Bandar stood, a shape emerged. It was a running figure, knees high and elbows pumping, dressed in black overalls over a red shirt, with a bent and towering hat on its head. But it was the face that caught Bandar's attention—the long muzzle flecked with foam, the red, lolling tongue, the cruel, needle-sharp fangs.

Oh, my
, he thought,
not just Storm, but Appetite too. An Eater
.

The great golden eyes turned Bandar's way and the idiomat scarcely broke its stride before swerving toward him.
Worse yet,
was Bandar's thought,
Indiscriminate Appetite, an Eat-'em-all-up
.

He flung himself back the way he had come, but the slavering pursuer was even faster than the pig-men had been and here in the clearing there were no obstacles to interpose between the Eater and the virtual Bandar flesh it craved.

He was headed for the stick house, specifically for a wall against which stood a pile of unused building materials. He leapt to the top of the heap, sticks flying from beneath his scrabbling hooves, one of them happily striking the Eater's bulbous nose and causing the pursuer to pull up sharply, though only for the time it took to shake its head and renew the chase.

The pause gave Bandar time to scramble atop the woven roof, cross the peak and slide down the other side. He heard the beast coming over the roof after him. The trees were too far away; the Appetite would run him down.

Beside Bandar, the door to the house of sticks stood open. He ducked inside and closed the portal after him, glad to see that it was made of thick timbers, closely fitted, and that it had a hinged bar that he could nose into place.

Scarcely had the barrier been sealed than the Eater struck it with force enough to make the door rattle in its mounts. A second blow followed but the timbers held firm.