The Gist Hunter (28 page)

Its handle, too, was shaped to fit a pig's hoof. He lifted it down then removed the cauldron's lid. A dark broth sent up steamy wisps of vapor. It smelled delicious. Bandar dipped the ladle and tasted the soup.

The broth tasted as rich as it smelled, but Bandar got no more than his first sip. As the stuff entered him, he saw the hoof that held the ladle become a hand once more, the foreleg become an arm. His back straightened and his legs set themselves under him again. He became a man standing in a little brick house, then the structure faded and he found himself atop a low rise.

The noönaut wasted no time in calling up an emergency gate. The air opened before him and he wanted to throw himself immediately forward. But he paused and said to the bright blue sky, "I will let them know."

A moment later he was looking through his own eyes at the worn furniture of the Institute's meditation room. He stretched the kinks out of his joints and muscles, rose and performed the usual exercises. When his body felt as if it fit him again, he crossed to the door that led out to the forum where students were wont to gather between classes.

He strode forcefully toward a group seated on the grass beneath a hanging wystol tree. Most of them looked up in curiosity; one showed alarm at being the focus of Bandar's gaze. The youth rose to his feet, a fearful apprehension seizing his features.

Bandar said, "Chundlemars, I wish you to come with me."

Chundlemars swallowed and said, "Master, I have thought better of my earlier observations about the noösphere's awareness. I withdraw them."

"Withdraw?" said Bandar. "To the contrary! You will expound them to me at length. You are henceforward my research assistant."

Chundlemars blinked. His chin fell toward his chest and remained there.

"Don't stand there gaping!" Bandar said, seizing the underclassman by one protruding ear and compelling him toward Bandar's study. "The Commons is awake and aware! It demands our attention!"

"What must we do?" said Chundlemars.

"What must we do?" said Bandar. "My boy, we are scholars and the Grand Colloquium is but a week away. We must quickly compose a thesis to grind Didrick Gabbris into a malodorous powder!"

Guth Bandar had always liked the red-haired one best. Her figure was not as voluptuous as the blonde's nor was her face as perfect as the raven haired girl's, but there was an elfin quality to the way she looked back at him over her lightly freckled shoulder, a gamin's wry twist of the mouth and a glint of mischief to her sea-green eyes.

In a moment, he would rise from where he lay in the shade of the coconut palm. He would affect a comic growl and they would respond with giggles. Then the blonde would press fingertips to half-open lips and gasp, "Oh!" and the brunette would shriek while the redhead cocked one sun-dappled hip, before all three ran laughing into the surf.

The dream always unfolded this way, had done so for all the years since Bandar had found his way into this innocuous corner of the Commons, the great collective unconscious of humankind. There were more erotic Situations than this one, certainly there were more realistic representations of intergender relations, but it was to this Location that Guth Bandar often repaired when life became wearisome and his troubles outweighed his joys.

There was a sweet innocence to the place. As near as he could tell, the three girls were not even anatomically correct. Their breasts were well enough conceived, although the areolas were too perfectly round, but in the less obvious places things seemed only sketchily realized. It was the fantasy of a boy still approaching the cusp of manhood: the girls could be chased and finally caught, but after that it all grew a little vague.

Bandar wanted to prolong the moment before commencing the sequence that would inevitably end the Location's cycle. It was not the prepubescent frolic that lured him to this place, but its atmosphere: the aura of naiveté, of a world that had not yet encountered guile and cynicism.

For Guth Bandar had lately encountered both, and in too ample a measure. They had come in the unwelcome form of Didrick Gabbris, his longstanding rival at the Institute for Historical Inquiry, where gathered those who spent their lives exploring the Commons—the noösphere was the technical term—and among whose number Bandar had been glad to count himself.

But now his tenure as an adjunct scholar had been abruptly terminated. He had been required to return his gown and pin and to vacate the little office in the basement of the Institute's connaissarium where he had conducted his researches. The fellows and scholars had ceremoniously turned their backs on him, looking anywhere but at Guth Bandar while he trudged to the great doors of Magisters Hall and departed.

The day should have ended in a triumph, the once-and-forever scotching of the odious Gabbris. But when Bandar had presented his revolutionary thesis—that the collective unconscious had paradoxically achieved consciousness, that the noösphere had become self-aware—the assembled noönauts of the Institute had turned on him. Snorts of disbelief and hoots of derision had battered at Bandar's ears, and the ranks of scholars assembled for the Grand Colloquium had become a sea of outraged faces and shaken fists.

The blonde idiomat came up the beach and offered Bandar a theatrical wink, pursed her full lips in an unwitting parody of eroticism, then turned to flee in anticipation of pursuit. But Bandar smiled wanly and flourished a weak hand. When he remained recumbent beneath the tree, she reformed her lips into a
moue
of dismissal and went away with what would have been a swish and flounce of fabric had she been wearing any.

Bandar knew he would soon have to get up and play out the sequence or see the dream dissolve. He had not come to this Location through the noönaut's techniques—a series of recondite mental exercises accompanied by the intoning of specific patterns of notes, called thrans—but by the more mundane expedient of falling asleep and allowing his own personal unconscious to connect him to the Commons. Even so, he was no ordinary dreamer; he could lucidly focus his awareness within a dream so that its figures and events became almost as real as if he walked through his waking life.

Still, there were limits. If he did not get up now and respond to the idomatic entities' importunings, he would overstress the fabric of this Situation and it would pop like a bubble. He essayed a small growl and put one elbow under him. The three girls tittered and coquetted a few steps away.

"Guth Bandar," said a soft voice beside his ear.

The noönaut felt a shock and a shiver as if an icy finger had trailed up his spine. The girls could not speak—prepubescent boys do not look to their fantasy objects for conversation—and there should have been no other entity within this Location.

In the Commons, when things went wrong they tended to go disastrously, dangerously—and all too frequently—lethally wrong. Bandar did not hesitate but mentally reached for the procedure that would propel him posthaste from the dream into full consciousness. But his cognitive grasp closed on emptiness; something was blocking his technique.

"Stay," said the voice, and now Bandar had to turn to face whatever was there, because one rule every apprentice noönaut learned was always to confront the unconscious.
To run is to be run
, went the old maxim.
To stand is to withstand
.

But when he stood and looked behind him, there was nothing to face down. The voice had come from the jungle beyond the coconut palm, an indifferently realized pastiche of leaves, vines and creeper that was only slightly more convincing than if it had been painted on stage cloth.

"Who speaks?" he said.

The answer came not in words but as a ripple in the air: the familiar sign that a gate had opened between this Location and some other corner of the Commons. The exit's presence deepened Bandar's worry: he knew every inch of this palmy beach and knew that the only way in and out, whether he came as a dreamer or as a conscious chanter of thrans, was eighteen paces to the left of the tree, a spot just past an ornate conch shell washed up above the limit of the surf.

He took stock of his situation.
I am stranded in a dream, bespoke by an unknown entity and beckoned to enter a gate that ought not exist. My day proceeds from defeat to who knows what further drama!

A terrible thought occurred to him.
Have I become a natural?
he wondered. It was an accusation that Didrick Gabbris had hurled at him in the Grand Colloquium, and Bandar had shrugged it off as merely another dart of abuse chosen from his rival's copious quiver of epithets and slanders.

Now, standing in the warmth of this generic beach, Bandar felt a shiver and an unaccustomed chill. Could Gabbris have been right?

All humans could visit the collective unconscious and did so nightly; the Commons was where the engrammatic stuff of dreams cohered in nodes and corpuscles called Locations, cyclical and eternal. A minority of humankind could consciously enter the wondrous and dreadful realm in which the composite experience of humanity was gathered and distilled to its essences. That minority was further divided into two classes: one was composed of Institute scholars trained in the techniques of orphic thrans that kept them from being perceived by the noösphere's archetypal inhabitants; the other category comprised the irredeemably insane—psychotics whose shattered personas had merged utterly with one of the primal entities loose in the shared basement of the human mind.

The significant difference between noönauts and the deranged was that the scholars retained an awareness of themselves as distinct from their putative surroundings—Bandar knew the people and things of the Commons were not "really real," though the dangers they posed might be—while loons and ravers could not reliably distinguish between a ravenous vampire and a hapless neighbor, which was why a chance encounter on the sidewalk could move in unexpected directions.

Guth Bandar reminded himself of this crucial distinction as he heard again the whispered summons from the darkness beneath the palms, where the rift in the air still quivered.
Can I be mad
he asked himself,
if I am willing to consider the real possibility that I am indeed mad?
He realized that the question led only to a conundrum: the judgment of the insane must always be suspect; only a sane man's verdict could be relied upon, but a sane man would never pronounce himself mad.

"Guth Bandar," said the soft voice. Bandar thought about fleeing the summons. If he couldn't wake himself up, there was another way out: noönauts who sang their way into the Commons could chant a specific thran that would open an emergency exit. Quite likely the same thran would pluck Bandar from this dream and in a second he would wake up in his bed, doubtless drenched in sweat, his limbs atremble.

But he left the seven notes unsung. Gabbris's victory in the Grand Colloquium had stung Bandar's pride. He was no natural. He was a true noönaut and he knew that the Commons had indeed communicated with him, as if it were a conscious entity. He had not been able to convince his peers and betters at the Institute, might never be able to do so. But a true scholar does not turn aside when confronted by the inexplicable. He penetrates the mystery.

Bandar squared his narrow shoulders and advanced to the rippling slit in the air. Without hesitation, he stepped through.

Beyond the beach was a luminous fog, a mist so dense that Bandar's hand, held at arm's length, became a doubtful object. Bandar knew that there were three fog-bound Locations in the collective unconscious: one was a Landscape (or more properly, a Seascape), that featured a ship enshrouded on an archetypal ocean; another had the same combination of elements but was classified as an Event, because the ship ran aground and broke up on unseen rocks, casting passengers and crew into the cold sea; the third was an urban Landscape where the idiomats stumbled on cobblestoned streets, feeling their way along walls of brick and fences of black iron on which the mist condensed and chilled their fingers.

This was none of those three, Bandar was sure, but to be certain he used the noönaut technique that summoned up his detailed globular map of the Commons. He rotated the sphere until he found the Location with the beach and its winsome idiomats, then identified each of the befogged Locations. As he had expected, there was no direct connection from the beach to any of the three; he would have had to pass through a Garden, a Class Two Massacre and a Class One Natural Disaster just to reach the nearest.

Now Bandar refocused his awareness on the sphere and employed another aspect of his noönaut training. The result of his effort should have been to create a small pulsation in the symbol that represented whatever Location he now occupied. But though he applied the method again and then still once more, with increased intensity, not one of the emblems in the sphere responded.

That is impossible
, Bandar thought. It meant that he must be in some corner of the Commons that was not on the map. But the noösphere had been fully explored and charted tens of millennia ago. The Great Delineation had been the work of thousands of generations and it had cost the lives of untold numbers of members of the Institute for Historical Inquiry, men and women who had bravely ventured into Locations and been absorbed into their spurious realities before they could ascertain which combinations of tones would screen them from their idiomatic inhabitants' perceptions, or find the way out before the Situation or Event reached the end of its cycle and reformed to begin anew.

Perhaps Gabbris is right,
Bandar thought.
Perhaps I have taken leave of my senses and become a natural
. He imagined the uproar that would ensue if he returned to the Grand Colloquium and declared that not only was the Commons aware of its own existence, but that it contained at least one Location that had remained undetected during the vast span of time since the first noönaut, the Beatified Arous, found his way through the Golden Door.
Madness,
he thought,
yet here I am
.