The Gist Hunter

by Matthews Hughes

  "He is called Vashtun Errible."

  "Tell me about him."

  There was little to tell: only an address on a cul-de-sac off the Fader Slide, an obscure location in an uncelebrated part of the city. No image of Errible reposed in the solvency's files and the connectivity code he had given when opening the account was long since defunct. The account had not been used for many years and had probably been forgotten by its nominee.

  I left the tallyman to his troubles and set my assistant to scouring all sources for news of this Vashtun Errible. The integrator turned up only one more item: a deed of indenture that bound Errible's services to the requirements of one Bristal Baxandall.

  "Now that's a name I have heard before," I said, though I could not immediately place it.

  "He prefers to be known as The Exalted Sapience Bristal Baxandall, an alleged thaumaturge," said the integrator. "He performs at children's parties."

  Again I spied the glimmer of an idea. Perhaps this Baxandall was the mastermind behind the calamity, hiding his brilliance by masquerading as a low-rent prestidigitator. Or he might be only the blind behind which Errible, the true prodigy, had concealed himself.

  I had a hunch that one or both of these two persons was central to the mystery. Normally, I despised hunches and had always denied their validity—to my mind, an intuition was no more than the product of an analytical process that took place in the mind's dark back rooms. Occasionally, a door was flung open and the result of unconscious analysis was tossed into the light of the mental front parlor, to be discovered by the incumbent as if it had arrived by mystical means.

  The thought led to another: I wondered if my own back rooms were as fully stocked and active as always but that some force had sealed the doors. The more I examined the idea, mentally probing about in my inner recesses the way my tongue would explore the gap left by an extracted tooth, the more it seemed likely that my faculties had not been irrevocably ripped away, but only placed out of reach. I listened and it seemed that I could almost hear the ghost of my former genius crying out to me from beyond a barrier in my mind.

  I realized that my assistant was saying something. "Repeat," I said.

  "The Exalted Sapience's address is the same as that which the solvency found for Vashtun Errible," it said.

  "Connect me."

  "I cannot. He apparently possesses no integrator."

  "How is that possible?"

  "I cannot even speculate," said the integrator. "His house appears as a blank spot in the connectivity matrix."

  "Ahah!" I said again. "The shape left by the invisible object!"

  "What do you mean?"

  I did not know. It was another hunch. "It would be premature to say," I said. "Summon an aircar and have it take me to that address."

  The vehicle took longer than usual in arriving and I noticed that its canopy was darkly stained. When we rose above the rooftops I saw why: thick columns of greasy, black smoke boiled skyward from several sites along the big bend in the river, joining to form a pall over the south side of the city. To the west, several streets were blocked off by emergency vehicles bearing the lights and colors of the provost bureau, and a surging mob was rampaging through the financial district, smashing glass and overturning motilators.

  The aircar banked and flew north toward an industrial precinct that looked to be quieter. After a few minutes it angled down to a dead-end street below the slideway and alighted before an ill-kept two-story house whose windows were obscured by dark paint. I bid the car remain but it replied that it could only do so if I paid the accumulated fare immediately and allowed it to deduct its waiting fee every five minutes.

  "How much?" I asked and was told that I owed seven hepts. Furthermore, it would charge me twenty grimlets per minute to wait.

  "Usually, I charge such expenses to my account with your firm," I said.

  "These are unusual times," it said, and I was forced to agree to the terms.

  The house was dilapidated, the paint peeling and some siding sprung loose. Dank weeds had invaded and occupied the front lawn and the porch sagged when I topped the front steps. There was a faint smell of boiled vegetables.

  There were symbols painted on the front door. They seemed vaguely familiar but my uncertain memory could not produce their meanings. There was no who's-there beside the door, the house having no integrator to operate it. I struck the painted wood with my knuckles to make my presence known.

  There was no response nor any sound from within. A second knocking brought no result so I tried the latch and the door opened inward.

  I stepped within and called for attention. There was no answer. I looked about and saw a small, untidy foyer from which a closed door led left, a stairway went upward and a short hall ran back to what appeared to be a rudimentary kitchen.

  I called again and heard what might have been a reply from behind the closed door. I opened it and looked into a cramped and fusty parlor dominated by an oversized table draped in black cloth on which was scattered an arrangement of objects and instruments I could not immediately identify. The opaqued windows let in no light, and the only illumination was from some of the strewn bric-a-brac that emitted dim glows and wavering auras.

  "Hello?" I said, and again heard a moan from the gloom beyond the table. I produced a small lumen from my pouch and activated it so that I could work my way around the table without stepping on more knickknacks that seemed to have fallen to the floor.

  Under the table on the far side was what I first took to be a bundle of stained cloth loosely stuffed with raw meat and bare bones. A warm and unappetizing smell rose from it. The cloth was dark and figured with designs and symbols similar to those on the front door, but woven in metallic thread. The moan came again, and now it was clear that the bundle was its source.

  "What is this?" I said, more to myself than to any expected audience, but I was answered by a rich, deep voice from behind me.

  "Not what, but who," it said, "and the answer is The Exalted Sapience Bristal Baxandall. That answer will be valid for at most only a few minutes longer. After that, there are different schools of thought. Would you care to discuss the nature of being and the relationship of soul to identity?"

  I had turned around and found that the voice issued from what I had initially assumed to be a framed abstract on the wall. But I saw now that this painting constantly moved, thick shapes of unusual colors ceaselessly flowing into and out of themselves, their proportions and directions seeming to mislead the eye. A few seconds of regarding it evoked a dizziness and I looked away.

  "I am not equipped for metaphysical discussions today," I said. "Something has impaired my intellect."

  "Indeed?" said the painting.

  "Would you know anything about that?" I asked in a noncommittal tone.

  "It would be premature to say," said the voice.

  I directed the conversation to The Exalted Sapience. "What has happened to him?"

  "He was undertaking a transformational exercise."

  "Surely he did not wish to be transformed into that?"

  "No. It was not his intent to rearrange himself quite so drastically. He wanted only to be younger."

  "Not richer, smarter and better looking?" I asked.

  There was a chuckle. "No, that ambition was Vashtun Errible's."

  "He would be Baxandall's servant?"

  The voice chuckled. "He is the servant, at least until the indenture expires with Baxandall, in a few minutes at the most. He would be the master, though I doubt he will be."

  "And where is Errible now?"

  "He is upstairs consulting Baxandall's library, trying to deduce what went amiss with his plan. The first part went as he expected: he adulterated one of the ingredients in the master's transformation exercise and produced the unhappy result under the table; the second part varied from his expectations."

  "What went wrong?"

  "I did."

  "And what, exactly, are you?"

  "Again, there are
conflicting schools of thought. Baxandall called me a demon; you might call me a figment of the imagination. The Exalted Sapience conscripted me to be his familiar and strove to find ways to channel my . . . energies, shall we say, for his own purposes. Vashtun Errible sees me, quite erroneously, as a box from which he may extract his every tawdry dream."

  I saw it now. "He desired to be the richest, smartest, handsomest man in Olkney," I said. "He was a scraggly shrub that pined to grow into the tallest deodar in the forest. Instead, you shrank the rest of us to weeds."

  "It amused me to confound him."

  "But did it further your interests?" I said. "You indicated that your servitude is involuntary."

  The shapes in the frame performed a motion that might have been a shrug. "But temporary. Baxandall managed to catch me in a clumsy trap. You see, I am of an adventuresome disposition. Boredom led me to become an explorer of adjacent dimensions, even dusty corners like your own. I thought I had found a peephole into your realm, but when I pressed my eye against it—you will understand that I speak metaphorically—I encountered a powerful adhesive."

  The faint voice in the back of my mind was clamoring. I apparently had questions to ask, but I could not make out what they were. Yet even with only a fragment of my usual intellect I perceived that I was in a perilous situation. The entity in the frame exuded a grim complacency. It was about to exact vengeance for its enslavement, and I had already seen that it had no compunctions about inflicting harm on innocent bystanders.

  "I shall leave," I said. "Good luck with Errible."

  But as I made by way around the table, this time keeping the furniture between me and the thing hanging on the wall, a hunch-shouldered figure in a tattered robe appeared in the doorway. I knew from the disharmony of his features that this was Baxandall's indentee.

  He held open before him a large book bound in leather and as soon as he entered the chamber he began to recite from its pages in a voice that came as much from his misshapen nose as from his slack-lipped mouth, "Arbrustram merrilif oberluz, destoi malleonis . . ."

  And then he saw me and his concentration slipped. He broke off in midsentence—only for a moment, but the moment might as well have been an eon, because during that brief caesura the entity on the wall extruded part of itself into the room.

  It was something like an arm, something like a tentacle, something like an insect's hooked limb and altogether like nothing I had ever seen; but it seized Vashtun Errible about the neck, lifted his worn slippers from the carpet and drew him into the swirl of motion within the frame.

  The book fell from his hands as his face was drawn into the maelstrom. The rest of his body followed, pulled through the frame with a sound that reminded me of thick liquid passing through a straw. But I was not concentrating on the peculiarities of Errible's undoing; for the moment his head entered the frame, my faculties were restored.

  I took in the room again, but with new eyes. I recognized some of the objects on the table and recalled having read about the fallen book in my youth. Thus, when the thing in the window had done with Errible and reached for me, it found me holding the volume and quoting the passage that the indentee had begun.

  The limb retracted and the shapes in the frame roiled and coruscated. I could not read the emotions, but I was willing to infer rage and disappointment.

  "This is not as lamentable an outcome as you may think," I said, when the cantrip had once more bound the demon.

  "Our perspectives differ, as is to be expected when one party holds the leash and the other wears the collar," said the thing in the window.

  "We did not finish discussing where your interests lie nor had we even begun to consider mine. But if we can cause them to coincide, I am prepared to relinquish the leash and slip the collar."

  The next sound approximated a sardonic laugh. "After I arrange for you to rule your boring little world, no doubt."

  I made a sound involving lower teeth, upper lip and an explosion of air, and said. "Do I strike you as one who aspires to be a civil servant? The Archon already performs that tedious function and good luck to him."

  A note of interest crept into the demon's tone. "Then what do you wish?"

  I told him.

  With the transdimensional demise of Vashtun Errible, all of his works became as if they never were. Grier Alfazzian's prospects had never dimmed and Oblos Pinnifrant's fortune had not been touched, thus neither owed me a grimlet nor knew that they ever had.

  I did not care. My fees had become increasingly arbitrary: for an interesting case I would take no more than the client could afford; if it bored me, I would include a punitive surcharge. In recent years, as experience had augmented my innate abilities, truly absorbing puzzles had become few and infrequent. I had begun to fear that the rest of my life would offer long decades of ennui, my mind constantly spinning but always in want of traction.

  My encounter with the demon had put that fear to rest. All I had needed was a worthy challenger.

  The next morning I entered my workroom. An envelope rested on my table. I opened it and found a tarnished key and a small square of paper. On the key was a symbol that tweaked at my memory, though I could not place it. Printed on the paper was the single word, Ardmere.

  I placed both on the table and regarded them. I could not resist rubbing my hands together. But before I began to enjoy the mystery, I must fulfill my side of the bargain.

  I took from my pocket a sliver of charred wood in which two hairs were caught. I crossed the room and presented the splinter to the frame hanging on my wall.

  "Not where, not when, not who—but why?" I said.

  A kind of hand took the object from me and drew it into the shifting colors. "Hmm," said my opponent, "interesting."

  "Last one to solve the puzzle is a dimbo," I said, and turned toward the table. "Ready, set . . . go!"

  Relics of the Thim

  My lecture to the assembled savants of the Delve at Five City on the world known as Pierce having been well received, I was conducted to a reception in the First Undermaster's rooms where a buffet of local seafruits and a very presentable aperitif wine stood waiting.

  As Old Earth's foremost freelance discriminator, with an earned reputation for unraveling complex mysteries, I had been invited to lecture on systems of asymmetric logic. I had published a small monograph on the subject the year before. The paper had been reprinted and passed along through various worlds of The Spray, like a blown leaf bouncing down a cobbled street, and the fellows of the Delve were not the only academics sufficiently stimulated to request an elaboration of my views. But they were the only ones to couple their invitation to a first-class ticket on a starship of the Green Orb line. I was happy to accept.

  Halfway through my first glass of the wine, which grew more interesting with each sip, my perfunctory conversation with the Dean of the faculty of applied metaphysics was interrupted by a wizened old scholar, his back as bent as a point of punctuation, who advanced an argument.

  The Dean introduced him as a professor emeritus while rolling his eyes and making other gestures that indicated I should prepare for a tedious encounter.

  "Surely the great Henghis Hapthorn," the old fellow said, in a voice that creaked like unoiled leather, "will not deny that in an infinity of space and time any event that can happen, however remote its probability, will happen."

  "I do not bother to deny it," I said. "I simply dismiss it as irrelevant."

  "But you have said yourself that when all the impossible answers to a question have been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the true answer."

  "Indeed," I said.

  The old man's gimlet gaze bored into me. "Yet in your discussion of the Case of the Winged Dagger, you discounted the possibility that the victim's false suicide note might have been produced by his pet rodent randomly striking the controls of his scriptamanet as it pursued moths about his study."

  "I did," I agreed.

  "Even though the person
accused in the matter offered just that supposition when the case was adjudicated."

  "The defense would have held more cogency if she had not been discovered still holding the stiletto that had pierced the victim's heart," I said.

  "Ahah!" said my interlocutor. "So you also dismiss her contention that explosive gases propelled the weapon out of his chest and across the room and that she merely caught the instrument to prevent it from injuring her?"

  "I do."

  "Even though the victim had dined heartily on bombard beans, well known to generate copious quantities of methane."

  "Indeed," I said, "the constant side effects of his diet were advanced by the procurator's office as a partial motive for his murder. Still, although beans are colloquially associated with offering benefits to the heart, they are not known to charge that organ with propulsive gases."