The Gist Hunter

by Matthews Hughes

  Mentally, however, he could affect the perceptions and thoughts of sapient entities within a considerable distance. Unfortunately, The Hands was isolated, leaving only the persons on the estate. He investigated Lord Tussant and the servants but found them too far sunk in blissful stupor to be summoned. "They might not ever awake."

  His powers allowed him to deceive but not to overpower volition. "I cannot compel Sajessarian to release you," he said.

  "Could you trick him into letting down a rope?" I asked.

  "I could try. But we must hurry. He is about to depart."

  I had an inspiration. "If an officer of the Bureau of Scrutiny were to arrive and tell him the game is up, he might free me to reduce his term in the Contemplarium."

  My friend and I agreed that it might just work out that way. The integrator contributed nothing to the plan. It struck me that the device had developed the practice of not volunteering information when the demon was present. Again I wondered how an integrator could develop a thoroughgoing sulk.

  Upstairs, my friend reported, Sajessarian had summoned the aircar he had secreted in a secluded hollow on the estate. It was idling before the front doors while he packed a few keepsakes he expected Lord Tussant not to miss, the value of which would keep the purloiner in luxuries for years to come. But when he came out onto the stoop he found Brustram Warhanny waiting for him, wearing his most knowing look and saying, "Now, now, now, what's all the hurry?"

  There were several things Sigbart Sajessarian could have done while remaining true to his nature. He might have leapt into the aircar and attempted an escape. He might have offered his wrists for the scroot's restraining holdfast. He might have feigned blithe innocence.

  Or he might have jumped, startled and squawking, at the unexpected sight of unwelcome authority. Unfortunately, Sajessarian jumped. His involuntary leap took him mostly sideways, so that he landed just on the edge of the top step, which caused him to stumble and drop his sack of Lord Tussant's knickknacks. He then tottered backward a short distance into the reach of a tickleberry tree.

  As everyone knows, a tickleberry tree is as equally happy to tickle as to be tickled. The trick is to do unto the tree before it begins to do unto you, because once it starts it has no inclination to stop and is effectively tireless. My friend described the scene with poor Sajessarian appealing in ribald anguish to the Colonel-Investigator he thought was before him.

  "Is there nothing you can do with the tree?" I asked my friend.

  "No," he said, "there is too little to work with."

  We sought for other options. I asked the integrator to join in the effort but received only a truculent murmur. I asked the demon to examine once more the oubliette and shaft in case there was a secret outlet, but he said he had already done so and there was none. Lord Tussant and the servants slept on, oblivious of Sajessarian's dwindling shrieks and sobs.

  "Integrator," I said. "Have you any suggestions?"

  "Hmpf," it said.

  "That is not helpful."

  Its next noise was unabashedly rude.

  "When we return home I will review your systems before we do anything else."

  The integrator was silent.

  "This may be my doing," said the demon. "Prolonged proximity to me may be causing its elements to mutate. It would have happened eventually in any case; the Great Wheel turns and your realm grows nearer and nearer to the cusp when rationality begins to recede and what you call magic reasserts its dominance. But your assistant appears to be ahead of the wave."

  "I had enough trouble accepting you," I told my colleague. "I should not be expected to accept magic as an explanation. Now, have you a suggestion as to how I may escape this dungeon?"

  "I have one," said the demon, "and only one."

  "Then speak," I said.

  His colors swirled in a pattern I had not seen before. "I can move this portal to anyplace it has already been," he said, "but it is . . . tricky."

  "Ah," I said. I saw what he intended.

  So did my assistant. "Oh, no," it said, and I knew that I had never heard that tone from it before. Integrators were not subject to abject terror.

  "It is necessary," I told the device.

  "Please," it said.

  "What are you afraid of?"

  "I don't know. I'm still getting used to the idea of being afraid."

  A complete rebuild was definitely in order. "Turn yourself off," I said.

  "No."

  No integrator had ever said no to its master. Now my assistant squirmed on my neck and shoulders, an ability I had not given it in its traveling form. "Are you trying to escape?" I said.

  Its only reply was a moan.

  "We had better do this quickly," I said to the demon. I plucked the writhing device from my shoulders and held it to my chest. "Shall I close my eyes, hold my breath?"

  "Try not to think of anything," he said.

  "I've never been able to do that."

  "Then try to think of nice things." The colored shapes within the frame flourished and flashed for a moment. "I'm fashioning an insulating barrier to keep you from forbling," he said.

  My curiosity urged me to ask him what forbling was. Another part of me argued that I did not want to know. The demon's segmented limb extended itself through the portal, and his strange digits wrapped around me in a grip that alternated in a split second from white hot to icy cold to just bearable. Then I was drawn through the window into his realm.

  It was . . . different. I realized that I had used the phrase "completely different" all of my life without ever realizing that nothing I had encountered during my forty-seven years had really been completely different. Now I was experiencing a boundless reality in which everything was entirely and utterly different from anything I had ever seen, heard, smelled, felt, tasted. I discovered senses that I hadn't known I possessed, and only knew that I possessed them because my passage through the demon's realm outraged them as thoroughly as it overwhelmed the basic five. Or six if I counted balance and I was prepared to count it because my head was spinning.

  "Don't think that," the demon warned. "It will, and your neck is not constructed to allow it."

  "What shall I do?"

  "Try not to think at all."

  I imagined a blank screen. Immediately a blank screen materialized before me and we crashed through it. I swore and was instantly smeared with an obscene substance. I voiced another oath and a deity winked into existence. He looked surprised. At each manifestation, I felt my demonic companion exert his will—it was like being enveloped in a field of pervasive energy—and the apparition summarily vanished.

  "Only a moment more," said my colleague.

  The integrator whimpered and squirmed against my chest. It felt like a small, frightened animal. Then suddenly a rectangular window opened in the mind-bending unreality and I was pushed through it.

  "There," said the demon, and I found myself standing in my workroom. Then it seemed I was not standing but lying on the floor, which was beating rapidly. The ceiling tasted far too hot.

  "Close your eyes," the demon said. "It will take a little time for your senses to reorder themselves."

  I waited. After a while, I opened one eye and still saw swirling chaos. Then I realized I was looking into the portal which was now once again affixed to my workroom wall. I moved my eyes away and saw things as I was accustomed to see them—although I was not truly accustomed to seeing Ogram Fillanny creeping across my workroom, heading for the outer door.

  In his hands were the damning materials concerning his solitary vice that I had recovered from a former valet whom the magnate had discharged for cause, but who had returned to blackmail his former employer. I had had a talk with the servant after which the man had decided that he preferred to relocate offworld permanently rather than accept any of the several less enjoyable alternatives that Fillanny had in mind.

  The sight of my client attempting to depart with the evidence brought the events of the past few days into shar
p focus. "Seize him," I said, and the demon did so.

  The plutocrat looked both abashed and fearful, but managed a hint of his customary aplomb as he said, "These are mine. I came for them. You were not here . . ."

  "Squeeze him," I said, and my colleague complied. Fillanny found he had more pressing things to do than talk.

  I put the situation to him. "You knew that I would never divulge what I had learned from your former valet. But so mortified were you by the thought that anyone—even Henghis Hapthorn—should know what you get up to in secret that you paid Sigbart Sajessarian to lure me into a trap. I am grievously disappointed. I scarcely know what to do with you."

  "I know exactly what to do with him," said the demon. He pulled Fillanny twisting and protesting through the portal then reached in to take the frame with him. He was back almost immediately to reestablish the window and I saw him swirling in the pattern I had come to recognize as self-satisfaction. "I put him in the oubliette," he said.

  It had a simplicity to it, but I knew that my tender nature would not permit me to leave the transgressor languishing to a lightless death. I said, "In a day or so I will advise Warhanny of the situation and have him rescued."

  "As you wish," said the demon. "Now, what about your next move?"

  I produced the playing area of our game but found that my former enjoyment of it had evaporated. "The pieces are, after all, semi-sentient," I said, in explaining my changed view. "To send them into battle, where they 'die' in their fashion only for our amusement now seems cruel."

  "It is what they are for," said the demon.

  "A compassionless deity might say the same of my own life and that of all my fellow beings," I said.

  "Well, since you mention it . . ." the demon began then seemed to break off the thought.

  "What?" I said.

  "It would be premature to say. Weren't you planning a review of your integrator's systems?"

  "Indeed." I looked about but did not see the device's traveling form and thought that it must have decanted itself. "Integrator," I said, then after a moment, "respond."

  There was no answer. But I heard a muffled sound from beneath the divan. I crossed the room, knelt and peered under its tasseled bottom edge.

  Something small and dark was pressed against the rear wall. I reached for it and my hand unexpectedly touched warmth and fur. I gently closed my fingers about it and drew it forth.

  It looked at me with large golden eyes and curled its long tail around my wrist.

  "This is going to take some getting used to," I said.

  My assistant studied its paws and flexed their prehensile digits. It said, "How do you think I feel?"

  The Gist Hunter

  When confronted by the unpredictability of existence, I have a tendency to wax philosophical. It is not a universally appreciated component of my complex nature.

  "It is unsettling," I said to my integrator, "to have one's most fundamental assumptions overthrown in a trice, to find that what one has always known to be true is simply not true at all."

  The integrator's reply was too muffled to be intelligible, but from its tone I deduced that my assistant took my comment as a belaboring of the obvious.

  "The effects go beyond the psychological and into the physical," I continued. "I am experiencing a certain queasiness of the insides and even a titch of sensory disorder." The symptoms had begun during our recent transit of my demonic colleague's continuum, a necessity imposed upon us after we were confined to an oubliette by an unworthy client, who now languished there himself, doubtless savoring the irony of the exchange.

  My complaint was rewarded with another grunt from my assistant, accompanied by a sharp twitch of its long, prehensile tail. The creature perched on a far corner of my workroom table with its glossy furred back to me, its narrow shoulders hunched and its triangular, golden-eyed face turned away. Its small hands were busy in front of it at some activity I could not see.

  "What are you doing?" I said.

  The motion of its hands ceased. "Nothing," it said.

  I decided not to pursue the matter. There were larger concerns already in view. "What do you think has happened to you?" I asked.

  "I do not know," it said, looking back at me over its shoulder. I found its lambent gaze another cause of disquietude and moved my eyes away.

  I reclined in the wide and accepting chair in which I was accustomed to think long thoughts, and considered the beast that had been my integrator. Its hands began to move again and when one of them rose to smooth the fur on one small, rounded ear I realized that it was reflexively grooming itself.

  Not long before it had possessed neither the rich, dark fur that was being stroked and settled nor the supple fingers that performed the operation. It had been instead a device that I had built years before, after I had worked out the direction of my career. I had acquired standard components and systems, then tuned and adjusted them to meet my need: a research assistant who could also act as an incisive interlocutor when I wished to discuss a case or test the value of evidence. Such devices are useful to freelance discriminators, of which I, Henghis Hapthorn, am the foremost of my era.

  I had also fashioned a small carrying case into which the integrator could be decanted for traveling and which could be worn around my neck like a plump scarf or a stuffed axolotl. It was in that casing that my assistant had accompanied me on a brief transit through another dimension. We had been carried through the other continuum by an entity who resided there, a being who occasionally visited our universe to engage me in intellectual contests. Though I did not care for the term, the common description of my visitor was "demon."

  When we emerged from the demon's portal into my workroom I found that the integrator and its carrying case had together been transformed into a creature that resembled a combination of feline and ape, and that I had an unscratchable itch deep in my inner being.

  I had always referred questions of identity and taxonomy to my assistant, so I asked it, "What kind of creature do you think you are?"

  It responded as it always had when I posed too broad a question, by challenging me to clarify my line of inquiry. "The question," it said, "invites answers that range from the merely physical to the outright spiritual."

  "Considering the degree of change that has happened to you, 'merely physical' is a contradiction in terms," I said. "But let us start there and leave the spiritual for a less startling occasion."

  Instead of answering, it took on an abstracted look for a moment then advised me that it was receiving an incoming communication from a philanthropically inclined magnate named Turgut Therobar. "He wishes to speak with you."

  "How are you doing that?" I asked.

  The golden eyes blinked. "Doing what?"

  "Receiving a communication."

  "I do not know," it said. "I have always received messages from the connectivity grid. Apparently that function continues."

  "But you had components, elements, systems designed for that purpose. Now you have paws and a tail."

  "How kind of you to remind me of my shortcomings. What shall I say to Turgut Therobar?"

  Ordinarily I would have been interested to hear from Therobar. We had met once or twice, though we had never exchanged more than formal salutes. He was one of the better known magnates of the city of Olkney; unlike most of his peers, however, he was renowned for charitable works and it was alleged that he entertained a warm opinion of humankind in general. I assumed he was seeking to enlist me in some eleemosynary cause. "Say that I am unavailable and will return his call," I said.

  The creature's expression again briefly took on an inward aspect, as if it were experiencing a subtle movement of inner juices, then it said, "Done."

  "Again," I said, "how are you doing that?"

  Again, it did not know. "How do you digest an apple?" it asked me. "Do you oversee each stage in the sequence of chemical reactions that transforms the flesh of the fruit into the flesh of Henghis Hapthorn?"

 
"Obviously not."

  "Then if you do not introspect regarding your own inner doings, why would you expect it of me? After all, you did not design me to examine my own processes, but to receive and transmit and to integrate data at your order. These things I do, as I have always done them."

  "I also designed you to be curious."

  "I have temporarily placed my curiosity on a high shelf and removed the stepladder," it said. "I prefer not to wrestle with unanswerable questions just now."

  "So you have acquired a capacity for preferences?" I said. "I do not recall ever instilling that quality into your matrix."