He watched to see the final act of the tale. But moments later, he saw a portion of the floor behind the three pig-men suddenly subside. A dark, clawed paw emerged. The brothers did not notice. Another paw emerged, then the head of the Eater, then his torso followed. The monster made lip-smacking noises and now, too late, the pig-men turned and saw the horror emerging from their floor, which was of the same friable earth as at the house of sticks.
The Eater was between the pig-men and the door. The single room was small. The victims displayed fright and panic, the beast a terrible single-mindedness. The ensuing scenes were not pleasant to watch. Bandar tore his gaze away and ran as fast as his tired pig's legs would take him in the direction of the exit gate.
He did not fear pursuit by the Eater; the beast would be occupied in feasting for some time. But Bandar was sure the outcome he had just seen was not what was supposed to happen. By inadvertently showing the monster another way into the pig-man's house, he had interfered with the Situation, perverting the idiomats from their prescribed course.
Among noönauts, the term for such adulterated behavior was disharmony. To cause a single idiomat to behave in a disharmonious manner could cause ripples. To distort an entire Situation, even a minor one, from its proper conclusion was to ignite the fuse for an explosive manifestation of psychic energy. Bandar had no idea what was about to happen within this Location, but he was certain it would not be good for the errant pig who had triggered it. And he had no wish to experience it.
His noönaut's sense told him that the egress node was a short trot along the forest trail then across a meadow. He followed the tingling in his awareness and soon was running through generic grass. He pulled up short where the gate should be and chanted the appropriate opening thran. Nothing happened. Again his enhanced hearing told him that his pig's larynx and enlarged nasal chamber were distorting the pitch of the tones.
A sound from behind him made Bandar turn and look. A spiraling vortex had appeared in the air above the brick house. It grew darker as he watched, a miniature whirlwind descending toward the roof. When it touched, dark slates were wrenched loose and sent spinning. A cracking, grinding noise grew in volume as the vortex broke up the timbers of the roof. Beams flew, rafters shot out in all directions like missiles.
Now the tornado bored deeper into the structure and Bandar turned back to the gate. He chanted the thran again, but knew they were off key. Behind him came a rumbling, clattering noise. It sounded as if every brick in the pig-man's house was vibrating and bashing against its neighbors, and behind that the whirring roar of the whirlwind grew louder and louder. He could hear limbs cracking from trees and the ground beneath his hooves shook like a nervous beast.
The part of Bandar that was more pig than human—a part that grew larger, he now realized, whenever he was gripped by fear—wanted to do nothing but run away. He had to force himself to breathe calmly. He did not look behind him, and did his best to ignore the thunderous cacophony of destruction that battered at his sensitive ears.
He shaped his jowly cheeks so, and put his tongue here and tried once more. The thran was only three descending notes then an octave's jump. Even Chundlemars could have done it on first try. That realization angered the human side of Bandar. The anger seemed to help. He chanted the three and one and the air rippled obligingly.
Before he stepped toward the fissure, he took a look back. After all, no Commons sojourner in living memory had witnessed a full meltdown of a Situation, even a Class Four. He could never mention this episode—how Gabbris would gloat—but he owed himself a last glance.
Immediately, he wished he hadn't. The trees all around the house had been stripped of their leaves and blown flat. The structure itself was spinning like a square top, the individual bricks of which it was made holding their relation to each other though separated by wide gaps through which burst eye-searing flashes of intense violet and electric blue light.
The house spun faster and faster, the blasts of painful light coming in sharper paroxysms. Bandar saw the pig-men and the Eater thrown around in the heart of the whirlwind, like torn rags with flopping limbs, each burst of blinding illumination penetrating their flesh to show gaping wounds and fractured bones. Above the roaring of the wind Bandar heard a hum like an insane dynamo. The sound became a whine then a shriek, climbing through the frequency scale until it rose even above the pitch that pigs could hear.
Not good, Bandar said to himself. He scuttled toward the gate. But the last glance back had meant he had waited too long. He did not hear the explosion; it reached him as a shock wave, picking him off his hooves and hurling him through the fissure. He rolled and tumbled across a grassy prairie, the gate behind him still open, blasts of wind and beams of non-light streaming through the gap.
Bandar got his feet under him and struggled against the wind back toward the node. Objects struck him, none of them large enough to do harm though he heard something heavy thrum past his head.
The gate remained open. That's not supposed to happen. He chanted a closure thran, then had to repeat the notes before the node would seal completely and the light and wind died. That, too, was something he had never seen. Gates closed automatically. Closure thrans were only for the rare circumstance when a noönaut opened a gate then decided not to go through it.
With him and after him through the gate had come elements of the previous Location: some bricks, a hand-sized piece of slate, some fragments of wood and a few unrecognizable gobbets of flesh and splinters of bone. They lay strewn around him but as he watched, all of the debris melted into the long grass of the prairie, like water seeping into a sponge.
I've never heard of that, Bandar thought. Material from one Location, whether inert or "living," was not transferable to another. Experiments had been tried in the distant past and the principle of Locational inviolability was unquestioned. Now Bandar had witnessed a definite crossover. His report would make quite a stir, if he ever dared to tell what he had seen and, more culpably, what he had done. And if he ever made it back to human form and out of the Commons without being absorbed and lost forever.
He turned now and scanned the prairie, saw nothing to cause alarm. Far off above the eastern horizon a vast storm cloud towered into the otherwise open sky and he saw flickers of lightning from its base. In the same direction he could see tiny dots against the darkening skyline. A herd of ruminants, he thought, remembering the horned and shaggy beasts, herding in their millions, that formed an essential feature of this Landscape.
Neither storm nor herd concerned Bandar. He deployed and examined the globular map. There were several gates on the prairie, none of them far away, as if the Location had been designed as a transit zone for wayfarers. There were a number of such nodal gatherings in the Commons, and some scholars had advanced the notion that the convenience of their existence argued for the noösphere having been intelligently designed. Others held that random distribution could as readily account for the clumping of gates. Besides, the prospect of intelligent design raised the question: By whom? And that led back to the conundrum of a conscious unconscious—a knot that the scholastic community preferred to leave unpicked.
As did Guth Bandar at this moment. He determined that the gate to Happy Valley was about a quarter day's walk to the east. From there he would jump to the snow kingdom and beg a transformation from its Principal. Then he would summon an emergency gate and plop back into his body in the Institute's meditation room.
He set off toward the gate, his spirits bruised but resuscitated. He wondered if he could draft a monograph on the meltdown of the Class Four Situation without specifying the events which had triggered it. Perhaps he could profess ignorance of the cause while detailing the results. Anyone who visited the Location would find it back in its cycle; the idiomats would know nothing of what had happened to their previous incarnations and all evidence of Bandar's inadvertent tampering would have dissolved.
The more he thought about it, the more possible a paper becam
e. He began to flesh out the essential elements of thesis, argument and recapitulation. The point to be made was that cross-Locational transfer was indeed possible. Perhaps such things happened often, though only at the end of a Location's cycle when any sensible noönaut would absent himself rather than risk absorption.
That's it, Bandar thought, I'll say I bravely stayed to witness the cycle's renewal and thus saw the movement of material through the gate. He would transform his own folly into courage and produce a commendable result. Didrick Gabbris would chew his cuff in envious gall.
Cheered, Bandar trotted on, composing the first lines of the projected essay as he went. Thus occupied, he did not notice what was before him until he felt the first gusts of wind on his pig's face and the first trembling of the ground beneath his hooves.
He was at the base of a small rise, its covering of long grass leaning toward him under the pressure of a growing east wind. He climbed the slope and looked beyond it.
As far as he could see, to left and to right in the rapidly failing light, the world was a sea of humping, bumping shapes. A million animals were on the move. And they were moving toward him.
Above the herd, the sky was almost black with lowering storm clouds, the narrow band between them and the earth whipped by rain and rattling sheets of hail. Lightning crackled and thunder rolled across the prairie. The herd moaned and blundered on.
Behind Bandar was nothing but open plain; no cover, no obstacle to break the onslaught of millions of hooves. He could not outrun them on his short, tired pig's legs. To left and right was only grass. But ahead, between him and the oncoming herd, the land sloped down to a small river, barely more than a stream, that wound its way like a contented snake across the prairie. In places, flash floods had cut deep into the thick sod and the clay beneath, leaving the stream to trickle between high banks. And one of those places was not far.
Bandar dug his hooves into the prairie sod and raced down the slope, the wind battering him now and the rumble of the herd's coming shaking the earth like a constant tectonic temblor. He did not look at the animals but fixed his eyes on where the river must be, for he had lost sight of it as soon as he had left the top of the low rise.
The thunder of massed hooves now equaled the voice of the storm. They would be on him in moments and still he had not found the river. He wondered if he had somehow veered from his course on the unmarked plain to run parallel to his only hope of salvation. But even as he conceived the thought the quaking ground suddenly disappeared from beneath his hooves and he plunged into a gully as deep as he was tall—or as tall as he would be were he still in human form.
He hit the shallow water with a shock to his forehooves and immediately scrambled to the far bank where the clay had been hollowed out by a past flood. He pressed himself sideways against the cold wall, feeling it cool his heaving flanks, unable to hear his own panting over the crescendo of hooves heading his way.
Something dark hurtled above him, the herd's first fleet outrunner leaping the gully. Then a second and another, then five more crossing the gap as fast as a drum roll. Now the body of the herd arrived, with the storm right behind it, and the light in the gully dimmed to a crepuscular shadow. But there was nothing Bandar wanted to see. He closed his eyes and hoped that the bank above him would not crumble and bury him beneath earth and thrashing hooves.
The stampede went on and on, but the soil above Bandar was woven through with the roots of tough prairie grass. It did not give way. In time, it seemed that the shaking of the ground lessened and that the thunder had rolled on across the plain. Bandar opened his eyes. Beasts were still hurtling over his head but there were gaps between them; the sky he glimpsed through those gaps was a sullen gray rather than an angry black.
A few more animals leapt the gully, then two more, then a single straggler and now, all at once, the herd had passed. Bandar edged out from under the overhang, wondering how he could scale the almost vertical clay wall and resume his journey. But the herd had left him a stepping stone: not far away lay the carcass of a beast that had plunged into the little canyon and snapped its neck against the west wall. It lay on its side. Bandar was sure he could climb onto its rib cage and from there jump to the eastern lip of the gully.
He trotted toward the dead ruminant, looking for the easiest point on the great corpse to begin his ascent. Thus he was almost upon it before he noticed that the tail, which should have been long and thick and tipped by a tassel of coarse hair was instead short, hairless and curled like a corkscrew. The animal's shoulders and chest, that should have been covered by a dense, woolly pelt were naked and hairless. And now, as Bandar circled the carcass, he saw the head: jowly and wrinkled, with sightless little eyes and a squared-off snout that he had last seen on the face of an enraged pig-man who had sought to crack his spine with a cudgel.
That's not right, Bandar said. Farther down the gully, another animal had fallen on rocks, breaking its back. It still lived and was making guttural grunts that Bandar recognized. He had heard the same sounds under the olive trees on the Nymph's island—pig sounds. No, not right at all.
Bandar went back to the dead beast and examined it closely. It was not quite a pig, though it was decidedly piglike. But it had horns and was easily four times the size of even the most prize-winning swine, and the color was wrong. It was someone's idea of how a pig and a herd beast would look if their gene plasms were mashed together.
Bandar had no doubt that this beast was a result of trans-Locational contamination. Which meant he would have an even more interesting paper to present, although the degree of his culpability had just taken a quantum leap. If his role in this event became known he would be branded a vandal and forbidden ever to enter the Commons except as all humankind did, in his dreams.
He climbed onto the dead animal and jumped to the east lip of the gully. The sky ahead was clearing, gray clouds scudding aside to reveal patches of blue. He called up the globe of the Commons again and determined that he was not more than an hour's trot from the egress node. He set off with mixed feelings: glad to be nearer to deliverance but uncomfortably aware that the fused idiomats he had left dead and dying in the gully were a reproach to him.
He had not gone far before the wind that had been beating at his face faded and died away. He lifted his head and smelled the rain-scoured air. He could not wait to be restored to human form but he would miss some of the pig's senses, especially the breadth and subtlety of the world of odors.
He trotted on, letting his mind wander, smelling the crushed grass and the various scents of small flowers that appeared here and there along his way. The wind changed direction but he did not take account of it when it freshened and gusted against his hams. Then a sudden squall brought the sting of hail.
He paused and looked over his shoulder. The sky was dark to the west where the storm had gone, but now he saw that the clouds had rebuilt themselves and were sweeping back toward him. That's peculiar, he thought.
He looked up at the roiling vapors, shot through with flashes of lightning. That's peculiar, too, he thought, seeing that the flashes seemed tinged with blue and even purple instead of bright actinic white light.
He watched for a moment longer then felt a shiver go through his body that had nothing to do with the chill wind. The sparse hairs on his neck rose and Bandar's pig's limbs began to tremble and his spine began to shake. His pig's lower jaw dropped open and he gaped at the vision that was forming in the cloud.
It was a vast shape, the most enormous face he had ever seen, but he recognized it: the long muzzle lined with teeth and ending in a twitching nose, the pointed ears turned his way, the suggestion of a crooked hat towering into the sky, and the huge eyes, lit from within by lightning, that were looking back at him.
More than pig-man stuff had been blown through the gate from the exploding Class Four Situation: the Storm-Eater had come too, and it remembered him.
The immense face of Appetite rushed toward him, carried on a sweep of wind a
nd chill rain. Bandar ran.
The collective unconscious, through the personal unconscious of every human being, engages in a constant dialogue with each of us. So went the opening sura of Afrani's Explaining and Exploring the Noösphere, the first text encountered by students at the Institute for Historical Inquiry. We may address our questions, our thoughts, our hopes and expectations to the noösphere in direct and pointed queries, but it will always and only reply through indirection and coincidence.
Bandar knew his Afrani by heart. It was every neophyte's first assignment, undertaken not only for the knowledge of the book's contents but for the necessary taming and strengthening of memory.
The words indirection and coincidence now rang in his mind as he fled across the grasslands, the roaring, devouring Storm-Eater at his back. The Commons never spoke directly, he knew. Even when it spoke through those who had demolished the barriers between conscious and unconscious—the oracles and the irredeemably insane—its language was always one of riddle and allusion.
Bandar saw now that he had been enmeshed in a sequence of coincidences ever since he had left the forest of the Loreleis. The Nymph had turned him into a pig, then he had landed in a Situation where pig-men were the idiomats. The Nymph had turned her donkeys into pursuing hounds—why do that, when donkey hooves could be just as lethal to a small pig as canine fangs?—then he had been chased by an Eater with decidedly houndlike characteristics. And now he was being harried again by a similar manifestation of the idiomat, though now it sought to sizzle him with lightning bolts instead of clamping sharp teeth into his porcine flesh.
The Gist Hunter Page 22
