The Gist Hunter

by Matthews Hughes

  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.

  "Not madness," said the soft voice. "Merely something new."

  In the fog, the sound seemed to come from all directions and from none. Bandar collapsed the sphere then turned and peered about him, but there was only the ubiquitous vapor. He looked up to see if he could identify a direction from which the light came, and thus orient himself, but no part of the unseeable sky was brighter than any other.

  Now he became aware of a shape a little to his right. He turned to face it, at the same time beginning to chant the four-and-six thran, the sequence of tones that was most commonly effective.

  "It will do you no good," said the voice.

  Bandar switched to the seven-and-three.

  "Neither will that." The shape was becoming clearer. It was human in size and outline.

  He tried the four-four-and-two.

  "Nor that." It was moving closer, though Bandar saw no motion that suggested walking. It seemed to float toward him through the mist.

  "Who are you?" he said. "What do you want of me?"

  "You know who we are," said the voice.

  The figure had come close enough for Bandar to see that it was definitely human, but that was its only definite characteristic. Its progress stopped when it was near enough for him to have touched its face, and he stared, trying to bring form and features into focus.

  But he could not. The face and figure before him constantly shifted, a set of features appearing and disappearing every second in a constant series of slow dissolves. He saw an old man, a young girl, a scarred warrior, an evil king, a sad-eyed clown, a were-beast, a matron, a shining god. The form beneath the face shifted in harmony, showing him lush robes succeeded by battered armor, replaced by rough-sewn animal skins, which gave way to roseate nakedness supplanted by samite threaded through by gold.

  "I know who you are," Bandar said. "You are the Multifacet." He used the term every loblolly apprentice learned in his first week at the Institute. It denoted the crowd of archetypal personas that made up the human psyche and from which every individual assembled a personality, some taking more of this one and less of that one, and everyone's individual mix evolving over a lifetime, as nature and circumstances dictated. But here they were assembled in one vessel.

  "Yes." The answer came when the figure was that of a young stripling, the voice breaking to make two syllables out of one.

  Bandar let anger infuse his reply. "You are the one who has ruined my career."

  A wicked witch-king answered, "But to a purpose."

  "No purpose of mine."

  "We could give you an argument on that. We contain all that combines to form you, after all."

  Bandar folded his arms across his chest. "But we have not arrived at 'after all,'" he said. "Instead, I am in the springtime of my life, which you have just diverted from the only course along which I ever sought to shape my years."

  The shifting faces regarded him through a succession of eyes—sharp, mild, innocent, cunning—then the voice of an aged queen said, "We require you to perform a service. We will reward you, as best we may."

  "Reward me? Very well, return me to the Institute's good graces and I am yours."

  "We cannot," said a portly toper. "A life at the Institute will not shape you to do what you must do."

  "Then how will you repay me for the loss of my heart's desire?"

  A bearded prophet answered, "With useful qualities that are ours to bestow: the power to persuade, the knack of winning trust and affection, luck in small things." By the time the speech was finished, the speaker was a sly-eyed rogue.

  "None of these came to my aid in the Grand Colloquium."

  "Your path does not lead through the Institute."

  "My path?" Bandar said. "If it is not mine to choose, by what definition does it remain my path?"

  "We cannot debate with you," said a slack-mouthed idiot that became a proud hierophant. "You are chosen. You must accept."

  "And if I will not?"

  "You must."

  "What is the service you require?"

  "We cannot tell you that."

  "When would I have performed it and be free of you?"

  "Not for many years."

  "Then why disrupt my life now?"

  "You must have time to grow into the kind of man who can do what must be done."

  "What kind of man is that?"

  There was no answer. Bandar had had enough. "You abort my career then offer me trinkets for some service you will not define. I decline your offer. Instead I will awaken now and let you seek out a more credulous implement for your obscure purposes. I recommend Didrick Gabbris."

  He opened his mouth to sound the seven notes that would pluck him from this nebulous place and let him wake in his bed. But the protean figure before him raised a hand, smooth and full fleshed as it came up, transforming into a black gauntlet as it mimed squeezing with thumb and forefinger. Bandar's throat closed. He could make no sound, not even a moan around the obstacle that his tongue had suddenly become.

  A rift opened in the pearly mist. Bandar's eyes narrowed against a burst of raw sunlight, then he felt himself propelled through the node. He fell to his knees and pitched forward. Burning sand stung his palms. Heat swaddled him and the air was thick with the rank odor of stale sweat.

  "Up!" said a harsh voice. A line of fire cut across the noönaut's shoulders. He would have screamed if he could have, but his voice was still imprisoned within his chest. The lash came back, this time striking the same flesh and creating a pain that compounded the first to evoke an astonishing effect. Bandar leapt to his feet and looked about him.

  The desert stretched in every direction but to his rear, where trees sheltered a substantial town beside a broad river, with grain fields beyond the farther shore. Ahead was a massive pile of masonry, each sand-colored, oblong block as long as Bandar was tall and half his height in cross-section. He could measure their size accurately because just such a block was immediately before him, snared in a net of fibrous ropes and with peeled logs beneath to roll on. The ropes went forward to rest upon the shoulders of a gang of straining, half-naked men. Two others were busy pulling logs from behind the back of the stone and running to position them just ahead of its inching progress. A few more were at the rear of the procession pushing the block forward and it was here that Guth Bandar found himself. They all wore long kilts of linen and not much else, although some had sandals and a few wore skullcaps. Bandar looked down at himself and found that he was similarly attired.

  But the hands and arms he saw, the pot belly and spindly shanks leading to splayed flat feet, were not those of Guth Bandar. It was an unheard of circumstance. A noönaut entered the Commons in his own virtual image. But Bandar here was clearly not Bandar in appearance. Somehow he had been thrust into the "flesh" of an idiomat. It was but the latest impossibility that Bandar had had to swallow, but it was the one that worried him most.

  "Push!" said the voice that had accompanied the whip. The noönaut hastened to place his palms against the sandstone and shove before the braided leather could revisit the welt made by its previous landings and bring about an as yet hypothetical but entirely likely third degree of agony whose existence Bandar did not wish to confirm. The stone was cool against his sweating palms and the effort needed to move it across the rollers—aided by all the other straining muscles in the work gang—was not as taxing as he would have expected. Indeed, the men pulling and repositioning the rollers seemed to be working harder than the haulers.

  The labor required no mental effort, however, other than to re
member to step over the rearmost log as it was pulled from beneath the block. Bandar was thus able to give his full attention to his predicament. The more he considered it, the worse it became. The amount of activity around him, the scope and scale of the site, told him that this was not just a Landscape, nor was it a mere Situation: this was an Event, and a Class One Event at that.

  The scholars of the Institute categorized the myriad Locations of the noösphere into three types. The simplest were Landscapes, which were recollections of the archetypal settings against which the long story of human existence had been carried out. They ranged from the painted caves that sheltered humankind's infancy, through jungle and farmed plain, to cityscapes of all ages, including the most decadent of Old Earth's penultimate age.

  More complex were the Situations, which preserved all the recurrent circumstances and rites of passage that were the landmarks of human life, from birth through the first kiss, to the meeting of soulmates and on to the gathering of kin around the deathbed. Situations also covered all the darker milestones to be encountered between cradle and grave: the stillborn child, the lover's betrayal, the breaking of friendship's bonds and the lonely death in the wilderness.

  Most detailed of all were the Events, the turning points great and small on which history had pivoted: from the fire-hunt that chased mammoths over cliffs to the first planting of crops, through the founding and sack of cities, to the taming of frontiers and the building of topless towers.

  Landscapes were classified according to their size, from a back street to a trackless ocean. All of them recycled quickly. Situations were ranked according to their complexity: some might involve no more than one person's hand enfolding another's; others might require a cast of thousands. But the duration of most Situations was brief, from a moment to at most a few hours, then the elements reformed and the process began anew.

  Events, however, might range in duration from under a minute (for a Class Six occurrence like a sprinters' foot race), to a span of many years, even of more than a lifetime, as in such Class One Events as The Opening of the Territory or The Invasion of the Barbarians.

  As Bandar shoved against the block of stone and gazed about him at the scores of other work gangs playing their parts he became more and more fearful that he was trapped in a Location that might endure for as long as a slave—for surely that was what he was in this place—could expect to live.

  Unable to speak, he could not sing the tones that would hide him from the perceptions of the idiomatic entities around him. Nor could he activate an exit node and escape back to the waking world. Until his voice returned—and he refused to believe it would not—he was stuck in what was obviously an early version of a Class One Event: The Building of the Grand Monument.

  Bandar continued to push, the cycle of the rollers continued, and time wore on as he looked about him and waited for his throat to heal. He was hoping that the cause of his muteness was induced hysterical paralysis, which might fade with time, rather than a magic spell. In the Commons, magic worked effectively and permanently. He grunted and achieved a chesty sound. But when he sought to generate different tones he could not convince himself that he was meeting with success.

  His efforts attracted the attention of the idiomat next to him, a heavy-featured man whose back and chest were slabs of muscle and whose arms were corded with hard flesh. The entity turned his small, close-set eyes on Bandar and regarded him without favor, then said, "Shut up, dummy," and laughed at his own wit. In case there was any doubt that the injunction should not be interpreted as friendly banter from an amiable workmate, he accompanied it with a slap of his plate-sized hand that left Bandar's virtual head ringing.

  Bandar subsided. He would wait until he was alone to try again. He had only to manage the seven tones and his consciousness would be freed from this imprisoning false flesh. He would wake at home in his bed.

  The passage of the sun told him that he had arrived in the Event at about midmorning. By the time the men's shadows were pooled about their feet, they had brought the block more than halfway to its destination. At that point, a two-wheeled cart caught up with them, pulled by a leather-skinned old man wearing only a kind of diaper. The overseer with the whip, a skinny fellow with a squint in one eye, called a halt. The slaves immediately stopped their labors and began what looked to Bandar to be a practiced routine: some pulled from the cart a few poles and a wide bolt of cloth and quickly created an awning whose back wall was the stone block. Others extracted baskets of round, flat loaves and terracotta jars that sloshed with liquid confined by wooden stoppers. The men gathered to sit in the shade of the cloth while the food and drink was passed around.

  Bandar lowered his buttocks to the hot sand and accepted a chunk torn from a loaf and a wooden cup from the man next to him, a young-looking idiomat who offered him a shy smile and a friendly word. The old man in the loincloth stooped to pour from one of the jars and Bandar smelled the yeasty odor of beer. He drank half a cupful in one gulp, finding it sour but refreshing, then bit off a mouthful of bread and chewed. It was tough though flavorful, despite occasional iotas of grit that scored the enamel of his teeth.

  He swallowed and regarded the idiomats with circumspect glances, sorting them into types. Travelers in the noösphere had to remember that its inhabitants were only facsimiles of human persons. Principals of Class One Events and Situations might be somewhat internally varied and nuanced. One such had been the satanic Adversary from whom Bandar had received the permanent gift of memory that enabled him to reify the map of the Commons as a color-coded globe. But none approached the complexity of even the simplest human being. The average idiomatic entity was no more than a bundle of basic motivations and responses, enough for it to play its role in the Location's action. It most resembled a character out of fiction.

  So the youth with the shy smile was almost certainly a variant of Doomed Innocence. The big man who had slapped Bandar, and who now hulked with two Henchmen where the awning's shade was deepest, was a classic Bully—and perhaps a lethal one if provoked. The noönaut glanced about and saw other instantly recognizable types: a blank Despair mechanically chewing his crust, a self-possessed Loner off to one side, a bluff Salt-of-the-Earth with chin up and eyes clear, and now here came a smarmy Toady to bring the Bully a refill of beer. The squinting overseer appeared to be a variation on the universal Functionary, specifically an Unambitious version, which was a relief to Bandar, who might have found himself under the rein of a Sadist or Martinet. There was no Hero or Unrecognized King in the mix, so Bandar came to the preliminary conclusion that this gang was no more than a background element in whatever main stories were woven through the Event.

  That was a small mercy, since it meant he was unlikely to find himself as a Spear Carrier in a revolt with a life expectancy of hours at best. He would probably have enough time to work out a means of extracting himself from this Location, although time was an enemy as well as a friend: eventually, he would become absorbed into the Event, his consciousness abraded away until only some rudimentary functions remained. His real body would lapse into a coma and dwindle to lifelessness while what was left of Bandar repetitively pushed a stone block across a desert, until the extinction of the human species.

  One of the fastest routes to absorption was to interact with the elements of the Location. Bandar had to eat and drink and breathe the hot dry air—here his virtual flesh had all the needs and limitations of his real body lying asleep in his room at the Institute—but forming relationships with idiomats was the greatest danger. So when the Doomed Innocence asked if he was all right, Bandar turned his shoulder and stared into the heat haze that filled the middle distance. The idiomat turned away and was drawn into a conversation among the other men concerning appropriate tactics in some form of team sport.

  After they ate, the gang was allowed a siesta. Bandar copied the others, scooping out holes for hip and shoulder then reposing himself on the sand, but though he closed his eyes his mind remained active whil
e stereotypical snores erupted around him. He sorted through his options: the restriction of his voice might wear off, but that was nothing to count on; he might find a magician who was willing to help; he might somehow train an idiomat to sound the seven-note emergency than for him, though how he might do that while mute was hard to imagine and besides, it would require encouraging an idiomat to act contrary to its nature—the technical term for such behavior was disharmony—which could lead to sudden and even contagious violence; or, best of all, he could find or make a musical instrument that could be tuned to produce the right tones in the right sequence for the right duration.

  There was nothing within eyeshot that offered any promise. Bandar would have to wait until they moved to a richer environment: the encampment wherever this crew overnighted. With that issue settled, he turned his mind to the question of what had brought him here. It was not a happy series of thoughts. The collective unconscious was apparently, paradoxically, conscious. It was aware of itself. Worse, it had an agenda, a will of its own. Worse yet, it had no qualms about interfering with the consciousness of an individual—or even several; Bandar now realized that the harsh reception he had received at the Grand Colloquium might well have been stimulated by the Commons. Worst of all, the individual consciousness that had been selected for the most aggravated interference was Guth Bandar's.