But it can't be a straddle, Bandar reasoned. Scholars had argued that two Locations might temporarily cohere, but three was beyond all speculation. He wished he could deploy his globular map of the Commons. It would confirm his suspicions if he peered into the color-coded globe and found no flashing indicator to specify his location. But he could not display such an out-of-context object in the presence of the Hero or the Helper without pushing the idiomatic entities toward disharmony.
I need no external confirmation, Bandar told himself. I came into this through a dream, and even if events are being manipulated by the Multifacet, there is only one venue where all of this can be happening—in my own head, my personal unconscious. It worried him, though, that the powers he should have commanded in a lucid dream were somehow being blocked. Then an even more worrisome thought intruded: the Commons could manipulate his dreams—the nosphere was where dreams came from, after all—but how could Uncle Fley have been transported into Bandar's personal unconscious? He did not believe his sensing of Fley's presence in the Principal, however passive that presence might be, was an illusion; an experienced nonaut was equipped to tell real from false. But these events meant that some of the most time-honored rules of how the Commons functioned could be radically overturned. For a moment Bandar imagined trying to make that case to the Grand Colloquium, then broke off the revery to concentrate on his immediate problem.
The tunnel ended at a Y-junction. Bandar saw tracks leading in both directions, but those that went into the left-hand tunnel looked fresher. “This way, Pa,” he said. The Principal's chiseled features still wore a look of underlying apprehension, but he nodded and said, “Stay close to me, Mark,” and followed the trail.
Soon after the Y-junction they came to a wide circular chamber from which six other passageways led. Tracks littered the dirt floor, but the Principal now had his well-developed faculties focused on following the freshest trail, and he quickly chose an exit and led Bandar on. They moved at a brisk walk, the young idiomat's shorter legs striving to keep pace, turning here to the left and there to the right, occasionally climbing or descending ramps of fitted stone slabs.
They stopped at a T-intersection, the Hero's nostrils flaring as he looked from one side to the other. “I can smell ‘em,” he said, gesturing with his prominent chin to the right. He eased back the hammer on the rifle until it gave a faint click and crept forward.
Bandar was familiar with the motif of The Baiting of the Monster in Its Lair. The encounter of the Hero and the Monster represented the archetypical struggle for dominance between the conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche. Usually, the Hero was physically outclassed, but still managed to triumph over the stronger opponent through guile or preknowledge of some inherent weakness in the enemy. Pa could not know what he was about to face, but his weapon, being out of place in this milieu, might affect the outcome.
An odor similar to that which had wafted off the stolen cattle grew ranker as they made their way down the tunnel. Ahead was an archway limned in brighter torchlight than shone behind them, a chill breeze carrying the beast-smell to them. The Hero inched his way to the opening and eased down onto one knee before peering into the open space beyond. Bandar crept close behind and looked over the idiomat's shoulder.
We have returned to the original Location, was Bandar's first thought. Beyond the tunnel lay a stretch of twilit prairie, short grass sweeping down a slope into a broad valley. Not far from the base of the slope sprawled a massive house made of squared logs above a fieldstone foundation, with a porch shaded by a shingle roof running along its wide front. Bandar saw a barn and smithy, some low-built structures—"bunkhouses"—and a spacious corral in which stood Pa's stolen cattle.
The Principal's eyes narrowed to slits. “Stay here, Mark,” he said.
Bandar could not allow the Hero to carry Fley into whatever waited down there. The idiomat had seen only what he needed to see and had ignored the anomalies that surrounded the scene: that the sky's darkness was too deep to be an effect of clouds or even night, that beyond the big house and to either side the prairie disappeared into thickening shadow, that no wind stirred the grass nor did even a Sincere/Approximate bird or beast ornament the view.
They had not returned to Resisting the Despot. They were not in any true Location of the Commons, and there was no guarantee that the Situation would play itself out by the rules. Bandar urged the boy to defy his father. “No, Pa. You'll need help with the cattle."
The Principal looked thoughtful for a moment then said, “All right, but you stay behind me. And if anything happens, you hit the ground.” He checked his weapon again and, holding it loosely in one hand, set off down the slope.
The air remained unnaturally still and the silence was immense. Not even the cattle stirred in their enclosure. The darkness that surrounded the visible elements of the scene seemed to move in as they neared the house and when Bandar looked back he saw blank nothingness crowding their heels.
As they entered the wide dusty yard his eye caught motion in the shadows beneath the porch. From a wide-open door filled with a stygian blackness the three Henchmen emerged into the twilight, their hands resting on the butts of their holstered weapons. Their postures argued for their being in synch with the normal dynamics of the Situation, but when Bandar examined their expressions he did not see the mocking sneers that should have animated their features at this point in their cycle. A sharp tic drew up one corner of the Chief Henchman's mouth, and the heavyset one displayed a slack jaw and unfocused eyes, while the thin one with the mustache alternated between flashes of stark terror punctuated by an idiot grin.
The Hero noticed none of this, of course, being intent on fulfilling his role in the conflict. When Heroes neared the cusp of a Situation's essential action, they tended to drive forward with increasing momentum, encompassing outrageous violence and destruction as if they were the stuff of day-to-day life.
"I've come for my cattle,” Pa was telling the men on the porch.
The Chief Henchman was shaking now, the tic wildly distorting his features, his bootheels beating a rapid staccato rhythm on the boards as his relatively simple faculties cracked under the strain of the anomalies. He's supposed to defy the Hero, Bandar thought, but he's becoming disharmonious. The other two should have backed up their chief, but without his lead they were falling even faster into disharmony: the chunky one toppled backward onto the porch's wooden floor, shouting wordless sounds, his arms and legs kicking in convulsive spasms, while his mustached compadre turned weeping toward the stone wall, striking it over and over with his bony fists until flesh and blood flew.
The Hero was disregarding the breakdown of the Henchmen, and Bandar sensed that this was the point, in the normal dynamic of the Location, when the Principal Antagonist would be summoned to the Final Confrontation. His supposition was confirmed when Pa stepped onto the porch and shouted into the black hole of the front door, “Strayhorn! Come out here! Or I'm coming in!"
A cold wind, freighted with the rank stench that had hung in the air of the tunnels, gusted from the doorway. The Hero held his rifle at hip height, its muzzle aimed into the darkness. Bandar saw his square jaw twitch and his shoulders set themselves.
"Wait!” Bandar stepped onto the porch and took hold of the idiomat's arm. “Don't go in there."
"It's all right, son,” said the Hero. “You wait here."
"No!” Bandar held on. “Uncle Fley! Don't go in!"
The Hero's stern face blinked. And then Fley was bemusedly looking out through the pale eyes. “It's all right, Guth"—now the voice was unmistakably Bandar's uncle's—"it's only a dream."
"No, it's....” The nonaut broke off as a golden glow filled the doorway. A mist wafted toward him and from within it appeared the shifting form of the Multifacet.
"You must not interfere with the essential dynamic,” said an apple-cheeked old woman.
"He will be harmed."
"He is the Hero, you the Helper. He will
do as he must, you as you must."
"No, we are real. Not like them.” Bandar indicated the Henchmen, who now stood or lay inert, all movement having ceased when the Multifacet appeared. “We do not recycle and begin anew."
"We see no difference,” said a dog with eyes as large as dinner plates. “You come, you go, only your stories endure."
"No,” Bandar said. “I will not do it."
"If you help him, he may survive,” said a hulking creature made of animated stone. “If you do not, he surely will not."
"This is not fair."
A young man with checked trousers and red hair answered him with a shrug.
"Nor is it according to the rules."
He was answered by a gentle-faced deity who wept crystal tears. “You must learn or die. Accept it. And now it comes."
The glow faded and with it the tear-stained face. Bandar saw that Fley had slipped back behind the Hero's eyes and determination reclaimed its place in the Principal's face. Pa turned again to the doorway.
Bandar thought fast. “No, Pa,” he said. “He'll jump you in the darkness. Make him come out."
The Principal checked himself. The Hero was always disposed to accept aid from the Helper. “You're right, son,” he said. He stepped back, his weapon covering the doorway, and Bandar backed with him into the yard. A silence settled on them, but it was soon broken by a crashing of footsteps from within the house, the sound of hard, sharp hooves on a plank floor. The stench reached an overpowering intensity; then the doorway filled with a creature too tall and too wide to fit easily through it: an amalgam of man and bull, spewing foam from its muzzle, shaking its needle-pointed horns, pawing with hoofed hind feet at the doorstep while its outsized hands reflexively grasped at the air.
The thing roared, revealing teeth that were neither human nor bovine, but daggers meant to tear flesh. It ducked its head to clear the lintel, lowered one shoulder to squeeze through the doorway, then stepped clear onto the porch.
The Hero fired his weapon without raising it from his hip, levering its action with speed and precision. A tight grouping of holes appeared in the center of the beast-headed thing's leathery chest and the impact of the projectiles drove it back against the sides of the doorway. But it did not fall. It brushed at the wounds with black-nailed fingers, bared its pointed teeth, and roared again. Then it crossed the porch in two clattering strides and stepped down into the yard, its great hands reaching for Pa.
"Run!” Bandar shouted, but the Hero was now beyond his reach, locked into the Final Confrontation even though this version could not be anything like the Situation this Principal was intended for. As the beast-man reached for him, the Hero dropped his weapon and leaped forward to seize its horns. He anchored his heels in the dust then rotated his body and pulled sideways and down as if to throw the roaring creature over his hip.
But the impulses Pa could draw upon were out of synch with this struggle. The beast-man swept one brawny arm in an arc that caught the Hero across the midriff, folding him up and breaking his grip, lifting him from the ground and throwing him across the yard. He landed hard, the breath whooshing out of him. The brute watched as he struggled to rise, but instead of charging and finishing the attack, it swung its monstrous head toward Bandar.
Its eyes were an expressionless black, unrimmed by white or iris, without intelligence or self-awareness, full only of a mindless intent to do harm. Bandar had seen the creature's like before, though always while chanting a thran that kept him from being noticed. Now he felt the full impact of archetypical malevolence directed at his own being, and he gasped as if struck by a blast of icy water.
From the corner of his eye he saw the Hero trying to rise and return to the fight. That was, after all, what Heroes did, however unequal the combat. And help is what the Helper does, he thought, though how can I help against this?
The bull-man pawed the dust, its baleful glare still locked on the nonaut. Then the intensity of its gaze diminished and, for a moment, another persona inspected Bandar through its black orbs, with a gaze full of cruel and disdainful amusement.
Gabbris! Even in the face of a beast-thing, the sneer of Didrick Gabbris was unmistakable. But it cannot be! The thought flashed through Bandar's mind. Dreamers could meet while passing through the outer arrondissement of the Commons, though it took exceptional powers of nonaut technique for them to do so. But actual dreams took place in an individual's own unconscious, and no other person could share that psychic space. The barriers were impermeable.
And yet.... Here was Uncle Fley inserted into a dream of Bandar's, and now Didrick Gabbris had undoubtedly appeared—not a dream-imagining by Bandar, but the actual entity that was his enemy's own psyche.
Which was impossible. Which violated all of the rules discovered and delineated over the millennia by countless explorers of the Commons, so many of whom had given their lives as the price of hard-won knowledge. And now, as the monster turned its gaze back toward the Hero who had risen to one knee, a hand to his diaphragm as he struggled to control his disrupted breathing, Bandar knew what this mad business was all about.
You must learn, the Multifacet had said. He was being taught an unprecedented lesson, but the learning was being delivered in the indirect manner by which the nosphere always transmitted its wisdom.
"I understand,” he said aloud. “You are showing me that rules I have always been taught are sacrosanct now no longer apply. Very well, I accept the lesson. I will be the Helper, and willingly. But now you must help me."
He saw no golden glow, no swirling mist or protean figure, but he knew he had been heard. Now he would see if his terms had been accepted.
He focused upon the setting. I dream a lucid dream, he thought, putting behind the assertion all the strength of will available to a mature nonaut. The dream is mine. All here is mine. I take control.
The beast-man's hind legs, human from hip through thigh, bovine from knee to hoof, quivered as it crouched and set itself to leap upon the Hero. Bandar closed the fingers of one hand as if turning the appendage into a cutting blade, then swept his arm down in a chopping gesture. As the edge of his hand clove the air, the ground beneath it trembled, then split open. A crack raced zigzag across the yard, dividing the monster from Bandar and the Hero. Now the nonaut flung wide his arms and the Earth groaned and snapped as the crevice gaped and deepened.
The beast-man roared its rage, its hooves stamping the ground. It gnashed murderous teeth and glared at Bandar with a primal hatred in which he could still see the spiteful malice of Didrick Gabbris. Then it raced forward and flung itself headlong across the still widening gap.
For a long moment it seemed to float motionless in the air, then its chest crashed into the lip of the ruptured ground, and its huge hands clawed at the dust while its dangling hoofed feet scratched and scrabbled for purchase.
Bandar watched with satisfaction. It will not succeed, he thought. The thing was losing its struggle and would slip inevitably into the chasm. He saw panic appear in the fathomless depths of its eyes that still contained Gabbris. “We have beaten you,” Bandar told him.
Then he saw its eyes look beyond him, saw triumph flare in their blackness. Bandar turned, a shout of “No!” forming in his mouth. But he was too late. The Principal moved past him on shaky but determined legs and raised a foot to plant one boot heel square between the horns of the enemy.
The great head snapped back and the creature lost all hope of climbing out of the riven earth. But as it slid backward into the abyss it reached and seized. Its giant fingers encircled Pa's calf and pulled him over the edge.
Bandar flung himself down, his head and shoulders over the lip of the precipice. Below him he could see the two of them falling slowly into the bottomless darkness, the monster's grip unyielding on the Hero. There was no time to control the event. Pa looked up and Bandar could see his uncle staring at him in true fear from behind Principal's widened eyes.
"Fley!” the nonaut shouted. “Wake up, Fley! It
's only a dream! Wake up!"
And then they were gone.
* * * *
This time, the Multifacet left Guth Bandar with a full memory of his experiences. Thus it was with both urgency and trepidation that, the following morning, the young man climbed the angled stairway that led to the apartment above the housewares store. He passed through the silent lounge and entered the hallway that led to the master sleeping chamber. No sound came from behind the closed door.
He engaged the device that caused the panel to open and poked his head around the jamb. His uncle lay facedown on the sleeping pallet. Bandar listened but heard no breathing. He wished he could go back downstairs and avoid this moment, but instead he summoned up his nonautic discipline and crossed the room. He put his hand on Fley's shoulder and gently shook.
A sharp intake of breath told Bandar that the man still lived. But death, though not impossible, was not the outcome he feared. “Uncle,” he said, “time to awaken."
The older man made incoherent sounds, and Bandar's heart fell within him. “Uncle,” he said again and pulled at the thin shoulder to roll the man over. Fley came easily and a moment later was sprawled on his back, mouth slack and eyes staring without focus.
Oh, no, Bandar said within the confines of his skull. He has not come back.
Then the man on the bed blinked and smacked his lips, and the eyes that regarded Bandar filled with intelligence and affection. “Guth,” he said, “I had the strangest dream."
* * * *
A few days later, Bandar passed by Barr-Chevry's and cast a knowing eye over its outer display. The goods offered looked no different from those that had been sold in the establishment since time out of mind. Nor were there any signs of the allegedly intended competition with Bandar's Mercantile Emporium.
Bandar stepped inside and when he was approached by the shopkeeper, he inquired as to whether there were any insipitators on the premises.
FSF, December 2006 Page 4
