The Gist Hunter (26 page)

Now it grew quiet. Bandar put an eye to a tiny gap in the woven wall and saw that the Eater had drawn some distance away. It sat on its haunches and studied the noönaut's refuge for a few moments, then exhibited the demeanor of one who has thought through a problem and come to a decision.

It began to draw in great gouts of air. Bandar saw its thorax expand and contract to unlikely dimensions, and now he knew what must come. Somehow, this idiomat combined the essentials of the Eater
and
a Storm elemental. He wondered for a moment what demented mythmaker had first welded the two together, then deferred speculation while he sought a way out of the refuge that had become a deadly trap.

The floor was packed dirt. Pigs' hooves ought to make good digging implements. He went to the wall opposite where the Storm-Eater worked to inflate himself and frantically scratched at the earth.

Fortunately, this was a Class Four Situation so the dirt was made of uniformly homogeneous particles, without rocks or boulders to block his passage. The soil flew, piling up behind Bandar's haunches as the hole deepened into a passage under the wall. Above the sound of his own labors he could hear the idiomat chanting, "Let me come in," in a singsong voice that carried the force of a gusty breeze.

There came a silence as the Eater waited for a response, then the walls shook and the door rattled as a blast of air struck the opposite wall. Bandar heard a snapping of sticks and a tearing of cords. He looked back between his legs and saw that the door and the posts that supported it were canted inward. The whole front wall was skewed out of true.

He heard another puffing and huffing. The Eater was refilling its body with a fresh storm. A second blast would surely blow the house in. Bandar dug faster, harder, deeper. Soon there was a pig-sized passage beneath the back wall. He wriggled into the hole, scraped more earth out of his way, the narrow hooves doing a gratifyingly fast and thorough job.

In a moment, he saw a chink of daylight above him. In another moment, the chink had become a swatch, then a fully realized hole. Bandar wriggled through just as the storm smashed the front wall to flinders. The strong door crashed to the floor, the outer walls blew out and the roof fell in. The wall beneath which Bandar squirmed was pulled inward.

But he was out in sunlight and across the clearing, keeping the wreckage of the house between him and the Eater. He could hear it thrashing through the debris, alternately cooing to him and smacking wet lips. Bandar ducked into the undergrowth and lay trembling beneath a bush.

The Eater kicked at the wreckage of the house, searching for him. Then Bandar saw it notice the tunnel he had dug beneath the back wall. The beast squatted and examined the gouge in the earth, sniffed at it with its elongated snout. Then it raised its head and peered about the clearing. Bandar resisted an instinctive urge to draw farther back into the bushes; should his movements shake his branches the Eater would be on him in seconds.

Its gaze passed over Bandar without seeing him. After a long moment, its head turned in the direction the anthropomorphic pigs had taken then it rose and set off after them. Bandar waited until it was out of sight then crept from cover. If this was the kind of tale he now thought it was, none of the idiomats would return to this part of the Location until the Situation had completed its cycle and begun anew.

He brought up the great globe of the Commons and examined it as best he could with one eye then the other. It was easier to see in the clearing's bright sunlight than deep in the Nymph's forest. He found the gate through which he had come from the Enchantress's island—it was still a yellow heptagon within a green circle—and saw where he must be: a small mauve spot in the shape of a diamond, with a white stripe running diagonally from one side to another. Squinting his pig's eye, he deduced that the exit gate was not far off, somewhere beyond the brick house, where no doubt the Eater was now laying siege to the three brothers.

Bandar collapsed the map and thought about the Situation. This was clearly an admonitory tale for children, not, as he had thought, about Flexibility versus Rigidity, but a very early version of the Three Wayfarers motif that constantly reappeared in endless variations throughout the collective unconscious. It would conclude with one or, more likely, all three of the pig-men turning the tables on the Eater. From the effects of the monster's wind on the house of sticks, Bandar could guess that the Eater would fail to blow in the brick house. Then, its elemental power literally blown out, it would somehow be captured and destroyed by the brothers.

Bandar's best course was to position himself where he could observe the Situation's end game. Then during the Pause that always preceded a renewal of the cycle he could pass through the egress node and move to the next Location: a Landscape of primeval prairie. He might have to dodge vast herds of ruminants and those who hunted them, but more likely he would be alone on a rolling plain of endless grass. The prairie connected to another Location—a mountain valley where no one ever grew old. From there, Bandar could loop back to the snowland where the good Principal granted favors.

He trotted down the forest trail and soon came to the clearing where the little brick house stood. He approached warily, staying within the cover of the undergrowth. He did not see the Eater, but he saw that a painted wooden sign that bore the legend "A. Pig" in cursive script had been blown off the door's lintel to land on a strip of bare earth from which the stalks of petalless flowers grew.

The Eater has blown himself out and is probably even now being dispatched by the pig-men
, Bandar thought. He crept to one of the shuttered windows and peered between the slats. Within, he saw the trio gathered about an open fireplace in which a deep, black cauldron steamed. The bricklayer held the pot's lid in readiness and all three were regarding the chimney with evident expectation.

Of course,
Bandar thought,
the frustrated Eater descends the chimney, is clapped into the pot to become the pig-men's dinner
. The Eater would be eaten by those he would eat: another example of the circular irony which abounded throughout the Commons.

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.