The Gist Hunter (27 page)

The more he thought about it, the more possible a paper became. 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 and 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.

In the waking world, coincidences were often just the haphazards of chance—a coin could be tossed and come up heads ten times in a row—but in the Commons coincidences were never a mere coincidence. Concurrency was the language of the noösphere. There was meaning here, a message.

And what could the message be? The thought rattled in Bandar's pig's brain as he galloped on tiring legs across the gently rolling landscape, while bolts of fluorescent energy struck behind and all around him.
What question did I put?
he wondered.

He had wanted to know about the Song of songs, the Ur-melody wired into the human brain. But now, as he turned the question over in his mind, examining it from all angles, he could not discover even the most tangential relationship to his present predicament.

But if not the Lorelei's song, then what?
A blast of lightning lit the storm-darkened landscape ahead of him and he swerved around the charred and smoking gouge it had made in the prairie sod. Of course, direct questions to the Commons never brought a clear answer. The key to receiving a message was to think about something else. Then the unconscious would steal through the back door, to leave its offering like the gifts of faery sprites who labor through the night while their beneficiary snores, all unawares, in his bed.

So as he ran Bandar turned his thoughts elsewhere, though it was a difficult task with lethal blasts striking all around him. But he took the attempts on his life as encouragement—what better way to get his attention?—and set his disciplined mind, even housed in a porcine brain, to the work. He rehearsed his activities before entering the Commons. He had dined with the vicedean of applied metaphysics; he had filled an order of offworld dyes and fixatives for a longstanding customer (Bandar ran an inherited family commerciant firm, hence his status at the Institute as only an adjunct scholar); he had reprimanded Chundlemars; he had sketched an outline of his Lorelei paper.

And now it came to him. His pig's tongue and lips could not put it into words, but he could make the appropriate sounds.

"Hmm," he said, in the tones of one who has seen the light, then, "Um hmm," again to indicate acceptance of the revelation.

Another flash lit up the landscape and by its light, just ahead, Bandar saw an unlikely sight: a hummock of prairie land was transforming itself into another shape. In moments, Bandar found himself rushing toward a small but sturdy brick house, its stout door invitingly open.

He crossed the threshold at a gallop, skidded on his hooves as he turned to get his nose behind the door and push it closed. The wind resisted his efforts but he found renewed strength and when the door met its jamb a lock clicked and the barrier stood proof against the storm.

The single room was bereft of furniture although there were three framed pictures on the back wall, each portraying an anthropomorphically rendered pig in a stiff-collared shirt and dark suit. Centered in the same wall was a wide and tall fireplace with a black cauldron simmering over a well-stoked blaze. Bandar crossed to the kettle and found that the handle of its lid had been designed to fit a pig's trotter, confirming his surmise of what must be done.

He balanced on his hind legs and slipped a forehoof into the handle and prized the lid from the cauldron. It came easily. No sooner was the cover free than the chimney rattled to a downdraft of cold air. Sparks flew and smoke billowed, setting Bandar's eyes to water and causing him to vent an explosive sneeze.

But even blind he could hear the
sploosh
of something solid arriving in the cauldron. He immediately clapped the lid back into place. The kettle rumbled and shook but Bandar leaned his weight onto the leaping, vibrating top until the commotion ceased.

Outside, the storm had ended. Beams of sunlight angled through the windows to illuminate the smoky air inside the house.
Now what?
Bandar wondered, and even as he did so his eye fell upon something he had not noticed before: a substantial ladle hanging beside the chimney.