"You wouldn't dare."
Bandar yanked on Gabbris's arm to position his enemy while he turned his free hand into a fist and drew it back in preparation for launch. A hoot of anticipation came from the undergraduates.
"Wait!” Gabbris said.
"Only long enough for you to answer my question."
The scholar tried again to pull his arm free but the motion was more petulant than determined. “Very well,” he said. “It came to me in a dream."
"A lucid dream?"
"Of course."
"Ambiguous?"
"Not to a nonaut.” Gabbris's lips slid back into their habitual sneer and his brows rose to their usual supercilious heights to offer Bandar an unspoken corollary: Which you are not.
Bandar released the man's arm and uncocked his fist. A tenured fellow of the Institute could not be faulted for acting upon a clear message from the unconscious. “What was the import?” he said.
"That the enmity between us must continue. You must be further punished, through your uncle."
Bandar made a gesture of bewilderment. “It makes no sense,” he said. “What has Fley done to merit a penalty?"
"I do not question what comes from the Commons,” Gabbris said.
Bandar snorted. “That needs no assertion. You are as accepting as a....” His mind offered him a rude and scatological image but he did not voice it.
"Are we done?” Gabbris said. “I desire a cordial and some conversation.” He stressed the next three words: “With my peers."
"Surely you recognize that this role that has been assigned to you is consistent with my contention that the Commons has achieved self-awareness and is pursuing an agenda."
Gabbris waved away the supposition like a man brushing off a lethargic fly. “That again?” he said. “The only consistency I recognize is your continual harping on a self-deluding fantasy."
"But why else would you be urged to trouble me, now that you have won and I have lost?"
"The Commons is its own rationale.” Gabbris quoted. “It is the constant mirror in which we are but flickering reflections, ephemeral and substanceless. We do not question what comes from its depths; rather, we act and accept the consequences."
Bandar drew himself up to the slight height that his small stature could achieve. “Very well,” he said, “but know that I return home to seek a lucid dream of my own, and if it should counsel me to wreak havoc on your repulsive carcass, be assured that havoc will be thoroughly wreaked."
* * * *
It was late in the evening by the time Guth Bandar made his way back from the Institute. All during the ride on the balloon tram and the subsequent long walk through the streets of Olkney, thronged with indentors and their spouses promenading their fashionable attire, coiffures, and skin coloration, he had mulled what Gabbris had told him. A portion of his mind niggled at him, holding out a tantalizing whiff of some forgotten but crucial factum that was the key to unlock the mystery. But each time he rallied his normally well disciplined and biddable memory, it shied away from the target like a missile that did not care to make impact.
His uncle had already retired upstairs to his sleeping chamber. Bandar went to his small room at the back of his uncle's vendory, reposed himself upon the sleeping pallet and cleared his consciousness. He slowed his breathing and placed his limbs in the approved positions, then closed his eyes and summoned a mental image of a staircase with himself at the top and shadows beneath. Releasing a long sigh of breath, he pictured himself descending, step by step, at a measured pace. Within moments he found himself in a familiar setting.
He was walking along the main concourse of the Institute's New Quadrangle, an ancient labyrinth in whose warren of rooms senior fellows tutored mid-level students in the intricacies of the Commons's myriad Locations and the subtle techniques by which they could be entered and exited. The wide hallway was lined on either side by doors that led into rooms great or small, the former for lectures, the latter for exercises in meditation. As Bandar strode along, he noticed that one door a short distance down the concourse was limned in rosy, golden light. He stepped to it and pulled it open.
A warm effulgence bathed him. He entered and with the crossing of the threshold came memory—though it arrived, not as a helpmate ready to serve, but as an unwelcome intruder. He turned to retreat back through the door but found that the portal was gone. Once again, he was in a formless mist, out of which came the ever shifting shape of the Multifacet: that representation of the collective unconscious that had paradoxically become conscious, and that had chosen Guth Bandar, whether he wished it or not, to be the instrument of its will.
"You have done this,” Bandar said. “You have sicced the odious Gabbris on my good uncle, who has done none harm and merits no punishment."
He spoke to a cartoonish representation of an animal wearing an odd hat and some sort of ribbon that went around its neck and hung down its front—Bandar thought the original species must be long extinct—that replied in a buffoonish voice that changed in midsentence to a cackle as the form became a warty crone. “We are no respecter of persons. We do what must be done."
"If you wish my help,” Bandar said, “then enlist me. Do not coerce me by threatening those I love."
"We do as we must,” said the Multifacet, becoming a roly-poly fellow in scarlet tunic and trousers accented by white fur and a matching tasseled hat. “You must be shaped, and we must use the tools at hand."
"What if I refuse?"
A little girl in pigtails and pinafore looked up at him and said, “We will seek another, but the train of events has already begun and your uncle is now in play."
"He is a good man,” Bandar said. “He deserves better."
"Deserts do not come into it,” said a fanged and hulking nightmare. “It is about survival."
"Whose?"
A woman with impossibly long legs, an unnaturally buoyant bosom, and a husky contralto said, “Yours. Your uncle's. Everyone's."
"Even yours?"
"Even ours,” said a rosy-countenanced infant. “It is your destiny to help. Accept it."
"But I am not a Helper. My conformation has the Seeker dominant, influenced by the Wise Man and the Solitary, shadowed by the Hoarder.” He referred to the archetypes that blended together to form the core elements of his psyche. They had been delineated when he first applied to study at the Institute.
The figure before him made no answer but abruptly disappeared, to be replaced by a rippling rent in the mist. Hating the necessity, Bandar stepped into it.
* * * *
At first he was aware only of the Landscape: a vast sky of a paler blue than that which covered Old Earth in its penultimate age, the sun yellow and hot, the clouds above the horizon a pristine white. The land itself was mostly flat, with here and there a gentle roll. A constant wind stirred its covering of dry grass and scrub. In the far distance Bandar could see immense tables of rock, level on top and formed from striated layers of age-hardened sediments, some attended by solitary spires of stone shaped by no hand but the weather's.
He knew that it would be more than just a place. The Multifacet would have dropped him into at least a Situation, perhaps a complex Event, and he and Uncle Fley would be players in it. He had sought a lucid dream, in which his nonaut training would have given him considerable power to mold his environment. But this setting had all the hallmarks of an established Location somewhere in the matrix that was the Commons. Experimentally, he summoned his skills and attempted to still the wind. It blew on without regard for his efforts.
Next he tested his voice. The single tone rang clear in the fresh air, though it was more of a tenor than Bandar's own baritone. At least this time they have not muted me, he thought. If I wish, I can summon an emergency gate and awaken in my bed.
But he wouldn't. Somewhere in this Location was his innocent uncle, threatened by evil forces and with only his nephew Guth to help him withstand them. I must discover the dynamics of this Location, work o
ut the direction of events, then resolve them in our favor.
It was a flagrant violation of all that a nonaut stood for. Explorers of the Commons observed while unobserved, insulated from the perceptions of the idiomatic entities by the thrans that they constantly sang. It was dangerous to interfere with the workings of Events or Situations: the idiomats were not people but bundles of simplified traits and habitual responses; intervening in a way that distorted their preordained roles brought disharmony, generating a psychic friction that rapidly built up energies that discharged violently.
He gave the environment one more searching look and, seeing nothing amiss, examined himself. Once again, he had been deposited into the virtual flesh of an idiomat. Looking down, he saw a checked shirt and a wide belt with a heavy buckle. Below that were tan trousers of some sturdy material with pockets riveted at the corners, into which the thumbs of sun-browned and work-hardened hands were tucked. From the turned up cuffs of the pants emerged a pair of worn boots with pointed toes.
He became aware of the idiomat's thoughts: simple satisfaction at being out on his own, trusted with some minor but serious task. That is different, Bandar thought.
When the Multifacet had dropped him into the Event known as The Rising of the Oppressed, the persona of the idiomat into which he had been placed had been completely expunged. This time, Bandar seemed to be an addition to a persona that came equipped with its own inner life. That raised the question of whether the nonaut had control over his host's actions. He doubted that he would be a mere passenger, but suppressing the idiomat's will entirely might cause disharmony. To test his influence, Bandar gently urged a turn to the right. The idiomat shifted his weight and gazed idly in the suggested direction.
Bandar next tried a nose scratching and was rewarded with success. It seemed that he had only to think about his host's taking an action and it would happen—so long as it was within the idiomat's repertoire. Willing an idiomatic entity to do something far out of character would render it disharmonious, and the nonaut did not wish to be trapped in the flesh of an idiomat on a rampage.
It was time to seek out Uncle Fley and do whatever the Multifacet wanted done. Let's go, he thought, and the idiomat turned around, giving Bandar a view of a large, long-legged beast to which was strapped a contraption of leather and metal. Bandar had seen such beasts in many Locations that dated from the dawn-time, when they were ridden or used to pull primitive wheeled vehicles. Clearly this variant of whatever Situation he had been thrust into was from far back in the Deep Past, before the discovery of inherent motilation or even submolecular circuitry. Now as he looked at the beast, the word “horse” came into his mind, and even as he thought it, he realized that the idiomat was placing one foot into a metal loop hung from a leather strap. A moment later, Bandar was surveying the scene from a higher vantage point. He eased back on his control of his host so that it could go about its business. Bandar would watch and learn until it became clear what he was expected to do.
His host tugged on the leather straps—the word “reins” popped into Bandar's vocabulary as he focused on the items—and the animal's head veered to the right. The rest of its body followed as the idiomat's boot heels thumped into its ribs. They set off at a “canter” across the Landscape, the wind of their passage tugging at a broad-brimmed hat that Bandar found he was wearing. He contented himself with observing and over the next few minutes felt his vocabulary filling up with the jargon of this Location.
Not far off, he came to what he realized was the idiomat's intended destination—a patch of prairie not much different from any other, except that it featured a wire fence whose barbed strands had been severed, creating a wide gap, and a muddle of tracks made by a herd of animals with split hooves. The idiomat's eyes followed the tracks. They led up a gentle slope and he kicked his horse after them, coming to a broad crest from which the land fell away into a wide depression. In the middle distance moved a cloud of dust in which Bandar could see idiomats on beasts like his, slapping rope “lariats” against saddles and hooting as they drove forty or fifty “cattle” before them.
The idiomat's heels hit the horse's side again and he shouted some wordless syllable that obviously had meaning to the horse, because the beast broke into a sudden gallop. Bandar marveled at the smooth ease with which his host sat his saddle as the animal sped down into the basin, its ears flattened and its long neck hair—"mane"—streaming back over the hands that held the reins.
Man and beast rapidly closed the distance to catch up with the herd. They swung wide to race past the dust, then cut in ahead of the herd, the idiomat rearing his horse onto its hind legs, shouting hoarsely and waving his hat. The oncoming cattle shied and milled about, making sounds of distress.
Out of the dust came three men on horseback, dressed roughly in the same fashion as Bandar's host, though something about them gave the impression that they were of a different sort. Henchmen, the nonaut decided. Then he listened as his host spoke.
"Those are our cattle!"
He's younger than I thought, Bandar decided, angry, but also frightened.
One of the men urged his mount closer. In one hand was a long barreled weapon—"rifle"—laid casually over his saddle. Using only his knees, the Henchman skillfully directed his horse to turn broadside to Bandar's idiomat, and now the rifle's dark orifice was pointing Bandar's way. A cruel smile formed on the tanned and stubbled face and the man said, “Can't be yours, kid. They're on Circle B land."
"You cut our fence, drove them off,” said Bandar's host, and hearing the high-pitched voice again confirmed his first impression: he was in the body of an idiomat on the cusp between boy and man.
"Now that ain't a nice thing to say,” said the man with the rifle. The dust was blowing away and Bandar saw two more riders moving out to either side of the confrontation, both armed, both handling their weapons with a casual familiarity that argued that there would be no hesitation in using them.
"You say things like that,” said the one with the rifle, who looked to be a Chief Henchman, “you better be ready to back ‘em up. Man don't have to take that kind of talk, specially from some wet-nosed kid."
Bandar was worried by the anger that was now clouding what there was of the idiomat's mind. If the boy made the wrong move in this confrontation the man with the rifle might well fire. The nonaut was reasonably sure that his host would turn out to be the Helper in this Situation, his death therefore highly unlikely this early in the dynamic. But it would not help if he had to solve the puzzle while physically incapacitated. Besides, he did not know what pain felt like to an idiomat and did not care to find out through experimentation. He exerted his will to keep the boy's hands on the reins.
But he didn't take control of the idiomat's mouth. “You won't get away with this,” the boy said. “My pa'll kill you."
The other two henchmen had moved closer. One of them, a skinny man with a thin mustache, sneered and spat a stream of brown liquid, while the other, heavyset with a week's stubble on his jaw, said, “Sure, kid. We're scared to death."
The one with the rifle said, “Tell your old man if he's got anythin’ to say, he knows where to find Mr. Strayhorn. He'll be waitin'."
Bandar could see where this narrative was heading. It was a Situation, probably a variation on the motif of Resisting the Despot. This Strayhorn would be a Principal in this Location, a local Tyrant imposing his will upon a Suffering Population that was too timid to revolt and overthrow him. His host's father was probably also a Principal, the Hero of this tale, and the sequence of events would climax in a confrontation between the two, from which only one would emerge alive.
Which of the two that would be was uncertain: Heroes came in a wide variety of types, and Bandar would need to take a close look at the father before he could establish whether the idiomat was of the Reluctant, or the Pure, or even the Sacrificial type. He doubted that this Situation would include an Accidental or an Unlikely Hero, and was already confident that he would not
find a cynical Antihero when they returned to wherever the boy had come from.
In any case, Bandar was clearly once again cast as the Helper, and he wondered at the Multifacet's purpose in enlisting him to play the same role he had played in The Rising of the Oppressed. Of course, repetition of themes was a commonplace of the Commons, he thought, so it should not come as a surprise that, having become conscious, the nosphere should demonstrate a tendency toward the redundant.
Now was not a good time to mull these matters, Bandar knew. Fley was not in any of the Henchmen so it was time to move on. He exerted more control over the youth, causing him to pull the horse's head in the direction from which they had come and energetically ride away. As they went, Bandar paid attention to the setting, noting that the grass and scrub seemed well realized. The horse and its equipment also exhibited a wealth of detail, enough that Bandar felt comfortable in classifying this Location as a Class Two Situation, scoring high on the Realism scale. That meant that if, for example, his idiomat fell from his mount at their present rate of speed, he could expect broken bones, possibly internal injuries, and even death if he landed the wrong way.
The idiomat was determined to get home and report the theft of the cattle. Bandar was sure that would be the Initiating Incident of this Situation. He would know the Hero's type once he saw how the news was received; that would give him a reasonably good idea of where all this was heading, and some sense of where to look for Fley. He let the boy guide the horse through the broken fence and across the rolling landscape until they came to a small valley bisected by a shallow river. Down below was a house made of logs, a couple of outbuildings and an enclosure—"corral"—of posts and rails surrounding three more horses.
The boy set the horse to angle down the slope and Bandar left them to their business while he surveyed the scene. The level of detail intensified here, supporting his belief that this was the seat of a Principal. When in response to the boy's cries of, “Pa! Pa!” as they splashed through the river, a man came out onto the house's open porch, the nonaut's expectation was confirmed: Pa was a fully detailed Class One idiomatic entity, tall and muscular, with lines of character etched into the planes of his face and subtlety in his light-colored eyes. The work clothes he wore had the same lived-in look as the boy's attire.
FSF, December 2006 Page 2