FSF, December 2006

by Spilogale, Inc

  Bandar only half listened to the exchange between the two as the boy leapt from the saddle and breathlessly told his parent about the Initiating Incident. He was looking for telltales that would define this Hero. He had already added Flawed to the list of rejected types, and judging by the worry that he saw in the older idiomat's eyes as the boy told of confronting the three Henchmen, he was also ready to dismiss Pure as an option—a Pure Hero's eyes would have blazed with righteous anger. This one looked more tired than angry.

  The boy was looking directly at the older idiomat as he spoke his lines and Bandar was taking advantage of the point of view to study the Principal. As he allowed the impression to intensify, using a mentalism that was part of any trained nonaut's tool-kit, something tugged at the edge of his mind. He sensed something familiar about Pa, something in the face that underlay the features and formed the essence of the idiomat's character.

  The boy had finished his story. The Principal's brows drew down and his eyes lost their focus as he looked inward at some memory. Reluctant Hero, Bandar told himself, not for certain, but definitely most likely. Then, as the father stroked his nose with a thoughtful finger, the “something familiar” leaped at Bandar and seized his full attention.

  "Uncle Fley!” His cry sounded strange as he heard it in the still unsettled voice of the youth. The Principal acted as any Class One idiomat should at being confronted with disharmonious information. He paused, startled, then like an actor when a fellow cast member speaks a line out of sequence, he ignored the interruption and went on with the scene.

  His face regained a mood of introspection. The boy, who had been equally startled at what had come from his own mouth, also returned to the flow of the Situation. “What are we going to do, Pa?” he said.

  The Principal crossed to a water barrel and dipped up a mouthful, his eyes squinting into the westering sun as he drank. “I need to think about that, Mark,” he said.

  And I need to think about what's going on here, Guth Bandar thought to himself. Because when he had glimpsed the resemblance to his uncle in the Principal's expression and blurted out his relative's name, he had seen more than a jolt of surprise appear in the older idiomat's eyes. For a moment, the face that had looked back at Bandar was deeply familiar. Just as Bandar had been inserted into the Helper's virtual flesh, his Uncle Fley was trapped within the Hero's.

  * * * *

  Repetition is reality was one of the maxims drummed into undergraduates’ minds in their first years at the Institute. By definition, nothing that happened in the Commons happened only once. The constantly recycling Events and Situations were distillations of events and situations in the waking world that had happened so many times, in all their varieties and permutations, that their essences had become part of humanity's psychic machinery. Anything that had occurred no more than once or twice was not retained.

  Bandar considered this hoary truth as he struggled to maintain his composure. The worst mistake he could make was to let himself be caught up in the drama of the situation. If he allowed himself to be consumed by worry for his uncle, he would be drawn more deeply into the dynamics of this Situation. He might become lost in its movements, and thus unable to help Fley.

  Repetition, he repeated. It's not only how the Commons works, but how it teaches. The Multifacet wanted him to learn something, and this was its method of instruction. The last time it had plunged him into a Situation he had been made the mute Helper to a Hero he had scarcely had time to know before events moved rapidly to the crisis. Now he was cast in the same role, but the intensity had been raised by the infusion into the Hero's persona of someone he cared for deeply.

  Raise the stakes was another rule in the Commons: these kinds of Events and Situations always proceeded on an upward gradient of tension and conflict, culminating in a cathartic climax and an emotion-drenched denouement. The oxymoron that was the conscious unconscious was working to its own inbuilt rules, as if it were itself governed by unconscious drives. For a moment Bandar stopped to consider that the phenomenon of a conscious unconsciousness's unconscious would make a truly interesting paper, then decided now was surely not the time.

  Very well, he told himself, there is no way out but to see this through to the end. He would play out the dynamic of the Situation, abiding by the rules. Uncle Fley ought to take no hurt from being attached to a Reluctant Hero. Unused to the ways of the Commons, he would tell Bandar in the morning about a particularly vivid dream—if any memory of these events even clung to his waking mind.

  * * * *

  While Bandar had been thinking, events had moved on in the Situation. The father was now carrying a rifle similar to the one the Henchman had pointed at the boy. He had led a horse from the corral and was tightening the broad leather strap—"girth"—that looped under its belly. He slipped the weapon into a scabbard attached to the saddle, then swung up onto the horse. The boy did likewise with his own mount. They wheeled the animals and rode toward the horizon. Moments later, in the way that time often compressed in the Commons, they were out on the prairie and within sight of a cluster of wooden buildings that soon resolved into a rough and ready settlement.

  Riding into town, Bandar took a look through the idiomat's eyes and judged that little of import to the Situation would happen here. The idiomats walking the wooden sidewalks or crossing the single unpaved street lacked intensity. Most of the buildings were of the Essential/Representational type, with far less detail than the dwelling where he had encountered Pa. Only the ones with signs that read “General Store,” “Sheriff,” and “Saloon” looked to be fully realized. The two idiomats pulled their mounts to a halt outside the first, where a man attired in clothes similar to the Hero's, but with only a Sincere/Approximate level of detail, was asleep on a tilted-back wooden chair, his booted ankles crossed on a railing and a broad-brimmed hat over his eyes. A five-pointed metal star was pinned to his chest.

  "Mooney, where's the sheriff?” said the Principal.

  The man did not move, not even to raise his hat. “This time of day, I expect he'll be over in the Nugget,” he said.

  The Hero and Helper turned their mounts and walked them over to the other Earnest/Realistic building. They both stepped down from the saddle then up onto the wooden porch of the saloon, but the Principal said, “Mark, you wait outside."

  "But Pa—” Bandar's idiomat began, only to have his protest cut off.

  "I said wait."

  The Hero lifted his weapon from its scabbard and went into the building, pushing through a pair of swinging half-doors made of slatted wood. The boy obeyed but positioned himself close to the entrance so that he could see and hear what went on within.

  Bandar gave the conversation between the Hero and the sheriff only a portion of his attention. This would be part of the process by which the Reluctant Hero is isolated from all hope of help and comes to know that, like it or not, he must solve his problem through his own efforts. There might be one or even two other potential supporters who would be appealed to in vain, then the Hero would resign himself to the necessity of a confrontation with the opposing Principal, Strayhorn. Bandar sketched out in his mind the likely sequence of events, half listening as he heard the elderly sheriff explaining, in a tone tinged with disgust, that anything outside the town limits was beyond his jurisdiction.

  Soon the Hero would come out of the saloon and get on with it. Probably he would ride out to Strayhorn's center of power for the Confrontation Minor that, far from resolving the conflict, would instead intensify it. The Hero would be abused and something beyond him would be threatened—perhaps the boy or maybe a female Loved One who, if she was to play a role in the dynamic, ought to be factored into the Situation just about now. Bandar had the boy look around for a female idiomat. He was fairly sure that the tavern would not be the place to find her and so cast his eye back to the street outside.

  A high-pitched, oscillating whine impinged upon his concentration and caused him to look up. A circular shape had appe
ared in the air above the dusty street. Bandar's initial impression of the object was colored by his having to perceive it through the idiomat boy's sensorium, so he first took it for a hat or a pie plate that someone had flung into the air. Then, as the thing descended Bandar realized that it was not a small object at a low height, but was instead something immense that was plummeting swiftly toward the town from the upper reaches of the Location's sky.

  That can't be right, the nonaut thought. As a Situation, Resisting the Despot could play itself out against a background in which the cruel Tyrant was the head of an invading species from another world, but in such a Location the tyranny would have been established before the Situation began its cycle. Besides, the Initiating Incident would be completely different from the theft of cattle that had sparked the dynamic in which Bandar and Fley were trapped.

  The object had by now come down to hover above the town, revealing itself to be a gigantic disc of dull gray metal. Around its rim a string of flashing lights chased themselves at high speed. As Bandar watched, four tapering and telescoping legs extended themselves from its ventral hub. One struck hard into the earth of the street, while the others plunged straight down through the roofs of the Essential/Representational buildings, with a crash of splintering wood and shattering glass. A rectangular hatch opened in the belly of what Bandar now recognized must be a fully realized assault ship from an entirely different Location, probably a variant of The Incursion of the Other, Class Two or Three.

  It's a straddle, he thought. I'm actually seeing a straddle. Straddles were Locations that, according to some theories, had come into existence far back in the development of the collective unconscious, when new variants on archetypical events and situations were still being created by a combination of human ingenuity and the unfolding of actual events in the waking world. Elements from two substantially different but superficially similar Locations would temporarily cohere in an Event or Situation that straddled both. But their internal dynamics would quickly pull them apart.

  As he pursued this line of introspection, a segmented ramp extruded from the oblong hatch. Even before it touched the ground the opening filled with armored and multi-limbed creatures that would have stood about waist high to Bandar's idiomat. But these invaders were clearly motivated to do more running than standing; they swarmed down the ramp, each skittering on some of its limbs while others discharged energy weapons at any target they spotted with their stalked eyes.

  A yellow hound had been sleeping in the shade of a slab-sided wagon. Now it rose up and issued a tentative bark, then began a mournful howl—probably its only response to any stimulus, Bandar thought. A coruscating bolt of energy whuzzed through the air, catching the dog in mid ululation and causing the animal to glow brightly for a moment, then vanish, leaving a shadowy smudge on the ground.

  The invaders were firing indiscriminately. Bandar saw Mooney, the man who had been sleeping beneath a hat, stir himself. His booted heels hit the wooden sidewalk. He stood up shakily, but the hat still adhered to his brow, and Bandar surmised that the idiomat probably had no face beneath, none being needed for the minor role he was meant to play. Now his virtual existence came to an incandescent end as one of the metal-clad spiders scuttled down onto the street and opened fire.

  Another leaped from the ramp onto the second-story balcony of a building whose front bore the legend “Rosie's Club for Gentlemen” and aimed its weapon down and across the street at a well-realized female idiomat, mature though still youthful and dressed in high-necked blouse and full skirt topped by a gray gingham apron, who had just come out of the General Store. The Hero's Loved One, I'd wager, Bandar thought, a moment before the invader's blast incinerated her.

  The boy in which he was housed had reacted much as Bandar had: he stared, open-mouthed, at a spectacle of violence all the more horrific for being completely unexpected. Now it struck home to the nonaut that the straddle must soon throw the idiomat into disharmony, putting his behavior well beyond Bandar's influence. Along with that realization came a belated awareness that he was not viewing these events from a nonaut's normal vantage—hidden from the invaders’ view by the power of a chanted thran—but from deep within the frame of the action. And the next bolt of energy might be directed his way.

  As that thought came, the horse he had ridden in on lit up like a sunburst then dimmed to leave a smudged horse-shadow on the saloon porch. The Hero's mount had just enough time to rear up in terror before it received the same illumination. Careful to keep his actions within his host's range of acceptable reactions, Bandar now took control and pushed through the saloon's swinging doors, ducking low as he did so.

  The Principal and the sheriff were still going through their dynamic, unaware that, out in the street, their Situation had been so convincingly straddled. Bandar crossed the sawdust-strewn floor to where the Hero stood frustrated above the sheriff, who shook his gray-haired head in shame and chagrin. Pa's face hardened with anger as he swung toward Bandar and said, “I told you to stay outside, boy!"

  I must be careful, Bandar told himself. This could fly off in every direction. He could not announce that spiders with incomprehensible weaponry were incinerating the town. Instead he willed the young idiomat to call out a danger that would fit within the Situation's paradigm, then let the boy control his own vocal apparatus.

  "Apaches!” the Helper cried. “They're killing everyone!"

  Screams and random shouts now came from outside, along with the repeated whuzz of energy weapons. The invaders were indeed killing everything that moved in the street, and would soon enter the buildings to continue their work. The sheriff now stood up and moved toward the noise, confusion clouding his face. A stocky man with pomaded hair and gaitered sleeves who had been polishing a glass behind a long wooden counter set it down and came out from behind the barrier to peer over the top of the doors. A moment later, the top quarter of him incandesced and evaporated, the rest of him tumbling to the floor.

  A second bolt entered through the door and cremated the sheriff. The Hero blinked, looked with puzzlement at the smear on the floor, then recovered enough to turn toward the portal. He worked a lever on the underside of his weapon, the clicking of the mechanism sounding a note of resolution. In a moment, Bandar knew, Pa would reluctantly advance to do what he could to resolve the situation, carrying Uncle Fley within him. The nonaut did not want to see his own relative go the way of the hat-faced man, but he knew that to move a Principal from his proper track he must offer a motive that was within the idiomat's frame of reference.

  He took control of the boy to make him lay his hand on the Hero's arm and say, “Pa, I'm scared."

  The Principal turned, as Bandar had expected, to deal with his Helper's fear. The nonaut now followed up with a plausible suggestion. “They're too many to fight. We oughta go warn the others,” he said.

  He did not know what others he referred to, but was confident that in a Class Two Situation, a Reluctant Hero would surely have “others” to be concerned about. He did not think it wise to mention the fate of the Loved One.

  "You're right, Mark,” the Hero said. “We'll go out the back and circle around, see what we can do."

  They went through a door behind the bar, finding a storeroom with barred windows and a door in its outer wall. The Principal crossed the intervening space and pulled open the door, then paused in the opening to peer outside. He took a half step back, then seemed to freeze. Bandar heard the clatter of many metal-shod feet from the saloon's main room behind him, then the sound of the invaders’ weapons. There was no time to delay. He shoved Pa out through the doorway and leapt after him.

  He saw immediately why the Principal had hesitated in the doorway: instead of an Essential/Representational back alley, they were confined in a corridor formed by two parallel walls of well-dressed gray stone, Fully Realized. Higher above them than they could reach was a ceiling made of tightly fitted slabs of the same material. The light was dim, provided only by flickering torche
s ensconced in the walls before and behind them at distant intervals. The chill that came from the floor of packed earth told Bandar they were beneath the Earth. Of the doorway through which they had entered, there was now no sign.

  This is definitely not right, he thought. He looked to the Principal and saw signs of tension and rising disorientation. Unless Pa could be focused, he would soon fall into disharmony. Bandar had no doubt that the long-barreled weapon was intrinsic to the idiomat's motif of action. If the dislocated Hero snapped, the weapon would be put to use, and Bandar's host was the only available target.

  He cast about for some means of consolidating the idiomat and saw a hopeful sign in the dirt. “Look, Pa,” he said, “our cattle must be up ahead."

  The Principal looked where Bandar pointed. Clear in the firelit floor of the tunnel, split-hoofed tracks led onward into the darkness. A pile of dung moldered nearby. There seemed to be only one set of prints, and something about their arrangement struck Bandar as odd, but he could not afford to stand around thinking about it. Idiomats were characterized by their actions; to keep an armed Hero from devolving into wholesale violence, he needed to put the Principal to the work he was meant to do.

  "Come on, Pa,” the nonaut said, setting off in the direction the tracks led.

  The Hero paused only a moment before saying, “Wait up, boy.” He caught up with Bandar and, eyes flicking between the tracks and the dimness ahead, pushed past him to lead the way. Bandar was content to follow behind. It gave him time to think.

  They had entered an entirely different Location, and the nonaut had a strong hunch about what lay at the heart of all this darkness. It would be The Baiting of the Monster in Its Lair, and a very old version of the ancient trope, judging by the primitive setting and the type of ogreish being that was indicated by the tracks and dung.