Alternate Realities (59 page)

“Oh, excellent. Still barbed. What of that masterwork of yours? Shall I come to see it?”

“Not yet. When it’s done.”

“What, afraid of my reaction?”

“When it’s done.”

“When will that be?”

Herrin shrugged. “Possibly a week.”

“So soon?”

“Before deadline. I have had outstanding cooperation.”

“I’ve heard you plan a tribute to the workers.”

“Out of my account.”

“No, no, the State will fund it.”

“
Will
you? That’s quite generous.”

“A gesture seems in order. An inspiration to the city. I’m really impressed, Herrin, truly I am. I have administrators accustomed to such tasks of coordinating workers and supply who find less success. You have a certain talent there too, by no means minor.”

“I should not care to exercise it. My sculpture is the important thing. I credit my choice of supervisors.”

“One lost. Most unfortunate.”

Herrin fidgeted and recrossed his ankles, feet extended before him. The reference was in total bad taste.

“An invisible.”

“One supposes,” Herrin said. “I’m sure I don’t know.”

“You’re a disturbance,” Waden said.

“Do I disturb you?”

Waden tossed off the rest of his drink, set the glass down, still smiling. “I shall expect to see this wonder of yours next week. Dare I?”

“Barring rain. I don’t fancy working in the wet.”

“Ah, you’re admirably restrained. You’re dying for me to see it, and probably a little apprehensive.”

“Not in the least apprehensive.”

“But anxious.”

“I should imagine the same of you.”

“True,” Waden said. “True. I’ll leave you to your rest. I see you were on the verge.” He tapped the decanter with his fingernail. “You ought not to indulge so much. I hate to see a great mind corrupted.”

“Only on occasions. I’ve reformed since my Student days.”

“Have you?” Waden rose, and Herrin did. Waden brushed his clothes into order. “A pleasant rest to you.”

“Thank you.”

Waden started out. Stopped, halfway to the door, looked back. “Keye’s well. Thought I’d tell you.”

“My regards to her.”

Waden registered mild surprise. “Bastard! Did you know?”

“She is with you, then.”

“Ah, she visits. Says you’ve gone strange.”

Herrin shrugged. “A matter of indifference to me.”

“Do you know, I think she prefers you.”

“Again a matter of indifference. Beware of Keye.”

“Do you think so?”

“Creative ethics, Waden. She’ll create yours for you; doubtless she’s doing so at the moment. But that’s your problem.”

“Ah, you are offended.”

“I’m not offended.” He folded his arms to take the weight off his shoulders. His eyes were growing heavy from the drink. “I’m far too weary to cope with Keye, and she’ll drift back again. Or back and forth. I’m quite surprised you two haven’t reached an arrangement long before this. Evidently she feels herself in one of her stronger periods; she avoided you once; now she avoids me. I’ve always thought you underestimated her.” A thought came to him and he penetrated his lethargy with a more direct look. “Ah! you’ve talked to Keye about this—plan, this ambition of yours. And lo, Keye is
with
you.”

“Worth considering.”

“Indeed it is.”

Waden gnawed his lip, laughed softly. Nodded. “Warning taken, Herrin. Warning assuredly taken.”

He left. Herrin walked to the bed and sat down, utterly weary, disturbed in his concentration. He had not asked for disturbances. What had been contentment deserted him.

He tried to put it all from his mind, revise the time, wipe it all out and start over. He failed. He was muddled, vaguely and irrationally, knowing Keye was
not
sitting in her apartment over the Square waiting for his attention. He was hurt. Of course she would not wait. Of course there was no reason that she should. He would have had no objection had she taken a horde of others to her bed. She had done so, in fact, while taking him on convenient days.

But Waden.
Waden
, who rivaled him. He took that maneuver seriously. The three greatest minds in all Freedom ... and always Keye had maintained at least neutrality, with the balance tipped toward him. Waden conceived ambition and the Ethicist went to him like iron to a magnet.

When
his
great work was almost complete.

That
desertion hurt, and the news of it had to come when he was tired, when his maintenance of his reality could be shaken. There was a cure for that. He got up, walked to the table and poured his abandoned glass full of wine. He sat down and he drank, and when he could no longer navigate steadily, he headed for bed, to lie with the lights on because he was too muddled to turn them out, with a confusion of anger in him that was not going to accept things as they were and an exhaustion too great to think his way out of it.

He slept, more a plummet into oblivion than a sinking into rest. And he waked, leaden-limbed and with a blinding headache. He lay abed until he could no longer ignore the day, then rolled out gingerly, bathed, which diminished the headache and finally cured it.

Thinking ... was in abeyance. He toweled off, dressed, held out his hands to see if they were steady, and they were.

Possibly, he thought—because his mind
was
most brilliant—the restlessness at night would get worse. He thought of what Waden feared—the same perspective, to have no one equal, anywhere. To be throwing out thoughts and ideas which no one could criticize because there was no one competent to comprehend.

Life without walls. With endless, endless outpouring of ideas, and nothing coming back, being at the center of everything, and radiating like a star ... into void.

To be cursed with increasing intellect, and increasing comprehension of one’s reality, and increasing grasp....

You’ll swallow,
he recalled saying to Waden Jenks,
until you burst.

That was not, he thought, what Waden feared. It was rather expansion ... until expansion became attenuation, became dissipation ... until Waden had never been.

A wave with no shore.

The thought began to occur to him as well. As it might have occurred to Keye. He had left Keye alone, without a shore to break the wave, and she had gone to Waden; as Waden went to him when Keye did not suffice.

And where now did Herrin Law go?

To deaden his mind every night because the thoughts were too vivid and the brain too powerful, so powerful that the only way to deal with it was to anesthetize it, to get null, for a few precious hours?

Until the machine tore itself apart?

The hands were steady at the moment. He had that confidence, at least.

He decided on breakfast, to be kind to his abused body, to guard his health, food was a good cure for such moods. Well-being generally restored his confidence. He left for the University dining hall rather than order breakfast up from Residency kitchens, which could take far longer than it was worth, which was why he had given up on breakfasts, when he thought about it. He considered his physical condition, which was approaching excessive attrition; hours of physical labor on small intake and limited sleep. Food at regular hours had to help.

He was, in fact, stripped of resolve, of the energy which had sustained him thus far. He ate a far larger breakfast than he had ever been accustomed to since childhood, full of sugars and washed down with milk; he asked the kitchen to pack him a cold lunch, which he took with him in a paper bag; and he walked at a slow pace toward Jenks Square, letting breakfast settle.

He did, he concluded, feel better for all these measures of self-improvement. He walked along the street noticing his surroundings for the first time in weeks.

And invisibles were there.

He flinched from that realization. The first one he saw was where Second intersected Main, coming from a corner, and perhaps there had been others all along, but
after
this one there were others, farther down the street.

Another difficulty of a brain which could not be shut down. Perception.
He
saw them. And what should he ask of others who had been born in Kierkegaard?
Do
you
really see them?
They were there, that was all. He had not put on the brooch this morning—hubris did not go with his mood—now he was desperately glad that he had not. He no longer felt like challenging anything.

One cloaked, hooded figure had stopped, and he stopped. It was Leona Pace.

He stood there perhaps half the beat of his heart, and flinched, walked on past as he ought. The midnight robes, which blanked both ahnit and invisible human from the view of the sane, veiled a shoulder, a blankness.

Perhaps it was the shock he needed to jar him from his private misery, that sight of a reality fractured, a fine talent lost, the waste, the utter waste of it. He did not look back.

The dome lay before him, the vision which made all other things trivial.
This
was the thing, this beautiful object, on which he had poured out all his energy for months, which had taken on shape and life and form. To have it finished, to have it be what it was meant to be ... was worth the Leona Paces and the pain of his own body. Was worth everything, to have this in existence, shining in the morning, the sun sheening the stone with the illusion of dawn-color, with the interior now opened and hinting at convolutions within. It glowed with interior light at the moment because they had not yet shut down the inside lights which the night crews used, bright beads gleaming in the perforations.

He walked within, where steps and taps on stone echoed, where voices spoke one to the other, hidden in the huge triple shell and the curtain-walls and bent about by acoustics and the size of the place. Some of the echo effect he had planned; some was serendipitous, but beautiful: the place rang like a bell with voices, purified sounds, refined them as it refined the light and cast it in patterns. It took chaos and made symphony; glare and made beauty.

The center, beyond the devolving curtain-pillars, held the scaffolding, the image, still shrouded in metal webbing.

And he stopped, for crews were gathered there, both crews, and both supervisors, Gytha and Phelps; the apprentices, the workers, everyone ... more coming in until there could be no one of the active workers omitted, past or present.

“Done?” he asked. His own voice echoed unexpectedly in their hush, which was broken only by the human stirring of a quiet crowd. “Is it finished?”

Carl Gytha and Andrew Phelps brought their tablets, the daily and evening ritual, and another brought an armload of computer printout, the maps from which they had worked, all solemnly offered. He signed the tablets, looked about him at all of them, somewhat numb at the realization that for most of them there was nothing now to do.

“
Well
done,” he said, because saying something seemed incumbent on him. “
Well
done.”

There was a murmur of voices, as if this had somehow been what they wanted to hear. He was bewildered by this, more bewildered when apprentices and workers simply stood there ... and finally Gytha and Phelps offered their hands, which he took, one after the other.

“Go,” he said. “I’ve some finishing. I’ll still need a small crew; Gytha, Phelps, you stay to assist. Pick a handful. The rest of you—it’s
done
.”

He winced at the applause, which multiplied and redoubled like madness in the acoustics of the dome. He nodded in embarrassment, not knowing what else to do, turned matter-of-factly to his platform and his tools, and took off his kit with his lunch and set that down; scrambled up with the agility of practice, and set himself to work.

Confusion persisted. People stayed to talk, and voices and steps echoed everywhere. This failed to distract him, rather calmed him, because it was the life he had planned for the Work, that the interior should live, that there should be people, and voices, and laughter and living things flowing through it.

Eventually the noise changed, from the familiar voices to the strange voices of citizens, but the tone of it was much the same. There was, occasionally, a soft whisper of wonder, the piercing voice of a child trying out the echoes; but the scaffolding wrapped the centermost piece, the heart of it, and his activity fascinated those who stood to watch him work. “Hush,” his remaining assistants would say. “Hush, don’t bother him.” And: “That’s Herrin Law. That’s the Master.” He ignored those voices and the others, much more rapt in the consideration of an angle, the waiting, the aching waiting, for the right moment, as the afternoon sun touched precisely the point of concern, and he had a very small time to make the precise stroke which would capture one of the statue’s changing expressions without destroying all the rest of the delicate planes.

This day and the next and the next he labored, now with abrasive and polish, now smoothing out the tiniest rough spots. It rained, and he worked, until Gytha came and wrapped a warm cloak about him and got him off the platform; and others were there, who had not been there, he thought, in days, wrapped in their own rain gear and bringing raincoats with them. “I thought he might need it,” one said. “He doesn’t take care of himself,” said another, female.

He looked at them askance, huddled within Gytha’s cloak. He was offered warm drink, coddled and surrounded by dozens more who had come, some with blankets and some with warm drink. “Well,” said one, “it’s raining outside; we might as well share the drink and wait.”