Alternate Realities (73 page)

“Come,”
Sbi insisted, and drew him away, out the hall beyond the ell, into the corridor outside. He remembered Keye then and looked to all the shadows, half expecting her to be there.

Sbi drew him farther, toward the stairs, and down them, where the wind skirled in with the taint of smoke.

He hurried, wakened by the shock of the wind, hastened to be quit of the place and Waden’s fancies, his reasoning which threatened to swallow up all the things he thought he knew, down and down the rubble-littered stairs, deeper and deeper into the dark. His breath came short. Sbi gripped his arm to keep him steady and kept his pace.

Something started in the dark; a running shape pelted from the floor below to the staircase and down again.

“Keye!”
he shouted, making echoes. “Wait for me! Listen to me!”

The steps retreated, defying his control, racing away into their own reality.

And wood splintered, and crashed down in hideous echoes.

He ran, almost fell himself at the turn where the railing had broken, where it hung now, swinging in the almost dark, and a black-clad body sprawled on the steps below.

Sbi made to protest his haste, but he caught his balance against the wall and made the last turn down, dropped to his knees to try to lift Keye from where she had fallen on her belly, touched her shoulders and realized his hands had no strength to lift ... and that lifting might kill her. He patted her shoulder helplessly, leaned to see her side-turned face, at once overwhelmed to realize life in the eyes and a breath beneath his hand.

“Keye. It’s Herrin, Keye.”

“No, it isn’t,” the answer came. Her lips hardly moved and the sound was no more than a whisper. “I cancel all your realities. And my own. And my own. And all the world.”

The lips stopped moving and the breath sighed out. In an instant more the body diminished, a looseness very different from sleep.

He drew his hand back, recoiled slowly. He had never seen death happen. It seemed to take something of himself away too.

But the universe stayed.

Because, he wondered, he had indeed abdicated it? Because there was paradox, and he had made it? He knelt there, fixed in the thought, and Sbi gathered him to his feet and drew him away.

“Herrin,” Sbi said when they were outside, on the steps and in the wind. Sbi hugged him tightly, till the ribs hurt, and set him against the wall and touched his face. “Herrin. Don’t lose me. Listen to me.”

“I hear you,” he said. It was hard to speak, to pull his reason back from that logic that tried to claim it. He focused on Sbi’s dark eyes, on Sbi’s expressions which he had
learned
to read, and which he had never understood; on a remote monument which had stood before man had come to Freedom.

He looked up, above the door.

Man,
said the inscription,
is the measure of all things.

“No,” he said.

There was a lightening in the east, down the ruins of Port Street, and it showed the University intact at least from this perspective. And the city ... always before, the hedge had separated the Residency and the Outsiders from the city. A view was open now which had never been there before.

It was not fire in the east, but the sun coming up. He gazed at it in fixation, thinking that the world had turned, and that the greater forces in the Universe existed, as the star came up visible over the curve of the world with no one able to affect it.

There was argument which might prevail against that reasoning; he refused to pursue it, only staring toward the daylight as toward a goal that had to be won. “It’s there,” he said to Sbi. It was a horrid dawn, smoke-fouled and revealing ugliness, but it was the light, and it was coming.

The sun kept coming, making real the cindered hedge, the building which still poured a twisting column of black smoke, but a wind had come with the dawn, and began to sweep away what had hung there. They walked into the long expanse of Main together, cloaked but unhooded, both of them. There was debris left from the night, paper, scraps of clothing, wisps of cindery stuff like pieces of the night left over, which blew lightly along the pavement and collected in the gutters and against the lee side of buildings.

And there were some who lay dead. Herrin stopped by each, to know whether this man, this woman, this boy or girl was in fact dead, or lay in shock, or unconscious, or helpless with injury.
He
had lain helpless once and only Sbi had seen him. But he and Sbi this time found none to help.

They saw the living, too, furtive shapes which flitted from building to building, shadow to shadow in the dawn, some cloaked and some in the plain clothes of citizens who had once—before the night—been sanely blind.

There were ahnit, a few, who glided among the shadows, and one who came out from a vacant doorway and, seeing Sbi, spoke a few quiet hisses and clicks. Sbi answered. That one slowly unhooded and walked away down the steps and around the corner and on through the streets.

“Tlhai,” Sbi said. “Tlhai says some of us have stayed. That some have taken the injured away. That some have gone away, but may be back. We have the habit of this city. I think they’ll come.”

Herrin looked about him, at two or three of the human fugitives who had stood to stare in the shadows, but when he looked they ran away, and others came, and did the same.

“Stop,” he called to them. They did so, some of them, three or four, some distance down intersecting Second Street. They looked at him, and seemed likely to run away. But when he walked a few paces on down Main, showing no intent to force his presence on them, they drew a few paces closer.

Others came, and still others. They looked from the windows, and peered out from dark doorways.... They crept down steps into the daylight, their clothes stained with soot and dirt, their persons disheveled. Sbi drew closer to him, touched a hand to his back. He turned half about and saw more of them from another direction.

His heart beat in panic. He tried not to show it, but when another glance back the way they had come showed them now surrounded, he despaired of himself and of Sbi. He had felt violence, which was in Kierkegaard, like seeing invisibles; such things did not happen ... visibly. But there was no retreat out of this reality.

“Come,” he said to Sbi. Up against invisibles, one just ... walked, quietly past. He headed the way they had been going, which must take him through some of them, and they showed no disposition to back away.

They did not stop him. They all turned to keep their eyes on him but they offered no harm. “Master Law,” one said. “Master Law,” others murmured, and at his back he felt others following.

More gathered. He looked aside, and back, and faced a throng of solemn faces, expectant faces, haggard with desires and fears and every sort of need.

“The city still exists,” he said, meaning that Kierkegaard still had people, still had needs and life of its own, but he saw the faces which drank that in desperately and realized what he had said to them, saw hope struggling there. They wanted to hear him. Perhaps, he thought, to them he was all they could find of the authority that had defined what was. A University Master. That was what they had found. They waited for reason and the only reason he knew on their terms was paradox, that had swallowed Waden Jenks.

He could, he thought, destroy them. They came for answers and he could tell them lies.

“I’ve no answers for you,” he said and saw that hope painfully wounded. “But—” He reached for something, anything to give them, because the need was so unbearably intense in that place, all about him, stifling breath. “—I know other things. I’ve seen a place ... not so far from here ... where other things exist. Where I’ve seen what’s old. There’s a place in the hills where a statue stands, all alone, but it goes on existing in the middle of all that grass and the bare hills. It goes on saying what someone created it to say, all by itself. I’ve seen it. It has to do with love, and it’s out there all alone with no one to see it. Listen to me,” he said, but there was no need to say: the crowd grew, in utter silence, with eyes fixed painfully fast on him. He needed no loud voice. “We were just born. All of us. We were new, this morning. We’ve gotten through the night and the sun’s up even though we doubted it. Ahnit are here, and we are, and maybe Outsiders will come back. I think there’ll not be another attack; there was a man named McWilliams who had cause for what he did ... I think it was he, but there are other Outsiders, and likely they’ve done for him. There’s not been another attack, so someone out there either went away or couldn’t do it again. Go out in the city. Find everyone who
can
see, and tell them the sun’s come up. And it’s all right to see.”

The silence hung there. He walked away through it, his hand resting on Sbi’s shoulder, and people moved aside for them. Some flitted away; some followed still.

“Master Law,” said a man. It was Andrew Phelps. Herrin’s heart wrenched, recalling the mob, but Phelps’s look was sane, and anxious. “They said you were hurt,” Phelps said.

He reached out his bandaged hand, very carefully, and Phelps only let it rest on his, not closing on it. “It hurt,” he said. “But it’s not so much, Phelps. They thought it was, but I don’t. Can you find the others? Can you bring them? There’s more than statues to make here. There’s so much to
do
, Phelps.”

Andrew Phelps stood there, his mouth trembling, and looking as he used to when he had gotten some new instruction ... a moment to take it in, and then an eagerness. “To
do
, Master Law?”

Herrin nodded. “Sir,” Phelps said, and gently gave back his hand, and hesitated a moment before he hastened off.

“Master Law!” they began to shout from house to house, and people came and did nothing more than touch him. He flinched at first, and then understood himself as a reality they wanted to test; some touched Sbi as well, and fled in dismay. The touches became more and more, until it seemed everyone who met them on the street wanted to lay hands on them, and Herrin grew afraid, because even little jolts could cause him pain, and one of them might try to take hold of him too violently. Hysteria swirled about him.

“Sbi,” he said. “Sbi, stay close to me.”

“They chase their own fears,” Sbi said. “Ah, Herrin, I’m afraid for you.”

They had come to the dome itself, where others poured out, and more gathered from other streets. They pressed in, each pushing the others, until one did seize him, embraced him, sobbing; and another did, and they hurt him, for all that Sbi tried to fend them off: they were as anxious to touch Sbi as well.
“No!”
Herrin shouted, and somehow and by someone he found himself shielded, was taken by yet another pair of arms, but gently this time, protecting him, and a second pair, while people he knew were suddenly between him and the crowd, making a ring about him and giving him and Sbi a place to stand.

Gytha was there, and John Ree. And more and more of them. There was Andrew Phelps, shouldering his way through the quietened crowd. From another quarter a blue-robed figure pressed forward, hood flung back from brown hair and broad, freckled face. Herrin saw her, held out his hand fearing someone would stop her. “Leona Pace,” others of the workers murmured, and hands went out to pat her shoulders as she passed. “Apprentice Pace,” others whispered, because the name was one set in bronze, ahead of all the others. Herrin put his arm about her, looked into a plain face, radiant through tears. Others cheered her. There were others who unhooded. Here and there in the crowd someone recognized someone lost and found again. There were names cried out, and tears shed. Some hunted those they remembered. “Mari,” a man called out forlornly. “Mari, are you there, too?” Whether an invisible named Mari heard, Herrin did not learn, the noise of the crowd was too great, the press too insistent.

“Be still,” he called out, close to exhaustion, and others tried to pass the word, a confusion of shouting until finally the noise was subdued.

“Ask them to sit down,” Sbi said. It was inspiration. He did so, and uncertainly the word passed and people settled where they were on the pavement, disheveled and exhausted, many holding onto one another. Herrin still stood, and Sbi, and Gytha and Phelps and Pace.

He talked to them, in a silence finally so profound he need not shout. He said much that he had said before. “Don’t be afraid,” he told them, “Not of the ahnit, not of Outsiders, not of anything. Clean up your homes, clean up the streets, share with anyone who needs food or help. If anyone lacks shelter ... there are rooms in the University; there’s shelter there. See everything.
Do
something when something needs doing. That’s all.”

He was very tired. He thought if he did not get away soon he would fall down where he stood, senseless. His vision kept going gray and the sunlight blurred. He put out a hand for Sbi’s help, and Sbi put an arm about him. So did someone else, and the others cleared a way for him, parting the crowd, which stayed seated, all but the narrow aisle dislodged. There was a murmuring, and finally others gained their feet, a wave spreading from that disruption, but they did not rush in on him.

They found him a place to rest, on the steps of a building. People brought blankets, and food and drink, and he sat there with Sbi and Leona Pace and Gytha and some of the others, but most of the workers were out cleaning up the Square, out investigating shelter in the University, wherever he sent them. Some went to the port to order the market opened.