Alternate Realities (66 page)

Its arm across his back tightened and it pulled him over face-up; he resisted and stopped resisting in panic. He did not see it, refused this reality, and the other arm slid beneath his legs as it gathered him to its breast beneath the cloak. Panic assailed him, fear of being dropped in his pain—no one had handled him that way, ever, in his memory; in infancy, surely, but that was not in his memory—was not
there
, and did not happen. It was strong; he had never comprehended ahnit as strong. It rose with him without apparent effort, hugged his stiff body against it the more tightly and snugged the cloak about him, enveloping him in its scent, its color, its reality. He was aware of its powerful strides, of the sound of sane citizens it passed, of conversations which passed without interruption by a reality which was not theirs.

Help me,
he might cry to them; but there was nothing there when they should look, nothing that they would want to see, only something which had been Herrin Law being swept away by something which had nothing to do with humans.

There was no pity, not for what they did not perceive.

There was no fighting this thing, for even by fighting he lost. He tried not to feel what was happening, nor to perceive anything about him; he retreated into his own mind, rebuilding the reality he chose, as he chose, which ignored the pain, which denied that anything extraordinary had happened this morning, insisted that in fact he might continue to be in his bed, to sleep as late as he chose. That if he chose to open his eyes—in his imagination he did—he would see the clay bust of Camden McWilliams sitting on the table as it had been, where it would go on sitting until he chose to do something with it.

His reality, as he chose to have it.

He imagined the clay under his undamaged hands, imagined it malleable again and the face, the most perfect work he had ever done (but he would do others) gazing into infinity with a look of desire.

He felt the arms about him. He had gone limp within them, yielded to the motion; it had nestled him more comfortably, and there was dark cloth between him and the daylight, a woven fabric which scarcely admitted the declining sun; there was alien perfume in his nostrils; there was midnight cloth against his cheek, which rested on a bony breast as hard as the arms which enfolded him.

No,
he thought to himself, trying to rebuild that warm bed in the studio. When he was aware, his hands hurt, and his ribs did, and the pain throbbed in rhythm with his heart and the movement of what carried him. He made no move. Horror occurred to him, that perhaps it took him away to commit some further pain on him, or to feed on ... he knew nothing of ahnit, or what they did, and there was no rationality between human and ahnit.

There is no relevancy,
he insisted to himself. It and Herrin Law were not co-relevant; and what it in its reality chanced to do to Herrin Law were overlapping but unrelated events.

He could choose not to feel it; but his self-control was frayed already by the pain. And he was not strong enough to prevent it, had not even the use of his hands.

Here was an external event; he had met one or his mind had betrayed him and conjured one. It had taken him up, and the three greatest minds on Freedom, he and Waden Jenks and Keye Lynn ... had not planned this. Only he might have caused it. He had shaped his reality; and the shape of it suddenly argued that he had not been wise.

Or that something was more powerful, which was a possibility that undid all other assumptions.

Muscles glided, even, long steps; arms shifted him for comfort, adjusted again when the position hurt his ribs and he flinched. The pain eased and it kept walking. He heard nothing more of the human voices of the port, heard rather the whisper of grass, and his heart beat the harder for realizing that they had passed beyond help and hope of intervention. The pain had ebbed and exhaustion had passed and his betraying senses were threatening to stay focused, to keep him all too aware of detail he had no wish to comprehend.

It’s not here,
he tried to tell himself, testing the power of his mind; but sense told him that it was striding down a steep slope; that he heard water moving and smelled it ... they had come to the river. It might fall, or might drop him, or even fling him in, and he could not catch himself. His hands throbbed, shot pain through his marrow—it shifted its grip, was going to drop him. ...

He stiffened and slipped, tried to catch at its shoulder and could not, his hand paralyzed; but it caught him itself and slowly, a shadow between him and the sinking sun, its cloak still tenting him, eased him to the ground. He hurled his body frantically aside, to get away, but it knelt astride him and pressed his shoulder down, keeping him from going anywhere. He twisted his head. They were beside the water, on the riverbank. He looked dazedly at the brown current, staring in that direction and trying to think, muddled with pain and longing for the water; he had hurt his hand trying to use it. The pain was starting up again, headed for misery.

The ahnit got off him, a tentative release; he stayed still, not looking at it, reasoning that if he treated it as humans always did, it might treat him as ahnit always did and simply go away.

It moved into his unfocused vision, a mere shadow, and dipped water; it
was
only a shadow—he had achieved that much. But then the shadow moved closer and obscured all his view, like dark haze in the twilight; it leaned above him and laid a cold wet hand on his brow, so that he flinched. It bathed his face with light touches of leathery thin fingers. It leaned aside and dipped up more water and repeated the process.
Let it
, Herrin thought, and tried to stare through it.

Then it picked up his hand, and he flinched and cried out from the pain. It did not let go, but eased its grip. He stared into the midnight face, the wet dark eyes. Tried, with tiny movements, to indicate he wanted to pull his hand back; even that hurt.

“You see me,” it said.

It was a rumbling, nasal voice. A rock might have spoken. It chilled him and he ceased even to reason; he jerked from it and hurt himself. Quickly it let him go.

“You see me,” it said again.

He stared at it, unable to unfocus it. It reached to his collar, touched the brooch he wore there, forgotten. “You see this, you see me.”

And when be had almost succeeded in unfocusing again, it unpinned the brooch that he had handled daily, that he had worn in defiance of others, thinking it a vast joke. It was no-color, like the ahnit.

“See it,” said the ahnit, “see me.”

He could not deny it.

“I have a name,” said the ahnit. “Ask it.”

“I see you,” he said. It was hard to say. It was suicide. He gave up hope. The ahnit uncloaked itself, unclasping the brooch at its own throat, and baring an elongate, naked head, and a robed body which hinted at unhuman structure; it spread the cloak over him, bestowing oblivion, spreading warmth over his chilled body,

“Go away,” he asked it.

It stayed, a shadow in the almost dark, solid, undeniable.

“Do they all begin this way?” he asked of it.

“They?” it echoed.

“All the others who see you.”

“No others.”

“Leona Pace.”

“They don’t see. They look
at
us, but they don’t see.”

It had the flavor of proposition. Like a Master, it riddled him and waited response, conscious or unconscious of the irony. He searched his reason for the next Statement and suddenly found one. “My reality and yours have no meaning for each other.”

“They talk about reality. They say they lose theirs and they’re no longer sane.”

“They obviously talk to you.”

“A few words. Then no more. They try to go back; and they live between us and you. They just talk to themselves.”

“From that you know how to talk to us.”

“Ah. But we’ve
listened
for years.”

“Among us.” The prospect chilled. No one had known the ahnit
could
speak; or wanted to know; or cared. Humans chattered on; and ahnit—invisible—listened, going everywhere, because no one could see them. He shook his head, trying to do what the others had done, retreating to a safer oblivion; but he had been in the port, had tried to function as an invisible, and it had not saved him from shame.

Or from this.

“We’ve waited,” said the ahnit.

It was Statement again. “For what?” he asked, playing the game Masters had played with him and he had played with Students in his turn. He became Student again. “For what, ahnit?”

“I don’t know the word,” it admitted. “I’ve never heard it.” It made a sound, a guttural and hiss. “That’s our word.”

“That’s
your
reality; it has nothing to do with mine.”

“But you see me.”

It was an answer. He turned it over in his mind, trying to get the better of it. Perhaps it was the pain that muddled him; perhaps there was no answer. He wanted it to let him go ...
wanted
something, if the words would not have choked him on his own pride. The fact was there even if he kept it inside. Had always been there. He had denied it before. Tried to cancel it.

Truth was not cancelable, if there was something that could coerce him; and he had no wish to live in a world that was not of his making ... in which Waden Jenks and his Outsiders, and now an ahnit limited his reach, and crippled him, and sat down in front of him to watch him suffer.

“What do you want?” he challenged it, on the chance it would reveal a dependency.

“You’ve done that already,” it said, and destroyed his hope. “Do you want a drink, Herrin Law?”

It was not innocent. He looked into the approximate place of its eyes in the dark, in its dark face, and found his mouth dry and logic on the side of its reality; it
knew
what it did and how it answered him. He defied it and rolled onto his belly, crawled to the water’s edge and used his broken hands to dip up the icy water, drank, muddying his sleeves and paining his hands, then awkwardly tried to get himself back to a dry spot, lay there with his head spinning, feeling feverish.

Patiently it tucked the cloak about him again, silent statement.

“Why did you bring me here?” he asked. Curiosity was always his enemy; he recognized that. It led him places better avoided.

“I rest here,” it said.

Worse, and worse places. “Where, then?”

A dark, robed arm lifted, toward the west and the hills, upriver. The road ran past those hills, but there were no farms there; were no humans there.

I’ll die first
, he thought, but in this and in everything he had diminished confidence. “Why?” he asked.

“Where would you go?” it asked him.

He thought, shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut, pressing out tears of frustration. He looked at it again.

“I’ll take you into the hills,” it said. “There are means I can find there, to heal your hurts.”

An end of pain, perhaps; it worked on him with that, as Waden Jenks might, and perhaps as pitilessly. “Do what you like,” he said with desperate humor. “I permit it.”

The ahnit relaxed its mouth and small, square teeth glinted. “Mostly,” it said, “humans are insane.” Herrin’s heart beat shatteringly hard when he heard that, for what it implied of realities, and this reality was devastatingly strong. “Who broke your hands, Herrin Law?”

He was trembling. “Outsiders. At Waden Jenks’s orders.”

“Why?”

“So there would be no more statues.”

“You disturbed them, didn’t you?”

He rolled his eyes to keep the burning from becoming tears, but what he saw was stars and that black distance made him smaller still. “It seems,” he said, carefully controlling his voice, “that raw power has its moment.”

“Where would you go?” it asked. “Where do you want to go? What is there?”

He shook his head, still refusing to blink. There was nowhere. Wherever he was, what had happened to him remained.

Carefully it slipped its arms beneath him and gathered him up, wrapped as he was in its cloak. It folded him against its bony chest and he made no resistance. It walked, and chose its own way, a sure and constant movement.

There was a long time that he shut his eyes and yielded to the motion, and passed more and more deeply into insensibility, jolted out of it occasionally when some stitch of pain grew sharp. Then he would twist his body to ease it, faint and febrile effort, and the ahnit would shift him in its arms, seldom so much as breaking stride. Most of all he could not bear to have his hands dangle free, with the blood swelling in them, with the least brush at the swollen skin turned to agony. He turned to keep them tucked crossed on his chest and thus secure from further hurt. He trusted the steadiness of the arms which held him and the thin legs which strode almost constantly uphill. It was all dark to him. He was lost, without orientation; the river lay behind them—there was no memory of crossing the only bridge but his memory was full of gaps and he could not remember what direction they had been facing when the ahnit had pointed toward the hills.
Across
the river, he had thought; and up the river; but then he had not remembered the bridge, and he trusted nothing that he remembered.

They climbed and the climb grew steeper and steeper. Grass whispered. The breeze would have been cold if not for the ahnit’s own warmth.
We shall stop soon
, he thought, reckoning that it had him now within its own country, and that it would be content.