Alternate Realities (70 page)

They moved, his mother drying her hands which were already dry, and his father walking back to the kitchen counter as if he had business there.

“They’re wrong,” Herrin said again. “I’ve been through the system and I’ve taught in the system and I know the structure of the whole thing and it’s wrong.”

“Long wet autumn,” his father said to his mother. “I think we’ve got to expect a cold winter.”

“Father,” Herrin said. “Mother?”

“Leaves have gone dark,” his mother said. She looked through to the wall, still wiping her hands on the towel. “I think it’s time to pull some of those tubers, take a look at them.”

“Might.”

“Can’t afford a ground freeze. Could come any morning.” She seemed to shrink, a slight shiver.

“Mother?”

There was no answer. They started putting away the dishes. Herrin sat, hands on the table, with the sandwich lying undigestible in his belly. He sat and watched in silence as they began stirring about the evening routine, the complaints about the quality of the wood for keeping the fire at night; the reminder about the kitchen fire and the old argument about the temperature in the room, something played for him, and in his absence. He watched, hungry for the sights and the sounds, nonparticipant. He rose finally when they were about to go to bed and searched out a towel and filled it with food, got a bottle for water and filled it from the kitchen tub; while they settled into bed he entered the bath, pawed through things until he found a razor, and soap, and he searched the closet for clean clothes, but his father was smaller than he and there was nothing of his own left. Just Perrin’s things, still hanging there. He closed the door and snatched up the things he had pilfered, hastened past his parents’ bed in the main room and out through the door.

He left it open, ran, stumbling and blind with tears. “Sbi,” he called out, but he had said good-bye to the ahnit, had turned Sbi away. “Sbi,” he wept, and ran up the hill clutching the bundles in his arms.

A shadow met him just the other side, Sbi’s tall shape, Sbi’s scent, Sbi’s enfolding arms, which took him in, gently comforting. He wept, long; Sbi sat down with him on the grassy hillside and simply held him.

“They stopped seeing me,” he said.

“Yes,” said Sbi. “I feared so.”

He drew another breath, wiped nose and eyes with the back of his bandaged hand, blinked in the grit it left. “I pilfered things I could use.”

“Good,” said Sbi.

“I want to leave this place,” he said.

“Yes,” said Sbi, and rose, keeping an arm about him to help him. Something warm settled about his shoulders, the cloak Sbi had kept waiting for him. “Where shall we go now?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Sbi picked up the bundles of toweling, and laid an arm again about his shoulders. “Come. Out of the wind at least.”

He came, settled where Sbi wished, a place still not out of Law’s Valley, nor far enough from the house for his liking; but rocks sheltered it from the wind and he could sit down next Sbi and curl up with knees and elbows inside the midnight cloak.

There was dew the next morning too, but at least they were not hungry as well as cold and wet. Herrin breakfasted on parched grain and a bit of cheese ... he offered a bit of bread to Sbi, but Sbi would not take it, for whatever reason. And he drank from the jar, the merest sip, which Sbi watched silently.

They packed up then. The house would have been visible, he thought, if he climbed the hill; he could have looked down on his father and mother’s house by daylight ... had he just walked up the rise. He would not. Sbi wove grass braids with great dexterity and bound up the bundles he had to carry. “Here,” said Sbi. “We might go to Camus and pilfer a basket, but until we do. ...”

“Not Camus,” Herrin said. He leaned against the rock and hitched the grass rope to his shoulder, a weight on his hand for the instant, which hurt despite the splints.

“Where?” Sbi asked again.

He shook his head. “I don’t care.” He looked up, looked at Sbi’s face, recalling that last night he had deserted Sbi. Sbi had waited. Dismissed, had simply sat down outside the house and waited last night. His own predictability disturbed him. All that he did assumed the nature of a pattern of Sbi’s choosing. Sbi’s reality.

“What do you want?” he asked of Sbi again. “You stay with me ... why?”

No answer. He looked at the morning-lit face, the black, wet eyes, and found the morning bitter cold.

“Do what you like this time,” he told Sbi. “Go to your own kind; I’ll come with you, if that’s what you ultimately want.”

Sbi’s lips pursed in one of those unreadable expressions. “That would be a far walk, Master Law.”

“Where are your kind? Where do you live? What do you do with your lives?”

Silence.

“Sbi, what do you want from me?”

Again silence, which was like what his mother and father had done to him, and he did not find it comfortable. But Sbi put out an arm and embraced him very gently, beginning to walk from where they had camped. “I’ll tell you,” said Sbi, “that there are very few of us now. You brought us disease. Disease went where humans never have, into the far hills. We died in great numbers; but you never saw. It was a significant fact to us; but it wasn’t real to you. We used to live in the hills, but we yielded up this valley. We were in awe of you ... once. But I am educated in your University; and you never saw me.
That’s
why we came, to learn the things you know.”

He walked, not looking at Sbi, finding Sbi’s embracing arm a heavier and heavier weight as they descended the hill. “What will you do with those things you know?”

Silence.

“Sbi, is that it? That you stay with me ... because you think I can teach you something? Is that what you want from me?”

“No,” Sbi said.

“What then?”

Silence. They walked the level ground now, making their way across the fields in the direction Sbi chose, back the way they had come into the pocket valley. Herrin thought, tried to reason, kept turning back to the thought of ahnit
in
the University, invisible in the halls. In the Residency. In the dome in the Square, where others had started seeing them.

Sbi embraced him still, keeping him warm, keeping him close. So Waden had done to him, lulling his suspicions, using his weakness to bypass his reason. That Sbi was doing so seemed only reasonable. There would be a time that Sbi had extracted all the use possible from him, but for the moment it was a convenient source of help. The difficult thing, he decided, was knowing when to pull away, when to elude such users before they had their chance to harm him.

But he did not know where to go.

The size of what Sbi wanted, he reckoned, had to be measured in terms of the discomfort Sbi was willing to tolerate to get it; and what Sbi wanted had to do with his own will, his own consent, or something beyond the physical, because anything other than that, Sbi could do.

He tried to reason around an alien mind, and there was no reason; he tried to reason what he himself wanted, which was formless. Mostly he was not afraid of the world when he was with Sbi; he was only afraid of Sbi, and that limited things to a visible, bearable quantity.

That day, Sbi led him out of the valley and again into the hills. Sbi stopped whenever he grew tired, and comforted him and kept him warm, which was the limit of what he asked. It was limbo, and Sbi seemed patient with it.

He slept that night in Sbi’s arms, his belly comforted with pilfered food, his misery somewhat less than it had been; he thought again and again, half-sleeping, what pains Sbi had taken with him, and what inconvenience Sbi suffered, and he wondered.

Sbi hated him, possibly, for what he had made the ahnit do, in taking that small life.

But then the ahnit was not capable of killing him and he did not easily imagine that Sbi meant to do something
to
him.

To do something with him, undoubtedly. Whatever use he had left in him that appealed to an alien mind. He thought of his own work in the heart of Kierkegaard, and of the lonely pair of figures in the hills which Sbi had so wanted him to see, and neither made sense.

Sbi’s hand massaged his back, over tense muscles. “Pain, Master Law?”

“No.” The voice had startled him. He had not known the ahnit was awake. It disturbed him and he tried to relax, while Sbi’s hand massaged a spot which was particularly tense.

“You haven’t slept much.”

“Nor have you.”

“I don’t sleep as much as you.”

“Oh,” he said, and shut his eyes again and accepted the comfort, tired and puzzled at once.

“Master Law,” said Sbi, “why did they cripple you?”

He stiffened all over. It was the Statement again; it was never, to Sbi’s satisfaction, answered.

“I don’t know, Sbi. What is it that I don’t see?”

Silence.

“And how could you know?” he asked. “You weren’t there. You don’t
know
Waden Jenks. How am I missing the answer?”

Silence.

“Waden—couldn’t bear a rival. He warned me so.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Either. Why warn you?”

He thought about it. “It wasn’t rational, was it?”

Silence.

It lay at the center of what he did not want to think about. He lay still, staring into the dark. “Sbi. Where do you want me to go? What do you want?”

Silence.

“Whatever you want,” he said, “I’ll do it. I don’t see anything else. I don’t see anywhere else. You don’t make sense to me. I don’t know why you’re out here or why you bother or what you want. What is it?”

Silence.

More silence. He grew distraught. Sbi patted him gently, as if trying to soothe him to sleep.

“Let me alone.” He scrambled up, pushing with his hands, which hurt him, and stalked off close to striking at something, his bound ribs not giving him air enough. He stopped, staring out across the plains and finding nothing on the horizon but grass and night-bound sky, and stars, which belonged to strangers, the vast Outside, which went on and on, challenging illusions.

Suddenly he was afraid. He looked back, half expecting to find Sbi gone, or near him. Sbi simply waited.

And that did not wholly comfort him either.

There was no particular direction. Sbi walked east, this day, and sat down after a time, munching a grass stem, and seemed content to sit. Herrin lay down full length on his back and stared at the clouds drifting, fleecy white and far, with such a weight on his mind that it seemed apt to break.

“Sbi,” he said at last, “teach me.”

“Teach you what, Master Law?”

“My name is Herrin.”

“Herrin. Teach you what?”

“What reality is.”

“What do you see?”

“Sky.”

“What do you feel?”

“Pain, Sbi.”

“Both are real.”

“Whose reality?”

“Everyone’s.”

“What,” he snorted, having finally discovered Sbi’s depth, “
everyone’s
forever and however far? That’s hardly reasonable.”

“Throughout all the universe.”

“You’re mad.”

Silence.

“How can external events be real to you, Sbi?”

“I feel them.”

It angered him. In frustration he slammed his hand against the ground and rolled a defiant look at Sbi, with tears of pain blurring his eyes. “You tell me you felt that.”

“Yes. All the universe did.”

Sbi proposed an insanity. He retreated from it, simply stared at the clouds.

“I’ve taught you,” said Sbi, “all I know.”

“You mean that I’m not able to perceive it.”

“Where shall we go, Herrin?”

He bit down on his lip, thought, trying to draw connections through the maze of Sbi’s logic. He gave up. “How long are you prepared to sit here, Sbi?”

“Is this where you wish to be, then?”

“What does it matter what I want?”

Silence.

“Sbi, I was wrong. I’ve spent my life being wrong. What can I do about it?”

Silence. For the first time he understood that answer. He turned on his side and looked at Sbi, who sat chewing on another grass stem. His heart was beating harder. “What were you waiting for all those years in the city? For me? For someone who could see you?”

“Yes.

“And what difference does it make whether I see you?”

Silence.

“It makes a great deal of difference, doesn’t it, Sbi?”

“What do you think?”

“That it makes everything wrong. That the whole world is crazy and I’m sane. Where does that leave me, Sbi?”

“Invisible. Like me.”

He found breathing difficult, not alone from the bandage. He pushed himself up on his elbow. “You had to let me go back to my own house to find that out.”

“I had no idea what would happen. Reality is not in my control. Nor are you.”

“You’ll wander all over Sartre taking care of me if that’s what I decide, is that so?”

“I will stay with you, yes. And keep you from harm if I can.”

“Why?”

Sbi sucked in the grain-bearing head and chewed it. “Because I want to. Because when you struck your hand I had the pain, Herrin.”

“I could ask you; I could ask you question after question and when I got close to what I really want to know you’d say nothing.”