Alternate Realities (71 page)

“The important questions are for you to answer. It is, after all, your world that’s in jeopardy; mine is long past that.”

“Why were you among us?”

“If someone had destroyed your world, would you not have an interest in those who had done so?”

“They
did
. And I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to see them again or be seen.”

Sbi simply stared at him.

There was no relief for the silence, none. He sat up with his bandaged hands in his lap and contemplated them, flexed his hands slightly against the splints and bit his lip at the pain which won him no great degree of movement.

“Who broke your hands, Herrin Law?”

He shut his eyes, weary of the repeated question.

“Why?” Sbi asked inevitably.

He shook his head slowly, drew a breath which suddenly stopped in his throat. His eyes unfocused. He thought to Fellows’ Hall, a certain evening, and a conceit which had gripped them both, him and Waden. “I’d begun to see
you
. I’d begun to see things the way they were; and Waden was never dull. I think he saw too, Sbi. I think he did. He
does
. Sbi, I’m going back.”

“Yes,” said Sbi.

He had reached for the bundles of toweling and grass rope which were all his possessions; and suddenly he caught Sbi’s expression, and Sbi’s tone, and it was not the same as when he had proposed going to the valley. Then there had been disappointment, vague reluctance. Now it was different.

“You’ve pushed me to this,” he said, wrapping his arms about the bundles and staring at Sbi. “Sbi, have I guessed enough of what you want? Or do you go on the way you have?”

“I don’t know that you’re right,” Sbi said. “But your logic seems irrefutable save by Waden Jenks. I will tell you what I want, Herrin. I have found it: a human who can see. I’ll tell you what I’ve waited for all these years as you say ... to learn what that human will do, when he sees. But one thing frightens me: what those who don’t see will do to him.”

“They won’t be
able
to see me,” he said, disliking Sbi’s proposition. But he thought about it. “There are the Outsiders, aren’t there? And they see.”

“To my observation—yes.”

He sank down off his heels and frowned with the pain and with the fear the pain set in him. He stared straight before him and thought about it for a long while.”

“Now it’s hiding,” he said finally.

“How, hiding?”

“Before, I was surviving. Now it’s hiding, staying up here in the hills. Now I don’t go back because I’m afraid. Or if I don’t go back I
am
afraid.” He rolled a glance at Sbi. “You’re good; you’ve had the better of me. You set it all up. Located the best of us ... studied how to intervene. You had your best chance when I came out of the University and worked in the open. Then you could get to me. Accosted me in the dark that night, on Port Street. That
was
you. Drove Leona Pace over the edge. Came back to plague me. Worked at me—constantly.”

“Yes,” said Sbi.

“Now I should go back to the city. Now I should take on Waden Jenks and finish drawing him into this.”

“Yes.

“Why
, Sbi?”

“Our survival.”

“Reasonable,” he said, trying at least to admire the artistry of it.

“What are you going to do?”

He shook his head. “Surrender Freedom to your manipulation? That’s what you’ve set me up to do, isn’t it? Me, and Waden Jenks; one of us set against the other ... myself, taken out of influence; and on the other hand given the chance to change the world. I’m one of the invisibles. It occurs to me that murder is possible for one of us. That I can push Waden over the edge ... I can do that, because I’ve nothing to lose, have I? Or I can sit here in the hills and know that the greatest thing I ever did fitted your purpose.”

“All that humans have done is bent around us, Herrin Law. The way you live, the pains you take to ignore us, the insanity which claims some of you ... are these things spontaneous? Were you ever—reasonable?”

He stared at the horizon, colder and colder. “No,” he said.

“Herrin. I’ll go
with
you. I’m concerned for you.”

He thought of the statue in the hills; of a small dead creature in Sbi’s hands; of Sbi’s hands caressing what Sbi had killed.

Of his parents going about their business not seeing him.

He rested his face against the back of his hand, wiped at the left eye. “So, well, tell me this, Sbi, what do you expect to happen?”

“I don’t know. But it will be of human choosing, and my choosing, both, my friend. Both at once. Is it not reasonable?”

It was, as Sbi said, reasonable. “I’ve taught students,” Herrin said. “I thought I knew, and thought I saw, and I taught. For them, I’m going back, and Waden ... I don’t know about Waden.” He struggled to his feet, started to bend for his belongings again, but Sbi anticipated him and caught them up.

“It’s not far,” Sbi said.

He had guessed that too, that Sbi had brought him generally in the direction Sbi wanted him to go.

A ship passed in the night sky, a shuttle, headed offworld. Herrin watched it go, from the hills above Kierkegaard. He looked down on the city, with its dimly lighted streets, with the bright glare of the port like a bleeding wound. He felt Sbi’s presence at his elbow without needing to look. “Do you know what that was, Sbi?”

“One of the shuttles. I know. You taught us about other worlds.”

“Does it occur to you that we two don’t control everything?”

“Ah, Herrin, I understand more than that.”

“What more, Master Sbi?”

“That somewhere among those points of light stand others who misapprehend their limits; that somewhere at this moment someone is in pain; that somewhere a life has begun; that somewhere one has ended; I feel them all tonight.”

“I’m trying to feel them.”

“Somewhere,” said Sbi, “is someone else wrestling with dilemma. Somewhere is someone wondering the value of life itself. The universe is always asking questions.”

“Somewhere,” said Herrin, “someone is scared.”

“Beside you, Herrin Law.”

He turned and looked at the ahnit, who almost blended with the night, a shadow among shadows. A strange impulse possessed him, a melancholy; he opened his arms and embraced Sbi’s alien shape, gently, because contact hurt. He had done so in his life with his parents, with his sister when they were both small; with Keye when he made love; with Waden when Waden had a public gesture to make; with the workers when they helped him from the scaffolding ... only those times in his life had someone touched him; and with Sbi again it was different. Sbi embraced him very gently, and he stepped back and looked at Sbi sadly. “I don’t see you have any need to go down there.”

“Probably you don’t see,” Sbi said. “In some things you’re very complicated. Why did you go to your old house, Herrin Law, and to those people?”

“I don’t know.”

“A Master does something and confesses not to know why?”

“I wanted shelter. It didn’t quite work out, did it?” Heat came to his face. “I’ve made that mistake several times; it brought me here. Possibly it’s got hold of me again. Why else am I going down there? Stubbornness. I have some perverse desire to try it again, to talk to people I knew, to shake them till they see. I’m sure the Outsiders will see. I’m sure those who did this to me will.” He thought a moment. “I’m mad, aren’t I? Invisibles are. So why should you go?”

“Why did you go to your old house, and to those people?”

“Not satisfied with my answer?”

“No.”

He folded his arms across his ribs and stared at all the lights. “Well, it doesn’t make sense.”

And after a moment: “Why go, Sbi? Answer
my
questions.”

“But this is what I’ve lived my life for.”

“What, ‘this’? What
this?”

Sbi rested a hand on his shoulder. “That you give me back my faith. That I see our destroyers have the capacity to create. For one who believes in the whole universe, to one who doesn’t ... how can I explain?”

Herrin looked up at the sky above the city.

“We’ve become part of it again,” Sbi said.

“And if we all die, Sbi? Somewhere in your universe, somewhere out there—is there some world dying tonight?”

“Do you feel so?”

“O Sbi.” He shivered, and shook his head. And started down the slope, losing sight of the city among the hills.

Sbi overtook him, a soft pacing beside him in the grass, company in the dark.

“I don’t think,” Sbi said, “that the port market is likely to be open. The Outsiders were unfriendly to it. And without it—invisibles will go hungry; and some will pilfer in-town and some will trade for what those pilfer; and some who are ahnit will have gone away.”

“Best they should,” he said glumly. He considered what he should do, what there was to say ... to Waden Jenks.

Try reason again?
He had no doubt that Waden could kill him. Likely there were Outsiders about who would never let him close enough to say anything at all. They walked among the hills a long while, back and forth among the troughs and through the sweet-smelling grass. He savored the time finally, for what it was, because of the grass and the smell and the sounds and the hills and the sky. And Sbi’s presence. That too.

Then he rounded the shoulder of a hill and had a limited view of the city again, faint jewels against the dark.

And some of them were red.

“Sbi?—Sbi, what do you make of that?”

“The port,” Sbi said.

“It’s not fire. It’s not that.” The lights flashed. There was a whole cluster of them. The unwonted sight disturbed him. It was an Outsider phenomenon. He recalled the shuttles which had lifted, more activity than Freedom had ever had from Outsiders. He thought of Waden, and increasingly he was afraid—for Waden, for Keye, for all of them down there who had started to disturb more than they knew how to see.

“Let
me
go to explore this thing,” Sbi said. “I know where to go, how to move and when to move. Let me go ask questions. Some of us will have seen this thing close at hand.”

“No,” he said at once, and started off again, hurrying. “No, we’re both going. I have a place to go, too, and questions to ask, and I know where to ask them.”

“A ship,” said Sbi. “Herrin Law, look, see it.”

Something was lifting from the port. He began to laugh, a breath of relief. “A launch, that’s all. Maybe it looks like that from up here.”

“No,” said Sbi. “I’ve seen, and it doesn’t.”

The ship climbed, shot off with blinking lights.

And exploded.

“I see,” the ahnit said.

The flower died in the heavens. Suddenly there were bursts on land, flares which curled up silent, firelit smoke that traced toward the city.

Herrin began to run, downhill. “Wait,” Sbi called to him, hastening after. Herrin ran, slid, slowed when his ribs shot pain through him and shortened his breath ... he walked then, because that was all he could do, and the bursts of fire continued, stitching their way through Kierkegaard.

“Waden’s Outsiders,” he mourned to Sbi. “Waden’s ambitions . . .”

There were fires, in the grass, a wall of fire which swept away to the sea, a curtain of red and orange two stories high that made black skeletons of trees and bushes and glared eerily in the water of the Camus.

There were fugitives, who straggled away from the city along the Camus-Kierkegaard road, and crossed the bridge over the firelit waters. Some were terribly burned, in shock; some, perhaps mad, had flung themselves into the river and drifted there, dark pinwheels in the red current.