Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  Walking the circuit of the place, appreciating the folds and complications of it, took time. Herrin clasped his hands behind his back and waited, in the center and under everyone’s eyes, until at last Waden Jenks finished his tour and came back.

  Waden nodded. “Fine, very fine, Artist. But I expected that of you.”

  Herrin made a move of his hand toward the central pillar, the sculpted face, on which sun and time had now passed. Waden looked, for a moment surprised: the stone face had changed, acquired the smallest hint of a more somber look to come.

  “It’s different, isn’t it?” Waden asked. The change was small and to the unfamiliar eye, deceptive. “It’s different.”

  “It changes every moment that the sun touches it, with every season, every hour, with storm and morning and nightfall and every difference of the light ... it changes. Yes.”

  Waden looked at it again, and at him, and reached and pressed his shoulder, standing beside him. “I chose you well. I chose you well, Artist.”

  “A matter of dispute, who chose whom. I don’t grant you that point.”

  “But how do I see it? How does anyone see it, in its entirety?”

  Herrin smiled. “It’s for the city, First Citizen; for everyone who walks here and passes through it for years upon years, at varied hours in different seasons of his life, and for every person, different because of the schedule he keeps; different vision for anyone who cares to stand here for hours watching the changes progress. You’re a moving target, Waden Jenks, a subject that won’t hold still, and not the same to any two people. It’s time itself I’ve sculpted into it, and the sun and the planet cooperate. Done in one season it had to be. It’s unique, Waden Jenks.”

  Waden had not ceased to look at the face, which grew steadily more sober, the illusion of light within it in the process of dying now. And the living face began to take on anxiety. “What does it become? What are the changes going toward?”

  “Come at another hour and see.”

  “I ask you, Artist. What does it become?”

  “You’ve seen the Apollo; Dionysus is coming. It achieves that this afternoon.”

  “This thing could become an obsession; I’d have to sit hour after hour to know this thing in all its shapes.”

  “And, I suspect, season after season. Look at the time and the sun and the quality of the light, and wonder, First Citizen, what this face is. You don’t live only in the Residency any more: you’re here. In this form, in changing forms.”

  “Would I like all the faces?”

  Herrin smiled guardedly. “No. In Dionysus ... are moments you might not like. I’ve sculpted possibilities, First Citizen, potential as well as truth. Come and see.”

  Waden stared at him, and said nothing.

  Whatever you see in it,” Herrin said, “will change.”

  “I’m impressed with your talent,” Waden said. “I accept the gift, in both its faces.”

  “No gift, First Citizen. You traded to get this, and you were right: it will give you duration. It’s going to live; and when later ages think of the beginnings of Freedom, there’ll be one image to dominate it. This. All it has to do is survive, and all you have to do is protect it.”

  Waden sucked at his lips, as he had the habit of doing when pondering something. “Now time is my worry, is it?”

  “It always was; it’s your deadliest enemy.”

  The sober look stayed, and yielded to one of Waden’s quizzical smiles. “And your ally?”

  “My medium,” Herrin said, and for a moment Waden’s smile utterly froze.

  “We remain,” said Waden then, recovering the smile in all its brilliance, “complementary.”

  There was Keye, frowning; and the invisibles, who stood with their hands tucked into their belts looking at the place and at the crowd, and the crew, who watched them. On the fringes of the crowd were the pair no one else might see, midnight-hued and tall and robed, skeletons at the feast—Herrin imagined wise and unhuman eyes, baffled—and Waden’s Outsiders watching them.

  People did not make crowds in Kierkegaard; citizens were rational, cautious and conservative of their own Reality, avoided masses in which they could lose their own Selves. People gathered here, in this shell. And suddenly, when he looked at them in general and Waden did they began a polite applause, as people might, to express approval of something they had accepted as real and true—something they desired.

  Strangers applauded, and the sound went up into the triple perforated dome, and echoed down again like rain. “Herrin ...” he heard amid it, “Herrin,” “Herrin Law,” as if his name had become their possession too. “Master Herrin Law.”

  He smiled, sucked in the air as if sipping wine and nodded his head in appreciation of the offering. More, he spread his arms, seeing some of his chief apprentices near at hand, and invited them. “Carl Gytha,” he said, “Andrew Phelps. ...” He went on naming names, and the gathering applauded and faces grinned in pleasure. “Were you one of them?” people asked each other, and when one claimed to be, those standing next would all ask his name and touch him. Theirs were names written in bronze; names to last ... and it was the only art which had come out of the cloistered University into the streets of Kierkegaard.

  “It’s unprecedented,” said Keye, gazing with analytical eye on the chaos.

  “Of course it is,” said Herrin.

  Waden laughed and squeezed his shoulder. “You are unprecedented, Artist; now it’s unveiled, not before. That’s the nature of your art, isn’t it? It’s not stone you shape—time, yes, and Realities. You’re dangerous, Artist. I always knew you were.”

  “Complementary powers, Waden Jenks.” He lifted his arm toward the face, which had lost its inner glow, which began to shadow with doubt, which led toward the other shadows of itself. “That ... will be with generations to come. The weak will emulate it; the strong will be obsessed by it—because it challenges them. You’ll always be there. Give me substance, you asked, and there you stand.”

  “I chose you well. Dispute what you will, I chose you well.” Waden grinned like a child, pulled him round and embraced him in public, to the applause of all the crowd; and the doorways were jammed with more people seeking to know what happened there. “Walk back with me, to the Residency. They’ll give you no rest here; walk back with us and let’s celebrate this thing.”

  Herrin hesitated; he had planned to stay, or to do something else; to talk to Gytha and Phelps, he supposed, but the crowd overwhelmed him. He nodded, agreeing, and walked with Waden, with Keye, with the escort of invisibles who suddenly organized themselves to stay with them.

  At the first wall of the dome, Waden stopped and looked back, with awed reluctance, but Keye watched him, and Herrin watched him and Keye.

  Then they parted the crowd and headed back the way they had come, changed, Herrin thought, as everyone who came inside that place must be changed.

  No one followed them—no one would dare—but the invisibles stayed at their heels, silent as they had been from the beginning.

  XX

  Student: How does a person fit death into his reality, sir?

  Master Law: Whose?

  Student: How do you fit your own death into yours, sir?

  Master Law: One has nothing to do with another.

  Student: You deny the reality of death?

  Master Law: (After reflection.) With all my reality.

  It was a pleasant day, Waden in high spirits and prone to argue. “I find myself too tired for fine discussion,” Herrin confessed.

  “You’ve grown thin,” Waden said. They sat at a table in Waden’s rooms in the Residency, with exquisite tableware, Waden’s ordinary set... “Eat something, Herrin; you’ll waste away.”

  “By my standards I have.” Herrin leaned back, drinking tea and comfortable with a full belly. “A supper last night, a lunch today ... gluttony. I plan to increase my tolerance.”

  “You have to,” said Keye, third in their threesome at table. “I k
now your habits, Herrin, and they’re abominable.”

  He grinned pleasantly and briefly. “I fear the Residency is responsible. I find myself reluctant to bestir the whole array of kitchens and servants. It’s easier in the University to go downstairs and trouble cook for sandwiches. I’ll be leaving for awhile.”

  Waden shrugged. “Wherever you’re comfortable?”

  “You’ll have new projects,” said Keye.

  He shrugged.

  “What do you propose?” Waden asked.

  He smiled. “I’ll know when I find it.”

  “Ah, then you don’t know.”

  “I suspect that I know but that it hasn’t surfaced. Allow me my methods.”

  “You ... have no interest in exterior events?”

  “What, yours?”

  “Exterior events.”

  “Are there any?”

  “Rhetorical question?”

  “No. Inform me. What’s happening with your Outsiders? Anything of interest?”

  Waden shrugged and toyed with the handle of his cup, lips pursed. He looked up suddenly. “The station module is due to arrive. Past that point it begins to grow, a station, widening of the port. ...”

  “Irrevocably.”

  “My art, Herrin. Trust that I know what I’m doing.”

  Herrin smiled tautly.

  “Ah,” said Waden Jenks. “I see the thought passing. You say nothing; ergo you have very much to say. It’s only on trivialities that you debate motivation. You think—using that creation out in the Square, to have some great part in me.”

  “I do. I’m very self-interested.”

  Waden smiled. “I’ll never carry your argument for you. Only be sure I know what it is, even unspoken.”

  “I’d expect nothing less. So why should I bother? Mine’s a nonverbal art form.”

  “Beware him,” Keye said, chin on hand and smiling over her empty plate.

  “Which of us?” asked Waden.

  “Both of you.”

  “And you?” asked Herrin.

  “I’m always wary,” she said.

  That had the feel of the old, the hungry days. Herrin laughed, set down his cup. “Surely,” he said, “Waden, your appointments are waiting; and I’m due a rest. I’m going to walk off this excellent meal. And rest.”

  He tried. He left the upper hall of the Residency and walked downstairs, thought about going to his room and attempting a nap. He was tired enough to be very much tempted, but he also knew that the moment his head touched the pillow, he would begin thinking about what was in the Square or about something equally preoccupying, and he would lie awake miserable.

  He walked outside, and onto the streets, and onto Main ... alone this time. He stopped and looked at the crowd which still clustered about the dome, almost lost his taste for going there at all, ever. It gave him a sense of loss, that what had been his private possession now belonged to everyone and he could never get to it in private again.

  The crew was dispersed ... or if they were not, at least they would work together no more until he could conceive of some new idea.

  But the Work had its power. It drew at him inexorably, and he strayed slowly in that unwanted direction.

  “Master Law,” they whispered where he passed. There was no anonymity.

  “It’s beautiful,” some boy ventured to say to him, a breathless whisper in passing on the street, in fleeing his presence: a University Master did not converse with townsfolk, for their sakes, for their realities’ sake—because theirs were so vulnerable; but someone interrupted that silence to offer opinion. The boy was not the last. There were others who called it beautiful; and some who said nothing, but just came close to him. “My father worked on it,” said a freckled girl, as if that was supposed to mean something.

  “Wait,” he said, but she was embarrassed and ran away, and he never knew whose daughter it was.

  He walked inside, and even now there were a great many people in the dome, in the outer rings. He walked into the sunlit inner chamber, where people gathered before the image.

  It was the Dionysian face. A patch of sun fallen on the other side and at another angle had turned it into somber laughter, dark laughter, that expression of Waden’s when he was genuinely amused.

  It went on living; it possessed the chamber with a feeling which was, to one who knew Waden in that mood, not comfortable. Herrin deserted his own creation, and kept walking, shivering past shadows which had come to watch the watchers, invisibles.

  Leona? he thought, turning back to see, but he could not be certain, and he kept walking, slowly, out of the dome and out of the Square, farther down Main.

  People here recognized him too. The novelty of that passed and he tried simply to think in peace, disturbed and distressed that even the refuge of the streets was threatened.

  On one level, he thought, he should be troubled that he could not stay there; on another, he knew why ... that he was ready to shed that idea, to be done with it, and the persistence of it frightened him. It was Waden Jenks ... it was powerful, and had to be dealt with, and now that he had created this phenomenon, he could not allow it to begin to warp him, and his art. Having created he had to be rid of it, erase it, get it out of his thoughts so that his mind could work.

  But Waden, set in motion, was not a force easily canceled.

  And what Waden did threatened him, because it came at him through his own art, and gave him no peace.

  Perhaps it was the intrusion of Outsiders in Freedom which made it harder to settle himself again; an intrusion argued that events were at hand which might offer subject ... and that bothered him, the thought that no matter what he began, something might then occur which would offer more tempting inspiration: wait, wait, a small voice counseled him. Observe.

  But while he waited his mind was going to have nothing to work on, and that vacancy was acute misery; an adrenalin charge with nowhere to spend it, an ache that was physical. He could not sleep again with that vacancy in his intentions; could not; could not walk about perceiving things with his senses raw as an open wound, taking in everything about him, keeping him in the state he was in.

  His course took him to the end of Main, where it became highway, and led to the Camus river. From that point he could see the river itself, which led inland and inward, back to the things he had been. He walked to the edge of it, where the highway verged it along a weed-grown bank, and the gravel thrown by wheels had made it unlovely ... the scars of too much and too careless use; it could be better, but no one cared. He sat down there and tossed gravel in and watched the disturbance in the swift-flowing surface.

  In one direction it became the Sunrise Sea, and led to the other continent of Hesse; and men were going there. Humanity on Freedom was spreading and discovering itself, and he had duty there.

  In the other it was safety, Camus township, and Law’s Valley.

  I’d like to see them, he thought of his family, and then put it down to simple curiosity, one of those instinctual things which had outlived the usefulness it served.

  He had outgrown them. It was like the crowds back there at the dome. Approbation was pleasant but it diverted. Probably they would applaud him back in Camus Township, but they would no more understand him than they ever had. It was not simply that there was no going home to what had been: there had never been anything there in the first place but his own desire for a little triumph, to be able to explain what he had done to those who had been there at his beginnings.

  He laughed at himself and flung an entire handful of gravel, breaking up the surface into a cluster of pockmarks. He created the thing he wished existed, and it did, and he could look back on it—reckoning that his family did, at distance, perceive what he was, and that was the best they could do. They were, after all, no better than any others, and no less hazard: like Waden Jenks. Like Keye. He found pleasure in the crew because the crew adored him; they in fact adored the importance they gained through him. If they were really anything, truly able
to rival him, they would suck him in and drink him down as readily as Waden Jenks would, given the chance.

  Power was the thing. He had Waden worried; and in fact—in fact, he told himself—Waden ought to be worried about him, and about Keye, who was now feeding her own reality into Waden’s ear. He comforted himself with the thought that of all humans alive who were not about to be taken in, Waden Jenks would not be—would in no wise let Keye have her way with him.

  Creative ethics was Keye’s field; indeed creative ethics, and Keye was busy at it. She chose Waden either because, being political herself, she comprehended him best and rejected Art, or because she knew Herrin Law and saw she was getting nowhere with him.

  Keye’s art had to have political power to function—as Keye saw it. He saw an ethic in his art which Keye had never seen.

  Therefore he was greater. And sure of it.

  A second handful of gravel, which startled a fish and disturbed the reality of a very small life. He smiled at the conceit. The fish knew as much of Herrin Law as most did, and it was better off that way.

  He stripped some of the weeds and plaited them; his fingers were sore from the abrasive and from the work, but he could do it as dexterously as he had on the grassy hillside overlooking his home.

  His own bed would be a comfort, porridge cooking when he got up, the scrape of wooden chairs on wooden floor and the smells of everyone and everything he knew woven together and harmonious like the braid of grass.

  Herrin, his mother would say, time to get up. Did you hear? his father would say. He can go on and sleep; that would be Perrin. I get his bowl.

  He smiled, laughed a breath and stared into the water.