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.
XXIII
Student: What if Others existed?
Master Law: Have they relevancy?
Student: Not to man.
Master Law: What if man were their dream?
Student: Sir?
Master Law: How would you know?
Student: (Silence.)
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.
But it kept going, and he had time for renewed fear, that it was, after all, mad, and that he was utterly lost, not knowing back from forward. In time exhaustion claimed him again and he had another dark space.
He wakened falling, and flailed wildly, hit his hand on an arm and cried out with surprised misery. His back touched earth gently, and the ahnit’s strong arms let him the rest of the way down, knelt above him to touch his face and bend above him. “Rest,” it said.
He
slept, and wakened with the sun in his face. Waked alone, and with nothing but grass and hills about him and a rising panic at solitude. He levered himself up, squeezing tears of pain from his eyes, broken ribs aching, and his hands ... at every change in elevation of his head he came close to passing out. Standing up was a calculated risk. He took it, swayed on his braced legs and tried to see where he was, but there were hills in all directions.
“Ahnit!” he called out, panicked and thirsty and lost. He wandered a few steps in pain, felt a pressure in his bladder and, crippled as he was, had difficulty even attending that necessity. It frightened him, in a shamed and inexpressible way, that even the privacy of his body was threatened. His knees were shaking under him. He made it back to the place where he had slept and sank down, hands tucked upward on his chest, eyes squeezed shut in misery.
There was sun for a while, and finally a whispering in the grass. He looked toward it, vaguely apprehensive, and an ahnit came striding down the hill, cloakless. By that, it was the one which had left him here: it came to him and knelt down, regarded him with wet black eyes and small, pursed mouth, midnight-skinned. It reached beneath its robes and brought out a ball of matted grasses, contained in some inner pocket; it spread it and revealed a loathsome mass of gray-green pulp. “For your hands,” it said.
He was apprehensive of it, but suffered it to take the cloak on which he sat and to shred strips from it ... finally let it take his right hand and with its three-fingered hand—two proper fingers and opposing member—begin to spread the pungent substance over it. The touch was like ice; it comforted, numbed. “Lie down,” it advised him. “Lie still. Take some of it in your mouth and you will feel less.”
It offered a bit to his tongue; he took it, mouth at once numbed. In a moment more it dizzied him, and he tried to settle back. It helped him. It took his numb hand then and bound it, and while it hurt, it was a distant hurt and promised ease. “The swelling will go,” it promised him. “Then I shall try to straighten the bones. And then too I will be very careful.”
He drew easier breaths, drifting between here and there. It tended the other hand and probed his whole body for injury. “Ribs,” he said, and with its cautious touches it exposed the bruises and salved them and bound them tightly, holding him in its arms when it had done, for the numbness had spread from his mouth to his fingertips and his toes. He breathed as well as he could, eyes shut, out of most of the pain that he had thought would never stop. Only his mouth was a misery, numb and dry; he tried to moisten his lips over and over and it seemed only worse.
It let him back then, and pillowed his head. “Rest,” it seemed to whisper. He was aware of the day’s warmth, of sweat trickling on him, of a lassitude too great to be borne. The sweat stopped finally, and the torment of his mouth grew worse.
“Water?” a far, alien voice asked him, rousing him enough to focus on its dark face and liquid eyes. “I can give it from my mouth to yours if you permit.”
The thought made his throat contract. He shut his eyes wearily and considered the incongruency of their mutual existence, finding their situation absurd and his fastidiousness merely a shred of the old Herrin Law, before he had begun to see invisibles and lost himself. The ahnit in his silence delicately bent to his lips, pressed his jaw open, and moisture hit the back of his throat with the faint taste of the numbing medicine. He choked and swallowed, and it let him go, letting his head back again. His stomach heaved, and the ahnit held him down with a hand on his shoulder. The spasm ceased and the pain which had shot through his ribs at the convulsion ebbed. The taste lingered. He moistened his lips and found some vague relief, suffered a flash of image, himself staring vacant-eyed at a too-bright sky because he was too drugged to care. The ahnit sat between him and the sun and shaded his face.
“It hurts less,” he said thickly.
And eventually, when thirst had dried his lips again: “My mouth is dry.” He did not want another such experience; but misery had its bearable limit. It leaned above him again, pressed its lips to his and this time brought up a gentle trickle that did not choke him. It drew back then, but from time to time gave him more, until he protested it was enough. It kept holding him all the same; and it spoke its own language, softly, nasals and hisses, in what seemed kindly tones. He rested, finally abandoned to its gentleness, too numb to rationalize it or puzzle it, only accepting what was going to be because of what had been.
Far later in the day the ahnit took up his hand and unwrapped it. “It will hurt now,” it said, and it was promising to, little prickles of feeling. The color—he focused enough to look at it—was green and livid and horrible, but the swelling was diminished. The ahnit probed it, and offered him more of the drug; he took it and settled back, trying to gather himself for the rest of it, resolved not to let the pain get through to him.
It did, and though he held out through the first tentative tug and the palpable grate of bone against bone, the subsequent splinting with knots to hold it, he moaned drunkenly on the next, and it grew worse. The ahnit ignored him, working steadily, paused when it had finished the one hand to mop the sweat from his face.
Then it started the other hand and he screamed shamelessly, sobbed and still failed to dissuade it from its work. He did not faint; it was not his good fortune. If it were my reality, he told himself in delirium, I would not have it hurt. It seemed to him grossly unfair that it did; and once: “Waden!” he cried out in his desperation, not knowing why he called that name, but that he was miserably, wretchedly alone. Not Keye. Waden. He sank then into a torpor in which the pain was less. He rested, occasionally disturbed by the ahnit, who held him, who from time to time gave fluid into his mouth, and kept him warm in what had begun to be night.
He was finally conscious enough to move his arm, to look at his right hand, which was swathed in fine bandage, fingers slightly curved in the splints. He was aware of the warmth of the ahnit which held his head in its robed lap, which—when he tilted his head back—rested asleep, its large eyes closed, lower lid meeting upper midway, which gave it a strange look from this nether, nightbound perspective,
The eyes opened, regarded him with wet blackness.
“I’m awake, “ Herrin said hoarsely, meaning from the drug.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not much.”
Its paired fingers brushed his face. “Then I shall leave you a while.”
He did not want it to go; he feared being left here, in the dark, but there was no reason he knew to stop it. It eased him to the ground and arranged the cloak about him, then rose and stalked away so wearily and unlike itself he could see the drain of its strength.
He lay and stared at the horizon, avoiding the sky, which made him dizzy when he looked into its starry depth; he looked toward that horizon because he judged that when the ahnit came back it would come from that direction, and he had no strength to do much else than lie where he was. All resolve had left him. Breathing itself, against the bound ribs, was a calculated effort, and the hands stopped hurting only when he found the precise angle at which he could rest them on his chest, fingers higher than his elbows. His world had gotten to that small size, only bearable on those terms.
XXIV
Waden Jenks: Does it occur to you, Herrin, that I’m using you?
Master Law: Yes.
Waden Jenks: If you were master, you wouldn’t have to argue from silences. But you must.
He was on his feet when it returned, when the sun was just showing its first edge, when he had decided to climb the sunward slope to see what there was to see. Of what he expected to see—the river, the city—there was no view, just more hills; but a shadow moved, and that was the ahnit, which stopped when it seemed to have caught sight of him, and then came on, more wearily than before.
It said nothing to him; it simply stopped on the hillcrest where it met him and rummaged in the folds of its robes, offered something. He started to reach for it and the pain of moving his hand reminded him. “Food,” it said,
and offered a piece to his lips. He took it, and found it to be dried and vegetable; he chewed on it while the ahnit started downslope and he followed very carefully, aching and exhausted.
It sat down when it had gotten to the nest it had made in the grass; it was breathing hard. When he sat down near it, it offered another piece of vegetable to him, and he took it, guiding it with bandaged fingers. “Better,” it said to him.
“Yes,” he said. The pain had been enough to fill his mind; and then the absence of it. Now he discovered that both states had their limit, that the mind which was Herrin Law was going to work again; he had had his chance for oblivion and chosen otherwise, and now—now oblivion was not so easy. The sun was coming, and day, and he was alive because of that same stubbornness which had robbed him of rest and sleep in Kierkegaard ... which, drugged, had wakened again, incorrigible. It saw ahnit, and existed here, robbed of its body’s wholeness; it just kept going, and that frightened him.
“More?” the ahnit asked, offering another piece to his lips. He used his hand entirely this time, though it hurt. “Why do you do this?” he asked the ahnit. There it was again, the curiosity which was his own worst enemy, wanting understanding which another, saner, would have fled. The ahnit, wiser, gave him no reason.
“What’s your name?” he asked it finally, for it was too real not to have one.
“Sbi.” It was, to his ears, hiss more than word.
“Sbi,” he echoed it. “Why, Sbi?”
“Because you see me.”
“Before,” he said. “Sbi, did you—meet me before? Was it you?”
“I’ve met you before. I’ve been everywhere ... in the University, in the Residency.”
He shivered, hands tucked to his chest.
“Why,” it asked, “are you blind to us?”
“I? I’m not. I see you very well. I’d be happier if I didn’t.”
“We exist,” Sbi said.
“I know,” he said. “I know that.” It left him nothing else to know.
Alternate Realities Page 51
