Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  “But the manifestation, the manifestation, Herrin, isn’t that the important thing, because there’s no way my Apollonian art can have dominance over your Dionysian one save by inspiration; and yours similarly with mine. Inspire me. I defy you to do more.”

  “When I defy you to do more, I fear you can.”

  “Then have you not, Herrin, met your master?”

  “Then have you not met the thing you say you fear most?”

  Waden stared at him a moment, then all his expression dissolved in humor and he poured more beer from the pitcher, poured for Herrin as well. “See, I’m your servant. I must be, because I have a need, and you are that need. Without Dionysus, I become stasis, and the world stops.”

  “We are both Dionysian, and drunk.”

  “Drunk, we are soberer than most will ever be. No, we are still in complement, because our opposite natures are on the expressive side, and our internal realities are therefore opposite. We are a doubled square of dark and light, complete pattern.”

  “Then, my complement, give me Jenks Square.”

  “That is your ambition.”

  “That is a step toward it.”

  “But I’m only a student.” Waden held outward his empty hands. “Who am I to give gifts?”

  “Waden Jenks.”

  “That I am.” His laugh at this was different, sober, conscious. “I shall give you the Square, Artist, and you will make me visible to all of time. Visible. You’re right that I live like the invisibles, and I don’t savor it. Give me substance. Whatever you need, that I’ll give.... Ah, Herrin, respect me.”

  “Fear me, if I’m your outlet to the world; your substance flows through my hands.”

  “I’ve told you what I fear. What do you fear, Artist?”

  Herrin frowned, and looked him in the eyes and grinned, lifting his glass. “Your art can’t function until you know that, can it? You open your mind to me, that’s one thing, but to open mine to you, ah, that’s another.”

  “Marvelous. O Artist, I tell you I find no pleasure greater than this, to find a mind to answer mine, a recognition passing all other pleasures. I ask you no more questions. What you want—is possible. Indeed, you’ll find it’s possible. Begin your work in your mind; I’ll give you the stone.”

  Herrin’s heart beat very fast. He was drunk, perhaps, but only half with the beer. It was Waden’s intoxication which infected him. He believed, and that night in his own bed, alone, for Keye had other business, he still believed, and began to build the plans he had already made—bigger, and finer, and more far-reaching.

  He had his means. Waden Jenks frightened him, for he knew himself, how dangerous he was in his own power, and he believed that Waden Jenks was at least second to him, in a way that Keye could never be, for Keye was tunneled in on a very narrow reality and Waden Jenks—had scope. And intelligence.

  And worked in different ways.

  There was nowhere in the University or in the Residency that one was likely to discover the handiwork of Waden Jenks; Waden’s work was silence, was subtlety, the warping of a purpose; was kinetic and impossible to freeze. Herrin thought of capturing this in stone, and began to despair.

  More and more it became his obsessive concern, the thought that this Man, this potentiality against which all Freedom was measured, had an essence which defied him.

  VII

  Master: What is matter?

  Herrin: Appearance.

  Master: What is the validity of appearances?

  Herrin: Whatever value I set on them.

  Master: Are you not also a manifestation of the material universe?

  Herrin: The universe is irrelevant.

  Master: Are you then relevant,

  Herrin: I am the only certainty.

  He went out into Jenks Square and considered the foursquare blankness paved in all directions, stood on the bronze circle which, marked the center of Kierkegaard and therefore of all civilization, and tried to envision Waden Jenks, turning on his heel to the bewilderment of those passersby who must recognize the somber Black of a Student, and therefore, a purpose which was higher than their own or a talent which exceeded theirs.

  The conceit amused him. He laughed aloud, and spun, and finally in the spinning world about him, conceived the image of Waden Jenks, a frozen form of many dimensions, embracing all the square, an element, a structure inside which all the citizens of Kierkegaard must pass in their daily affairs. It would be a sculpture of monumental proportions, a Reality through which others’ Realities must pass daily, until their courses were diverted by it and their minds were warped by it and it became like Waden Jenks himself, so subtle an influence it would distort minds and attitudes without the subjects’ being aware, and impose terror on those who looked on the whole and recognized it for what it was.

  He walked the ten streets of Kierkegaard, omitting his classes; he looked on the exterior of Kierkegaard, the beige and gray of the solid citizens, the workmen, the sellers, the manufacturers, the occasional midnight blue of one no one saw.

  His reality. His visions. And Waden Jenks, captured in stone, apertures and textures and surfaces shifting as one passed through them.

  He went back to his studio in the University, locked the door, stayed and sketched and planned, mad with the vision.

  VIII

  Master: What is more real, my reality or yours?

  Herrin: Mine.

  Master: How do you demonstrate that?

  Herrin: I need not.

  “Come out,” Keye pleaded with him through the door, and to someone else, outside: “I think he’s gone mad.”

  He laughed to himself and kept at work. “Call Waden,” he said. “Call Waden here. This is for him.”

  And Waden came.

  “Well,” Waden said, “Artist?”

  The clay lay before them, the three nested shells which he proposed. The central figure, lifelike, emerged out of a matrix of similar apertures and texture within the dome. He waited, anxious, enormously vulnerable.

  Waden walked about the model on the studio table, bent, looked within it. A smile spread over his face and his eyes lighted.

  “Everything,” Herrin ventured, “and everyone ... must flow through it. For all time to come in Kierkegaard.”

  “Amazing,” Waden pronounced, and grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “O Artist, amazing. Order the stone. Select your apprentices.”

  “What, now?”

  Waden looked into his eyes, and a curious smile, a subtle smile, sent a slight chill into the air. “I shall move into the Residency soon.”

  And the week the stone began to arrive, moved by truck from the quarries, to be set in the Square and in the studio, First Citizen Cade Jenks died, of causes unspecified.

  The coincidence occurred to Herrin, if to no other. Herrin went very soberly about his own business, matter of factly shut everything down for the three-day mourning and memorial, and very quietly resumed when the public ceremony was done. In fact the mourning was official and very little private, a condition more of uncertainty than of grief, mutterings and wonderings, what manner of person this son was who assumed—assumed the power of the State, but no one had an inclination to prevent the assumption. At least no one heard of anyone who did. There was no disturbance; the Residency remained as mute as ever, as inscrutable. Waden Jenks sat within it. Nothing else changed.

  IX

  Master. Is art reality?

  Herrin: Art reflects reality.

  Master: The reality of the artist or the reality of the subject?

  Herrin: (Silence).

  The work began in Jenks Square. The five hundred apprentices and laborers allotted to the work began to consider their plans. The voices rang in the dead silence of official mourning, echoed off buildings draped with black.

  Herrin stood amid the square, now ringed with stone blocks on which the foundation shapes had been plotted, himself experiencing a drawing of his skin, a sense of the power of his beginning creation, whi
ch was Waden Jenks’s self, Waden Jenk’s reality, the first layer of stones, the first courses of all three shells and of the central pedestal. In his mind he saw what should stand there one day, and shivered.

  Waden came on the morrow, no longer in Student’s Black, walked about the ring of white stones and acknowledged the respects of the apprentices with grave nods of his head. Of a sudden, Herrin thought, Waden looked like power. There was nothing obvious; the gray brocade and conservative tailoring was nothing more than a very wealthy citizen might wear; but the eyes seemed to miss nothing, to linger, invasively.

  “With so many hands,” Waden said, “you should make rapid progress.”

  “The image,” Herrin said, “is alive in my mind. With the excellent equipment, I can make it flow into the stone. I’ve apprentices sufficient to work in shifts; lights will keep the work going through the night. I reserve the central image for my own hand. That is the focus. In the flow of that, the whole begins.”

  “I must sit for it.”

  “I shall need you to sit for it, yes.”

  “Did I not promise, Herrin?”

  “I think you went rather far in getting me the Square, First Citizen.”

  Waden chuckled. “My reasons were complex.”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “Do you flatter yourself you had something to do with them?”

  “Do you say I didn’t?”

  “Does it trouble you, Artist?”

  “Ah, no.” Herrin turned and regarded Waden with a cool eye. “I don’t believe in karma, my friend. It’s all one to me, whether you acquired your power by abdication or assassination. It doesn’t intrude on my Reality. Mine lies in the future; yours is present. Mine is length and yours is breadth.” He laid a hand on the block nearest, cool, fractured marble from the quarries up the Camus. “This is my medium. Practice your art, First Citizen, and don’t take up the chisel.”

  “Now which of us deals in intangibles? This stone of yours—becomes me, Herrin Law; and my reality—isn’t that the subject?”

  “True, First Citizen.”

  “Then where is yours?”

  Herrin smiled. “I’m content. The more you’re visible, the more I’m there too, First Citizen.”

  “I was always Waden to you.”

  “You are whatever you want to be, aren’t you? In a few weeks you’ll begin to see things take shape here. Those amorphous heaps are the central pedestal, the median arch foundations, the three shells, all the first courses. The first five go into place and the carving begins.”

  Waden walked further, walked back again. “You’ll come to the Residency,” he said. “You’ll live there what time you’re not working.”

  Herrin lifted a brow. “In the Residency?”

  “What, is your self-confidence lacking?”

  “Not in the least. I’ll accept it without comment.”

  “There’s inferiority in the word accept.”

  “Possibly. I admit it.”

  “Now I suspect you of arrogance.”

  “There’s inferiority in arrogance. It assumes one cares. I’m simply as I am. I’ll come to the Residency. It seems adequate for my comfort.”

  “Pathetic games. You’re my guest, my employee.”

  Herrin turned a cold smile on him. “I’m your immortality. Your interpreter.”

  “Mine. What other message goes out, Artist?”

  “Black and white, an interlocked pattern, lovers inextricably entwined.”

  “Ah, I’ve discovered your reality.”

  “You are involved in it.”

  “Does it occur to you, Herrin, that I’m using you?”

  “Yes,” he said, leaving pregnant silence, staring into Waden’s brown eyes. He smiled finally, as did Waden.

  “If you were master,” Waden said, “you wouldn’t have to argue from silences. But you must.”

  “I don’t contend in politics. I argued that from the beginning, and the power you have is not mine. Since you lend it to me, I accept it, and I shall doubtless enjoy it. But rival me. I defy you.”

  Waden chuckled. “Come to the Residency when it pleases you. We’ll drink together.”

  “You’ll sit for me, I’ll need both holographs and sketches. You’ll come to my studio for the holographs, where I have the equipment.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow at ten.”

  “You realize I have other schedules.”

  “At ten.”

  Waden laughed. “I accept. As for you, come when you please.” He walked a distance, looked back. “Bring Keye to the Residency, if it suits.”

  “She may be amused. I wouldn’t venture to predict.”

  Waden nodded, turned, walked his way back toward the Residency, as everyone walked in Kierkegaard, except the incapacitated, the infant, and the drivers of trucks which carried things too large or too heavy for carrying by hand. Herrin turned a cold eye on the apprentices, who put themselves as coldly to work, knowing they could not daunt him, but each attempting to assert an independent reality. They were not accustomed to such handling as he gave them ... well, but they took it.

  He walked about, directing this and that team as he had previously. He found himself ill at ease, knowing the temper of Waden Jenks, knowing that Waden had touched perilously close to the heart of matters. Cade Jenks was dead, and this proved certain things about Waden which Herrin had suspected; but then, there had been in that father-son relationship no love, or pleasure, or respect.

  He also had power, by reason of his position in the University and in Kierkegaard. The apprentices regarded him with fear, because he had authority to hire and dismiss any Student or laborer from the project. At a word from him even an Apprentice would be banished from University and disgraced, condemned to the provinces; or a worker sent among the invisible Unemployed. The Students coveted the chance at Jenks Square. The laborers coveted the government support. They worked with zeal, in consequence. The dread with which they regarded that possibility of dismissal and the pride they took in being assigned to the project were evident in their application.

  He watched the stacks of stone arranged, which were already waist high, and eventually, toward dusk, he spoke to his chief apprentice, Leona Pace, and saw to it that due care would be taken in unloading the stone which was still coming in on trucks from the warehouses.

  “I shall hold you accountable,” he told her, “if any damage is done; and twice accountable if there is any weak stone set into the structure. Remember the weight this foundation must bear. If there is a flaw in any stone, however it came there, set it aside and hold it for my personal inspection. If you have doubt in any stone, set it aside. The supply of stone is endless; the State provides. Am I understood?”

  “Master Law, without question.”

  He nodded, walked away, through the stone circles and to that apartment overlooking Jenks Square which belonged to Keye,

  “I’ve been watching,” she told him when he had, in front of the window looking down on the building, taken her in his arms and kissed her. Their relationship was by turns cool and by turns warm, and lately the latter.

  “It looks like nothing at all as yet,” he said, relieving her of any duty to flatter him. He let her lead him to the table. She had promised dinner, and dinner there was, with flowerlights drifting in bowls among the dishes, and incense in the air. Keye had a servant to provide such touches, while he had never bothered, tossing things aside when done with them, to live in a warren of discarded stones and clothes piled according to washed and unwashed, cleanly—he was obsessive about cleanliness—but he confined his art to stone, not house-holding,

  This was not, however, to say that he failed to appreciate beauty offered him. He sat down, gave the flowerlight nearest a push which sent it drifting through the maze of the crystal serpentine bowl and smiled at her.

  “That was Waden down there today.”

  “What, spying from the window? I thought you had classes.”

  �
�Canceled still. The official, dreary respect goes on. You’ve been my sole entertainment—watching the trucks, considering your plight.”

  “How, plight?”

  “You understand me. Nothing escapes you; you take such pride in it.”

  “Because I work for him?”

  “No.”

  “You mean to drag this through dessert, I can see.”

  “I trust not. I’ve warned you, but you see only endurance. You plan to outlast him, encompass him, and he ... has his vanity. There was a time you knew where you were going; now you apply to Waden Jenks for a roadmap.”

  “I am not political.”

  “Where do you live?”

  He frowned, patient with her games. “On Freedom, in Sartre, in Kierkegaard, in the University, in specific—how fine shall I dice it?”

  “Until you smell the air and know you are political.”

  “I confess to it then, but I’m politically unconsenting. I live in larger scope than Waden Jenks; our arenas are different.”

  “Yours embraces his. As you embrace that monument—shells within shells—he won’t laugh when he perceives that Reality.”

  “You are uncommonly keen this evening.”

  “Only talkative.”

  “He asked you to the Residency, as my companion.”

  “What, are you going?”

  “I said yes.”

  “Well, I’ll not. Those who become embraced by stones of another’s shaping ... take what shapes they dictate, don’t they? I have my own comforts. I’ll watch. Come here, when you will; I’ll even give you the key. It may be a refuge more convenient than your own.”

  “I suspect you of unguessed talents. You think I’ve erred.”

  “Go if you like.”

  He smiled slowly. “I shall, and come, and take the key too. I thank you.”

  “I remind you I am fastidious in housekeeping.”

  There was a time when he looked into Keye’s eyes and saw something reserved, and again not; he was never sure. Keye deserved regard. He had never caught her at humor, but sometimes, he suspected, at kindness. When he was with her sometimes he smelled earth and old boards, recalled a world quite different from the competition of the University and the fierce, cold Residency. Recalled that provincial reality where in their Self and for their pleasure, or perhaps because they were bound by primal instincts—his parents had surprised him with kind acts. He had treasured surprises of that nature, unpredictable in the main because there was no particular reason for them, and they were small—a favorite dish, something of the sort. Keye, he thought, had come from such a provincial origin, even farther up the river; Keye did some things which had nothing to do with the study and practice of creative ethics, simply because there were unrecognized patterns within her behavior.