Alternate Realities

by C. J. Cherryh

  Or doing such things pleased her, because the following of childhood patterns was in itself satisfying, and she played purposeful games watching others’ reactions to them, which was within her art. Keye’s field was, like his and unlike Waden’s, creative, and at moments when he thought of that, he reckoned Keye as greater than Waden gave her credit for being.

  “No,” he said suddenly. “I’ll not take the key. And you know my reasoning.”

  “What, you surrender to Waden’s bending but not to mine?”

  “I have wandered between both. My eyes are open.”

  “Pursue your liberty.”

  She mocked him now. “Waden has erred about you,” he said. “Go to the Residency. Exert your influence there.”

  “At your suggestion? Or at Waden’s either?” She lowered her lids like a curtain and looked up again smiling. “I am the only free individual in Kierkegaard. Go or stay. I am immovable from my Self. I’m the ethicist, and I am continually creating the ethic in my personal reality, which I am doing at this moment. Consider all my advice to you in that light.”

  He thought it humor for a moment. Then he knew otherwise. He rose, stared down at her in outrage and distress. She continued to smile. “There is a reason,” he said, recovering his mental balance, “that you tell me this.”

  “I refuse comment, perhaps ... but I don’t give reasons. Part of my creativity lies in letting others shape themselves around their own guesswork. You are—what? Omnipotent? Waden’s servant? Mine?”

  For a second moment she had thrown him totally off his balance, and then he smiled and nodded. Let Keye think as she would. “Good evening,” he said. “I prefer a little quietude this evening, and I think we’re approaching one of our cooler periods. When you’ve resolved your personal dilemmas, or when you find it convenient ... I’ll hear you, but I’m tired this evening, Keye, indeed I am. First Waden, and then Waden again tomorrow. So if this is your humor, do without me.”

  “You exude destruction. Perhaps I want you clear of me.”

  “Power never comes from retreat, Keye.”

  She stared at him, wise and amused as Keye could look, perhaps agreeing, perhaps refuting him by her very silence. He sighed, denied all but a good dinner, and walked out the familiar door, down the clean pebblestone hall, the same as every other hall in Kierkegaard, and down the stairs which was like every other stairs, all a blank slate which waited this generation, and his talent, and students of his teaching.

  I shall be here, he thought, after them all. It’s my nature to take in inspiration, and upon that thought, he suffered such a narrowing of the heart, such an apprehension that he stopped in his tracks there in the stairwell and leaned against the pebbled wall, thinking a moment and cold with fright. An art which was necessarily dependent on inspiration arriving from external forces was—perhaps enslaved to those forces; and if it was, then he was. Keye could be right. It shook the assumption of a lifetime and demanded thinking.

  He wandered out then, through the foyer and onto the street where the white electric glare lit small black figures against the white stone and the cranes wheezed and lifted their burdens like grotesque giants. He saw yet another course of stone going into place as a view which had been open in Kierkegaard all the years of his residence here became forever obstructed, imprisoned, cut off.

  He built a snare for the eye; he did things until now unthought of; he discovered unconsidered and unfelt dimensions to his own work which verged on the chaotic.

  An irrational force, a madness, a dark and Dionysian force. That was his work, which begun, acquired its own momentum which seized minds and impressed them with its own Reality.

  Kierkegaard changed. It was begun. Keye and Waden had no power against it.

  He laughed as he had laughed the sunny day he stood on that bronze circle marking the center of Kierkegaard and spun; but no one would ever stand there again, no foot in all of time to come would likely tread that spot, no one ever have that vantage which had inspired the work. Even if ten thousand years made a crumbled heap of all man had done on the site of Kierkegaard, a hill would stand there, of crumbled marble, of ruin, and memories. A city would have stood there, the heart of which was forever sucked in and warped and changed by his mind. The world would not be the same, since that heap of stone began to stand there, and never could be what it would have been had there been no Herrin Law.

  But Waden Jenks had permitted the work, urged it.

  The perplexities overcame him. He had interrupted the workers with his laughter, and now with his silence, They stood there, surely wondering who was there in the shadows. But then they began work again, no one investigating. There were madmen in Kierkegaard, the invisibles, who sometimes with sound or action intruded on the Reality of the city—who screamed, sometimes, or laughed, as if they made some attempt to be seen by the sane. Herrin drew breath, and walked quietly away from Keye’s apartment building and through the peripheries of the work.

  “Sir,” apprentices murmured, recognizing him now, and offering him respect. He walked on, paying no attention to them, casting instead a critical eye to the stone which gleamed white in the darkness, sheened with the artificial lamps. No flaws were evident.

  “Sir,” said Leona Pace, who came to intercept him. “I thought you’d gone.”

  “Going,” he said equably, and walked on.

  He refused to be disturbed. The physical fact of the sculpture reassured him that all Keye’s hopes to manipulate him and all Waden’s confidence that he did so ... were the necessary illusions of Keye Lynn and Waden Jenks. This, this stone, was real. He was not deluded into believing the substance was real; he discounted that. The shaping far more than the substance of the stone ... that was the reality. And the shaping was his.

  He walked ... up the long extent of Main, through the narrow archway in the firebush hedge, onto Port Street, intending to go to the studio in the University, to apply his restlessness to his labors ... but the Residency was before him and he stopped, stared up at the bleak pebblestone façade which was identical to that of the University, or a warehouse, or anything else.

  This, too, I shall change, he thought, conceiving further ambitions, wondering which was the more important, to involve himself immediately in the Residency alterations or to intervene in the proposed new hemisphere programs.

  MAN, said the plaque inset above the Residency entry, IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS.

  And he smiled, knowing how that was set forth to the masses of Freedom, and what the real truth was, for in University they taught another maxim: The strongest survives, the weaker serve, the weakest perish.

  Who am I? the masses in the provincial schools were taught to ask.

  The masses went on asking, diverted by the question and never really wanting the answer if they had known it. The sign was for them. They took pride in it. They saw the world in their own measure.

  The Students at University learned a second question. What is reality? They doubted all previous questions.

  And a very few attained to the Last Statement.

  I.

  He smiled somewhat cruelly at the sign, which to the masses promised control of their destinies.

  Perhaps the mad, he thought, have seen their conditions. Inferiority was a bitter mouthful. The mad in Kierkegaard were one step ahead of the sane and subservient ... because most of those out there limited their thoughts—lest they see what the mad had seen, that they were not in control of anything.

  Must not think further—or go mad, lacking power, which, after all, makes life worth living.

  And is there one, he wondered (the inevitable question), only one man, after all, for whom the whole species exists? But humanity had no existence, of course, save in the mind of the one man who warped all that was about himself.

  Himself.

  He was, after all, very comfortable this night. He had simply recovered his previous state, before Keye, which was solitude. He thought of the first night he had begun to
realize his solitude, the first night he had begun to conceive of himself as psychurgos and not as child, the night the visitor had come to tell him he was different.

  His parents. Perrin. In fact his thoughts had not tended that way twice in a day in a very long time. He would bring them to Kierkegaard when his great work was finished. They would be an excellent test of it. The anticipation of the effect on them excited him.

  Accomplishment, he thought, did not diminish goals: it opened new ones. To reach back to Camus and to alter that place too ... one of his apprentices, trained by the work here, would suffice to change Camus. And to change his parents’ and sister’s lives, by enveloping them in his influence, giving them prominence in Camus. ...

  He smiled, self-pleased, confident, and walked from the facade of the Residency and its power and its philosophy toward his own domain at the University. He never meant to let Waden come too close to him, as Keye had come, until she tried to maneuver him and discovered that she could not.

  He whistled, walking along the walk beneath the streetlamps, disturbing the night because it was his to disturb.

  A shadow confronted him, gangling, robed. He saw it because it startled him, coming out of that patch of shadow between the two buildings. Or perhaps it had been there all along and he had not perceived it. He had truly not seen one of the Others in—he had forgotten how long. He had learned how not to see them, out of politeness.

  It stood there, a blob of midnight in the light of the street-lamp, and from within the hood seemed to stare at him, a question posed. His path was blocked. The ahnit made himself ... itself? inconvenient to his progress.

  He walked round it and curiously—for he was beyond such curiosity—he had a nagging impulse to look back, to see if it regarded his departing back, or if he should see it taking its own way.

  Anathema.

  It did not exist. He refused it existence. An inevitable question occurred to him, regarding his existence in its eyes.

  His mind rebounded perversely to his analysis of the insane, who confronted a reality which swallowed them, and who thereafter, had to ignore all realities, or establish their own rules.

  He laughed nervously, silently, because the night was no longer empty of threat to him. He went not to his studio, but to the Fellows’ Hall in the University, and sat at that table which he and Waden had shared on a certain night, familiar scarred wood.

  The University was created for Waden, and created Herrin Law, sculptor.

  He drank his beer and sat alone, because he was a Master and there were no younger Students who dared approach or question him; because he was known to be powerful and most of good sense would not come to him uninvited, fearing the edge of his wit. His apprentices had spread his reputation of late and the self-knowing retreated from hazard.

  He was alone. Solitary in his Universe, the only real point.

  X

  Master Herrin Law: Does emotion originate from within or without your reality?

  Apprentice: Within. There are no external events.

  Master Law: Is the stimulus to emotion also internal?

  Apprentice: Sir, no external events exist.

  Master Law: Am I within your reality?

  Apprentice: (Silence).

  Master Law: That is a correct answer.

  Waden Jenks tolerated the sitting, suffered in silence, because to admit discomfort and then go on to bear it was to admit he was constrained. Herrin prolonged the misery in self-contained humor, took whatever shots might be minutely necessary, sketched from several angles, after resetting the lighting with meticulous care.

  And Waden, perched on his uncushioned chair, sat rigidly obedient.

  “The lighting,” Herrin said, “will be from a number of sources. I take the seasons into account; apprentices are running the matter in the computer, so that the lighting will be exact from season to season, the sun hovering hour by hour in a series of what appear to be design-based apertures. The play of—”

  “Spare me. I’ll see the finished effect. I trust your talent.”

  Herrin smiled, undisturbed. Darkened an area beneath the chin and smiled the more.

  “A little haste,” said Waden. “I have appointments.”

  “Ah?”

  “A ship in orbit. An ordinary thing.”

  “Ah.”

  “There is some hazard. This is McWilliams’s Singularity.”

  Herrin lifted an eyebrow, nonplused.

  “An irregular client, one of the more troublesome. I’d like you to be there, Artist.”

  Both eyebrows. “Me? Where, at the port?”

  “The Residency, my friend.”,

  “What, you want sketches?”

  Waden smiled. “I find the opinion of the second mind of Freedom—an asset. You have an insight into character. I value your assessment. Observe the man and tell me what you’d surmise about him.”

  “Interesting. An interesting proposal. I bypass your naïve assumption. I’ll come.”

  “Of course you will.”

  He stopped in midshadow, made it a reflective pause, studiously ignoring Waden, refusing at this moment to interpret him.

  XI

  Apprentice: Master Law, what is the function of Art in the State?

  Master Law: The question holds an incorrect assumption.

  Apprentice: What assumption, sir?

  Master Law: That Art is in the State.

  And on the morrow the shuttle was down and Camden McWilliams was in the Residency.

  Herrin wore Student’s Black; it was stark and sufficiently dramatic for confrontations. He sat in the corner of Waden’s office, refusing to be amazed at the splendor of the decoration, much of the best of the University culled for the private ownership of the First Citizen. He knew the individual styles: the desk with the carved legs, definitely Genovese; the delicate chair which bore Waden’s healthy weight, Martin’s; the paintings, Disa Welby; the very rugs on the floor, work of Zad Pirela, meant as wall hangings, and here trod upon as carpet.

  He was offended. Vastly offended. He observed, catalogued, refused to react. It was Waden’s prerogative to treat such things with casual abuse, since Waden had the power to do so; he recovered his humor and smiled to himself, thinking that there was one work Waden could not swallow, but which engulfed him.

  Meanwhile he sketched, idly, and looked up with cool disinterest when functionaries showed in captain Camden McWilliams.

  A black man of outlandish dress, bright colors, a big man who assumed the space about him and who had probably given the functionaries difficulty. Waden greeted McWilliams coldly, and Herrin simply smiled and flipped the page of his sketchbook to begin again.

  “McWilliams of the irregular merchanter Singularity,” Waden Jenks said, failing to hold out his hand. “Herrin Law, Master of Arts.”

  “McWilliams,” Herrin said cooly.

  McWilliams took him in with a glance and frowned at Waden. “Wanted to see,” he began without preamble, “what kind of authority we have here. You’re old Jenks’s son, are you?”

  “You’ve been informed,” Waden said. “Come the rest of the way to your point, McWilliams of Singularity.”

  “Just looking you over.” McWilliams studiously spat on the Pirela carpet. “Figure the same policies apply.”

  “I follow old policies where pleasant and convenient to me. That I see you at all is more remarkable than you know, for reasons that you won’t understand. Outsiders don’t. You’ll accept the same goods at the same rate and we’ll accept no nonsense. Trade here is not necessary.”

  “We,” said McWilliams, “have the ability to level this city.”

  “Good. I trust you also have the ability to harvest grain and to wait about while the new crop grows. Perhaps the military will assist with the next harvest.”

  McWilliams chuckled softly and spat a second time. “Good enough, Jenks. Go on about your business. We’re loading at port. You know my face now and I know yours.”

  “Suf
ficient exchange, McWilliams.”

  “What’s this—thing—in the city?”

  “Thing, McWilliams?”

  “This thing in the middle of town. Scan doesn’t lie. What are you doing out there?”

  “Art. A decorative program.”

  McWilliams’s eyes rested coldly on him. “Nothing military, would it be?”

  “Nothing military.” For once Waden Jenks looked mildly surprised. “Take the tour, McWilliams. There’s no restriction in Kierkegaard. Wander our streets as you will.”

  “This city? Hell, sooner.”

  “The driver will take you to the port.” Waden made a temple of his hands and smiled past them. “A safe trip, McWilliams.”

  “Huh,” McWilliams said, and turned and walked out.

  Herrin filled in a line, shadowed an ear, languidly looked up into Waden’s waiting eyes. “Barbarian,” he judged. “Limited in formal debate but abundantly intelligent. Can he level the city?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  Herrin’s insouciance failed him. For a moment he almost credited Waden with humor at his expense, and then revised his opinion.

  “Freedom,” said Waden Jenks, “navigates a black and perilous sea, Herrin. And I guide it. And I see the directions of it. And I shape things beyond this city, beyond Sartre, beyond Freedom itself. I am a power in wider affairs, and when they come calling ... I deal with them. This much you should see, when you portray me, Herrin Law.”