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But Waden. Waden, who rivaled him. He took that maneuver seriously. The three greatest minds in all Freedom ... and always Keye had maintained at least neutrality, with the balance tipped toward him. Waden conceived ambition and the Ethicist went to him like iron to a magnet.
When hisgreat work was almost complete.
Thatdesertion hurt, and the news of it had to come when he was tired, when his maintenance of his reality could be shaken. There was a cure for that. He got up, walked to the table and poured his abandoned glass full of wine. He sat down and he drank, and when he could no longer navigate steadily, he headed for bed, to lie with the lights on because he was too muddled to turn them out, with a confusion of anger in him that was not going to accept things as they were and an exhaustion too great to think his way out of it.
He slept, more a plummet into oblivion than a sinking into rest. And he waked, leaden-limbed and with a blinding headache. He lay abed until he could no longer ignore the day, then rolled out gingerly, bathed, which diminished the headache and finally cured it.
Thinking ... was in abeyance. He toweled off, dressed, held out his hands to see if they were steady, and they were.
Possibly, he thought—because his mind wasmost brilliant—the restlessness at night would get worse. He thought of what Waden feared—the same perspective, to have no one equal, anywhere. To be throwing out thoughts and ideas which no one could criticize because there was no one competent to comprehend.
Life without walls. With endless, endless outpouring of ideas, and nothing coming back, being at the center of everything, and radiating like a star ... into void.
To be cursed with increasing intellect, and increasing comprehension of one’s reality, and increasing grasp....
You’ll swallow,he recalled saying to Waden Jenks, until you burst.
That was not, he thought, what Waden feared. It was rather expansion ... until expansion became attenuation, became dissipation ... until Waden had never been.
A wave with no shore.
The thought began to occur to him as well. As it might have occurred to Keye. He had left Keye alone, without a shore to break the wave, and she had gone to Waden; as Waden went to him when Keye did not suffice.
And where now did Herrin Law go?
To deaden his mind every night because the thoughts were too vivid and the brain too powerful, so powerful that the only way to deal with it was to anesthetize it, to get null, for a few precious hours?
Until the machine tore itself apart?
The hands were steady at the moment. He had that confidence, at least.
XVIII
Waden Jenks: Your hubris surpasses mine.
Master Law: Philosophy argues that hubris doesn’t exist.
Waden Jenks: But it does. There are offenses against the State.
Master Law: I purpose nothing against the State.
Waden Jenks: No, your ambition is far greater.
He decided on breakfast, to be kind to his abused body, to guard his health, food was a good cure for such moods. Well-being generally restored his confidence. He left for the University dining hall rather than order breakfast up from Residency kitchens, which could take far longer than it was worth, which was why he had given up on breakfasts, when he thought about it. He considered his physical condition, which was approaching excessive attrition; hours of physical labor on small intake and limited sleep. Food at regular hours had to help.
He was, in fact, stripped of resolve, of the energy which had sustained him thus far. He ate a far larger breakfast than he had ever been accustomed to since childhood, full of sugars and washed down with milk; he asked the kitchen to pack him a cold lunch, which he took with him in a paper bag; and he walked at a slow pace toward Jenks Square, letting breakfast settle.
He did, he concluded, feel better for all these measures of self-improvement. He walked along the street noticing his surroundings for the first time in weeks.
And invisibles were there.
He flinched from that realization. The first one he saw was where Second intersected Main, coming from a corner, and perhaps there had been others all along, but afterthis one there were others, farther down the street.
Another difficulty of a brain which could not be shut down. Perception. Hesaw them. And what should he ask of others who had been born in Kierkegaard? Doyou really see them?They were there, that was all. He had not put on the brooch this morning—hubris did not go with his mood—now he was desperately glad that he had not. He no longer felt like challenging anything.
One cloaked, hooded figure had stopped, and he stopped. It was Leona Pace.
He stood there perhaps half the beat of his heart, and flinched, walked on past as he ought. The midnight robes, which blanked both ahnit and invisible human from the view of the sane, veiled a shoulder, a blankness.
Perhaps it was the shock he needed to jar him from his private misery, that sight of a reality fractured, a fine talent lost, the waste, the utter waste of it. He did not look back.
The dome lay before him, the vision which made all other things trivial. Thiswas the thing, this beautiful object, on which he had poured out all his energy for months, which had taken on shape and life and form. To have it finished, to have it be what it was meant to be ... was worth the Leona Paces and the pain of his own body. Was worth everything, to have this in existence, shining in the morning, the sun sheening the stone with the illusion of dawn-color, with the interior now opened and hinting at convolutions within. It glowed with interior light at the moment because they had not yet shut down the inside lights which the night crews used, bright beads gleaming in the perforations.
He walked within, where steps and taps on stone echoed, where voices spoke one to the other, hidden in the huge triple shell and the curtain-walls and bent about by acoustics and the size of the place. Some of the echo effect he had pla
The center, beyond the devolving curtain-pillars, held the scaffolding, the image, still shrouded in metal webbing.
And he stopped, for crews were gathered there, both crews, and both supervisors, Gytha and Phelps; the apprentices, the workers, everyone ... more coming in until there could be no one of the active workers omitted, past or present.
“Done?” he asked. His own voice echoed unexpectedly in their hush, which was broken only by the human stirring of a quiet crowd. “Is it finished?”
Carl Gytha and Andrew Phelps brought their tablets, the daily and evening ritual, and another brought an armload of computer printout, the maps from which they had worked, all solemnly offered. He signed the tablets, looked about him at all of them, somewhat numb at the realization that for most of them there was nothing now to do.
“ Welldone,” he said, because saying something seemed incumbent on him. “ Welldone.”
There was a murmur of voices, as if this had somehow been what they wanted to hear. He was bewildered by this, more bewildered when apprentices and workers simply stood there ... and finally Gytha and Phelps offered their hands, which he took, one after the other.
“Go,” he said. “I’ve some finishing. I’ll still need a small crew; Gytha, Phelps, you stay to assist. Pick a handful. The rest of you—it’s done.”
He winced at the applause, which multiplied and redoubled like madness in the acoustics of the dome. He nodded in embarrassment, not knowing what else to do, turned matter-of-factly to his platform and his tools, and took off his kit with his lunch and set that down; scrambled up with the agility of practice, and set himself to work.