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“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.”
“ Arethere 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.”
“ Myart, 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 i
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 waspowerful, 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 begi
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.