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Creative ethics was Keye’s field; indeed creative ethics, and Keye was busy at it. She chose Waden either because, being political herself, she comprehended him best and rejected Art, or because she knew Herrin Law and saw she was getting nowhere with him.
Keye’s art had to have political power to function—as Keye saw it. Hesaw an ethic in his art which Keye had never seen.
Therefore he was greater. And sure of it.
A second handful of gravel, which startled a fish and disturbed the reality of a very small life. He smiled at the conceit. The fish knew as much of Herrin Law as most did, and it was better off that way.
He stripped some of the weeds and plaited them; his fingers were sore from the abrasive and from the work, but he could do it as dexterously as he had on the grassy hillside overlooking his home.
His own bed would be a comfort, porridge cooking when he got up, the scrape of wooden chairs on wooden floor and the smells of everyone and everything he knew woven together and harmonious like the braid of grass.
Herrin,his mother would say, time to get up. Did you hear?his father would say. He can go on and sleep;that would be Perrin. I get his bowl.
He smiled, laughed a breath and stared into the water.
Trucks passed in one direction and the other, never slowed, but roared past on their own business; it was not the day for either bus, which wandered opposite directions of a loop somewhere in the outermost reaches of the Camus valley, linking village to village and all with Kierkegaard.
The river came from the high valleys, from places he had known. It was, even with the truck traffic, a pleasant place to sit.
It was the cold that moved him finally, the shift of wind which accompanied a line of clouds marching on the city, which ruffled the water and bent the weeds and persuaded him it was time to walk back. The sun was sinking. He thought of the dome, where the disquieting image would have settled toward peace. He wanted to see it, but he was drained, and it was cold, and he wanted only to go unrecognized and to stay private in his thoughts. He had achieved at least a measure of tranquility, and found he ached in his bones and that his feet and backside were cold.
He angled off toward the east, avoiding the straight of Main and Jenks Square. It happened to be the direction of the port, and his palate remembered meat pies. There, in the gathering twilight, existed a place where he could walk unremarked. All the way to the port’s south gateway he thought of the pies and the strange and peaceful market.
But there was a silence when he had gotten to the wire fence and the open south gate. It was almost dark; he stood there bewildered, staring at the closed booths and wondering if he had lost track of things. He walked where there had been the smell of things good to eat and the busy commerce of invisibles ... and there was nothing. There were occasional invisibles, robed forms which melded with the shadows and the booths and the dark, between the shops and the fence, but it was all dead; the few shapes which moved here were like insects over the corpse of the life which had existed here.
The port itself ... lived. He looked out where a machine sat in the port, stranger than any he had ever seen, a gray monster attempting nonchalance on the soil of Freedom, where lights glared and motors whined. It was gulping down supply drums; and those drums were about to be lifted off Freedom, to something which, if he looked up, would not be visible, the size and the nature of which he did not clearly picture to himself, although he had seen pictures of ships.
Waden’s. All of this belonged to Waden, and indirectly, therefore, to him, and yet he had never imagined it, or had, in the sense that he had conceived at least of the possibility in comprehending Waden Jenks, in that statue in Jenks Square. Like the sculpture in the Square, it took on independent life, surprising him, disquieting him.
His mind flinched back to the escort which had come with Waden, the unwelcome visitants who had walked within the dome at Jenks Square. More of them would come. His Work was great, and all those who came to Freedom’s station and to Freedom itself would be drawn to it. He thought of Camden McWilliams and the Pirela weavings, and felt a slight insecurity, the apprehension of a destructive, not a creative, force, which had begun to disturb him even then. He remembered the face and the form which were safely shut in that sketchbook he had not touched after that day, that dark and overlarge figure which had occupied Waden Jenks’s office as that ship occupied the port, radiating things Outside, a figment of Waden Jenks’s private ambitions, which now began to have many faces.
Thatwas what had begun to nag at him, that was the disturbance which had made these strangers unbearable to him ... that unfinished portrait and the whole concept behind it, that ... presence ... in the untouched sketchbook, which was not a part of Freedom’s reality, and was; and was his; and was not. It was in there, imprisoned in the leaves, reminding him of the same thing the machine out there told him—that within the ambition of Waden Jenks, and therefore within his own, was the like of Camden McWilliams and the foreign colonel who wanted him ... what, dead? Was that what became of enemies in the Outside? It was all full of uncertainties, things half-formed.
Thatwas what kept at him. Open the book,it said, that unfinished sketch, wanting him to do something with it, interpret it, bring it the rest of the way into view of all the rest of these people, for Waden and for Keye and for the city, make them see what he saw, make their vision ...
... Outward.
As his kept leading him. Look,look at the potential in this individual; consider the perspective of his being; look at the hazard; and the possibility; look.
Seehim, this invisible, this Outsider,
He wiped his mouth, which had gone dry, stared at the inspiration which was trying, combined with what sat out there in the floodlights, to rear up inside him and claim his undivided attention.
His own reality suddenly discarded the whole project of the expedition to Hesse as irrelevant—an expedition to a place which would be as rude and bare of need for art as Law’s Valley; the prospect stifled him. This, on the other hand, thisargued for seizing an opportunity before Waden Jenks could have it all his way, before Keye could work upon Waden or anyone else. Make them see hisvisions instead....
Camden McWilliams. Waden had betrayed the man to his hunters, had traded that man and that information for what Waden wanted, which was the station Freedom had never had since the colony ship broke up. A second chance. And from that second chance, that station which would bring the military to Freedom—a chance to extend the grasp of Waden Jenks. To take the minds of their leaders, to divert them for his purposes ... all these things.
Camden McWilliams, whatever else he was and whatever potential he had, became the commodity in this trade, which was being made now, for good or for ill for Freedom. That brooding black figure stayed central in his thoughts, the solitary image, dark, like the Outside; unknown, like the Outside.
He started walking toward the University, toward the studio. The port, the street, the stairs passed in a blur of other thoughts, of visions which began like fevered dreams to tumble one over the other. He forgot about supper, remembered it when he was already in the University building, and from one direction there was a soft noise of the Fellows’ Hall, and in the other the stairs, and the studio.
He had no appetite for food now, not with the other hunger.
He took the stairs, the way to the studio which he had visited only infrequently of late. He walked into the studio and turned on the light. Everything was disordered as he had left it, dusty with neglect. He kicked papers this way and that, kicked some old rags aside—they were for wiping his hands from the clay. He remembered where he had left the sketchbook on the table by the bed, sat down on the rumpled sheets—no servants ever gained access here; they had never been permitted. He knew the place and the page, and opened it to that series dark with shading out of which the Outsider face stared. He had caught the expressions, the frowns, the menace, the poses of the powerful body. It was all there; he remembered.