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“More?” the ahnit asked, offering another piece to his lips. He used his hand entirely this time, though it hurt. “Why do you do this?” he asked the ahnit. There it was again, the curiosity which was his own worst enemy, wanting understanding which another, saner, would have fled. The ahnit, wiser, gave him no reason.
“What’s your name?” he asked it finally, for it was too real not to have one.
“Sbi.” It was, to his ears, hiss more than word.
“Sbi,” he echoed it. “Why, Sbi?”
“Because you see me.”
“Before,” he said. “Sbi, did you—meet me before? Was it you?”
“I’ve met you before. I’ve been everywhere ... in the University, in the Residency.”
He shivered, hands tucked to his chest.
“Why,” it asked, “are you blind to us?”
“I? I’m not. I see you very well. I’d be happier if I didn’t.”
“We exist,” Sbi said.
“I know,” he said. “I know that.” It left him nothing else to know.
“Do you want water?”
He thought about it; he did, but undrugged he was too fastidious.
“It disturbs you,” Sbi said.
“All right,” he said, and Sbi touched his chin to steady him, leaned forward and spat just a little fluid into his mouth. Herrin shuddered at it, and swallowed that and his nausea.
“I simply store it,” Sbi said, and hawked and swallowed.
“An appalling function.”
“Our nature,” said Sbi.
Herrin stared at Sbi bleakly. “Your reality. I’d not choose it.”
Sbi made a sound which might be anything. “Mad,” it said. “ Look, at the sunrise. Can you or I make it last?”
“Material reality. Mancounts where I’m concerned, and we can’t agree.”
“You’ve made things so complicated out of things so simple. There is the sun.”
In a single flowing movement Sbi rose and walked to the hillside, stood there with hands slightly outward and face turned to the sky ... sat down then, and ignored him entirely, seeming rapt in thoughts.
“Sbi,” Herrin said finally, and Sbi looked over a shoulder at him. “What do you intend?”
“When can you walk, Master Law? I’ve spent too much to carry you.”
“I can walk until I have to stop,” he said. “A while.”
“Don’t harm yourself.”
“What amI to you?”
“Something precious.”
“Why?”
Sbi stood up again. “Will you walk now?”
He considered the pain of it, and nerved himself, took the cloak in his hand and used his legs more than the ribs getting up. He used his splinted hands to put the cloak to his shoulders, and Sbi helped him. The act depressed him. He bowed his head and clumsily pulled the hood up, no different finally from other invisibles; safe—no one but Sbi would see him—even in the city no one would see him. He supposed that was where they might go.
But they walked slowly, and something of directional sense, the sun being at his back, argued that they were bound only into more hills.
I shall be further lost,he thought. He did not wholly mind, because while in one sense he was dead, he was still able to see and to feel, and the mind which sometimes frightened him with its persistence of life began to yield to its besetting fault, which was at once his talent and his curse.
“You don’t care,” he prodded at Sbi on short breaths, “to go back to the plain. Where are you leading?”
“Where I wish.”
He accepted that. It was an answer.
“See the hills,” said Sbi. “Smell the wind. I do. Do not you?”
“Yes,” he said. What the ahnit asked frightened him. “How much else?”
“Tell me when you know.”
It took the pose of Master. His face heated, and for a little time he thought, on the knife edge of his limited breaths and the weakness of his legs in matching strides with the ahnit. “I will tell you,” he said, “when I know.”
He walked, with the sun beating down on him, with the gold of the grasses and the sometime gold of flowers, and it occurred to him both that it was beautiful; and that humans did not come here—ever.
He looked to the horizon, where the hills went on and on, and it occurred to him that Freedom was full of places where humans had never been.
He thought of the port, where Kierkegaard played its dangerous games with Outsiders, and Waden sought to embrace the world; there were things Waden himself did not see, choosing his own reality, in Kierkegaard, and outward.
I could make it visible,he thought, and at once remembered: Icould have. Once.
He stopped on the next hillside, out of breath, stood there a moment. “I’m not through,” he said, when Sbi offered to help him sit down.
“Rest,” said Sbi. “Time is nothing.”
He started walking again, hurting and stubborn, and Sbi walked with him, until he was limping and his ribs were afire. “Stop,” Sbi said, this time with force, and he did so, got down, which jarred his ribs and brought tears to his eyes. He stretched out on his back, resting with his hands where they were comfortable, on his chest, and Sbi leaned over him and stroked his brow, a strange sensation and comfortingly gentle.
“Why are you blind to us?” it whispered to him.
It had asked before. “Do you play at Master?”
“Why are you blind to us?”
“Because—” he said finally, after thinking, and this time with all earnestness, “because if we shed our ways on each other ... what becomes of us and you, Sbi? How do we choose realities?”
“I don’t,” said Sbi softly.
He rolled his eyes despairingly skyward and shut them because of the sun. “You don’t care,” he said. “Your whole existence is of only minor concern to you.”
“There was a time humans saw their way to come here to Freedom; there was a time you were so wise you could do that; and there was a time you saw us, before my years. But you took your river and built your cities and stopped seeing us; you stopped seeing each other. Why are you blind to each other, Herrin Law?”
He shook his head slowly, not liking where that question led.
“Why did they cripple you?”
“Because I saw.” He lost his breath and tried to get it back, with a stinging in his eyes. He felt cold all the way to the marrow. “We’re wrong, aren’t we, Sbi?”
“What do you think, Master Law?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and blinked at the sun, which could not drive the cold away. “I don’t know. Where are we going, Sbi? Where are you taking me?”
“Where you’ll see more than you have.”
He shivered, nodded finally, accepting the threat. Sbi slid a thin arm under his shoulders and supported him as if the cold were in the air, resting with arms about him and sleeves giving him still more warmth.
And finally he found his breath easier again and knew he had strength for more traveling. “When you’re ready,” he said quietly to Sbi, “I am.”
Sbi’s three-fingered hand feathered his cheek. “Are you so anxious?”
“I won’t like it, will I?”
“I might carry you a distance.”
“No,” he said, and began to struggle, with Sbi’s careful help, to sit, and then to stand up. He was lightheaded. It took Sbi’s assistance to steady him.
Perhaps, he thought, there was much of Waden in Sbi, to persuade, to create belief—to prove, at the last, and cruelly, that he was twice taken in. Perhaps Sbi also had a Talent, and perhaps Sbi was coldblooded in his waiting, since he had learned to reason with a human Master. Waden Jenks had disturbed a long stability between man and ahnit; and he had had no small part in it.
Perhaps there was a place that Sbi would turn as Waden had.
He pursued it, to know. It was all the courage he had left.
And late, after hours of sometime walking and walking again, when the sun had gotten to the west and turned shades of gold, they crossed the final hill.
He had been ready to stop. His side hurt, and tears blurred. “I’ll carry you a little distance,” Sbi had offered, but he hated the thought of helplessness and kept walking, wondering deep in his muddled thoughts why of a sudden Sbi was so anxious to keep going.