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“To my observation—yes.”
He sank down off his heels and frowned with the pain and with the fear the pain set in him. He stared straight before him and thought about it for a long while.”
“Now it’s hiding,” he said finally.
“How, hiding?”
“Before, I was surviving. Now it’s hiding, staying up here in the hills. Now I don’t go back because I’m afraid. Or if I don’t go back I amafraid.” He rolled a glance at Sbi. “You’re good; you’ve had the better of me. You set it all up. Located the best of us ... studied how to intervene. You had your best chance when I came out of the University and worked in the open. Then you could get to me. Accosted me in the dark that night, on Port Street. That wasyou. Drove Leona Pace over the edge. Came back to plague me. Worked at me—constantly.”
“Yes,” said Sbi.
“Now I should go back to the city. Now I should take on Waden Jenks and finish drawing him into this.”
“Yes.
“Why, Sbi?”
“Our survival.”
“Reasonable,” he said, trying at least to admire the artistry of it.
“What are you going to do?”
He shook his head. “Surrender Freedom to your manipulation? That’s what you’ve set me up to do, isn’t it? Me, and Waden Jenks; one of us set against the other ... myself, taken out of influence; and on the other hand given the chance to change the world. I’m one of the invisibles. It occurs to me that murder is possible for one of us. That I can push Waden over the edge ... I can do that, because I’ve nothing to lose, have I? Or I can sit here in the hills and know that the greatest thing I ever did fitted your purpose.”
“All that humans have done is bent around us, Herrin Law. The way you live, the pains you take to ignore us, the insanity which claims some of you ... are these things spontaneous? Were you ever—reasonable?”
He stared at the horizon, colder and colder. “No,” he said.
“Herrin. I’ll go withyou. I’m concerned for you.”
He thought of the statue in the hills; of a small dead creature in Sbi’s hands; of Sbi’s hands caressing what Sbi had killed.
Of his parents going about their business not seeing him.
He rested his face against the back of his hand, wiped at the left eye. “So, well, tell me this, Sbi, what do you expect to happen?”
“I don’t know. But it will be of human choosing, and my choosing, both, my friend. Both at once. Is it not reasonable?”
It was, as Sbi said, reasonable. “I’ve taught students,” Herrin said. “I thought I knew, and thought I saw, and I taught. For them, I’m going back, and Waden ... I don’t know about Waden.” He struggled to his feet, started to bend for his belongings again, but Sbi anticipated him and caught them up.
“It’s not far,” Sbi said.
He had guessed that too, that Sbi had brought him generally in the direction Sbi wanted him to go.
XXIX
Waden Jenks: Do you know what frightens me most in the world, Herrin? Not dying. Discovering—that I’m solitary; that my mind is the greatest one, and that I’m damned to think things beyond expression, that I can never explain to any living being. Have you ever entertained such thoughts, Herrin?
Master Law: (Silence.)
Waden Jenks: I think you have, Herrin. And how do you answer them?
Colonel Olsen: The module’s come through; the station begins its construction. Now there’s a matter of the other agreements. Of supply. My aides will draw up a list of requirements.
Waden Jenks: Of no interest to me. Consult appropriate departments in the Residency.
Colonel Olsen: We find no cooperation in these departments of yours.
Waden Jenks: You intrude, colonel, we have our ways. You persist in coming in person. Use the liaisons we are training in University, that’s their purpose, after all.
Colonel Olsen: Nothing you’ve given us has been of value; not your information; not your promises of cooperation.
Waden Jenks: Yet you remain; you and I both know you are obtaining something you desire: a base. Supplies have become important to you. Let’s then admit that you want them badly and that it’s a matter for my personal attention; let’s adjust the price accordingly. Let’s talk about agreements that keep your bureaus from disturbing us. From setting foot here.
Colonel Olsen: We have policies....
Waden Jenks. They don’t get you what you want.
A ship passed in the night sky, a shuttle, headed offworld. Herrin watched it go, from the hills above Kierkegaard. He looked down on the city, with its dimly lighted streets, with the bright glare of the port like a bleeding wound. He felt Sbi’s presence at his elbow without needing to look. “Do you know what that was, Sbi?”
“One of the shuttles. I know. You taught us about other worlds.”
“Does it occur to you that we two don’t control everything?”
“Ah, Herrin, I understand more than that.”
“What more, Master Sbi?”
“That somewhere among those points of light stand others who misapprehend their limits; that somewhere at this moment someone is in pain; that somewhere a life has begun; that somewhere one has ended; I feel them all tonight.”
“I’m trying to feel them.”
“Somewhere,” said Sbi, “is someone else wrestling with dilemma. Somewhere is someone wondering the value of life itself. The universe is always asking questions.”
“Somewhere,” said Herrin, “someone is scared.”
“Beside you, Herrin Law.”
He turned and looked at the ahnit, who almost blended with the night, a shadow among shadows. A strange impulse possessed him, a melancholy; he opened his arms and embraced Sbi’s alien shape, gently, because contact hurt. He had done so in his life with his parents, with his sister when they were both small; with Keye when he made love; with Waden when Waden had a public gesture to make; with the workers when they helped him from the scaffolding ... only those times in his life had someone touched him; and with Sbi again it was different. Sbi embraced him very gently, and he stepped back and looked at Sbi sadly. “I don’t see you have any need to go down there.”
“Probably you don’t see,” Sbi said. “In some things you’re very complicated. Why did you go to your old house, Herrin Law, and to those people?”
“I don’t know.”
“A Master does something and confesses not to know why?”
“I wanted shelter. It didn’t quite work out, did it?” Heat came to his face. “I’ve made that mistake several times; it brought me here. Possibly it’s got hold of me again. Why else am I going down there? Stubbor
“Why did you go to your old house, and to those people?”
“Not satisfied with my answer?”
“No.”
He folded his arms across his ribs and stared at all the lights. “Well, it doesn’t make sense.”
And after a moment: “Why go, Sbi? Answer myquestions.”
“But this is what I’ve lived my life for.”
“What, ‘this’? What this?”
Sbi rested a hand on his shoulder. “That you give me back my faith. That I see our destroyers have the capacity to create. For one who believes in the whole universe, to one who doesn’t ... how can I explain?”
Herrin looked up at the sky above the city.
“We’ve become part of it again,” Sbi said.
“And if we all die, Sbi? Somewhere in your universe, somewhere out there—is there some world dying tonight?”
“Do you feel so?”
“O Sbi.” He shivered, and shook his head. And started down the slope, losing sight of the city among the hills.