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“You’re mad,” Herrin said. “ Idid this? I did nothing of it. It was your doing, from the first time you brought them here. What ship attacked us? Was it Singularity? Or your own allies?”
“Whatever you imagine,” Waden said. It was a lost voice, a lost look in his eyes, which spilled tears. “I should have had them finish you; I neededyou. That should have warned me where control was ... really. O Herrin, your revenge is excessive. Remake it. Revise it.”
It was an ugly thing to see, a hurtful thing. He closed his eyes to it and looked again, saw Waden still standing there, hands open, face vulnerable. “I wish I could, Waden. But you see—” He sought, half humorous, some logic to devastate logic, to break through to Waden Jenks. “—I let it go. The reality I imagined was a reality that would become universal, that would exist on its own in time and space ... that I myself could no longer interrupt, that’swhat I imagined. And now the world has to take its course under those terms. Sbi exists. We’ll all see each other. We’ll listen to the ahnit and see them. We’ll not do things the way they were; we’ll not teach dialectic to shut down minds; we’ll not bewhat we were. And I can’t stop it. That’s what I imagined.”
Waden’s eyes were terrible. Not vacant but following that speculation, gazing into possibilities. “What do you imagine that I’lldo?”
“I imagine ... that you’ll do things that are natural to this reality. Whatever they are. I can’t stop it. You can’t. We have no more control, Waden. Nor do the ahnit. We share this world and it comes down to that. It has its own momentum and it can’t be canceled.”
Waden turned away, fending himself from the door frame, walked back into the dark.
“Waden,” Herrin objected.
“You created paradox.” Waden’s voice came back out of the dark. “And you abdicated. You’ve done this, Herrin Law, you’ve done this.”
Herrin started forward, to go in, but Sbi’s arm intervened. “No,” Sbi said. “No, don’t go in there. Come with me. Please, come away from this place. Now.”
Herrin shivered, and stopped, lost in his own paradox.
“Come,”Sbi insisted, and drew him away, out the hall beyond the ell, into the corridor outside. He remembered Keye then and looked to all the shadows, half expecting her to be there.
Sbi drew him farther, toward the stairs, and down them, where the wind skirled in with the taint of smoke.
He hurried, wakened by the shock of the wind, hastened to be quit of the place and Waden’s fancies, his reasoning which threatened to swallow up all the things he thought he knew, down and down the rubble-littered stairs, deeper and deeper into the dark. His breath came short. Sbi gripped his arm to keep him steady and kept his pace.
Something started in the dark; a ru
“Keye!”he shouted, making echoes. “Wait for me! Listen to me!”
The steps retreated, defying his control, racing away into their own reality.
And wood splintered, and crashed down in hideous echoes.
“Keye!”
He ran, almost fell himself at the turn where the railing had broken, where it hung now, swinging in the almost dark, and a black-clad body sprawled on the steps below.
Sbi made to protest his haste, but he caught his balance against the wall and made the last turn down, dropped to his knees to try to lift Keye from where she had fallen on her belly, touched her shoulders and realized his hands had no strength to lift ... and that lifting might kill her. He patted her shoulder helplessly, leaned to see her side-turned face, at once overwhelmed to realize life in the eyes and a breath beneath his hand.
“Keye. It’s Herrin, Keye.”
“No, it isn’t,” the answer came. Her lips hardly moved and the sound was no more than a whisper. “I cancel all your realities. And my own. And my own. And all the world.”
The lips stopped moving and the breath sighed out. In an instant more the body diminished, a looseness very different from sleep.
He drew his hand back, recoiled slowly. He had never seen death happen. It seemed to take something of himself away too.
But the universe stayed.
Because, he wondered, he had indeed abdicated it? Because there was paradox, and he had made it? He knelt there, fixed in the thought, and Sbi gathered him to his feet and drew him away.
“Herrin,” Sbi said when they were outside, on the steps and in the wind. Sbi hugged him tightly, till the ribs hurt, and set him against the wall and touched his face. “Herrin. Don’t lose me. Listen to me.”
“I hear you,” he said. It was hard to speak, to pull his reason back from that logic that tried to claim it. He focused on Sbi’s dark eyes, on Sbi’s expressions which he had learnedto read, and which he had never understood; on a remote monument which had stood before man had come to Freedom.
He looked up, above the door.
Man,said the inscription, is the measure of all things.
“No,” he said.
There was a lightening in the east, down the ruins of Port Street, and it showed the University intact at least from this perspective. And the city ... always before, the hedge had separated the Residency and the Outsiders from the city. A view was open now which had never been there before.
It was not fire in the east, but the sun coming up. He gazed at it in fixation, thinking that the world had turned, and that the greater forces in the Universe existed, as the star came up visible over the curve of the world with no one able to affect it.
There was argument which might prevail against that reasoning; he refused to pursue it, only staring toward the daylight as toward a goal that had to be won. “It’s there,” he said to Sbi. It was a horrid dawn, smoke-fouled and revealing ugliness, but it was the light, and it was coming.
XXXI
Herrin Law: Why go, Sbi? Answermy questions.
Sbi: But this is what I’ve lived my life for.
Herrin Law: What, “this” Whatthis?
Sbi: 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? ... We’ve become part of it again.
The sun kept coming, making real the cindered hedge, the building which still poured a twisting column of black smoke, but a wind had come with the dawn, and began to sweep away what had hung there. They walked into the long expanse of Main together, cloaked but unhooded, both of them. There was debris left from the night, paper, scraps of clothing, wisps of cindery stuff like pieces of the night left over, which blew lightly along the pavement and collected in the gutters and against the lee side of buildings.
And there were some who lay dead. Herrin stopped by each, to know whether this man, this woman, this boy or girl was in fact dead, or lay in shock, or unconscious, or helpless with injury. Hehad lain helpless once and only Sbi had seen him. But he and Sbi this time found none to help.
They saw the living, too, furtive shapes which flitted from building to building, shadow to shadow in the dawn, some cloaked and some in the plain clothes of citizens who had once—before the night—been sanely blind.
There were ahnit, a few, who glided among the shadows, and one who came out from a vacant doorway and, seeing Sbi, spoke a few quiet hisses and clicks. Sbi answered. That one slowly unhooded and walked away down the steps and around the corner and on through the streets.
“Tlhai,” Sbi said. “Tlhai says some of us have stayed. That some have taken the injured away. That some have gone away, but may be back. We have the habit of this city. I think they’ll come.”