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He walked the ten streets of Kierkegaard, omitting his classes; he looked on the exterior of Kierkegaard, the beige and gray of the solid citizens, the workmen, the sellers, the manufacturers, the occasional midnight blue of one no one saw.
His reality. His visions. And Waden Jenks, captured in stone, apertures and textures and surfaces shifting as one passed throughthem.
He went back to his studio in the University, locked the door, stayed and sketched and pla
VIII
Master: What is more real, my reality or yours?
Herrin: Mine.
Master: How do you demonstrate that?
Herrin: I need not.
“ Come out,” Keye pleaded with him through the door, and to someone else, outside: “I think he’s gone mad.”
He laughed to himself and kept at work. “Call Waden,” he said. “Call Waden here. This is for him.”
And Waden came.
“Well,” Waden said, “Artist?”
The clay lay before them, the three nested shells which he proposed. The central figure, lifelike, emerged out of a matrix of similar apertures and texture within the dome. He waited, anxious, enormously vulnerable.
Waden walked about the model on the studio table, bent, looked within it. A smile spread over his face and his eyes lighted.
“Everything,” Herrin ventured, “and everyone ... must flow through it. For all time to come in Kierkegaard.”
“Amazing,” Waden pronounced, and gri
“What, now?”
Waden looked into his eyes, and a curious smile, a subtle smile, sent a slight chill into the air. “I shall move into the Residency soon.”
And the week the stone began to arrive, moved by truck from the quarries, to be set in the Square and in the studio, First Citizen Cade Jenks died, of causes unspecified.
The coincidence occurred to Herrin, if to no other. Herrin went very soberly about his own business, matter of factly shut everything down for the three-day mourning and memorial, and very quietly resumed when the public ceremony was done. In fact the mourning was official and very little private, a condition more of uncertainty than of grief, mutterings and wonderings, what ma
IX
Master. Is art reality?
Herrin: Art reflects reality.
Master: The reality of the artist or the reality of the subject?
Herrin: (Silence).
The work began in Jenks Square. The five hundred apprentices and laborers allotted to the work began to consider their plans. The voices rang in the dead silence of official mourning, echoed off buildings draped with black.
Herrin stood amid the square, now ringed with stone blocks on which the foundation shapes had been plotted, himself experiencing a drawing of his skin, a sense of the power of his begi
Waden came on the morrow, no longer in Student’s Black, walked about the ring of white stones and acknowledged the respects of the apprentices with grave nods of his head. Of a sudden, Herrin thought, Waden lookedlike power. There was nothing obvious; the gray brocade and conservative tailoring was nothing more than a very wealthy citizen might wear; but the eyes seemed to miss nothing, to linger, invasively.
“With so many hands,” Waden said, “you should make rapid progress.”
“The image,” Herrin said, “is alive in my mind. With the excellent equipment, I can make it flow into the stone. I’ve apprentices sufficient to work in shifts; lights will keep the work going through the night. I reserve the central image for my own hand. Thatis the focus. In the flow of that, the whole begins.”
“I must sit for it.”
“I shall need you to sit for it, yes.”
“Did I not promise, Herrin?”
“I think you went rather far in getting me the Square, First Citizen.”
Waden chuckled. “My reasons were complex.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Do you flatter yourself you had something to do with them?”
“Do you say I didn’t?”
“Does it trouble you, Artist?”
“Ah, no.” Herrin turned and regarded Waden with a cool eye. “I don’t believe in karma, my friend. It’s all one to me, whether you acquired your power by abdication or assassination. It doesn’t intrude on my Reality. Mine lies in the future; yours is present. Mine is length and yours is breadth.” He laid a hand on the block nearest, cool, fractured marble from the quarries up the Camus. “This is my medium. Practice your art, First Citizen, and don’t take up the chisel.”
“Now which of us deals in intangibles? This stone of yours—becomes me, Herrin Law; and my reality—isn’t that the subject?”
“True, First Citizen.”
“Then where is yours?”
Herrin smiled. “I’m content. The more you’re visible, the more I’m there too, First Citizen.”
“I was always Waden to you.”
“You are whatever you want to be, aren’t you? In a few weeks you’ll begin to see things take shape here. Those amorphous heaps are the central pedestal, the median arch foundations, the three shells, all the first courses. The first five go into place and the carving begins.”
Waden walked further, walked back again. “You’ll come to the Residency,” he said. “You’ll live there what time you’re not working.”
Herrin lifted a brow. “In the Residency?”
“What, is your self-confidence lacking?”
“Not in the least. I’ll accept it without comment.”
“There’s inferiority in the word accept.”
“Possibly. I admit it.”
“Now I suspect you of arrogance.”
“There’s inferiority in arrogance. It assumes one cares. I’m simply as I am. I’ll come to the Residency. It seems adequate for my comfort.”
“Pathetic games. You’re my guest, my employee.”
Herrin turned a cold smile on him. “I’m your immortality. Your interpreter.”
“Mine. What other message goes out, Artist?”
“Black and white, an interlocked pattern, lovers inextricably entwined.”
“Ah, I’ve discovered your reality.”
“You are involved in it.”
“Does it occur to you, Herrin, that I’m using you?”
“Yes,” he said, leaving pregnant silence, staring into Waden’s brown eyes. He smiled finally, as did Waden.
“If you weremaster,” Waden said, “you wouldn’t have to argue from silences. But you must.”
“I don’t contend in politics. I argued that from the begi
Waden chuckled. “Come to the Residency when it pleases you. We’ll drink together.”
“You’ll sit for me, I’ll need both holographs and sketches. You’ll come to my studio for the holographs, where I have the equipment.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow at ten.”
“You realize I have other schedules.”
“At ten.”
Waden laughed. “I accept. As for you, come when you please.” He walked a distance, looked back. “Bring Keye to the Residency, if it suits.”
“She may be amused. I wouldn’t venture to predict.”
Waden nodded, turned, walked his way back toward the Residency, as everyone walked in Kierkegaard, except the incapacitated, the infant, and the drivers of trucks which carried things too large or too heavy for carrying by hand. Herrin turned a cold eye on the apprentices, who put themselves as coldly to work, knowing they could not daunt him, but each attempting to assert an independent reality. They were not accustomed to such handling as he gave them ... well, but they took it.