Alternate Realities (Port Eternity; Wave without a Shore; Voyager in Night)

Master Law: They delude themselves, they’re part of mine.

He departed the structure, where lights had come on, glaring with their nightly brilliance, and walked along an increasingly deserted street past the ever-same buildings, taking no thought for his safety,

The slight traffic of Main vanished entirely at the hedge of Port Street. He passed through the arch of the firebushes, and experienced ever so slight a fear, outraged by it as soon as he had come out again into the deepening dusk of the street, out in front of the Residency, in which rows of lights showed interior life. He was not accustomed to fear. He was the most confident of men; had every reason for confidence. Suddenly he took on caution in harmless streets, as if there were something there which nagged at his attention, an eroding of safety, a thing which appeared only in the corner of the eye, as the blanking color of the Others and the invisibles had screened them from eyes which had learned not to see that color and that robed shape. He had never been so troubled, had never had such sick fantasies.

He was an Artist, and sawdetails which others could not see. That was his art.

And did he then, in his skill, begin to lose that ability which screened out madness and the irrational?

I, he insisted to himself, and looked to the Residency façade.

MAN IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS. MAN. MAN ... and nothing else.

I.

There was a rumbling. Shuttles had come and gone at the port many times in his life in Kierkegaard; no one heard them or deigned to pay them notice, except those whose business it was to deal with the fact. But in the dark, and the slight chill, the disturbance of the air could not be ignored. The thunderclouds gathered like a summer storm, and he lifted his eyes to the far end of Port Street, where a light rose in the sky. And because he was alone and had no shielding distraction he found himself looking up, and up, and up, following the moving light of the shuttle, against a sky utterly black near the glare of the port lights, and then sprinkled with stars as the light climbed higher.

He was not wont to look up at all. He knew vaguely that the stars were suns like their own and that such suns had planets like their own and that organization drew those worlds together into complexities of politics. Knew that there were renegade powers, like Camden McWilliams. But for the first time he saw how manystars there were.

It was like looking down from a height, realizing that number. For a moment his balance deserted him. The Ibecame less than it had been, a reality valid on Freedom, in Freedom’s context.

Scope.Waden’s art reached for those points of light. His art—bound to Waden—would go out there. Waden called himself Apollonian, orderly, light-loving and logical, but what he perceived in that scattering of dust was disquietingly Dionysian, chaotic, dark, and random.

Why do they stay in order?he wondered of the stars; and recalled half-heard tapes of natural structure, and forces, and his own art, which had to do with the architecture of a dome, and of i

I, he reminded himself, defying the stars, and lowered his eyes to the street and walked across it.

Why?The question echoed in his mind, unwelcome; along with how far?and how wide?and how old?

I.

The invisibles looked at Reality and flinched from it, retreating into madness. His art was to see, and to go on seeing. It occurred to him that something dangerous was happening, that he had started a chain of events which led precipitately somewhere, and there was no stopping it.

He heard Waden asserting an exterior reality as valid. The University had been founded for Waden.

And might not other things have served Waden Jenks?

If he were sane, he thought, he would back off from such questions, which kept demanding others and others until the perspectives went spiraling up and down from molecule to star and back again.

He kept walking, past the safe front of the University, ignoring the hunger which he had nursed past a neglected lunch, the faint savor of food in the air from all the houses in Kierkegaard. He followed the avenue, which was deserted, and came closer and closer to the port.

Fear was there. He knew that it was. Fear was what he pursued. He walked as far as the open gate in the wire fence which ran the circumference of the port area—fenced for what reason was not clear, for there were no guards, no one defending the access. There were lights, glaring in the night like the lights which he could see if he looked back, where the glow of the work in Jenks Square lit the darkness above the hedges and the tops of buildings. Lights glared in the area from which the shuttle itself might have lifted, a bare circle, of machinery fit with floodlamps all up and down its ugly and yet interesting height, like the cranes which labored to place the stone in Jenks Square.

And figures, robed, walked among booths garishly draped under the fieldside floods. He stared, recognizing them as Others, or invisibles, there for trade.

He knew that invisibles somehow pilfered by night in the port market, where citizens of Kierkegaard traded by day, disdaining any robed intruders out of their time, but there was no mention that thiswent on by night, organized, booths ma

He walked farther, facing fear, because it was there, as he would have faced down Waden or Keye or anyone else fit to rival him. Fear ran the aisles, skipped along almost visibly in the rippling shadows of robes which should have been invisible to his trained perceptions; but it was night, and robes cast shadows, and shadows were everywhere, There was no one like himself, a citizen. Pilfered goods disappeared and no one cared to complain, because had the invisibles been a problem, something would have been done about it, the solution so often proposed and never, because they did not care for the untidiness, carried out.

To kill them all, some had argued in University, would remove a blight. And whoever proposed the solution stood self-consciously admitting that they existed.

And who knows how many there are? another had proposed. Or how we should track them all? They do no harm.

In point of fact, no one knew ... how many there were, who had gone mad. No one knew how many ahnit there were, or how many robes here might conceal one or the other. The invisibles had stopped being human.

Perhaps they bred, making more invisibles. If so they were quiet about it, and perhaps the offspring, lacking proper care, died; no one asked. No one noticed. It was not good health to take overmuch thought in the matter.

As for ahnit, they were not even in basic question. They were a separate rationality. The proper study of man is man,the maxim ran.

Who had proposed such a thing, when their ancestors had been merchants, or at least merchants had been among their ancestors? Who had made the decisions, when they found this perfect world that was Freedom and laid down the Reality which existed here? A Jenks?