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But once ... all their ancestors had been up, out there, far away.
Once....
He cancelled that reality, preferring to start time over again. It was his Reality, his option. He smiled self-confidently, walked up to a booth ma
Much more savory than what was served in the Fellows’ Hall. He recalled an old saying about stolen fruit and, finishing one pie, sought a beer amongst the booths.
Quite a different reality, he thought, intrigued now that the disturbance of the day had been settled—food was what he had evidently needed to settle his stomach and his metaphysics. He was fascinated by the swirl of no-color and no-substance against the powerful glare of the port lights where the shuttle had gone back to the invisible ship and its invisible threat. Quite, quite fascinating, this walk through an invisible’s dream of reality, where madmen went about commerce and no-men stalked about on their own inscrutable business.
There must be a certain economy to allow it to function. Sane farmers grew crops, which invisibles pilfered, which in turn hepilfered, and it all somehow balanced, because what was pilfered was sold, turnabout day and night and his small consumption merely fed the engine that was Kierkegaard and Sartre itself, which fed this mass as well as the daylight trade.
And how did the ahnit fit in? Some of the goods in the booths—the clothes—the robes which ahnit and men wore ... ahnit robes. Ahnit Jewelry. He paused and tooka piece, turned it in his hand, found it, with its convolute patterns, of passing skill. He pi
He found his drink in a brightly draped booth which passed out an assortment of mugs. He appropriated what was destined for another hand, right from under the invisible’s reach, and walked his way, consuming his second pie, tasting cool beer and dazzled by amazements right and left.
When he had done he set the mug down, reckoning it would be pilfered back along the circuitous route, likely back to the very same booth from which he had taken it. Nothingcould get lost in the labyrinthine system. He had lived within it all his life and had never quite seen it so clearly delineated, so vividly exercised ... for even in Law’s Valley things had vanished, to turn up again in market in Camus, and it was not good form to question.
Kill the invisibles? He wondered. How would civilization survive if not for them? Where would be the humor in that?
Not to go searching the market for a lost plowshare? Not to have the confidence it would turn up again? No one ever hungered because of it. And a good many times were never missed, or were missed with gratitude, and discovered by another with pleasure, whenever some citizen bought it back again. This was somewhat like the country markets, indeed it was, and the few new-goods warehouses in town were dull by comparison. Only in Camus there had been just the Place, where goods tended to appear, and remain, and perhaps—he had never wondered—there was also this nighttime activity.
By day, simple citizens; by night, invisibles. The same merchandise.
A balance, indeed.
He had quite shed his fear and walked now in utter abandon.
An ahnit set itself in his path, and from within the hood a glitter of eyes regarded him with such directness that he forgot himself, and stopped, and then had to recover his self-possession and walk around the obstacle, instead of employing that graceful sidestep one used when the obstacle was expected. He was shaken. It was deliberate. It was very near aggression. The thought occurred to him that if a citizen should ever be found dead in Kierkegaard—and it happened—the inquiry did not extend beyond citizens and natural causes.
He kept going in his chosen path, which took him again to the gate, and to Port Street.
He looked back. For the first time in his adult life he committed such an indiscretion, and there was an ahnit there.
A shadow, a robed shadow on the street, beneath the lights by the gate. It had followed.
He had looked—and never meant to again—but this one time he had looked, simply to prove himself wrong. His apprehension had been correct, and thereafter, alone or in public, whenever beset with the temptation to yield to the urge to look behind him, whenever insecure in his own reality he would remember ... once ... there had been something there. He shivered. He hurried.
The University doors received him, solid wood, carved, safe and sturdy. They closed behind him and he walked down the corridors toward Fellows’ Hall, hearing the slight boisterousness from it long before he reached it. He sought the familiar, the banal, desperately.
XIII
Student: Master Law, is friendship possible?
Master Law: What is friendship?
Second Student: We propose it’s a sharing of realities.
Master Law: Do you also propose to step into the same river in the same instant and in the same place?
Student: Perhaps ... friendship is equivalency of realities.
Master Law: How do you establish that equivalency?
Student: If we were equal.
Master Law: In all respects?
Student: In the important ones. In the ones we consider important. Is that possible, sir?
Master Law: Have you not equally defined rivalry?
Second Student: If we agreed.
Master Law: If common reality is your reality, it exists, within that referent. It either of you exists, which is by no means certain.
He betook himself to bed in the studio, having a cot there for occasions of late work; it was his own familiar clutter and he had had a great many beers. He reckoned that the best cure for his troubles.
Overwork. He had overstrained himself, and his agitated brain was seeking occupation even when it reasonably had none, simply burning off adrenalin; that was the source of his bizarre fancies.
But when he sat on his cot and reviewed the sketches he had made in his sketchbook, he stopped on the last one he had done of Waden, knowing that another turn of the page was going to bring the nightmare back again.
He turned it, because he could not refrain. The image of Camden McWilliams was there, black and broad-shouldered and solid, refuting invisibility. He had sketched an invisible, and brought it home with him. And on his collar was another thing, which he had forgotten, until he saw the outsider again.
He pulled off the ahnit brooch and it lay chill in his palm. He was numbed by his evening’s drinking. He sat there unsure what he ought to do with the thing, which was ... fine. It was no-color, lapis, nothing very precious, but ... fine. There was no destroying such a thing. It went against all his sensibilities.
He laid it atop the portrait of Camden McWilliams, who had spat on priceless art, canceling him from his thoughts. He lay down on his cot, with the light on, and stared about him at what had been real and solid and true for so many years, and finally the Reality reasserted itself. Hereasserted it, and snugged into the warmth and slept a drunken sleep.