Alternate Realities (50 page)

H
e felt pain when he parted with his family, seventeen and bound for University in Kierkegaard. They cried, even Perrin, but his parents cried because they were hurting at losing him and Perrin cried because.... Perrin’s tears were more complex constructions, he thought, jouncing along in the leather seat of the Camus bus over the dirt roads, and eventually over the smoother road on the weekly Camus-Kierkegaard run. Perrin cried for herself, and that she saw a chance departing which had never been hers.

They would all be happier without him, he reckoned, leaning his head disconsolately against the window brace and watching the cultivated fields roll past the unwashed windows. He had been too strong for them, and despite all the tears of various quality shed at his parting—the wound would heal now; Perrin might blossom in her share of the sun, a belated, slightly twisted blossoming, to be sure, but it was possible now; and his parents could devote themselves to their more comfortable offspring and he—
he
could draw breath in a somewhat wider room. That reasoning did not entirely cure the loneliness, but he was used to separation in all its aspects. He did not, with the confidence he possessed, brood overmuch on other possibilities. He would not choose to be anyone but Herrin Law, eminently satisfied with his fortunes. He had seen Perrin, who was popular, and unlike Perrin, he understood the reason of her popularity, and he was too kind to explain it to her: he simply congratulated himself that he was
not
Perrin, or anyone else he had met in Law’s Valley or in Camus, even citizen Harfeld, who, from his almost adult perspective, was considerably diminished, a rather sad man who sought out and encouraged an excellence which Harfeld himself was not competent to comprehend—a useful job, but a depressing one.

Herrin created. He had discovered in himself an aptitude for art; and while he pursued the literary and philosophical and musical studies the school of Caraus had promoted, his real joy was in form and substance. He worked in clay and in stone, finally settling on stone as his greatest love, work with old-fashioned chisel and more modern tools, with ambitions still greater than his young hands could yet achieve. He had, boarding that bus for Kierkegaard, left every item of his art behind as inadequate, incomplete, a provincial past to be forgotten along with every other taint of his upbringing.

If anything frightened him at this stage it was his own power, his own intellect, which was in steady ascension. He realized that he was dependent on such as Harfeld, educators of less than his ability, who yet possessed the experience he knew he lacked.

He knew that he could be warped, even destroyed, by inexpert guidance, like some machine of vast power which, set off balance, could destroy itself by its own force. He knew that he must analyze all the help that he was offered for fear of being misdirected; that he must, in essence,
train
those who were to help him in the proper handling of Herrin Alton Law, and that mere good intent or worldly wisdom in those about him was not sufficient, because most people were not capable of comprehending the logic on which he functioned or of comprehending the abilities which he felt latent within himself. This made him uneasy in going among strangers ... not the strangeness itself, because he was perfectly confident that his own grasp of a situation was superior to that of others, and that, if anything, it would be a relief to be safe within the environment of the great University, where he could reasonably anticipate that his instructors might be more competent to direct him and that his companions—perhaps a few of them—might be strong enough to withstand his strength at full stretch. He was just generally cautious.

He feared ... that Kierkegaard itself might be a disappointment, that perhaps nowhere in all Freedom was there a place of sufficient stretch for him and that somehow his self might still fray its edges at the limits of what Freedom could offer. He was young; he was not sure that the universe itself could contain him.

He got off the bus on hedge-rimmed Port Street, and walked the short distance to the University, which was, like the Residency near it, of sufficient magnificence compared to Camus to reassure him. He registered, received all the suitable authorizations in his papers, and settled into the very comfortable apartment the government allotted him.

K
ierkegaard was a city growing according to plan, now three hundred years old and acquiring some sense of time. There was of course the Residency of the First Citizen, Cade Jenks, descended from the original Planner of Kierkegaard. In that long, five-storied building the government was carried on, and the planners had their offices and facilities. There was the University, mirror image of the Residency and next to it on that section of Port Street which lay within the city limits. The rest of Port Street extended to the shuttleport, the mostly disused facility which interested Herrin only in theory. MAN, the inscription over the Residency’s main entrance proclaimed, IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS, and it was humanity which wanted attention, not—not whatever was outside. Freedom itself was on its way to what it might become, and it had no love of the outsiders who came intruding on its search. The port was, like those who came in through it, irrelevant.

There were ten streets in Kierkegaard itself, excluding Port Street, which everyone did. The central street at a right angle to Port Street, beyond an archway and footpath through the firebush hedge, was called Main. Two vertical streets ran on either side; there was a central east-west named Jenks with two laterals paralleling it, and a paved commons where Jenks and Main intersected: Jenks Square. Warehouses, manufactories, apartment houses, all production and residence fit, completely mingled, within the geometry of the City Plan; an apartment might stand next a mill or a manufactory next a warehouse. The port’s near edge was the site of all small trade, in a daylight market. Of construction, there was great regularity: a company in Kierkegaard turned out building slabs, all concrete on a meter of the upper section and a meter of the lower, and covered with river pebbles on the middle; there was one completely without openings, one with a warehouse-size door; one with a double door; one with a single. There was one with a window, a meter square. Out of these the whole city of Kierkegaard was built, with such conformity that it seemed all one building. It was an eye-pleasing coherency. Only the port escaped it. It was a city without ornament or variance. The whole world lay at its vulnerable beginning. Its greatest minds were being brought from all regions of Sartre to assure the right beginning—and Herrin Law was part of the program. He surpassed his instructors; he gazed on the void regularity of Jenks Square with a proprietary eye and the sobering consideration that the artistic expression of a planet lay under his young and guiding hand, for he knew that the blankness in Kierkegaard which was meant to be filled with art was his arena, that
his
work which would one day stand there—he was sure it would—would influence the total of artists to come in Kierkegaard. He knew that if it were great, they must either imitate or react against what he chose to do, and that therefore he would, more than those in the halls of the Residency, shape the reality of Freedom.

His reality, imposed on a forming world.

His self, extended over all the globe of Freedom, because there was talk now of going into the other hemisphere and the continent of Hesse. His work would go
there
, as well.

It was a thriving city, with vehicles coming in from all the Camus River plain, and going out again with raw materials converted into needed goods. It held thousands upon thousands of residents, who passed—afoot—in its streets. But Herrin did not form associations with the folk who came and went in the streets of Kierkegaard. The important ones he met at social gatherings at the University and the Residency; the unimportant went their ways in their own and limited realities, reminding him much of those he had associated with back in Camus Province. He brushed past them on his trips through the city, noticing with simple aesthetic satisfaction that the run of people in Kierkegaard were better dressed than those in Camus. That there was prosperity here, fit his sense of what Kierkegaard should become.

There were more Others, too, which one might expect: a great city was like a magnet for drawing things to it, and like a great machine for producing debris of broken parts. There were those who were mad, or defective. It was debated in University what to do with them. It was early in the history of Freedom, so it was deemed enough until the ethical dilemma was resolved, to allow the defectives to resolve their existence in their own reality, which existed principally at the shuttleport, at night, and rarely in the city. They were the Unemployed, the invisibles; they were excluded and in abeyance. They were inconvenient, but not greatly so. They were not greatly ... anything.

And more than these—the primary Others, midnight-robed, who stalked through the streets of Kierkegaard mostly by night, with their own purposes, in their separate reality. Herrin was almost trapped into staring, for they were a sight he had never seen; they avoided Camus. But he recovered himself and pretended he had not seen, which was the only courtesy that passed between human and ahnit. It was their
modus vivendi
, mutually practiced, separate realities, neither contaminating the other. Presumably the ahnit gained something in Kierkegaard, but a sane man did not speculate on something that was not human, not in aspect, not in manners, not in art or logic or in any other respect. They left humans alone. It would have better pleased humanity had the ahnit stayed out of human places altogether, but there had been ahnit on the lower course of the Camus obviously for a longer time than there had been humans, and it was a question of prior occupancy. Realities in Kierkegaard overlapped, perhaps, but a little schooling in the courtesies of the city made it possible to walk a street without remarking on the dark-robes. They had nothing at all to do with man, or man with them.

H
errin
enjoyed
Kierkegaard.

“Living here,” breathed Keye Lynn, who was one of Herrin’s pleasant associations in the University, “living here is Art in itself. Imagine the effect. We’re shaping ten thousand years.”

He thought of this, lying in Keye’s bed with Keye’s body delightfully filling his arms, and experienced a cold moment when he thought that Keye was an influence on
him.
From that moment on he abandoned trust of anyone, suspecting that Keye, who knew herself less talented than he (they were both artists, Keye in ethics, a more abstract field than his), meant to use her art to warp him from his absolute course. It set him to thinking much more widely, analyzing all his associations past and present for possible taint, suddenly aware that there were people whose motivation might be to
use
him, knowing his brilliance; that they might, robbed of their own hope of consciously warping the future—lacking the personal scope or talent for that—yet might seek that effect by using him, who did have such scope and talent.

It set him back for a time. He lay staring at the ceiling in the determination to have that matter sorted out, and resumed his relations with Keye in a new understanding which he kept entirely to himself, that now that he was aware of the possibility, he could do that to others—seize them, warp them to suit himself, that he could sculpt more than stone.

He could widen his effect on the future by being quite selective in his relationships with others at the University. He could gain vast power in many fields by seeking out talents of great acuity but less scope.

Like Keye.

He was grateful to her for that thought. Like Perrin, Keye did not understand him, simply because his reach was wider. Keye would see only a part of Reality, and yet she was brilliant in ethics.

He sought others, became far more confident and outgoing than before.

But the loneliness was there, which Keye could not fill. He experimented with others, who might, by providing him new situations, confront him with new ethics, but his own Reality still encompassed them all, and his own ethic belittled theirs.

There remained Waden Jenks.