Alternate Realities (67 page)

But it kept going, and he had time for renewed fear, that it was, after all, mad, and that he was utterly lost, not knowing back from forward. In time exhaustion claimed him again and he had another dark space.

He wakened falling, and flailed wildly, hit his hand on an arm and cried out with surprised misery. His back touched earth gently, and the ahnit’s strong arms let him the rest of the way down, knelt above him to touch his face and bend above him. “Rest,” it said.

He slept, and wakened with the sun in his face. Waked alone, and with nothing but grass and hills about him and a rising panic at solitude. He levered himself up, squeezing tears of pain from his eyes, broken ribs aching, and his hands ... at every change in elevation of his head he came close to passing out. Standing up was a calculated risk. He took it, swayed on his braced legs and tried to see where he was, but there were hills in all directions.

“Ahnit!” he called out, panicked and thirsty and lost. He wandered a few steps in pain, felt a pressure in his bladder and, crippled as he was, had difficulty even attending that necessity. It frightened him, in a shamed and inexpressible way, that even the privacy of his body was threatened. His knees were shaking under him. He made it back to the place where he had slept and sank down, hands tucked upward on his chest, eyes squeezed shut in misery.

There was sun for a while, and finally a whispering in the grass. He looked toward it, vaguely apprehensive, and an ahnit came striding down the hill, cloakless. By that, it was the one which had left him here: it came to him and knelt down, regarded him with wet black eyes and small, pursed mouth, midnight-skinned. It reached beneath its robes and brought out a ball of matted grasses, contained in some inner pocket; it spread it and revealed a loathsome mass of gray-green pulp. “For your hands,” it said.

He was apprehensive of it, but suffered it to take the cloak on which he sat and to shred strips from it ... finally let it take his right hand and with its three-fingered hand—two proper fingers and opposing member—begin to spread the pungent substance over it. The touch was like ice; it comforted, numbed. “Lie down,” it advised him. “Lie still. Take some of it in your mouth and you will feel less.”

It offered a bit to his tongue; he took it, mouth at once numbed. In a moment more it dizzied him, and he tried to settle back. It helped him. It took his numb hand then and bound it, and while it hurt, it was a distant hurt and promised ease. “The swelling will go,” it promised him. “Then I shall try to straighten the bones. And then too I will be very careful.”

He drew easier breaths, drifting between here and there. It tended the other hand and probed his whole body for injury. “Ribs,” he said, and with its cautious touches it exposed the bruises and salved them and bound them tightly, holding him in its arms when it had done, for the numbness had spread from his mouth to his fingertips and his toes. He breathed as well as he could, eyes shut, out of most of the pain that he had thought would never stop. Only his mouth was a misery, numb and dry; he tried to moisten his lips over and over and it seemed only worse.

It let him back then, and pillowed his head. “Rest,” it seemed to whisper. He was aware of the day’s warmth, of sweat trickling on him, of a lassitude too great to be borne. The sweat stopped finally, and the torment of his mouth grew worse.

“Water?” a far, alien voice asked him, rousing him enough to focus on its dark face and liquid eyes. “I can give it from my mouth to yours if you permit.”

The thought made his throat contract. He shut his eyes wearily and considered the incongruency of their mutual existence, finding their situation absurd and his fastidiousness merely a shred of the old Herrin Law, before he had begun to see invisibles and lost himself. The ahnit in his silence delicately bent to his lips, pressed his jaw open, and moisture hit the back of his throat with the faint taste of the numbing medicine. He choked and swallowed, and it let him go, letting his head back again. His stomach heaved, and the ahnit held him down with a hand on his shoulder. The spasm ceased and the pain which had shot through his ribs at the convulsion ebbed. The taste lingered. He moistened his lips and found some vague relief, suffered a flash of image, himself staring vacant-eyed at a too-bright sky because he was too drugged to care. The ahnit sat between him and the sun and shaded his face.

“It hurts less,” he said thickly.

And eventually, when thirst had dried his lips again: “My mouth is dry.” He did not want another such experience; but misery had its bearable limit. It leaned above him again, pressed its lips to his and this time brought up a gentle trickle that did not choke him. It drew back then, but from time to time gave him more, until he protested it was enough. It kept holding him all the same; and it spoke its own language, softly, nasals and hisses, in what seemed kindly tones. He rested, finally abandoned to its gentleness, too numb to rationalize it or puzzle it, only accepting what was going to be because of what had been.

Far later in the day the ahnit took up his hand and unwrapped it. “It will hurt now,” it said, and it was promising to, little prickles of feeling. The color—he focused enough to look at it—was green and livid and horrible, but the swelling was diminished. The ahnit probed it, and offered him more of the drug; he took it and settled back, trying to gather himself for the rest of it, resolved not to let the pain get through to him.

It did, and though he held out through the first tentative tug and the palpable grate of bone against bone, the subsequent splinting with knots to hold it, he moaned drunkenly on the next, and it grew worse. The ahnit ignored him, working steadily, paused when it had finished the one hand to mop the sweat from his face.

Then it started the other hand and he screamed shamelessly, sobbed and still failed to dissuade it from its work. He did not faint; it was not his good fortune.
If it were my reality
, he told himself in delirium,
I would not have it hurt.
It seemed to him grossly unfair that it did; and once:
“Waden!”
he cried out in his desperation, not knowing why he called that name, but that he was miserably, wretchedly alone. Not Keye. Waden. He sank then into a torpor in which the pain was less. He rested, occasionally disturbed by the ahnit, who held him, who from time to time gave fluid into his mouth, and kept him warm in what had begun to be night.

He was finally conscious enough to move his arm, to look at his right hand, which was swathed in fine bandage, fingers slightly curved in the splints. He was aware of the warmth of the ahnit which held his head in its robed lap, which—when he tilted his head back—rested asleep, its large eyes closed, lower lid meeting upper midway, which gave it a strange look from this nether, nightbound perspective,

The eyes opened, regarded him with wet blackness.

“I’m awake, “ Herrin said hoarsely, meaning from the drug.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not much.”

Its paired fingers brushed his face. “Then I shall leave you a while.”

He did not want it to go; he feared being left here, in the dark, but there was no reason he knew to stop it. It eased him to the ground and arranged the cloak about him, then rose and stalked away so wearily and unlike itself he could see the drain of its strength.

He lay and stared at the horizon, avoiding the sky, which made him dizzy when he looked into its starry depth; he looked toward that horizon because he judged that when the ahnit came back it would come from that direction, and he had no strength to do much else than lie where he was. All resolve had left him. Breathing itself, against the bound ribs, was a calculated effort, and the hands stopped hurting only when he found the precise angle at which he could rest them on his chest, fingers higher than his elbows. His world had gotten to that small size, only bearable on those terms.

He was on his feet when it returned, when the sun was just showing its first edge, when he had decided to climb the sunward slope to see what there was to see. Of what he expected to see—the river, the city—there was no view, just more hills; but a shadow moved, and that was the ahnit, which stopped when it seemed to have caught sight of him, and then came on, more wearily than before.

It said nothing to him; it simply stopped on the hillcrest where it met him and rummaged in the folds of its robes, offered something. He started to reach for it and the pain of moving his hand reminded him. “Food,” it said, and offered a piece to his lips. He took it, and found it to be dried and vegetable; he chewed on it while the ahnit started downslope and he followed very carefully, aching and exhausted.

It sat down when it had gotten to the nest it had made in the grass; it was breathing hard. When he sat down near it, it offered another piece of vegetable to him, and he took it, guiding it with bandaged fingers. “Better,” it said to him.

“Yes,” he said. The pain had been enough to fill his mind; and then the absence of it. Now he discovered that both states had their limit, that the mind which was Herrin Law was going to work again; he had had his chance for oblivion and chosen otherwise, and now—now oblivion was not so easy. The sun was coming, and day, and he was alive because of that same stubbornness which had robbed him of rest and sleep in Kierkegaard ... which, drugged, had wakened again, incorrigible. It saw ahnit, and existed here, robbed of its body’s wholeness; it just kept going, and that frightened him.

“More?” the ahnit asked, offering another piece to his lips. He used his hand entirely this time, though it hurt. “Why do you do this?” he asked the ahnit. There it was again, the curiosity which was his own worst enemy, wanting understanding which another, saner, would have fled. The ahnit, wiser, gave him no reason.

“What’s your name?” he asked it finally, for it was too real not to have one.

“Sbi.” It was, to his ears, hiss more than word.

“Sbi,” he echoed it. “Why, Sbi?”

“Because you see me.”

“Before,” he said. “Sbi, did you—meet me before? Was it you?”

“I’ve met you before. I’ve been everywhere ... in the University, in the Residency.”

He shivered, hands tucked to his chest.

“Why,” it asked, “are you blind to us?”

“I? I’m not. I see you very well. I’d be happier if I didn’t.”

“We exist,” Sbi said.

“I know,” he said. “I know that.” It left him nothing else to know.

“Do you want water?”

He thought about it; he did, but undrugged he was too fastidious.

“It disturbs you,” Sbi said.

“All right,” he said, and Sbi touched his chin to steady him, leaned forward and spat just a little fluid into his mouth. Herrin shuddered at it, and swallowed that and his nausea.

“I simply store it,” Sbi said, and hawked and swallowed.

“An appalling function.”

“Our nature,” said Sbi.

Herrin stared at Sbi bleakly. “Your reality. I’d not choose it.”

Sbi made a sound which might be anything. “Mad,” it said. “
Look
, at the sunrise. Can you or I make it last?”

“Material reality.
Man
counts where I’m concerned, and we can’t agree.”

“You’ve made things so complicated out of things so simple. There is the sun.”

In a single flowing movement Sbi rose and walked to the hillside, stood there with hands slightly outward and face turned to the sky ... sat down then, and ignored him entirely, seeming rapt in thoughts.

“Sbi,” Herrin said finally, and Sbi looked over a shoulder at him. “What do you intend?”

“When can you walk, Master Law? I’ve spent too much to carry you.”

“I can walk until I have to stop,” he said. “A while.”

“Don’t harm yourself.”

“What
am
I to you?”

“Something precious.”

“Why?”

Sbi stood up again. “Will you walk now?”

He considered the pain of it, and nerved himself, took the cloak in his hand and used his legs more than the ribs getting up. He used his splinted hands to put the cloak to his shoulders, and Sbi helped him. The act depressed him. He bowed his head and clumsily pulled the hood up, no different finally from other invisibles; safe—no one but Sbi would see him—even in the city no one would see him. He supposed that was where they might go.

But they walked slowly, and something of directional sense, the sun being at his back, argued that they were bound only into more hills.

I shall be further lost,
he thought. He did not wholly mind, because while in one sense he was dead, he was still able to see and to feel, and the mind which sometimes frightened him with its persistence of life began to yield to its besetting fault, which was at once his talent and his curse.

“You don’t care,” he prodded at Sbi on short breaths, “to go back to the plain. Where are you leading?”

“Where I wish.”

He accepted that. It was an answer.

“See the hills,” said Sbi. “Smell the wind. I do. Do not you?”

“Yes,” he said. What the ahnit asked frightened him. “How much else?”

“Tell me when you know.”

It took the pose of Master. His face heated, and for a little time he thought, on the knife edge of his limited breaths and the weakness of his legs in matching strides with the ahnit. “I will tell you,” he said, “when I know.”

He walked, with the sun beating down on him, with the gold of the grasses and the sometime gold of flowers, and it occurred to him both that it was beautiful; and that humans did not come here—ever.

He looked to the horizon, where the hills went on and on, and it occurred to him that Freedom was full of places where humans had never been.