“Let me out,” he pleaded of Gytha, of Sbi, of anyone who could hear him. He shouted into the noise and could hardly hear himself. “Let me out!” The whole place was mad and Waden Jenks’s firelit face presided over it in rigid horror.
Perhaps Gytha understood. A tide started in the press which surged toward the other side of the dome, which swept him along with Gytha’s arm to protect him ... or Sbi’s ... in the confusion he was no longer sure. The crush compressed his ribs, threatened his hands, and he would have fallen but for an arm which encircled his waist and pulled him.
They broke forth into the air, a spill of the crowd like a wound bleeding forth onto the firelit paving. He had a momentary view of the distant, dying fires of the hedge, of ancient shrubbery gone skeletal and black as winter twigs.
“Sir,” someone was saying to him, but he shook his head dazedly, finding even breathing hard. The crowd was pouring out after him, threatening to surround him here as well. Panic took him and he pushed at someone with his arm, saw Gytha’s anxious look directed to the outpouring crowd.
And there in shadow, a taller, hooded figure, which unhooded itself and stood with naked head facing the crowd, which wavered, which slowed. Sbi turned and purposefully came and took him by the arm, drew him away in the moment’s shock, even away from Gytha, even from those he would have wanted to see. He yielded to Sbi’s encircling arm, walking farther up Main, slipping into what fitful shadows there were from the light of the burning, where Second Street offered them shelter.
Herrin stopped there, sank down on the doorstep of a dark and open doorway, his arm locked across his aching side.
“You are hurt?” Sbi asked him, touched his face with two gentle fingers, wiped sweat from him.
“Drink?” Herrin asked, for shock threatened him and somewhere—he could not even remember where—he had lost the bundles of his belongings, everything. Sbi bent and touched his lips, transferred a mouthful of sweetish fluid to him, caressed his brow in drawing away and regarded him with great black eyes, pursed mouth bearing an expression of ahnit sorrow.
“Sit,” Sbi wished him. “O Herrin, sit still.”
“Waden,” he said. “He and Keye ... won’t know what to do. Can’t know what to do. I have to go to the Residency, Sbi, and talk to them ... if I can help there—I have to.”
He tried to get up. Sbi did not help him at first, until he had almost made it and almost fallen, and then Sbi’s arm encircled him. A dark runner passed them, slowed, looked back and ran on, quick steps fading. Soon there were others, straggling after. Sbi’s arm tightened protectively. “I don’t trust this, Herrin.”
“Come on. Come on. Let’s get back to Main, into the light.”
“Your species frightens me.”
“Come.” He walked, insisting, anxious himself until they were back on the main line of the city, with the smoldering hedge in front of them and the fire from the burning buildings still lighting the smoke which hung over the city like a reddened ceiling, casting light to all that was below it. It all looked wrong; and then he realized that he had never seen the buildings on Port Street without the façades lit. Only a few windows showed light on the Residency’s uppermost floor. He could not see the University clearly, but they had emergency power over there too, as they did at the port, and it was all dark, as far as he could see.
He was afraid ... on all sides, afraid. More runners passed them, one screaming: he thought it screamed his name, and flinched. Back at the dome they were still shouting, still in uproar, and the echoes made it like the voice of some vast single beast.
They left the concrete for the berm, which was powdered black with the burning of the hedge. Smoke obscured their vision. Fires still crackled, knee-high flames in a line down the remnant of the hedge on either side as they passed what was left of the archway and crossed onto Port Street, in front of the Residency.
The whole west end was a shambles, the roof of the fifth level caved in, making rubble of that level and the next, where he had had his rooms ... and cracking walls beneath. The east wing, the source of the lights, stayed apparently intact, but the cracks ran there too.
I would have died here,he thought dazedly, reckoning where his rooms were. He crossed the street with Sbi close beside him. No one prevented them, no one appeared on the street or on the outside steps. The doors gaped dark and open, showing only a little light from somewhere up the interior stairs when they walked in. The desk at the entry was deserted, dusted with fallen cement and there was rubble on the floor.
“Waden?”he called aloud, and his voice echoed terrifyingly in the empty halls. Something moved, scurried, ran, stopped running in some new hiding. The skin prickled on his nape, and he felt the touch of Sbi’s hand at his arm as if Sbi too were insecure. He started up the stairs, careful in the shadows and the litter of rubble. Sbi imprudently put a hand on the wooden railing and it tottered and creaked.
They came into the uppermost hall, where light showed on the right and wind from the ruined west wing came skirling in with a stinging breath of smoke. “Waden?” Herrin called again, fearing to surprise whatever guards Waden Jenks might have about him. He trod the hall carefully, toward that closed door where Waden’s office was.
He called again. Something moved inside. He heard a voice, used his bandaged hand to press the latch and pushed it open.
Keye met them. She had been sitting opposite the door in the long room, and rose, and her hands came up to shield her face. She cried out: Keye ...cried aloud, and Herrin reached out a hand to prevent her dissolution. “Keye,” he said, but she darted—for him, he thought for the instant—and then slid past him, past Sbi, for the dark hall, out, out of his presence and the sight of him. He looked back again to the room, dazed and of half a mind to go after Keye, to stop her if he could and reason with her if there was any reason. But there was movement in the doorway beyond the ell, and Waden was there, his face quickly taking on that look that Keye’s had had.
“Waden,” Herrin said, before he could do what Keye had done. “What happened?”
Waden only stared at him, in frozen stillness.
“The Outsiders,” Herrin said. “Waden, you see me. You see I’m not alone; you always have, haven’t you? Wake up and see what’s going on, Waden. The city’s afire; your Outsiders have run mad. It was a lie. From the beginning, everything University set up—was a lie.”
“Your reality,” Waden said from dry lips. “This is your reality, Herrin Law.”
He blinked, caught up in that fancy automatically, for one mind-wrenching instant that made all the walls shimmer, that rearranged everything and sent it inside out. “No,” he said, and reached his clumsy hand for Sbi, for a blue cloak, drawing the ahnit forward, into Waden’s full view. “Real as I am, Waden; real as you are, as the fire is real. You can’t cancel it.”
“It’s yours,” Waden said bleakly. “I would not have imagined this. I failed to kill you, and you did this.”
“You’re mad,” Herrin said. “ Idid this? I did nothing of it. It was your doing, from the first time you brought them here. What ship attacked us? Was it Singularity? Or your own allies?”
“Whatever you imagine,” Waden said. It was a lost voice, a lost look in his eyes, which spilled tears. “I should have had them finish you; I neededyou. That should have warned me where control was ... really. O Herrin, your revenge is excessive. Remake it. Revise it.”
It was an ugly thing to see, a hurtful thing. He closed his eyes to it and looked again, saw Waden still standing there, hands open, face vulnerable. “I wish I could, Waden. But you see—” He sought, half humorous, some logic to devastate logic, to break through to Waden Jenks. “—I let it go. The reality I imagined was a reality that would become universal, that would exist on its own in time and space ... that I myself could no longer interrupt, that’swhat I imagined. And now the world has to take its course under those terms. Sbi exists. We’ll all see each other. We’ll listen to the ahnit and see them. We’ll not do things the way they were; we’ll not teach dialectic to shut down minds; we’ll not bewhat we were. And I can’t stop it. That’s what I imagined.”