He wiped them from his mind, turned to his own work, which was the central column. Leona Pace was not at hand, presumably being off about some important business. He interrupted an apprentice to look at diagrams, found everything in order, bestowed no compliments. They were not expected to exercise their own inspirations, but to execute his, and they were all doing so with absolute precision: had any failed, that one would have been discharged with prejudice. He pushed the apprentice aside, made a minor change, sketching with black on the stone itself, and the apprentice obediently altered the computer-generated sheet which was the master plan.
So doing, he put himself back to work and put the external from his mind. He worked until suppertime, and involuntarily thought of Keye, looked from the incomplete hemisphere of the dome, and saw the warmth of her window light in the dusk. He recalled sweet scents and a meticulous order, and the servant's excellent taste, and suffered a spasm of regret for their continued separation. His mind flashed back to Law's Valley, and to other such warm comforts, now lost. He prepared to make his solitary way back to University, and left the work in the capable charge of Leona Pace, who had returned from the shipping terminal and her own selection of the stone, a zeal he silently approved. Pace looked shadowed, hungry, exhausted; she kept at the work nonetheless, for her reasons, probably having to do with insecurity in her subordinates. He did not blame her: Pace was extraordinary, and anyone of lesser ability had to be a frustration and a worry to her.
He valued Pace, might have made closer acquaintance with her, with the thought of filling some of that solitude; there were looks he received from her which hinted a desire for his approval, which might lead to dependency on it, which might in turn lead to a relationship different and more controllable than he had known.
But no, experience of Keye and Waden argued caution was in order. Pace was zealous. Ambitious. He was at the moment too weary to deal with someone of ability and possible labyrinthine motive. Such entanglements with apprentices were all potential hazard.
Dinner, he told himself, at the Fellows' Hall; he still wore his black, and he would be inconspicuous as Herrin Law could ever be. A solitary dinner. Solitary tea. Solitary bed.
XII
Master Keye Lynn: How do the realities of Freedom coexist?
Master Law: They don't.
Master Lynn: How do you reconcile the realities of Freedom?
Master Law: I don't.
Master Lynn: How are lower degrees of intelligence able to maintain their separate realities?
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 saw details 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 facade.
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 many stars there were.
It was like looking down from a height, realizing that number. For a moment his balance deserted him. The I became 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 inner, chemical structures of stone, vision plummeting from macroscopic to microscopic in one dizzying contraction and out again. He realized that he was staring, that someone might see him and think him gone mad, but he had never been concerned for the opinions of lesser minds; had disturbed Jenks Square with equanimity, uncaring. Now he felt exposed, catching a glimpse of something, like the Others, which refused to fit.
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 lit with floodlamps all up and down its ugly and yet interesting height, like the cranes which labored to place the stone in Jenks Square.