"Wait," he said, but she was embarrassed and ran away, and he never knew whose daughter it was.
He walked inside, and even now there were a great many people in the dome, in the outer rings. He walked into the sunlit inner chamber, where people gathered before the image.
It was the Dionysian face. A patch of sun fallen on the other side and at another angle had turned it into somber laughter, dark laughter, that expression of Waden's when he was genuinely amused.
It went on living; it possessed the chamber with a feeling which was, to one who knew Waden in that mood, not comfortable. Herrin deserted his own creation, and kept walking, shivering past shadows which had come to watch the watchers, invisibles.
Leona? he thought, turning back to see, but he could not be certain, and he kept walking, slowly, out of the dome and out of the Square, farther down Main.
People here recognized him too. The novelty of that passed and he tried simply to think in peace, disturbed and distressed that even the refuge of the streets was threatened.
On one level, he thought, he should be troubled that he could not stay there; on another, he knew why . . . that he was ready to shed that idea, to be done with it, and the persistence of it frightened him. It was Waden Jenks ... it was powerful, and had to be dealt with, and now that he had created this phenomenon, he could not allow it to begin to warp him, and his art. Having created he had to be rid of it, erase it, get it out of his thoughts so that his mind could work.
But Waden, set in motion, was not a force easily canceled.
And what Waden did threatened him, because it came at him through his own art, and gave him no peace.
Perhaps it was the intrusion of Outsiders in Freedom which made it harder to settle himself again; an intrusion argued that events were at hand which might offer subject . . . and that bothered him, the thought that no matter what he began, something might then occur which would offer more tempting inspiration: wait, wait, a small voice counseled him. Observe.
But while he waited his mind was going to have nothing to work on, and that vacancy was acute misery; an adrenalin charge with nowhere to spend it, an ache that was physical. He could not sleep again with that vacancy in his intentions; could not; could not walk about perceiving things with his senses raw as an open wound, taking in everything about him, keeping him in the state he was in.
His course took him to the end of Main, where it became highway, and led to the Camus river. From that point he could see the river itself, which led inland and inward, back to the things he had been. He walked to the edge of it, where the highway verged it along a weed-grown bank, and the gravel thrown by wheels had made it unlovely . . . the scars of too much and too careless use; it could be better, but no one cared. He sat down there and tossed gravel in and watched the disturbance in the swift-flowing surface.
In one direction it became the Sunrise Sea, and led to the other continent of Hesse; and men were going there. Humanity on Freedom was spreading and discovering itself, and he had duty there.
In the other it was safety, Camus township, and Law's Valley.
I'd like to see them, he thought of his family, and then put it down to simple curiosity, one of those instinctual things which had outlived the usefulness it served.
He had outgrown them. It was like the crowds back there at the dome. Approbation was pleasant but it diverted. Probably they would applaud him back in Camus Township, but they would no more understand him than they ever had. It was not simply that there was no going home to what had been: there had never been anything there in the first place but his own desire for a little triumph, to be able to explain what he had done to those who had been there at his beginnings.
He laughed at himself and flung an entire handful of gravel, breaking up the surface into a cluster of pockmarks. He created the thing he wished existed, and it did, and he could look back on it—reckoning that his family did, at distance, perceive what he was, and that was the best they could do. They were, after all, no better than any others, and no less hazard: like Waden Jenks. Like Keye. He found pleasure in the crew because the crew adored him; they in fact adored the importance they gained through him. If they were really anything, truly able to rival him, they would suck him in and drink him down as readily as Waden Jenks would, given the chance.
Power was the thing. He had Waden worried; and in fact—in fact, he told himself—Waden ought to be worried about him, and about Keye, who was now feeding her own reality into Waden's ear. He comforted himself with the thought that of all humans alive who were not about to be taken in, Waden Jenks would not be—would in no wise let Keye have her way with him.
Creative ethics was Keye's field; indeed creative ethics, and Keye was busy at it. She chose Waden either because, being political herself, she comprehended him best and rejected Art, or because she knew Herrin Law and saw she was getting nowhere with him.
Keye's art had to have political power to function—as Keye saw it. He saw an ethic in his art which Keye had never seen.
Therefore he was greater. And sure of it.
A second handful of gravel, which startled a fish and disturbed the reality of a very small life. He smiled at the conceit. The fish knew as much of Herrin Law as most did, and it was better off that way.
He stripped some of the weeds and plaited them; his fingers were sore from the abrasive and from the work, but he could do it as dexterously as he had on the grassy hillside overlooking his home.
His own bed would be a comfort, porridge cooking when he got up, the scrape of wooden chairs on wooden floor and the smells of everyone and everything he knew woven together and harmonious like the braid of grass.
Herrin, his mother would say, time to get up. Did you hear? his father would say. He can go on and sleep; that would be Perrin. I get his bowl.
He smiled, laughed a breath and stared into the water.
Trucks passed in one direction and the other, never slowed, but roared past on their own business; it was not the day for either bus, which wandered opposite directions of a loop somewhere in the outermost reaches of the Camus valley, linking village to village and all with Kierkegaard.
The river came from the high valleys, from places he had known. It was, even with the truck traffic, a pleasant place to sit.
It was the cold that moved him finally, the shift of wind which accompanied a line of clouds marching on the city, which ruffled the water and bent the weeds and persuaded him it was time to walk back. The sun was sinking. He thought of the dome, where the disquieting image would have settled toward peace. He wanted to see it, but he was drained, and it was cold, and he wanted only to go unrecognized and to stay private in his thoughts. He had achieved at least a measure of tranquility, and found he ached in his bones and that his feet and backside were cold.
He angled off toward the east, avoiding the straight of Main and Jenks Square. It happened to be the direction of the port, and his palate remembered meat pies. There, in the gathering twilight, existed a place where he could walk unremarked. All the way to the port's south gateway he thought of the pies and the strange and peaceful market.
But there was a silence when he had gotten to the wire fence and the open south gate. It was almost dark; he stood there bewildered, staring at the closed booths and wondering if he had lost track of things. He walked where there had been the smell of things good to eat and the busy commerce of invisibles . . . and there was nothing. There were occasional invisibles, robed forms which melded with the shadows and the booths and the dark, between the shops and the fence, but it was all dead; the few shapes which moved here were like insects over the corpse of the life which had existed here.