Wave Without A Shore

XXVII

The house was there, as he recalled, bare boards one with the color of the earth, a corrugated plastic roof . . . they did not even get the building slabs they had down in Camus. The windows were lighted in the evening. There was no better time to come home.

Herrin stopped on the hillside, in the midst of a step, and looked back at Sbi, who had stopped on the hillcrest. Ungainly, alien, robes flapping in the slight breeze, Sbi just stood, whether sad or otherwise Herrin could not tell. And then he thought of the midnight cloth he himself wore, the cloak, the bandages, which he had taken on him like a brand, which no one put off once on.

He shed the cloak and took it back, held it in his hands toward Sbi, there in the wind, on the hill. "Good-bye," he said, which curiously had more of pain in it than leaving that brown board farmhouse had had for him long ago, because there was so much of Sbi he had missed and never seen and there was so much Sbi had done that made no sense and now never might. He thought Sbi looked sad, but with Sbi's face that was no certainty. "Good-bye," he said a second time, and left the cloak in Sbi's hands and walked back down the hill.

Faster and faster.

He was tattered and worn, his Student's Black dusty and seam-split at the arm; his face was unshaven and his hair hung in dusty threads; the bandages remained on his hands—he could not have borne the pain without them—but the color was obscured by grease and dirt. Home . . . and cleanliness, and food, and most of all, to be what he had been. He almost ran as he approached the lighted windows and the door. "Hello!" he called, to make them listen, "Hello!" He reached the wooden door and hit it with his elbow, and listened in agonized excitement as chairs moved inside, as familiar furniture scraped on a familiar wooden floor and steps crossed to the door.

"Who's there?" It was his father's voice.

"It's Herrin," he cried. "Father, it's Herrin, home."

The door opened, a rattling of the latch, swung inward. His father was in the doorway, his mother beyond, both grayed and older than he remembered; he crossed the threshold, opened his arms although they had never had the habit of touching him, and if they embraced him it would hurt him—he would bear the pain of his ribs to ease that ache inside.

"What happened?" his father asked, looking frightened. "Where did you come from?"

"I'd like a drink. Something to eat."

They looked at him in evident disturbance. He stood still, letting them sort it out slowly, trying to remember as he had always remembered, that they thought differently and less deeply than he. After a moment his mother drew back a chair at the table in front of the door and joined his father who was busy in the small kitchen at the left of the table, virtually one room with the bedroom on the right.

It was small; it was poor; there was so little here that had changed over the years, except there was a new rug on the floor, and it was far newer and brighter than anything else in the room. Dishes rattled comfortingly. Even the feel of the chair was right, the table under his elbows what he remembered it felt like. There was the place on the other side of the door where his bed had stood. A plow leaned there now, probably waiting sharpening. Perrin's bed was still there, beyond theirs. It smelled right, the whole house, as it had always smelled; there was something about the spices they cooked with, that no one in the Residency kitchens and no one in University had the knack of. Food had always tasted better here.

His parents brought him a sandwich and a cup of tea, steaming hot, set it down in front of him. He took half the sandwich up in dust-crusted, bandaged hands and bit into it with a bliss that ran through his body, choked that bite down and handled the tea the same, a delicate sip of purest steaming liquid out of old, familiar dishes; for a moment he felt Sbi's lips and shuddered, and felt the old china again.

He ate, tears welling up from his eyes, because it was chill outside and warm inside, and the inside of him was coming to match it, filled with food and comfort. He could not eat all of it, could not possibly. And that seemed bliss beyond compare, to know that he need not be hungry, or thirsty.

Only then, his belly full to hurting, he began to notice the silence and their eyes, which waited for him, as they had waited in years long before, knowing that reasoning with him was not easy or often possible, on their level. The world had changed; they had not. He looked back at them, frightened by that old silence.

"What happened?" his father asked a second time. They were still waiting for that precise question. "Where did you come from?"

"Kierkegaard. I walked."

Silence. They stared at his face, not his hands, fixedly at his face, without expression on their own beyond a residual fear.

"I've come home," he said.

They said nothing to that.

"Why did you walk?" his mother asked.

"I've quit the University. Mother, there are Outsiders there. The First Citizen is bringing them in. I can't stay there. I don't want to stay there the way things are getting to be."

Fear. He still picked that up in the expressions. And something else, a deeper reserve.

"I need a bath," he said.

Without a word his mother nodded toward the back of the house where the bathroom was, where an old pump produced water with slow patience.

"I'm going to stay," he said.

"Heard you're a great artist, a University Master," his father said.

"Was," he said. "I quit."

There were nods, nothing of warmth, nothing of comfort in his presence.

"I've stopped all that. I don't belong to the University. I have nothing to do with it any longer. I want to stay here, to farm."

Nothing. Their faces were like a wall, shutting him out.

"Perrin's moved out," he asked, "has she?"

Silence.

"Is she here, then?"

"Perrin's dead," his mother said. It hit him in the stomach. Fantasies collapsed, a structure of new beginnings he had imagined with Perrin, an intent to do otherwise than he had done, a half-formed longing to enjoy a closeness he had thrown away without ever knowing it.

"What happened?" he asked.

"She couldn't be you. She killed herself the year you left. Everyone talked about you. Everyone was proud of you. Even when you were gone she had no place for herself. Except here. And that wasn't good enough."

He sat motionless.

"She left a note," his father said. "She said she had never had anything important. It was all for you, for University."

His eyes stung. He stared across the room at the wall while his parents quietly, together, rose from the table and took the dishes back to the kitchen. The tears slipped and slid down his face. He was not sure why, because he did not particularly feel them, more than that stinging and a leaden spot in his stomach which might as likely be the sandwich on an abused digestion, far more food than he should have eaten all at once.

"You're important," his mother said, drying her hands by the counter. "We heard all the way in Camus about that big statue, about how you're the most important man in the University. You can't want to live in Camus."

"I'm not that, anymore." He held up his bandaged hands. "I had an accident. It's all right to say something about it. I can't work anymore, not like that. I've come home to do a different kind of work."

There was dead silence. His parents stood there and stared bleakly at him. After a moment his father shrugged and walked over to the fireside where evening coals were left. "You'll make something important here in Camus . . . better you should go down to the town and work there. There's nothing up here for you."

"You're not listening to me."

"Mind like yours . . . I suppose you've come out here to start a whole new branch of the University. A whole new way. But that's nothing to us."

"Perrin was ours," his mother said. "Perrin was ours. We understood Perrin and she understood us. She wanted so much she didn't have. It wasn't fair. Perrin was ours. Nothing was fair with her. She hated Camus after you'd gone. Talked about Kierkegaard. Wanted to come to University. Couldn't. She wasn't talented like you. That was the way of everything, wasn't it? You're going to start to work in Camus now. What are you going to build there?"

"They're wrong," he said. He stammered on the words. "Everything, everything is wrong. They broke my hands, you hear me? I've walked to this house from Kierkegaard. They've brought in Outsiders from off the planet and they're doing things that are going to change everything and no one sees it. Do you know, these Outsiders pilfer, too? Right off the tables in the market, they walk away and people pretend they don't see because that's what they're supposed to do, and they play the game, but it's a hole to nowhere . . . those goods don't turn up in market again, they don't come back to Kierkegaard, not even to this world. It goes out from here. We've opened the door on something that isn't small enough for us. We think we know what's real and we don't. It's all a structure that's operable only if we all believe it,"

They moved, his mother drying her hands which were already dry, and his father walking back to the kitchen counter as if he had business there.

"They're wrong," Herrin said again. "I've been through the system and I've taught in the system and I know the structure of the whole thing and it's wrong."

"Long wet autumn," his father said to his mother. "I think we've got to expect a cold winter."

"Father," Herrin said. "Mother?"

"Leaves have gone dark," his mother said. She looked through to the wall, still wiping her hands on the towel. "I think it's time to pull some of those tubers, take a look at them."

"Might."

"Can't afford a ground freeze. Could come any morning." She seemed to shrink, a slight shiver.

"Mother?"

There was no answer. They started putting away the dishes. Herrin sat, hands on the table, with the sandwich lying undigestible in his belly. He sat and watched in silence as they began stirring about the evening routine, the complaints about the quality of the wood for keeping the fire at night; the reminder about the kitchen fire and the old argument about the temperature in the room, something played for him, and in his absence. He watched, hungry for the sights and the sounds, nonparticipant. He rose finally when they were about to go to bed and searched out a towel and filled it with food, got a bottle for water and filled it from the kitchen tub; while they settled into bed he entered the bath, pawed through things until he found a razor, and soap, and he searched the closet for clean clothes, but his father was smaller than he and there was nothing of his own left. Just Perrin's things, still hanging there. He closed the door and snatched up the things he had pilfered, hastened past his parents' bed in the main room and out through the door.

He left it open, ran, stumbling and blind with tears. "Sbi," he called out, but he had said good-bye to the ahnit, had turned Sbi away. "Sbi," he wept, and ran up the hill clutching the bundles in his arms.

A shadow met him just the other side, Sbi's tall shape, Sbi's scent, Sbi's enfolding arms, which took him in, gently comforting. He wept, long; Sbi sat down with him on the grassy hillside and simply held him.

"They stopped seeing me," he said.

"Yes," said Sbi." I feared so."

He drew another breath, wiped nose and eyes with the back of his bandaged hand, blinked in the grit it left. "I pilfered things I could use."

"Good," said Sbi.

"I want to leave this place," he said.

"Yes," said Sbi, and rose, keeping an arm about him to help him. Something warm settled about his shoulders, the cloak Sbi had kept waiting for him. "Where shall we go now?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. I don't know."

Sbi picked up the bundles of toweling, and laid an arm again about his shoulders. "Come. Out of the wind at least."

He came, settled where Sbi wished, a place still not out of Law's Valley, nor far enough from the house for his liking; but rocks sheltered it from the wind and he could sit down next Sbi and curl up with knees and elbows inside the midnight cloak.

There was dew the next morning too, but at least they were not hungry as well as cold and wet. Herrin breakfasted on parched grain and a bit of cheese . . . he offered a bit of bread to Sbi, but Sbi would not take it, for whatever reason. And he drank from the jar, the merest sip, which Sbi watched silently.

They packed up then. The house would have been visible, he thought, if he climbed the hill; he could have looked down on his father and mother's house by daylight . . . had he just walked up the rise. He would not. Sbi wove grass braids with great dexterity and bound up the bundles he had to carry. "Here," said Sbi. "We might go to Camus and pilfer a basket, but until we do . . . ."

"Not Camus," Herrin said. He leaned against the rock and hitched the grass rope to his shoulder, a weight on his hand for the instant, which hurt despite the splints.

"Where?" Sbi asked again.

He shook his head. "I don't care." He looked up, looked at Sbi's face, recalling that last night he had deserted Sbi. Sbi had waited. Dismissed, had simply sat down outside the house and waited last night. His own predictability disturbed him. All that he did assumed the nature of a pattern of Sbi's choosing. Sbi's reality.

"What do you want?" he asked of Sbi again. "You stay with me . . . why?"

No answer. He looked at the morning-lit face, the black, wet eyes, and found the morning bitter cold.

"Do what you like this time," he told Sbi. "Go to your own kind; I'll come with you, if that's what you ultimately want."

Sbi's lips pursed in one of those unreadable expressions. "That would be a far walk, Master Law."

"Where are your kind? Where do you live? What do you do with your lives?"

Silence.

"Sbi, what do you want from me?"

Again silence, which was like what his mother and father had done to him, and he did not find it comfortable. But Sbi put out an arm and embraced him very gently, beginning to walk from where they had camped. "I'll tell you," said Sbi, "that there are very few of us now. You brought us disease. Disease went where humans never have, into the far hills. We died in great numbers; but you never saw. It was a significant fact to us; but it wasn't real to you. We used to live in the hills, but we yielded up this valley. We were in awe of you . . . once. But I am educated in your University; and you never saw me. That's why we came, to learn the things you know."

He walked, not looking at Sbi, finding Sbi's embracing arm a heavier and heavier weight as they descended the hill. "What will you do with those things you know?"

Silence.

"Sbi, is that it? That you stay with me . . . because you think I can teach you something? Is that what you want from me?"

"No," Sbi said.

"What then?"

Silence. They walked the level ground now, making their way across the fields in the direction Sbi chose, back the way they had come into the pocket valley. Herrin thought, tried to reason, kept turning back to the thought of ahnit in the University, invisible in the halls. In the Residency. In the dome in the Square, where others had started seeing them.

Sbi embraced him still, keeping him warm, keeping him close. So Waden had done to him, lulling his suspicions, using his weakness to bypass his reason. That Sbi was doing so seemed only reasonable. There would be a time that Sbi had extracted all the use possible from him, but for the moment it was a convenient source of help. The difficult thing, he decided, was knowing when to pull away, when to elude such users before they had their chance to harm him.

But he did not know where to go.

The size of what Sbi wanted, he reckoned, had to be measured in terms of the discomfort Sbi was willing to tolerate to get it; and what Sbi wanted had to do with his own will, his own consent, or something beyond the physical, because anything other than that, Sbi could do.

He tried to reason around an alien mind, and there was no reason; he tried to reason what he himself wanted, which was formless. Mostly he was not afraid of the world when he was with Sbi; he was only afraid of Sbi, and that limited things to a visible, bearable quantity.

That day, Sbi led him out of the valley and again into the hills. Sbi stopped whenever he grew tired, and comforted him and kept him warm, which was the limit of what he asked. It was limbo, and Sbi seemed patient with it.

He slept that night in Sbi's arms, his belly comforted with pilfered food, his misery somewhat less than it had been; he thought again and again, half-sleeping, what pains Sbi had taken with him, and what inconvenience Sbi suffered, and he wondered.

Sbi hated him, possibly, for what he had made the ahnit do, in taking that small life.

But then the ahnit was not capable of killing him, and he did not easily imagine that Sbi meant to do something to him.

To do something with him, undoubtedly. Whatever use he had left in him that appealed to an alien mind. He thought of his own work in the heart of Kierkegaard, and of the lonely pair of figures in the hills which Sbi had so wanted him to see, and neither made sense.

Sbi's hand massaged his back, over tense muscles. "Pain, Master Law?"

"No." The voice had startled him. He had not known the ahnit was awake. It disturbed him and he tried to relax, while Sbi's hand massaged a spot which was particularly tense.

"You haven't slept much."

"Nor have you."

"I don't sleep as much as you."

"Oh," he said, and shut his eyes again and accepted the comfort, tired and puzzled at once.

"Master Law," said Sbi, "why did they cripple you?"

He stiffened all over. It was the Statement again; it was never, to Sbi's satisfaction, answered.

"I don't know, Sbi. What is it that I don't see?"

Silence.

"And how could you know?" he asked. "You weren't there. You don't know Waden Jenks. How am I missing the answer?"

Silence.

"Waden—couldn't bear a rival. He warned me so."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Either. Why warn you?"

He thought about it. "It wasn't rational, was it?"

Silence.

It lay at the center of what he did not want to think about He lay still, staring into the dark. "Sbi. Where do you want me to go? What do you want?"

Silence.

"Whatever you want," he said, "I'll do it. I don't see anything else. I don't see anywhere else. You don't make sense to me. I don't know why you're out here or why you bother or what you want. What is it?"

Silence.

"Sbi."

More silence. He grew distraught. Sbi patted him gently, as if trying to soothe him to sleep.

"Let me alone." He scrambled up, pushing with his hands, which hurt him, and stalked off close to striking at something, his bound ribs not giving him air enough. He stopped, staring out across the plains and finding nothing on the horizon but grass and night-bound sky, and stars, which belonged to strangers, the vast Outside, which went on and on, challenging illusions.

Suddenly he was afraid. He looked back, half expecting to find Sbi gone, or near him. Sbi simply waited.

And that did not wholly comfort him either.