Wave Without A Shore

XXVIII

There was no particular direction. Sbi walked east, this day, and sat down after a time, munching a grass stem, and seemed content to sit. Herrin lay down full length on his back and stared at the clouds drifting, fleecy white and far, with such a weight on his mind that it seemed apt to break.

"Sbi," he said at last, "teach me."

"Teach you what, Master Law?"

"My name is Herrin."

"Herrin. Teach you what?"

"What reality is."

"What do you see?"

"Sky."

"What do you feel?"

"Pain, Sbi."

"Both are real."

"Whose reality?"

"Everyone's."

"What," he snorted, having finally discovered Sbi's depth, everyone's forever and however far? That's hardly reasonable."

"Throughout all the universe."

"You're mad."

Silence.

"How can external events be real to you, Sbi?"

"I feel them."

It angered him. In frustration he slammed his hand against the ground and rolled a defiant look at Sbi, with tears of pain blurring his eyes. "You tell me you felt that."

"Yes. All the universe did."

Sbi proposed an insanity. He retreated from it, simply stared at the clouds.

"I've taught you," said Sbi, "all I know."

"You mean that I'm not able to perceive it."

"Where shall we go, Herrin?"

He bit down on his lip, thought, trying to draw connections through the maze of Sbi's logic. He gave up. "How long are you prepared to sit here, Sbi?"

"Is this where you wish to be, then?"

"What does it matter what I want?"

Silence.

"Sbi, I was wrong. I've spent my life being wrong. What can I do about it?"

Silence. For the first time he understood that answer. He turned on his side and looked at Sbi, who sat chewing on another grass stem. His heart was beating harder. "What were you waiting for all those years in the city? For me? For someone who could see you?"

"Yes."

"And what difference does it make whether I see you?"

Silence.

"It makes a great deal of difference, doesn't it, Sbi?"

"What do you think?"

"That it makes everything wrong. That the whole world is crazy and I'm sane. Where does that leave me, Sbi?"

"Invisible. Like me."

He found breathing difficult, not alone from the bandage. He pushed himself up on his elbow. "You had to let me go back to my own house to find that out."

"I had no idea what would happen. Reality is not in my control. Nor are you."

"You'll wander all over Sartre taking care of me if that's what I decide, is that so?"

"I will stay with you, yes. And keep you from harm if I can."

"Why?"

Sbi sucked in the grain-bearing head and chewed it. "Because I want to. Because when you struck your hand I had the pain, Herrin."

"I could ask you; I could ask you question after question and when I got close to what I really want to know you'd say nothing."

"The important questions are for you to answer. It is, after all, your world that's in jeopardy; mine is long past that."

"Why were you among us?"

"If someone had destroyed your world, would you not have an interest in those who had done so?"

"They did. And I don't want to go back. I don't want to see them again or be seen."

Sbi simply stared at him.

There was no relief for the silence, none. He sat up with his bandaged hands in his lap and contemplated them, flexed his hands slightly against the splints and bit his lip at the pain which won him no great degree of movement.

"Who broke your hands, Herrin Law?"

He shut his eyes, weary of the repeated question.

"Why?" Sbi asked inevitably.

He shook his head slowly, drew a breath which suddenly stopped in his throat. His eyes unfocused. He thought to Fellows' Hall, a certain evening, and a conceit which had gripped them both, him and Waden. "I'd begun to see you. I'd begun to see things the way they were; and Waden was never dull. I think he saw too, Sbi. I think he did. He does. Sbi, I'm going back."

"Yes," said Sbi.

He had reached for the bundles of toweling and grass rope which were all his possessions; and suddenly he caught Sbi's expression, and Sbi's tone, and it was not the same as when he had proposed going to the valley. Then there had been disappointment, vague reluctance. Now it was different.

"You've pushed me to this," he said, wrapping his arms about the bundles and staring at Sbi. "Sbi, have I guessed enough of what you want? Or do you go on the way you have?"

"I don't know that you're right," Sbi said. "But your logic seems irrefutable save by Waden Jenks. I will tell you what I want, Herrin. I have found it: a human who can see. I'll tell you what I've waited for all these years as you say . . . to learn what that human will do, when he sees. But one thing frightens me: what those who don't see will do to him."

"They won't be able to see me," he said, disliking Sbi's proposition. But he thought about it. "There are the Outsiders, aren't there? And they see."

"To my observation—yes."

He sank down off his heels and frowned with the pain and with the fear the pain set in him. He stared straight before him and thought about it for a long while.

"Now it's hiding," he said finally.

"How, hiding?"

"Before, I was surviving. Now it's hiding, staying up here in the hills. Now I don't go back because I'm afraid. Or if I don't go back I am afraid." He rolled a glance at Sbi. "You're good; you've had the better of me. You set it all up. Located the best of us . . . . studied how to intervene. You had your best chance when I came out of the University and worked in the open. Then you could get to me. Accosted me in the dark that night, on Port Street. That was you. Drove Leona Pace over the edge. Came back to plague me. Worked at me—constantly."

"Yes," said Sbi.

"Now I should go back to the city. Now I should take on Waden Jenks and finish drawing him into this."

"Yes."

"Why, Sbi?"

"Our survival."

"Reasonable," he said, trying at least to admire the artistry of it.

"What are you going to do?"

He shook his head. "Surrender Freedom to your manipulation? That's what you've set me up to do, isn't it? Me, and Waden Jenks; one of us set against the other . . . myself, taken out of influence; and on the other hand given the chance to change the world. I'm one of the invisibles. It occurs to me that murder is possible for one of us. That I can push Waden over the edge . . . I can do that, because I've nothing to lose, have I? Or I can sit here in the hills and know that the greatest thing I ever did fitted your purpose."

"All that humans have done is bent around us, Herrin Law. The way you live, the pains you take to ignore us, the insanity which claims some of you . . . are these things spontaneous? Were you ever—reasonable?"

He stared at the horizon, colder and colder. "No," he said.

"Herrin. I'll go with you. I'm concerned for you."

He thought of the statue in the hills; of a small dead creature in Sbi's hands; of Sbi's hands caressing what Sbi had killed.

Of his parents going about their business not seeing him.

He rested his face against the back of his hand, wiped at the left eye. "So, well, tell me this, Sbi, what do you expect to happen?"

"I don't know. But it will be of human choosing, and my choosing, both, my friend. Both at once. Is it not reasonable?"

It was, as Sbi said, reasonable. "I've taught students," Herrin said. "I thought I knew, and thought I saw, and I taught For them, I'm going back, and Waden . . . I don't know about Waden." He struggled to his feet, started to bend for his belongings again, but Sbi anticipated him and caught them up.

"It's not far," Sbi said.

He had guessed that too, that Sbi had brought him generally in the direction Sbi wanted him to go.