Wave Without A Shore

VIII

"Come out," Keye pleaded with him through the door, and to someone else, outside: "I think he's gone mad."

He laughed to himself and kept at work. "Call Waden," he said. "Call Waden here. This is for him."

And Waden came.

"Well," Waden said, "Artist?"

The clay lay before them, the three nested shells which he proposed. The central figure, lifelike, emerged out of a matrix of similar apertures and texture within the dome. He waited, anxious, enormously vulnerable.

Waden walked about the model on the studio table, bent, looked within it. A smile spread over his face and his eyes lighted.

"Everything," Herrin ventured, "and everyone . . . must flow through it. For all time to come in Kierkegaard."

"Amazing," Waden pronounced, and grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. "O Artist, amazing. Order the stone. Select your apprentices."

"What, now?"

Waden looked into his eyes, and a curious smile, a subtle smile, sent a slight chill into the air. "I shall move into the Residency soon."

And the week the stone began to arrive, moved by truck from the quarries, to be set in the Square and in the studio, First Citizen Cade Jenks died, of causes unspecified.

The coincidence occurred to Herrin, if to no other. Herrin went very soberly about his own business, matter of factly shut everything down for the three-day mourning and memorial, and very quietly resumed when the public ceremony was done. In fact the mourning was official and very little private, a condition more of uncertainty than of grief, mutterings and wonderings what manner of person this son was who assumed—assumed the power of the State, but no one had an inclination to prevent the assumption. At least no one heard of anyone who did. There was no disturbance; the Residency remained as mute as ever, as inscrutable. Waden Jenks sat within it. Nothing else changed.