He was, in fact, stripped of resolve, of the energy which had sustained him thus far. He ate a far larger breakfast than he had ever been accustomed to since childhood, full of sugars and washed down with milk; he asked the kitchen to pack him a cold lunch, which he took with him in a paper bag; and he walked at a slow pace toward Jenks Square, letting breakfast settle.
He did, he concluded, feel better for all these measures of self-improvement. He walked along the street noticing his surroundings for the first time in weeks.
And invisibles were there.
He flinched from that realization. The first one he saw was where Second intersected Main, coming from a corner, and perhaps there had been others all along, but after this one there were others, farther down the street.
Another difficulty of a brain which could not be shut down. Perception. He saw them. And what should he ask of others who had been born in Kierkegaard? Do you really see them? They were there, that was all. He had not put on the brooch this morning—hubris did not go with his mood—now he was desperately glad that he had not. He no longer felt like challenging anything.
One cloaked, hooded figure had stopped, and he stopped. It was Leona Pace.
He stood there perhaps half the beat of his heart, and flinched, walked on past as he ought. The midnight robes, which blanked both ahnit and invisible human from the view of the sane, veiled a shoulder, a blankness.
Perhaps it was the shock he needed to jar him from his private misery, that sight of a reality fractured, a fine talent lost, the waste, the utter waste of it. He did not look back.
The dome lay before him, the vision which made all other things trivial. This was the thing, this beautiful object, on which he had poured out all his energy for months, which had taken on shape and life and form. To have it finished, to have it be what it was meant to be . . . was worth the Leona Paces and the pain of his own body. Was worth everything, to have this in existence, shining in the morning, the sun sheening the stone with the illusion of dawn-color, with the interior now opened and hinting at convolutions within. It glowed with interior light at the moment, because they had not yet shut down the inside lights which the night crews used, bright beads gleaming in the perforations.
He walked within, where steps and taps on stone echoed, Where voices spoke one to the other, hidden in the huge triple shell and the curtain-walls and bent about by acoustics and the size of the place. Some of the echo effect he had planned; some was serendipitous, but beautifuclass="underline" the place rang like a bell with voices, purified sounds, refined them as it refined the the light and cast it in patterns. It took chaos and made symphony; glare and made beauty.
The center, beyond the devolving curtain-pillars, held the scaffolding, the image, still shrouded in metal webbing.
And he stopped, for crews were gathered there, both crews, and both supervisors, Gytha and Phelps; the apprentices, the workers, everyone . . . more coming in until there could be no one of the active workers omitted, past or present.
"Done?" he asked. His own voice echoed unexpectedly in their hush, which was broken only by the human stirring of a quiet crowd. "Is it finished?"
Carl Gytha and Andrew Phelps brought their tablets, the daily and evening ritual, and another brought an armload of computer printout, the maps from which they had worked, all solemnly offered. He signed the tablets, looked about him at all of them, somewhat numb at the realization that for most of them there was nothing now to do.
"Well done," he said, because saying something seemed incumbent on him. "Well done."
There was a murmur of voices, as if this had somehow been what they wanted to hear. He was bewildered by this, more bewildered when apprentices and workers simply stood there . . . and finally Gytha and Phelps offered their hands, which he took, one after the other.
"Go," he said. "I've some finishing. I'll still need a small crew; Gytha, Phelps, you stay to assist. Pick a handful. The rest of you—it's done."
He winced at the applause, which multiplied and redoubled like madness in the acoustics of the dome. He nodded in embarrassment, not knowing what else to do, turned matter-of-factly to his platform and his tools, and took off his kit with his lunch and set that down; scrambled up with the agility of practice, and set himself to work.
Confusion persisted. People stayed to talk, and voices and steps echoed everywhere. This failed to distract him, rather calmed him, because it was the life he had planned for the Work, that the interior should live, that there should be people, and voices, and laughter and living things flowing through it.
Eventually the noise changed, from the familiar voices to the strange voices of citizens, but the tone of it was much the same. There was, occasionally, a soft whisper of wonder, the piercing voice of a child trying out the echoes; but the scaffolding wrapped the centermost piece, the heart of it, and his activity fascinated those who stood to watch him work. "Hush," his remaining assistants would say. "Hush, don't bother him." And: "That's Herrin Law. That's the Master." He ignored those voices and the others, much more rapt in the consideration of an angle, the waiting, the aching waiting, for the right moment, as the afternoon sun touched precisely the point of concern, and he had a very small time to make the precise stroke which would capture one of the statue's changing expressions without destroying all the rest of the delicate planes.
This day and the next and the next he labored, now with abrasive and polish, now smoothing out the tiniest rough spots. It rained, and he worked, until Gytha came and wrapped a warm cloak about him and got him off the platform; and others were there, who had not been there, he thought, in days, wrapped in their own rain gear and bringing raincoats with them. "I thought he might need it," one said. "He doesn't take care of himself," said another, female.
He looked at them askance, huddled within Gytha's cloak. He was offered warm drink, coddled and surrounded by dozens more who had come, some with blankets and some with warm drink. "Well," said one, "it's raining outside; we might as well share the drink and wait"
And another: "Look at it," in a tone of awe, but he was looking toward the statue, not the storm. "Look at it," another echoed, and despite the water which dripped in curtains through the apertures, a thousand tiny waterfalls, they moved to see.
Herrin watched them, drank and sat down where it was comfortable, warmed by their presence as much as any physical offering. John Ree was there, and Tib and Katya . . . he knew all their names, every one. They were artists and stonemasons and cranemen and runners, all sorts; and there was a strangeness about them as they sat down and shared their drink and their raincoats and sent their voices echoing through the curtain-walls.
It was the sculpture, Herrin thought suddenly. It was that which had taken them in, seized them by the emotions, a reality more powerful than theirs. He shivered, recalling the Others, and Leona Pace, the day they had been trapped into seeing each other, because sane and invisible had had, here, a common focus.
The effect went on. It kept drawing them back. Those who had been in the Work belonged to it; sane, prideful people began to lose their realities as surely as the invisibles lost their own. The Work did not let them go. He thought that he should warn them. And then he tried to analyze his own impulse in that direction and suspected that.
These people frightened him. Perhaps they frightened each other. He wanted to have things done, and it was all but finished. He had to look elsewhere, to other things, to the rest of his reality. And that was where the rest of them had failed. They could not make the break.