Strangers
Page 2
And Farber pulled away, frightened. He pushed his way up from the beach, shoving and scrambling, until the sound of the ceremony was less overwhelming and some of his panic died. He had taken it too far, come too close to something alien, too near to intuitively grasping a thing he was not equipped to understand. He was shaken, dizzy with incense and torchlight and strangeness, and his legs were like jelly under him. Slowly, he staggered up the beach toward Ocean House. The Alàntene had spoken to something wild and sad and desperate in his blood, conjured up longings that he could neither name nor satisfy. There was a ghost-horde of chaotic, unidentifiable emotion in his skull now, peripheral, mocking, insistent. Their voices had faded somewhat by the time he reached the portico of Ocean House, but he was still dazed and unsteady, and more helplessly bewildered than ever. A group of Earthmen were standing out in front of the building, holding native drinks and atomizers, watching the ceremony down on the beach with amused tolerance, as if it was a fireworks display. Farber avoided them, and went inside.
It was an enormous, L-shaped building, situated just to the north of the Aome’s juncture with Elder Sea. The side that faced south, overlooking the Aome, was called River House; the side that faced east, to the sea, was Ocean House. Both faces were glassed in floor to ceiling, so that they were actually two huge windows, divided horizontally by the building’s second story. It was purely a secular establishment, and had no real connection with the Alàntene, or with any of the Cian Modes, although it had been built—by the Cian—because of them. Here you could come in out of the weather—and there were Modes that were carried out in the middle of blizzards, or in the broiling, near-fatal heat of high summer—and watch the ceremonies through glass for a while; here you could relax on loungers and hammocks and refresh yourself with the variety of essences, liqueurs and foods that were on sale. The Modes had been around for a very long time, and the Cian were well aware of their entertainment value, and the possibilities for commercial profit that were created thereby. And had been so aware for hundreds of years, long before the first outworlder had arrived. It was not a matter of the Modes being exploited by crass aliens; the Cian exploited them themselves, cheerfully, and no one seemed to be upset by it. And yet there was a depth of solemn belief, a feeling of pure religiosity to the Modes that had died out of Terra generations ago. It was a point of contention among the Earthmen: whether the Modes were religion, or were considered by the urban Cian to be merely a body of quaint and charming tradition.
Your opinion on this, Farber now believed, would be determined by where you stood during the Mode. Here in Ocean House, surrounded by Cian who were relaxing and watching the show through the huge window-walls, or chatting with their friends, or strolling on the portico, or devouring essences and batter-fried blackfish, as easy and sophisticated as any crowd of city people anywhere, one would certainly opt for tradition. Down on the beach, packed in with the indefatigable mass of swaying, stamping, groaning devotees, you would come to quite a different conclusion. But there were not two separate groups of Cian; they mingled indiscriminately—often the chefs and concessionaires of Ocean House/River House would come down to take part in the Mode after their work shift, and some of the sweating, earnest spectators would eventually drift up to the big building for rest and essences. It was a dichotomy that no Earthman understood, and now Farber intuited dimly that it was only the tip of an iceberg.
He purchased a fuge—a gelatin concoction something like a cross between chocolate pudding and raw jellyfish—from a concessionaire, and strolled slowly through the corridors of Ocean House. Most of his terror had passed, leaving him sad and contemplative. He made his way up to the second story, which had a better overview of the beach. The lighting here was dim and diffuse, and Farber felt as if he was walking in a glass tunnel under the sea. He drifted over to the window-wall. The Alàntene glittered far below, the tiny figures swaying and whirling, a masque performed by animate, passionate dolls. Its flaring light struck odd reticulations from the vaulted ceiling of Ocean House, sent hunched shadows capering wildly across the stone floor. After a while, Farber became aware that someone was there with him, watching the fire and the night. The other had been there all along, hidden in the gloom at the bottom of a pillar, silent as a shadow, with only its presence to grow patient and gradual in Farber’s mind, until at last he must turn his head to look, not knowing why he did. He squinted. It was a woman. She felt his gaze and turned away from the window. The Alàntene washed half her face with fire-shot light, left the other half in shadow. One eye glinted clear silver, the other was a pale ember in darkness. She looked at him.
“Hello,” she said. “I, do not speik, this, well.” Her voice was low. Her English—a tongue that this group of Earthmen had the audacity to represent to the Cian as the Terran language—was halting and heavily accented.
“Në, it is of no circumstance,” Farber answered, in her own language, which he had learned by subcerebral techniques. It seemed a curiously evasive tongue to him, its simple grammar and syntax masking a million quicksilver shifts in meaning that he could never quite grasp. He wondered if he had impressed the woman with his cosmopolitanism. She did not speak again, and at last he said, “Hello,” belatedly, to break the inscrutable silence. He felt inane.
She nodded to him with somber formality. Then she smiled, quick and startling. “Do you”—she gestured with her head at the beach—“enjoy the Mode?”
“Yes, I do.” he answered. Then honesty made him add: “Although I don’t understand it.”
“Ah—” she said, wisely, squinting a little. “There are many things about the Modes that are not easy to understand, even for us perhaps, në? But still we must cope, as best we can.” Her tone was both mocking and melancholy—she was laughing at him, surely, but at the same time he sensed that she was pleading almost desperately for his company, for his regard. She seemed lonely, and yet ineffably remote. She spoke with economy, almost brusque, and yet her manner was relaxed and easy. Her smile was intense and abrupt, flash, striking like a chisel, gone—and yet, somehow, wistful. Her eyes turned to him again and again. He could see the liquid flash of them as they moved, to him, away, back. She fascinated him—almost in the old sense of fascinare, to bewitch, striking him motionless as a charmed bird. She was wild and sad, and she looked at him sidelong through the complex, shifting light-and-shadow cast by a thing that was older than either of their civilizations.
Her name, he learned, was Liraun Jé Genawen. She was taller than the Cian average, which brought the top of her head up to Farber’s breastbone. She was resting against the window ledge, one long leg tucked up on the stone and under her, sitting easy and supple on her own calf. She seemed even more slender than the majority of her slender race, sleek and lithe—even in the minuscule movements of her head and neck as she sat otherwise motionless on the ledge there was apparent the sureness and total muscular control that marked the dancers on the beach. Her face was sharp-edged, angular, her nose straight and heavy, her lips long and full, her eyebrows like startled black brushstrokes. Her eyes were enormous, fierce and staring as an owl’s or a hawk’s. Her skin held something of the rich, breathing tone of mahogany, though muted and with more brown in it. Her hair, black, was long, thick-textured and glossy, and fell heavily about her shoulders. She was dressed in silver and black, and she wore a tight necklace of amber and obsidian. Looking at her, Farber realized for the first time—although he had known it intellectually all along—that Cian translated as “The People.”
They talked for a while. She tried to explain some of the ceremony to him. “It is also called the Opening-of-the-Gates-of-Dûn,” she said. “Dûn is the otherworld, the Other Place, and it lies out there, deep below Elder Sea. The bones of the Ancestors rest there, naked, on the floor of Ocean, the Place of the Affliction—but it is not just that, not just the bottom of the water, në? It is a world in its own right, the place where some of the dead go, but more than that—there are demons, and People of Powe
r, and opein, and they live there in Dûn” She shrugged, and smiled her somber smile. “Alàntene marks the end of the Summer World, the heat, the growing things, the reign of the Warm People who govern in that season. It is the end of the year—after Alàntene is the Winter, the snow, the ice, the withering of life, the reign of the Cold People at the start of a new year. The Gates of Dûn open then, under Elder Sea. Then the ghosts of those who died in the old year, and who are to go into Dûn, they rise up then on the wind and go into Dûn, for the Gates are open and the otherworld is touching this Earth. And also, those demon and opein who wish to come into the world of men, they come in then. And the Cold People come up through the Gates, and the Fertile Earth dies and turns to frozen ash, for the House of Dûn holds influence during this season. And so, the Alàntene.”
“That’s—not quite what I expected,” Farber said, a little dismayed. “In fact, it’s kind of frightening. Why in—” he had been about to say hell, realized that the only possible equivalent would be Dûn, “—the world do you have a festival, a holiday, for such a thing? A ceremony I could see, maybe, but a celebration?”
She shrugged again. “For all the cold and death to come, at least the old year is gone, drowned, taking all its old problems and sorrows with it. An old year gone, a new year born—however malign. That is something to celebrate perhaps, në?” She looked intently at Farber. “And time does not exist, during Alàntene. It is the pause between the fading of one rhythm and the beginning of another, the motionless unmoved center, the still place wherein the syncopations of the World wind up and wind down. Uncreated and eternal. So we are told. Në, would you like that? It means that we two have always been here together, talking on Alàntene, and always will be here. No matter where else we have been on Alàntene in other years—we are there too, always, yes, but we are here too, always. Yes! Do you find that pleasant?” And she laughed, her face somber and set, her eyes unfathomable.
It was impossible for Farber to determine how much of this she took seriously; every time he thought that he had pinned down her mood it would shift dramatically, or seem to, and the words she was speaking, and had spoken, would be open to a new interpretation. It was also impossible for her to tell him more than the barest surface of the Mode, and not all of that. Time and again she would lose him in trials of allegory and language and symbolism that he could not follow, and she would have to shrug and smile and say that he did not know enough to know. They fell silent for a while, until finally she said, speaking to her reflection in the window: “The opein come into the world at Alàntene. They are spirits who possess men and drive them to evil deeds. Or they take the shape of men themselves, and walk abroad in the World in flesh, or what seems to be flesh. You could be an opein,” she said, after a heavy pause. Then she broke into sudden silver laughter. “And so could I!”
Silence again. She watched her reflection in the window, and did not look at him any more. He could see the tiny, rhythmical jerking of her belly as she breathed, the pulse in the hollow of her throat, the way her hair was sticking lightly to her skin at the temple, the cheek, the side of the neck. It was hot here, perhaps, but not that hot. She turned farther away from him then, as if to look at something way out on the beach. With her head averted and bowed, the buttons of her spine stood out taut against the material of her costume, and he could see her shoulderblades work slightly under her tight skin. She did not turn back, or speak. He had moved much closer, without volition—almost touching, but not quite. His blood had been speaking to him for some time, clearer than her words, and now it was the only sound that he could hear. He was intensely aware of her heat and her smell. He lifted his hand, slowly stretched it out—some distanced part of him thinking in horror: You don’t even know if she’s got a husband or a lover, or what their miscegenation laws are, prison, murder, castration—and closed it over her shoulder, feeling the flat muscle of her back under his palm, fingers brushing her neck, digging into the hollow of her collarbone. She stiffened—while he thought, That’s it! in tranced dispassionate despair—and then she slowly relaxed, muscle by muscle, and settled her long warm weight back against his chest, her head coming to rest against his cheek with a muffled bump, and she said “Ahhh—” in a whisper, a tiny sighing echo of the devotees on the beach. They stood quietly for a while, listening to each other breathe, and then he said, hoarsely, “Will you come home with me?” And she said, “Yes.”
2
All this took place about two decades after the Expansion, when a team of Silver Enye had opened the Earth up for trade by “inducing” her to join the Commercial Alliance, as cynically, and with as little concern for the inevitable impact on native culture, as Perry had opened Japan.
As a matter of fact, the impact of this on Earth—whose technology had not yet freed man of the solar system when the Enye arrived, whose cities were scarred and half-ruined by a series of vicious and nearly terminal “tactical” wars, whose biosphere was scummed and strangled by pollution, whose natural resources were nearly depleted—was immense.
Although he had been only a child when the Enye came, Farber was old enough to remember the tension, the fear, the knots of people in the streets of his little German village who spent half the night staring apprehensively at the sky; most of all, he remembered his parents’ frightened voices, coming dimly to him through his bedroom door as he lay sleepless and watched dusty moonlight on the cracked wood of his windowpane, thinking about the worlds beyond the sky, the endless black depths into which one could fall out and up forever. . . . For a day and a night and a day, the seven great egg-shaped spacecraft—each over a mile long, defying both Terran weaponry and our understanding of natural law—hung in the air above Stockholm, Rio De Janeiro, Chicago, Addis Ababa, Tokyo, Melbourne and Ulan Bator, and then the Enye emerged with their offer of incorporation, with the gift of stars.
In the months that followed, brushfire wars flared, guttered and died all across Earth, governments toppled, nations vanished as viable political entities. When the shooting stopped, amalgamations were formed among the survivors, the Terran Co-operative was hastily created, and its members were charged with the task of going out and getting a nice juicy piece of the pie in the sky for impoverished Earth. Earthmen went forth to the stars, first as paying passengers on alien ships, then, later, in human-crewed ships purchased at staggering cost from other worlds. Terran trade missions were gradually established on some of those other worlds, while meantime the Enye—and later, the Jejun—mission on Earth was doing a land-office business, mostly in “quaint” Terran trinkets and primitive native art.
Amidst all this forced-draft confusion and hothouse change, Farber grew up, and, growing up, partook of the rapacious spirit of the times. For many, the arrival of the Enye had been a miracle, divine intervention, an eleventh-hour reprieve for an exhausted civilization that had been just about to start an inevitable, irreversible spiral down into barbarism and degeneracy. The common response to this reprieve was buoyant relief and a sudden giddy sense of destiny. Suddenly, just when things had seemed darkest, the top was off the sky again—in fact, the polluted gray sky of Earth was nowhere near being the limit anymore, now that the alien cavalry had ridden to our racial rescue at the last possible minute. If there was any shame attached to the realization that we had needed the Enye to pull us out of the hole we had dug for ourselves—and the condescending, scornfully blunt Enye were hardly easy on Terran egos—then that very shame would make us work harder and scramble higher to blot it out. All at once, “manifest destiny” meant something again, was believed in again with a naive, almost religious optimism that had not been a serious political force since the muddled, saddening middle of the twentieth century. It was the age of the Robber Barons again, with those very Third World powers who had suffered most under the colonial yoke the most eager to go and carve some sort of colonial empire in the sky.
God was alive, after a long dry spell of atheism, and God helped those who helped themselves.
Farber spent the night before he was to report to the Outbound Center drinking in a small rural gasthaus in Zirndorf, the air heavy with the smell of spilled beer and cooking sauerkraut, listening to the bawdy jokes and naughty songs of his classmates, watching the proprietor’s half-blind old German shepherd beat its dusty tail against the floorboards and dream doggy dreams of youth. At midnight, ignoring the sounds of breaking crockery and Teutonic abandon, Farber got to his feet, carefully skirted two classmates who were wrestling on the floor next to the fussball machine while the proprietress slapped at them with a wet mop and the ancient shepherd growled reminiscently, and thrust himself out into darkness.
The stars were out in their chill white armies, and, moving under them, Farber felt almost too big for the night, for the narrow cobblestone path under his feet—big and raw and new, he felt, filled to bursting with life like a skin full of living green water, charged with blind energies that left him hot and flowing in the cold country silence. Walking unsteadily, he made his way through the sleeping streets and shuttered squares, out through the harvested stubble of the surrounding fields (dirt under his feet now, and rutted frozen furrows), and ultimately down onto the dry flood-bed of the river. It was black and still here, the lights of the town left far behind, only the dim blinking red eyes of the hydroelectric plant downstream to remind him of civilization. Then the ground sloped down slightly toward the river channel, and he lost even the lights of the hydroelectric plant, left them behind him in darkness. He could hear the river now, a soft toothless muttering of water, and he was surrounded chest-high by cane and thickets of wild wheat that rustled and creaked and re-formed around him. Thick black mud squelched under his feet, and he could smell manure and wet earth and dampness. He had reached the center of things, and it was dark and still and wet—and he was the only one there. He was the only one there was, or ever had been, on the Earth and under the sky—