Strangers

by Gardner Duzois

  A ghost exploded skyward from the grass at his feet, was a spread-armed gray shadow against the stars, was gone. Farber swayed in shock, scared sober. Another ghost-explosion, a half-seen form erupting upward from the ground as if it had been shot from a cannon; this time he heard the wet-canvas beating of wings against the damp river air. Pheasants, he thought, with a surge of astonishment and laughter he was still too scared to accept, pheasants, sleeping in the tall cover, frightened into flight by his blundering approach. He took a few more clumsy steps ahead, the undergrowth crackling and roaring around him. Another group of pheasants, four or five of them this time, exploded into the air a split-second apart, like shotgun blasts, like rockets going off, like spaceships hurtling outward to their destiny. He tilted his head up to follow the birds aloft, losing them almost instantly but being caught and transfixed instead by the million icy eyes of the stars. As he stood in rustling silence and stared up at the stars, he was shaken by such a surge of desire and awe and lingering terror that the stars seemed to spin and swirl into tight pinwheel squiggles, throwing down their light like spears, and he danced in rage and lust and exultation in the wet black mud.

  Then back through the dampness and the manure-smelling dark, with the liquor dying in him and his clothes wet against his body, through the translucent gray fog that was coming up to the town that was still asleep and the night that was somehow no longer his.

  And then—too quickly, too brutally sudden, before his hangover had even had time to dissipate—he found himself alone with aliens, locked into a vibrating steel box with them, watching Earth shimmer and disappear into Ur-space, into the scummy darkness laced with shooting pastel blurs that looked like nothing so much as the inside of his own mind.

  In spite of everything, most of the Terrans took quite a load of arrogance along with them into space. And as they traveled from world to world, further and further from Earth, that arrogance slowly died; some of it was drained away at every planetfall, like an intense electrical charge being grounded, and with it—oh, so gradually and grudgingly!—went the expansionist dreams of Empire, went even the more modest hope of financial dominance, fading from them as it had faded in turn from every star-faring race. Space was too big. Everything was too complex and too strange, the distances were too vast, the travel times too great, the communications halting at best. Even the Commercial Alliance was the loosest of organizations; some of its members had not had contact for hundreds of years. Establishing dominance—or even much continuity—across that gaping infinity of night was something that seemed possible only from the provincially narrow viewpoint imposed by looking up from the bottom of a gravity well. The vastness swallowed everything; it was too much for any corporeal creature.

  By the time the Enye ship phased into existence again before Weinunnach, Farber was no longer the cocky, ambitious boy who had shipped from Earth a year before. The Enye looked something like big gray-green boulders with watery oyster eyes and fringes of squirming chartreuse cilia. They were dour creatures who liked to coat themselves with saliva on social occasions (different kinds of saliva, and therefore different odors, on different occasions), and who “talked” (to Earthmen) by modulating air through a sphincter in a series of controlled belches or flatulences. They treated Terrans with barely restrained contempt—and sometimes open contumely—and were reluctant to deal with them on any sort of interpersonal level at all, feeling put-upon in much the same way a Terran might if he were obliged to open diplomatic negotiations with his dog, especially if the dog had fleas, doggy breath, and had recently been rolling in something nasty. Most of the time they ignored Farber, and when they did deign to interact with him—cilia curling in distaste—it was often worse: he couldn’t understand their games and pastimes (whose rules changed every few minutes according to a system he could never figure out but was expected to grasp without instruction), their casual conversation was bewildering, their “humor” was unfathomable, and the most everyday shipboard gadgets baffled him in humiliating ways that frustrated his desire to force the Enye to admit the equality of his intelligence. When they made planetfall along the Enye trading circuit, the other kinds of aliens he met—most of whom had never seen an Earthman before—tended to treat him as a pet of the Enye, or as part of their luggage, or to ignore him in a totally dispassionate way that indicated that he wasn’t even significant enough to be rude to.

  Farber had more than a year of this, in a ship that went subjectively from gigantic to much too small before the first two months were out.

  Other writers had speculated about Farber’s state of mind on Alàntene eve, reading into him the prejudices and passions of their day. Thus Nemerov’s The Barbarian has him full of jingoistic energy and choler, while Innaurato’s Till Human Voices Wake Us written decades later, after breast-beating for our cultural insensitivity had lost its popularity among the intelligentsia, and reaction had set in—has him the innocent victim of sinister alien machinations. Most bizarre is Darcy’s Comic Mazes, in which we find Farber characterized as an Absurdist Sage, manipulating people’s lives in random directions for no reasons to no ends, when in actuality the sinister cult of Noism would not even begin to spread from the rancid Detroit slum wherein it had spawned until nearly fifteen years after Farber left Earth.

  The fact is, Farber’s state of mind reflected the racial experience of his time. Thousands of young Terrans were going through similar kinds of culture shock in a dozen other places, although seldom were the consequences so drastic, or, in their own left-handed way (one thinks of the controversial Alternate Lives Society, founded by Eileen Ross and Tamarane, that had—and is having—enough of an effect on Cian culture as to nearly force the closing of the Terran mission) so far-reaching.

  Far from being the strutting egotist described in Nemerov and Gershenfeld, Farber was sad, bewildered, and apprehensive as he prepared to land on Weinunnach. A year of contact with the Enye—and, even worse, with creatures so alien they could barely interact with humans at all on any level—had stripped him of most of his original assurance, and given him no real knowledge or wisdom to replace it. Most of his pride had been leeched away, and he was unable to retreat behind a wall of defensive snobbery and cultivated disdain, as had many of his fellows. The path of his life, once so straight and obvious, had been lost in a morass of confusion. His career—once the vital, central thing in his existence—now seemed insipid, unimportant, meaningless.

  He didn’t even bother to watch as the orbot descended onto Weinunnach.

  When they reached the spaceport, in the low hills west of Aei New City, he took the high-speed line direct to the Terran Enclave, and, for all intents and purposes, did not come out again until Alàntene eve—either out of the Enclave, or up out of the stagnant depths of his own soul.

  Now, tonight, Alàntene eve, he had been drawn up out of himself again, and for the first time since leaving Earth he felt young and expansive and alive.

  Liraun had drawn him up, Liraun and the velvet intensity of the night itself—although the effect on him seemed more acute than even sex and strangeness could explain.

  Sex was good with Liraun, certainly (they had walked through the empty, echoing streets to the Enclave, to Farber’s apartment, without speaking at all, hand in hand, stealthily, like naughty children sneaking back to their rooms after some illicit escapade), but no better than it had been on occasion with other women. Their lovemaking that night was not a blaze of transcendental pleasure; like any other couple, they needed time to adjust to each other, and their first attempts were not without a certain element of clumsiness. It was the usual sweaty business, full of small mutual discoveries, disappointments, elations—not much different from his first time with Kathy a few days before, on a purely sexual level. Liraun was different, though, and the night was steeped through with her strangeness, as the air of Farber’s bedroom was soaked with the musty erotic smell of her body. She spoke little. She would laugh or sob at unpredictable times, for—to Farber�
�unanalyzable reasons. She was playful, and at the same time intently, almost grimly, serious; Farber could never be sure which mood to respond to, and couldn’t master her apparent trick of mixing the two. Physically, she was odd, although not enough so to be repugnant—rather the opposite, in fact. She had no breasts, or rather she had only vestigial ones, like Farber himself; the Cian men nursed the young, not the women. Her nipples were also vestigial—three pairs of them, spaced two by two, down along the rib cage, flat and almost unnoticeable except for large, smoky-dark aureoles. Most of her body was covered with a light, fine down that might once, millennia ago, have been fur. Her pubic hair was unusually thick and heavy, stretching down her thighs and up along her belly. Her canines weren’t really too much longer than a human’s, and she was very careful not to bite too hard, to Farber’s relief—and, almost, regret—since he had been half expecting her to slash him to ribbons. She was perhaps not as self-consciously expert as Kathy—although she was by no means unsophisticated, sexually—but there was an exquisitely restrained desperation to her responses that puzzled Farber even while it delighted him. At orgasm—their second try, finally working their slow, patient way up to it—she hugged him with a strength almost greater than his own, nearly cracking his ribs, and cried out harshly, as though terrified and elated by something he could never understand.

  In the morning, Liraun got up and dressed without a word. Watching her pad around his apartment in the cold, slate-gray dawnlight, shrugging herself into her skintight outfit, Farber felt a rush of idiot desire and would have been ready to tackle the night’s business all over again, eager as a schoolboy, although he was probably too drained and exhausted physically to take it. Liraun looked much less frazzled than Farber; her movements were still crisp and supple, her face was fresh and unshadowed, and she moved like a dancer through the mundane interstices of his room.

  Farber was so enthralled by the grace and fluidity of her motions that he let her glide all the way to the door before the spell broke and he sat up in sudden dismay to stammer, “Wait, I—Will I see you again? Will you come back? I’d like you to come back again”—he paused, intimidated by her silence, adding lamely—“if you want to.”

  She turned at the door to stare at him, her expression unreadable; then she shrugged, still wordless and noncommittal, and left.

  A few moments later, sitting in bed and staring at the blank white door, it occurred to Farber that he didn’t even know where she lived, or how to find her again.

  3

  Farber remained bemused throughout the morning rituals of washing and dressing and eating. His mind was divided. Half of it was moronically happy, and tried to keep him whistling and humming when the other half wasn’t paying attention. That half was filled with increasing anxiety, almost with fear, as the morning wore on. Suppose she didn’t come back? It was quite possible that he’d never see her again.

  Later than usual, he made it out into the flat white windy morning and headed for the Terran Co-operative Offices.

  Here in the Enclave the streets had Terran names—Washington Street, Pine Street, Second Avenue, Sutton Place, Rainbow Terrace—and the architecture was Terran as well: lots of glassine and plastic and fiberbond, lots of jutting arrogant angles, everything as tall as possible, like nothing in Aei, like nothing on all of “Lisle.” The high wall that encircled the Enclave was also reassuring, blotting out as it did all sign of the alien city beyond. Farber could almost pretend he was still on Earth as he walked up the black asphalt of Washington Street toward the futuristic alphabet blocks that were the main Co-op offices; New York, Frankfurt, Chicago, Tokyo—dozens of cities on Earth looked just like this.

  The Co-op offices were busy, as they usually were on all except Mode-days, but Farber was beginning to entertain suspicions about just how much of the swarming activity he saw ever actually accomplished anything. Daily the Cian would bring in sample goods from all over the planet, but they did so in a spirit of play, as a game—the Cian found the Terran Mission uproariously funny, as they did most Terran customs, and Farber wondered if they didn’t simply enjoy bringing useless and possibly insulting objects thousands of miles to place under the weary eyes of the Co-op evaluation teams. Every day the Co-op offices would be multifarious, multitudinous, malodorous, clangorous: stacked full of strange artifacts, bales of cloth, ore samples, pungent spices, art objects, plants of every kind (fruits, samples of food crops, flowering shrubs, bushes, whole trees, whole jungles it sometimes seemed, all adding their various fragrances, subtle or overpowering, to the manifold alien stink that even the nightly antiseptic spraydowns couldn’t wholly obliterate), animals of all descriptions (from a spherical, dead-black thing the size of a small elephant to small shaggy predators no bigger than lobsters that had scurried about nipping the clerks, though not, somehow, the Cian; from fairly normal-looking insects and worms to “birds” that were actually “lizards”—few of which were worthwhile exporting even as exotic pets, and almost none of which were housebroken), crates of household goods, samples of drugs and medicines and Cian haute cuisine, and even strange genetically altered beings produced by the Cian “tailors.” And of course, the Cian themselves were there, obviously having a hell of a good time at Terran expense, all the while managing to keep their demeanors good-natured and solemn at the same time; “like dealing with a planetful of cigarstore Indians,” one harried factor had said.

  Jacawen sur Abut, the Cian Liaison to the Terran Mission, struck Farber as about the only Cian connected with the Enclave who actually was as solemn as the others sometimes pretended to be, and he seemed not only solemn but downright grim. Of course, as “parent of appointment” to the Terrans, to use the Cian term, he was personally responsible for any damage to Cian society that might result from use of Terran trade goods or from interfacing with Terran social systems, but somehow Farber sensed more darkness of soul there than could be justified even by such heavy administrative responsibility. Jacawen was a Shadow Man, the old station hands said, and even though Farber wasn’t completely sure what a Shadow Man was, or what being one entailed, the name had a sinister enough sound to it—especially when considered in light of the alien’s brooding grimness—that Farber had already decided to avoid Jacawen as completely as he could.

  Most of Jacawen’s work was concerned with that small fraction of the vast influx of potential trade goods that had already been established as being of value to the Terrans—primarily art objects, some exotic chemicals and minerals, artifacts, spices, and bizarre foodstuffs at this point, as it was in the early years of trade between most planets—and, of course, with the corresponding Terran goods that, for whatever reason of caprice of (incomprehensible) economics, had taken the Cian’s fancy: goods as diverse as harmonicas, ball bearings, and English muffins. Jacawen dealt primarily with the sour-faced Co-op Director, Raymond Keane, and with the scurrying, babbitlike little Ethnologist, Dr. Ferri, causing them trouble enough to keep the Director sour-faced and the Ethnologist scurrying, merely by refusing to allow the Terrans to use their big forklift trucks to haul trade goods back and forth from the Enclave to the Cian warehouses on the banks of the Aome; no, instead Jacawen insisted that the goods be hauled by sweating levies of Cian laborers—who seemed to enjoy the work immensely, laughing and singing as they worked, as the mythical “happy darkies” of Southern propaganda were wont to do—with occasionally a few centipede-drawn carts to help with the really heavy loads, which not only slowed down business but assured that cheerfully rowdy Cian laborers would be penetrating the sacrosanct boundaries of the Enclave at all hours. All of which meant that Jacawen, Keane, and Fern were tied to the Enclave most of the time, and that meant that Farber could successfully avoid all three of them, none of whom he liked very much.

  Now that Farber’s initial sensory studies of the Enclave and of Co-op routine were completed (including, among other things, footage of the sweating Cian laborers, which he eventually did incorporate into a satirical still shot called Down on
the Old Plantation, decking the grinning Cian out with torn slave clothes, floppy straw hats, mint juleps, and banjos), he could, if he wished, stay away from the Co-op offices the entire day. knowing that the hours he spent prowling Aei as a sightseer would be both officially sanctioned and legitimate work—that, in fact, it was what he was supposed to be doing.

  Farber was a graphic artist, and thought of himself as such, although, like most artists of his generation, he had seldom even touched paints or oils or clay or bronze. He worked instead with a sophisticated device known as a sensory crown—exported by the Jejun, master craftsmen for this entire section of the spiral arm—that enabled him to transpose his internal fantasies and visualizations directly onto holographic film. The results of this process, rather inevitably known as “sensies” in popular parlance, could be exhibited either as a movie or as blown-up stills (there were conflicting views as to which was the proper method) and were gradually replacing the old arts of painting, sculpture, and photography—now regarded as passé and intolerably primitive by the Young Turks—among the more highly civilized nations of Earth. With the advent of the sensies, and the concurrent exodus of men to distant star systems, the old school of landscape painting crossbred itself with the travelog and regained something of the prestige and popularity it had enjoyed in the eighteenth century—with the additional advantage that these visualizations of alien lands were filtered through and colored by the perception of the individual sensie artist, giving rise almost overnight to critics and connoisseurs who would argue endlessly over the precision of Tunick’s eye as contrasted with the passion of Frank’s.