Strangers

by Gardner Duzois

  Farber stared at her, appalled. “It was really that bad for you?” he asked, but she merely shook her head, indicating not a negative reply but that she no longer wanted to talk about it. Instead she propped herself higher on her elbow, her thigh sliding over him as she moved, and stared down at him in a languid but intent way that finally reminded him—with an odd thrill of embarrassment—that she could see much better in the dark than he could. She touched his face with her fingertips, gently tracing the ridge of his eyebrows, his cheekbones, the line of his massive jaw. “So strange,” she said dreamily, “so strange. Like an animal, almost. Bestial. Like one of the scurrying little rockbabies who live in the western hills.” Farber, who had seen a rockbaby, realized that she was comparing him to the closest analog of an ape that Weinunnach possessed, and—after the initial half-amused flash of pique—it startled him to hear that she thought of him as ape-like, because he had often thought how much like a cat she was; a cat, or an otter, perhaps: some sleek, graceful animal, self-possessed and beautiful. Bestial, yes. Like a beast. Like him. Feeling obscurely guilty, he reached up and touched her cheek, the silken, crackling cascade of her hair. She blazed up at his touch like tinder. They made love in a desperate hurry, Liraun forcing the pace, as though she feared the ceiling would fall in or the ground swallow them before they could finish.

  Afterwards they rested in each other’s arms, the cat and the ape (neither was either, though both were aliens)—but Liraun slept fitfully, tossing and moaning as she worked her way through the turbulent country of her dreams, and Farber, who held her and stroked her throughout the night, slept not at all.

  6

  It took Farber a few more days to dig out the cause of Liraun’s ostracism, but at last, after much persistence and persuasion, the story came out in disjointed sections. Pieced together, it looked like this: Cian morality saw nothing wrong with an unmarried girl taking a lover, even an alien lover, as long as she did not conceive; there was no special premium on virginity—rather the opposite, in fact. Until she was married, however, she was expected to live by herself, or in her father’s house. There was a special symbolism to this—a girl was said to go “from under her father’s roof to her husband’s.” It was a matter of ownership, plain and simple, of transference of title, and there was no room in the equation for her accepting the protection of any other male. So Liraun’s sin was not that she was sleeping with Farber—a matter of utter indifference to most of the other Cian—but that she was living with him, “under the roof” of a man who was not her husband. Odd as this seemed to Farber, it was serious enough to get her ostracized.

  All this gave Farber another sleepless night. If he had been born thirty years earlier, or ten years later, he probably wouldn’t have worried about Liraun’s welfare at all, but amorality had gone out of fashion, as it periodically did, and along with their Horatio Alger optimism and drive to succeed, his generation had rediscovered humanism—limited to their own class of people, of course, i.e.: “humans”—and a sort of studied naiveté. So he stayed up to figure out the Decent Thing To Do. On the one hand, he sincerely loved Liraun, didn’t want her hurt on his behalf—but he didn’t want to lose her, either. On the other hand, he was as terrified of marriage as most young men of his day, especially the artists and the intelligentsia. But no matter how he nagged it, it always came down to that: he should either marry her, or leave her; nothing else would help her situation.

  Toward dawn, he decided—rather cold-bloodedly, but a man can often identify cold-bloodedness as practicality if he squints at it hard enough—that the best thing to do would be to marry Liraun, but only under the Cian rites. That would make her a respectable woman again in the eyes of the Cian, and yet, as far as his fellow Terrans were concerned, it would be only a native marriage: it wouldn’t be binding on Earth, and if his relationship with Liraun soured, he could leave at the end of his hitch without worrying about legalities. In the morning he sent an application to the Cian Liaison (that cold little man probably wouldn’t approve it anyway, judging by his reaction to Liraun at the party), and a note to the Co-op explaining what he was proposing to do.

  Then he went to sleep.

  He hadn’t thought to tell Liraun about it yet.

  Liraun’s eyes, when he told her. The second step.

  The next afternoon, Farber had an interview with the Co-op Director.

  Most of the Earthmen played at being embittered because it was the style of their times, but with Raymond Keane, the Director, it was not an assumed thing. He was embittered. He was a bitter, troubled, cynical, beat-out, burnt-up man, with just enough energy left to him to form a reservoir of weary malice. He had been here since the very beginning of Terran involvement with “Lisle,” in one capacity or another. In all that time, he had been unable to come up with a really viable trade commodity. The last great white hope had been a native drug—used for an entirely different purpose on Weinunnach—that the Co-op had imported to Earth as a serum to overcome organ rejection in transplant cases, and which had turned out to have the unfortunate side effect of dissolving all the cholinesterase in a user’s body two years after the initial dose, something that had never happened at the Enclave in years of testing. Apparently the reaction had been triggered by something in the environment of Earth; something had switched on an episome that remained latent on “Lisle.” That was the trouble with interstellar commerce: too many wild factors, and the rules of the game shifted constantly and unpredictably. Keane, a minor executive at the time, had been swept into the Director’s office by the cholinesterase scandal, but had not been able to get out from under its shadow. Time after time, his exports to Terra went wrong, soured, failed of their expectation—never as spectacularly as the first fiasco, never drastically enough to shake him out of office, but consistently. This had been going on for almost five years. It had eaten him. He looked like a man who no longer had the strength to go on, but who must, and so goes on without strength, held together only by a set of complex and rigidly interlocking weaknesses.

  He kept Farber on the carpet for more than an hour.

  Farber had not been passionately attached to his matrimonial plans when he came to the office—it was the morning after, and he was beginning to see some of the difficulties involved. He had half-expected to be talked out of it, and half-wished that he would be. But instead of persuading, Keane had chided, threatened, fumed, ranted, finally working himself into such a red-faced rage that he had almost begun to scream. At first, Farber had been amazed. He worked for the Co-op on the loosest of contractual bases, with effectively no supervision at all, and he wasn’t used to this type of vicious dressing-down. Then he began to get mad. Keane blustered on—the marriage would stir up bad feelings among the Cian, it would be a step toward diluting the cultural identity of the Earth Enclave, it might encourage other Earthmen—or worse, women—to do the same, it would split Farber’s loyalties, take up too much of his time . . . a plethora of reasons, some good, some bad, all of them false. Farber watched Keane’s face as he talked. The Director’s face was flat and dull, his skin the seeming texture of horn, crosshatched with shiny dead places, like scales of congealed lard, where a dream had died and turned to chitin. No matter what he said, the real reason he was against the marriage was that he hated the Cian. That was something that went beyond logic, or duty, or even self-interest. He hated the Cian, he hated the Co-op, “Lisle,” his job, Farber. Most of all he hated himself. It was a weary, helpless hatred, all the blacker because it was impotent. It could not even destroy. All it could do was negate.

  Farber could be a very obstinate man indeed when aroused to it, and now that mulish streak became dominant. He began to flush. Unconsciously, he braced himself, settling down more firmly in his chair, flattening his feet against the floor.

  Keane ran down at last, and the room filled with a silence that went on and on. Farber sat perfectly still. He had not said a word since Keane began his tirade. He did not speak now. He just sat motionle
ssly in the center of the office—a gleaming antiseptic cave, steel, plastic, chrome, shiny tile, glass, filled with oddments, plaques, framed certificates, charts, stacked banks of files, a huge computer terminal, a hologram tank that filled half a wall—and stared levelly at Keane.

  Keane fiddled with the litter on his desk.

  “The Cian Liaison has granted you an interview tomorrow,” Keane said, after an uneasy pause, “to discuss this proposal of yours. My advice to you is not to keep it. If you do keep it, then you must assure the Liaison that this has all been some sort of mistake or misconception on your part. Do you understand that?”

  “My personal life is none of your business,” Farber said flatly.

  “Under no circumstances will you pursue this matter any further, Mr. Farber.”

  “Your authority does not extend to my private life,” Farber said, with a touch of heat. “I’ll do what I like with it.”

  “Farber—” Keane said, and Farber, simultaneously said, “It’s none of your business!”

  Another pause.

  “I can make a great deal of trouble for you, you know,” Keane said.

  That was the third step.

  Doggedly, Farber took the following afternoon off and went to see the Cian Liaison to the Terran Mission, Jacawen sur Abut.

  Jacawen had his office in Old City.

  Farber had been up to Old City before, but he hadn’t stayed long because he didn’t like it there. It was a place of precipitous cobblestone streets, towers and spires and domes, steep stairways, terraced balconies and plazas, long narrow alleys that wound claustrophobically between high walls of black rock until they opened onto sudden startling vistas of the wide country or the restless sea below. It was a place of levels, of shafts that dropped down deep into the rock of the cliff itself, going down and down with lights and windows sparkling silver and orange in the depths like phosphorescence at the bottom of an old dry well; of honeycombed bluffs of more adamant rock that rose like cliffs atop a cliff from a terrace or a square, looming up like the stern of a great dark ship and lifting a twinkling freight of windows high above the rooftops of the level below, with more buildings built atop it, and still more built atop them, mazy roofs climbing up and up into the deep blue-black sky. It was a place that was banded by little vertical jungles, growing right up and over the city like creeper vines. All of Aei was crisscrossed with Feral Strips, kept wild to provide the citizens with relief from urban existence, but the Feral Strips in Old City were almost straight up-and-down, weeds and ropy bushes and little stunted trees that clung to fissures and slanting crevasses in the outer walls, full of shaggy agile creatures—something like goats, something like squirrels—that leapt in serene silence from hummock to hummock, pursued by little mewling predators with needle-tipped tails and perpetually apologetic grins. It was a place of little commerce or overt activity. There were no shops or stores in Old City, although there were many administrative offices and private homes. There were two open-air markets during the daytime, and hot-food vendors along the Esplanade, but only a few small restaurants that operated after dark, and no commonhouses or entertainment places at all, unlike New City. It was a restricted place, in some ways. Any Cian could visit Old City, but only a member of one of the Thousand Families could live there. In New City, you would often see nulls or clones or genetically altered beings in the street—the Cian possessed an immensely sophisticated biological technology, and their genetic surgeons, the “tailors,” produced strange creatures to order as one of Weinunnach’s major exports—but they were not allowed to set foot in Old City. Offworlders like the Terrans were allowed to visit, but reluctantly. It was a place made primarily of rock and dressed obsidian, interwoven with wood, iron, glass, and slate. Its predominant colors were black and silver, with a few slate grays and reds, and an occasional startling patch of orange or earth brown. It smelled of clean naked rock, and ozone, and sea-wind, with a lingering undertang of musk. There were few loud sounds, but the silence was a vibrant humming one—as of a million constant voices a bit too subdued to be heard. The mood of Old City balanced on the razor edge between “brooding” and “serene.”

  Today, to Farber, it was brooding. He took the cablecar up, walked along the Esplanade at the edge of the great cliff, went up a stairway, along an alley, through a tunnel, up another stairway, along another alley, penetrating ever deeper and higher into Old City. At last he was so deep inside it that he saw Fire Woman only occasionally and at a distance as it peered over the jumble of high roofs and down into the narrow warrens and passageways. Everything was bathed in shifting half-light now, and he walked on through alternating strips of bright hazy radiance and shadows so deep that they looked like glistening black solids. He felt like a worm inching his way through black rock and wet earth, until he came out onto a staircase that led up and across the domed roof of a building on a lower level, dizzying and sundazzled, with a sheer unprotected drop on one side, and then he felt like an insect crawling across the naked shoulder of a mountain. Jacawen’s office was nearby, in a building that jutted out from the city mass like a gable, its windows opening on nothing except air and distances.

  Jacawen’s heir-son, Mordana, showed Farber in. He was a tall, taciturn young man with a face like a scornful angel: remote, handsome, full of pride and disdain. He moved like a tiger, like a warrior gliding into battle; his eyes blazed with feral intelligence and an almost fanatical intensity. It was obvious that he disliked Farber on sight, that Farber’s very existence was somehow an affront to his conception of the universe. With a stiff, self-absorbed face, like that of someone who smells a bad odor, he took Farber to the inner office and departed quickly.

  “Sit down, Mr. Farber,” Jacawen said.

  Farber sat down. The floor here was carpeted with what appeared to be a kind of pale fungus, and he sank into it as he would into a cushion. Jacawen sat on a low dais a few feet away. The office was roomy, neat, uncluttered, with stone walls and a half-timbered ceiling. There was a window in the east-facing wall, looking out over the tidelands of Elder Sea; it was open, and they could hear surf and the crying of “seabirds,” brought near by the wind, then fading away again into distance as the wind died. That wind, whistling in through the window with its freight of ocean sounds, was thin and cold, and tasted of salt, which tasted in turn of blood. Some sunlight leaked in with the wind, also thin and cold, but pure as clear crystal—it played on the rich tapestry covering the opposite wall, meticulously picking out gods and men, cold-eyed demons and beautiful women, births and battles, deliverance and death.

  Farber and Jacawen looked each other over, silently.

  Jacawen himself was a small, somber, self-possessed man, with the jet-black hair and wide golden eyes of most of his race. He was sleek as an otter, giving the impression of sturdiness, of a compact and supple muscularity. His breasts were no larger than those of an ordinary Earthman, as he was not in lactation at the time, but his thin shirt showed the impression of three pairs of nipples, spaced two by two down along his ribcage, and six small bumps to go with them. His face was calm, almost dispassionate, but it looked somewhat satanic to Farber because of the tiny points of the canine teeth that protruded beyond the lips. Jacawen was even more intelligent and adamant than his son, but in him the fanatic intensity had been banked down into a more assured, controllable, useful force, a steady, smokeless flame. Both were Shadow Men, a quasi-religious sect that ran much of the government of Shasine, but Jacawen had the maturity and the wisdom of experience—Mordana was still full of worldly pride, but Jacawen had passed beyond that to curious arrogant humility of a senior Shadow Man, and he aspired to be, like the angels, beyond shame and pride. With that, he had varying degrees of success.

  “Did you know that Liraun is my half-niece?” Jacawen asked abruptly.

  Oh Christ, Farber thought.

  After a moment, he managed to say: “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “I tell you this,” Jacawen said, with equanimity, �
��not because it is important in itself, but because it is proof that I know her mind, that I have had much time to observe her. On Weinunnach, it is the custom to have our children in surges, Mr. Farber, four years apart. Liraun was born in the fallow period between surges, one and a half years after the previous surge, two and a half years before the surge to come. It almost never happens that our women conceive when they are not supposed to conceive, but sometimes it happens regardless, and this was one such time. Do you understand, Mr. Farber? Liraun grew up alone, with no age group to fit into, with no companions. Not even wombmates—the Mother, who did not realize for months that she had conceived, did not have time to cherish the growth in the proper way: most of her wombmates were stillborn, one sister died in early childhood. Liraun survived, but she grew up sad and wild, and she still is so. She had been out of Harmony on other occasions.” He stopped and stared at Farber. “Do you understand, Mr. Farber? I am talking openly to you of private matters, against the custom of our people, and it is distasteful to me—but I wish you to understand.”

  Farber scowled. “It seems like you’re telling me that Liraun’s—affair—with me is just one more wild prank in a life of unfortunate rebellion.”

  “That is oddly put, but basically accurate.”

  “And that’s all you think it is?”

  Jacawen sat impassively for a moment, then started again. “Mr. Farber, I don’t think you’ve understood me after all,” he said drily. “I am not talking about your proposal of marriage to Liraun. What I have been saying to you is in the way of an apology for the strain and disharmony this thing must have caused you, and an assurance that it was not your responsibility. This mating between Cian and Terran should never have happened at all, but if it was going to happen, then it does not surprise me at all that Liraun should be the one woman in all of Shasine that it happened to. Who caused it to happen, Mr. Farber. That is all I wished to convey to you.”