Liraun ran to meet them.
She passed the other woman, ran a few feet farther on toward the oncoming mob, stopped, threw her arms wide, and waited, motionless, like a spread-armed statue, like King Canute trying to turn back an alien tide.
To Farber, running hard to catch up, cold fear like a fist in his belly, it looked for a long moment like the mob was not going to stop, like it would roll right over Liraun, trampling her, to get at the other woman. But almost imperceptibly the mob slowed, slowed, and then came to a restless, surging halt a few feet from Liraun, like a comber arrested on its way in to the beach.
They eyed each other in silence, Liraun and the hundred-handed, hundred-headed crowd.
Then Liraun, arms still outstretched, said: “This hunt is over. Go home.”
The crowd surged restlessly, humming that ominous razor-edged hum, and then one of its voices said “The opein!” and another voice said “What about the opein?” and another said “Let us have her! She is an opein!” They started forward again.
Liraun took another step forward, raising her arms higher, holding the mob, seeming to press them back as though she were radiating a wall of invisible force. “Opein or not,” Liraun shouted, “you shall not have her! She is mine now, and the opeinad is over. Go home!” Her voice was hard, icy, filled with chill authority. The crowd also heard that authority, and reluctantly, against their own wills, they began to respond to it, one or two men at the back of the mob turning hesitantly to walk away. Behind Liraun, the woman sat up.
That was a mistake. The mob howled at the sight of her face, and one young man at its leading edge darted forward, trying to get around Liraun. Hissing, Liraun snatched the man’s torch away from him and beat him fiercely over the head with it. As he fell, rolling and slapping at the sparks in his hair, Liraun whirled the torch around and around her head, so that it blazed up as brightly as a comet, and screamed “Get out! People Under the Sea, hear what I say! Get out! Now!”
And she hurled the torch at the crowd.
That broke them. They poured back out of the square, some unabashedly running, some trudging dispiritedly with their heads bowed, but none stopping or turning back.
Liraun stood looking after them, standing straight as a ramrod, her face passionate and fierce. Farber watched her in awe, almost afraid of her, seeing in this furious Valkyrie no trace of the Liraun he thought he knew.
The other woman got painfully to her feet, Liraun making no attempt to help her. Her face was streaked with dirt and sweat and blood, her hair wildly tangled, a bruise—probably from a thrown rock—purpling half her face and already beginning to swell. In spite of her dishevelment, Farber realized, with a shock, that he recognized her. She was named Tamarane, and she was the wife of Lord Vrome (his actual title was hyrithákumenäe, “Hereditary Holder of Land-Titles, in Escrow, for a Sub-Sept of Which He Is Elder”), who has bloodline connections of some kind to Genawen’s sept. He had met them at Genawen’s house a few times, and had heard some talk about her—she had failed to conceive at two weiunids now, and was thought to be sterile.
Liraun and Tamarane eyed each other, much as Liraun and the mob had a few moments before, and there was a similar kind of hostility and tension in the air between them.
At last, Tamarane managed a crooked smile through her bruised and bleeding face. “Well, Mother,” she said in a husky, ironic voice. “Thank you for my life.”
“I should have let them have you,” Liraun said bitterly. “I should have let them have you. Only I couldn’t somehow—” She swayed suddenly, no longer fierce, looking instead gray and tired and drawn. Farber put out a hand to steady her.
Tamarane’s face changed, too. “Liraun—” she said, or started to say, concern in her voice now, and a certain rueful tenderness. But Liraun cut her off with a wave of her hand. “There is nothing I want to hear from you,” Liraun said coldly. “There is nothing you can say to anyone anymore. You forfeited that privilege.” The carriage came up then, and with Farber’s help, Liraun climbed into it. She would not look at Tamarane again.
Farber’s last glimpse of the scene, as the carriage clattered away, was of Tamarane, standing alone in the center of the square, looking after them, grinning a complex, bitter, and ironic grin through her broken face as she fell away behind into the darkness and obscurity of the night.
Liraun refused to say anything about this incident at all, but the next day at work Farber’s shiftmates were full of gossip about it. It had been discovered—how, Farber did not know—that Tamarane was not really sterile at all; that instead she had been taking a drug that inhibited fertility (the Cian shuddered in incredulous horror as they related this, and it struck Farber that the word “contraceptive” wasn’t even a part of their vocabulary)—said drug-that-inhibits-fertility having been smuggled up at enormous expense from distant lands to the south. Thus the opeinad: obviously only an opein, or a woman who had been possessed by an opein, could do such a monstrous thing, and it was best to crush it and her out of existence before the opein could contaminate anyone else. All of Farber’s workmates were puzzled by Liraun’s interference with the opeinad, but they didn’t censure her for it or—now that the heat of the moment was past—even question her actions: after all, she was “One Who Has Been Translated to Harmony,” and as such her decisions were divinely motivated and by definition correct, no matter how incomprehensible they might seem to mere untransmogrified creatures like themselves—annoyingly, they included Farber in this classification and didn’t even bother to question him about the motivations for Liraun’s behavior, naturally assuming he was too lowly to understand them.
The affair of Tamarane was far from over, however. Already, two foreign river-traders, suspected of duplicity in bringing the drug-that-inhibits-fertility north to Shasine, had been taken into custody, and Tamarane herself had disappeared into Sloptown, the warren of foreign commonhouses and hostels on the Vandermont edge of the Aome waterfront. No one would hurt her, since a Mother of Shasine had thrown a cloak of protection over her, but at the same time it was obvious that she could not remain in Aei for long—no one would serve her, shelter her, or sell to her, except possibly a few foreign merchants of dubious sensibilities, and once Liraun’s term as a Mother was over and her protection was therefore withdrawn, the opeinad would start its hunt for Tamarane all over again. There was much speculation about what Tamarane would do then. There was even more speculation about whether Lord Vrome himself had had complicity in his wife’s crime. Whether he had known about it or not; he was nevertheless in deep disgrace.
Later that day, Farber took the cable car back up to Old City, and had just stepped out onto the Esplanade, making his way through the afternoon crowds on the Terrace, when his attention was caught by the sudden and insistent ringing of a triangle or gong. He looked up. There was a man on the roof of one of the tall buildings that bordered on the edge of the Esplanade, six stories up, standing with his hands clasped behind his head. A few steps behind him was a servitor with a bronze gong and a hammer. The servitor beat the gong, over and over again, until the brassy waves of sound washed back and forth across the Terrace, and everyone was looking up. Satisfied that all eyes were upon him, the man unclasped his hands, touched them to his chest, and bowed. Then he stepped to the edge of the roof, raised his arms like a diver going off the high board, and threw himself out into space.
The man seemed to hang in the air above Farber for a long time, arms outstretched to either side, hair floating in the wind, face serene, and then, suddenly moving very quickly, he plunged down and past, having calculated his leap to take him past the outer edge of the Esplanade. He plummeted down through the gulfs of air toward the New City, down the sheer three-hundred-foot drop toward the roofs of Brundane, dwindling, becoming a manikin the size of a fingernail paring, a dot, a speck, disappearing from sight entirely, swallowed by distance and death.
Farber had recognized him.
It was Lord Vrome.
Or
perhaps one should say, it had been Lord Vrome.
· · ·
A week or two later, at dusk, Farber was making his way through one of the narrow, high-walled, winding alleys in the interior of Old City when he came face to face with a man coming the other way. A fugitive ray of wine-colored sunlight, falling down a shaft past dust and old black stone, illuminated the man’s face.
It was Lord Vrome.
Farber gasped and fell back against the wall, too stunned even to be afraid. “Lord Vrome!” he whispered, feeling the blood drain out of his face and his lips go numb. The man turned to look at him, that impossible face unruffled and remote, and said, “You are mistaken. I am not Lord Vrome. My name is Tanar sur Riné.” He brushed past Farber—who shrank away from his touch—and continued on down the alley, and was lost in musty darkness within five paces.
Farber stared after him long after there was anything to see. It had been Lord Vrome: the face was the same, line for line, the body and posture and gait the same, only the style of clothes different.
But, at the same time, it couldn’t have been Lord Vrome.
Farber started walking again, his skin crawling, looking fearfully into dark corners as he passed them, the uncanny silence and mystery of the Old City pressing down on him like a hand.
That night, Farber dreamed that he was present at the Creation of Life.
This was before anything had come into being, even mountains and oceans, and the world was smooth and gray as a billiard ball.
Farber—or Farber’s viewpoint, rather, since he had no body—was hovering just above a flat ashen plain that seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions. As he watched, the gods appeared on the horizon, looking down into the world. There were two of them, immensely tall, vaguely humanoid, with the blank, rough-hewn, oversized faces of Easter Island statues. Stiffly, the two gods—each miles high, storms and lightnings playing unheeded around them—began to walk ponderously forward, the ashy ground sinking and smoking under their weight. They walked steadily forward, side by side, looking straight ahead, past Farber’s viewpoint and away toward the horizon, shrinking to the size of big-headed Tiki totems, disappearing around the curve of the planet. Behind them they left a long double-line of deep-sunken footprints, each footprint filled with water and suffused with an eerie blue glow. Slowly, the footprints began to widen, merging together, spreading out in ever-increasing circles, and the Elder Creatures who inhabited the ashen plain, creatures who lived without being alive and without recourse to flesh, dwellers in the primordial Chaos, drew back in dismay before the steadily spreading advance of these pockets of causality and life—when they joined together, meeting each other after spreading around the planet, Chaos would be exiled, time would have begun, and the Fertile Earth would be born.
Farber tilted his viewpoint to look down into the puddle of water at the bottom of one of the gods’ footprints, at the squirming, wiggling life that bred there.
The puddle was full of worms.
The worms had Liraun’s face.
15
Sometimes Jacawen sur Abut, Liraun’s half-uncle, would come to visit them. Apparently this was motivated by polite custom more than by familial affection, as both Liraun and Jacawen were very formal with each other, most of their exchanges seeming to conform to a set ritual. But Jacawen didn’t know what to do with Farber. There was no ritual there to tell him how to act—the situation was unique. The man was there, he must be treated with, an interrelation must be formed. But what? Jacawen knew how to relate to outworlders: it was part of his job, and appropriate custom had evolved. But, like it or not, Farber could no longer be considered an outworlder—he was now tied by blood to Jacawen’s own House and Tree, he was, by law, a relative. Jacawen, however, found it impossible to accept him fully in that role either. Try as he might, Jacawen could not wholeheartedly attune himself to familial ritual with this huge, obstreperous alien. And Farber’s ignorance of the proper forms made things even more difficult. There was nothing left but to attempt to deal with Farber on an extemporaneous, one-to-one basis, unguided by custom or ritual, neither knowing what the other expected of him—a horrifying prospect for a Cian, especially one of Jacawen’s aloof and aristocratic caste.
To give Jacawen his due, he made a conscientious attempt to do it. Jacawen was a Shadow Man. Like the Apache Netdahe or the Yaqui-Yori of Old Earth, his philosophy was one of unwavering hostility to all outlanders, to all intruders. Unlike the Netdahe, he was not obliged to kill them on sight. Social contact with outlanders was regarded, by the Shadow Men, as a distasteful but unavoidable condition of interstellar commerce, which in turn was acknowledged as a necessary evil. Cian Angst rarely worked itself out in violence anyway—not socially directed group violence, at least, though there were many duels. Nevertheless, the hostility was there. Jacawen was trained to regard outlanders with polite scorn and bristling suspicion. He did. He would have had difficulty reacting to them in any other way. He did not like Farber. He did not approve of Farber—everything about the Earthman reeked of an offensive and contaminating unorthodoxy. He had been outraged by Farber’s marriage to Liraun, and was forever estranged from them by it. It was a wound that could never heal. But, by the custom of his people, he was obliged to seek synchronization of spirit with the despised outlander. It was unthinkable that he do this by increasing his tolerance of Farber’s unorthodoxy—ignorance of the Way was no excuse; its Harmony lay waiting to be discovered at the heart of all creatures, of all things, and if Farber had not found it, then it was a sin of omission on Farber’s part. Therefore, if they were to synchronize, it was Farber who must change. To this end, Jacawen spent long hours patiently explaining to Farber what, in his opinion, was wrong with the Earthmen’s way of life.
“You go too fast.” he said once, unconsciously echoing Ferri’s words. “You have no patience. You do not understand what you see, and you will not wait for understanding to come, you just rush ahead, so fast.” He blinked, shaking his head, groping for expression. “You are all so hungry. You are aggressive—” he used the Cian term, which translated as “The Mouth (Which) Is Always Hungry.” “You are ambitious” he used the English word here, as this concept could not be translated into his language at all—-”and you go so fast that you cannot watch the ground under your feet, and so you smash what is around you. Like wild things, you are dangerous even when you are not overtly hostile. You are too much enmeshed in the external world, the world of flesh and duration, and you do not perceive the inside of the world or of yourselves. It is a disease with you, a contamination, this thing that lets you see only the one aspect.” He paused, and his expression shifted from somber to grim. “We, the Shadow Men, have that disease too, although we suffer from it much less. That is why we can deal with you, why we can understand you at all. We are aberrant, abnormal, but we have our purpose—the burden of earthly government is left to us. We serve as buffers for the rest of our people. We are barriers against the contamination of corporeality that creatures such as yourself spread. This is our pride and our sorrow—honor to us that we guard our people so, shame to us that we are tainted enough to be able to do so.”
And so on, throughout the night.
Farber did not understand. Jacawen did not understand Farber.
After a while, in spite of tradition, Jacawen stopped coming at all.
Farber began to spend time with Genawen sur Abut, Liruan’s father, and Jacawen’s older half-brother. Although one of the Thousand Families, Genawen was not a Shadow Man—you had to become one, you could not be born into the cult—and didn’t seem to share Jacawen’s dislike of aliens. He was a shrewd, jovial old man, and he ran a large household with benevolent firmness. His house was a rambling stone structure fronting the Square of the Ascension, at the far end of the Esplanade.
Genawen’s wife was a Mother at the time, and that gave him and Farber some common ground for conversation, although Genawen seemed to want to spend most of his time complaining about how his
wife was simply ruining his household staff during her period of authority over them. But what was disrupting Genawen’s household the most at the moment, it seemed, was what looked to Farber like a circus parade, sans elephants, in the inner courtyard.
“What in the world is that?” Farber asked, as Genawen led him around the flagstone rim of the courtyard.
“It’s the rehearsal for my wife’s Procession,” Genawen answered.
“But what’s a Procession, anyway’?”
Genawen stopped dead. He stared at Farber in amazement. “What’s a Procession?” he murmured blankly, and then he said: “What’s a Procession! Oh, ho ho ho! By the First Dead Ancestor, Mr. Farber, do you know that I’m not really sure how to tell you what it is. I’ve never had to explain it to anyone before. Oh, ho ho ho!” Genawen always laughed by saying “Ho ho ho!” like Santa Claus, with perfect enunciation and never an extra “ho!”—or a missing one. He even looked something like Santa Claus, minus the beard: bushy eyebrows, ruddy cheeks, fat jelly-bowl stomach. Since his wife was pregnant, he was in lactation, and his six pendulous breasts flopped up and down when he laughed. “Well, let’s see, how do I explain,” Genawen began, becoming more serious. “You know that my wife, Owlinia, is a Mother, and she’s pretty close to term. She should be delivering any day now, as a matter of fact. Well, these people will escort her to the Birth House when she’s ready—you do know about the Birth Houses, don’t you?”
Strangers Page 13