“Goddamn you, you witch! She’s not dead yet!”
“Yes, she is,” Tamarane said calmly. She studied him intently but with seeming dispassion, as though he were a specimen on a laboratory slide. “You failed her miserably, do you know that? She always was the rebel, the lone one, the stranger—rescuing me from the opeinad, no one else in Aei would have done that. She had the potential to get free of here, this bleak deadly country, to ignore custom, to escape from Shasine. She couldn’t quite get all the way out, though; for her rebellion and defiance, all out in the open with no fear of consequence, she could not quite get free of custom, as some of us, less brave, did in silence and dissemblance while pretending to obey. She deserved someone who would help her to get all the way out. Instead, you came along and pushed her right back in.”
“I didn’t make up your damn barbaric customs, missy,” Farber snapped, breathing harshly. “I didn’t notice you helping her, eh? I didn’t notice you telling her she should ‘get out.’ After all, you knew about all this crap—I didn’t. No, all I notice you doing is pretending to be a good loyal wife like everybody else and keeping your mouth shut, right?”
Tamarane studied her hands, clenching and unclenching her fingers, and there was silence between them for a long time.
“I failed her too,” she said at last. “We all failed her. She failed herself—she could have gotten out, but she did not. Damn her!” she blazed suddenly, using the Terran word. “Goddamn her! Why couldn’t she have pressed a little harder?” Her snapping black eyes flicked to Farber. “And damn you! Why couldn’t you have seen, why couldn’t you have helped her? And damn me . . .” Her eyes filmed over, became opaque, and there was another long pause. “There is too much silence, too much fear, too much of living only from day to day, too much of doing what is easy. Not enough questions, not enough talk, not enough work. We all failed ourselves, all of us.”
She took a long swig from Farber’s bottle, shuddered, and stood up. “I go downriver tonight,” she said. “Smuggled south in an iceboat to Katrine, like contraband. There are other places on this world beside Shasine, after all, other cities than Aei to live in, even if the Shadow Men don’t seem to think so. That’s what you should have done with your wife, Earthman—long ago, before it was too late.”
“It’s not too late,” Farber said doggedly. “There is still time to do that later, if I want to, and maybe I will someday; it’s not a bad idea at that, although it’s going to be hard to get away entirely from Shasine’s influence anywhere on this miserable planet.” He wagged his hand at Tamarane. “You are counting me out, eh? But you’re wrong. I’ll protect Liraun, don’t you worry about that—I’ll even protect her from herself if I have to. Nothing’s going to happen to her while I’m around!”
Tamarane looked at him quizzically, that hard bitter irony coming back into her face now that pain and guilt had ebbed. “When this is over, Earthman, remember one thing—the Shadow Men could save Liraun if they wanted to. They could save all of us. They have the knowledge, the technology— But then, one cannot interfere with religion, can one? And of course, the Modes are so beautiful—” She grimaced, her battered face wincing in some complex variety of pain. “Goodbye, Earthman,” she said. “I mean you no ill, but I wish you’d stayed there, I wish you’d died there—on Earth.”
“Goodbye, Tamarane,” Farber said harshly. “I wish I could say we’ll miss you around here, but goddamn it! I don’t think anyone will.”
“Oh, I’ll be back!” Tamarane said, almost jovial now. “Life in Shasine is a hard and unyielding thing. Hard things are brittle.” She smiled. “Brittle things break.”
She went out.
Farber ordered another bottle. He noticed, dispassionately, that his hands were trembling.
For the first time in months, he drank himself into oblivion.
When he woke up in the morning, he felt like a dead man. No part of his body seemed to be working properly. The Cian, who had let him wallow alone in his corner all night, stared at him with opprobrium. He stared back at them without shame or interest. The concessionaire, his face frozen with distaste, suggested politely that—since this establishment was far too poor to serve him appropriately—Farber might care to grace another commonhouse with the honor of his patronage.
Out into the bright morning, sweating and stinking.
19
“I can’t help you,” Ferri said. “Keane will kill me if I do.”
“I’ll kill you if you don’t,” Farber said.
Ferri glanced sidelong at Farber, and felt the blood begin to drain out of his face. There was something in Farber’s voice that he had never heard before in anyone’s, a hard, weary, backed-to-the-wall desperation. It was there in his face as well: cold and expressionless as a manikin, eyes like two daubs of lead. He sat slumped in his chair as if he was too heavy to move. And yet it was that very heaviness that was ominous—instinct told him that anything with that much inertia would possess a terrifying amount of kinetic energy when it finally did start to move, the mountain coming down with the landslide. Ferri suddenly accepted that Farber might well be capable of killing him, not so much in passion as out of a sodden bitter stubbornness: because Ferri was blocking the only road Farber knew how to follow, and the man simply did not have the energy to trailblaze a new one.
Nervously, Ferri licked his lips.
“Look, Joe,” Ferri said, in as reasonable a voice as possible, “this thing you’ve stumbled on, the ritual murder of the Mothers—that’s the missing factor in the social equation here, and it explains a lot. Your second ‘Lord Vrome,’ for instance. Even with multiple births, even with the majority of the babies female, their population would slowly and inevitably decline if they lose the mother every time, especially as a certain percentage of the women are sterile. A diminishing spiral. They must clone certain individuals, important individuals, to bring the population back to its usual steady level. Genetically unsound in the long run, but feasible, and possibly even another reason why this society has been static for so long.
“But don’t you realize how all-pervasive a thing it is? Using hindsight, it’s easy to see how that one thing is reiterated throughout their whole society, art, religion, the home, everything. That inscription on the eikon, remember? The one you couldn’t read? It’s: ‘From Sacrifice—Life,’ as near as I can get it. There are hundreds of things like that, in front of our faces all the time, that prove—in retrospect—that the average Cian not only accepts this killing of the Mothers, he believes in his bones that it’s sacred. It’s not just the Shadow Men; however much of an aversion you’ve taken to them, you can’t say that—although they may have been responsible for the mass indoctrination in the first place, millennia ago. But by now it’s a thread that’s woven right through their entire culture.” He glanced at Farber’s face, looked away quickly. “Dammit, don’t you see how difficult it would be to buck a tradition that firmly entrenched? Remember, the women accept it too. It’s sacred to them, too; in fact, it’s a transcendental thing to them, a way of becoming a god, if only for a few months. And Liraun has all the prejudices and values of her society, you know. Damn it, I warned you not to roleplay with these people. You’re treating Liraun as if she were Madame Butterfly, but she’s not—she’s one of the heads of Shasine government, a leader of their whole society, and, under these circumstances, high priestess more than victim. You’ve got to understand that. Face it—it’s too late to do anything about this, change anything.”
“It will work,” Farber said. His accent was coming back, as it did only under extreme stress, so that he actually said, “it vill vork,” like a comic-opera Prussian. “I had a lot of time to think about this last night.” He closed his eyes tiredly. “She’ll get over it. Once she has the child, and she realizes that she doesn’t have to die, that a bolt of lightning will not come down and fry her because she didn’t go to the Birth House— It’ll be hard, sure, but she’ll get over it. I’ll re-educate her.”
<
br /> “It won’t work,” Ferri said flatly.
“Goddammit! It better!” Farber blazed. His eyes flew open—they were muddy and ill-tempered, like those of a snapping turtle. “I refuse to lose my wife to a bloodthirsty pagan superstition. D’you understand me, Mister? And you’re going to help me, aren’t you?”
Ferri wiped his face—it had gone white. Very carefully, he said: “This is going to raise a hell of a stink. You know that. I don’t believe this kind of a situation has ever come up before—the Cian are temperamentally unsuited for it. God knows how they’ll react to it, except I doubt if it’ll be phlegmatically. If you kick that bee’s nest over, Keane is going to find out about it, very soon.”
“He already knows,” Farber said. “You know what I did this morning?” he continued in an artificially light voice. “Before I came here? I called Keane up, and I asked him if I could put Liraun into the Co-op Hospital. I crawled on my belly to him. Do I have to tell you what he said? No, I thought not. Easy to guess, huh?” He shrugged with elaborate casualness. “So, Liraun will have to have her baby at home. And you’re going to deliver it.”
“I can’t,” Ferri said. He looked sick. “Joe, listen. I can’t help you that openly. You know Keane has it in for you. If I delivered Liraun, he’d find out, and then he’d have it in for me too. He sends efficiency ratings on me back to Cornell, you know that. Listen, dammit. A really bad report from him could ruin my career, invalidate this expedition and all the work I’ve done. Lose me my tenure—”
“Are you going to help me? Or not?” Farber said. His voice had become very quiet, and his face had gone dead. He was not moving at all.
“Christ,” Ferri said. He reached out for the drink that had been sitting, unsampled, on a sidetable, and then drew his hand back with a grimace, as if the touch of his fingers against the cold sweating glass had made him nauseous. He put his fingers to his lips, as though he wanted to suck on them. “Look, Joe,” he said, coming alive, “this is what I’ll do for you. Right? I’ve got a scanner here, on loan from the Co-op. I’ll use it to give you a subcerebral course on childbirth, take about an hour. We’ve got a package on it in the First Aid program, ‘Basic Midwifery,’ or somesuch. Then you can go home and deliver Liraun yourself, and Keane won’t be any the wiser. Right?” He winked at Farber, as though in relief at solving the problem, but there was a fine tremor to his hands.
Farber was silent for a long time. “What if there’re complications?” he said at last.
“Unlikely,” Ferri replied. “Ninety percent of the time you won’t run into anything you can’t handle after the subcerebral training. Christ, don’t forget women did it all by themselves for thousands of years.” At Farber’s unsatisfied look, he said passionately, “Goddammit, how much do you want from me?” Admitting defeat: “Okay, listen. You can borrow the diagnosticator. It’s Jejun work, beautiful thing, you can fold it up small enough to fit it in a backpack, though it’s fairly heavy. And for God’s sake, be careful with it—it’s at least a century advanced over any medical equipment made on Terra, and it’s as expensive as shit. I only got one because I’m doing critical field work. Now the thing telemeters, and it’s got waldoes on it, surgical ones, micro stuff. I’ll monitor everything, when the big moment comes, and if anything serious goes wrong, I’ll take over. But I won’t be there in the flesh, oh no! And if we’re careful and you keep your mouth shut, friend, then Keane won’t find out about it. Okay? I swear to God,” he added, belligerently, “that’s the best I can do for you. Take it or leave it.”
Another long silence, then Farber seemed to untense a little for the first time, slumping back against the cushions. He closed his eyes again.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll take it.”
Ferri drained his glass in one fervent gulp.
Farber made one more stop on the way home, visiting a rat-faced steward who worked in the Co-op VIP Mess.
From him, Farber bought a gun.
It was an outdated, secondhand projectile weapon, one of thousands on the Co-op black market, and nowhere near as classy as the kilowatt lasers used by the honor guards at the Enclave.
But it worked.
20
Thinking gray, coagulated thoughts, Farber took the cablecar up to Old City. He watched the pastel sea of roofs spread out and fall away below as the car rose, and he told himself, I will not let it happen. He repeated it aloud, but the Cian riding with him were too polite to stare. Perhaps they edged infinitesimally away, perhaps not. Farber was oblivious of them in either case. “She isn’t responsible,” he announced to the air. “She doesn’t know any better.” Almost to the top now, and he felt his stomach and thighs tightening, as if he was unconsciously preparing himself for combat. The car ratcheted as it swung through the coupling and up to the station platform, bright reticulations shook across the windows, the walls vibrated. He rested his forehead against the cool, buzzing metal, and was instantly overwhelmed by the smell of her body, the taste of her secret flesh, the texture of her skin, her voice, her calm eyes, the soft pressure of her hands and mouth and tongue—more a cellular remembrance than an ordinary memory. She was imprinted on him; he was surprised it hadn’t left visible marks on his skin. I will not let it happen, he thought. “I won’t let them take her,” he remarked conversationally to the alien standing next to him. The Cian smiled noncommittally, and edged away. The car stopped.
He was making his way up Kite Hill when he first heard the music.
He began to run ponderously, weighted down by the heavy backpack, stiff from a lack of sleep and hungover as hell, but grimly covering the ground anyway. He skidded around a corner onto the Row, and there they were: a large Procession marking time in front of his house, drums and tikans skirling, Talismans held high. In front of the Procession proper stood the twizan and the soúbrae. Off to one side was Genawen, beaming at everyone, looking almost fatuously happy. Up and down the Row, people had poked their heads out of windows to watch, and the whole scene had the relaxed, festive formality of an old-fashioned Fourth of July parade.
Farber felt himself go very cold.
Something in the back of his throat tasted like molten iron.
He came forward at a stiff-legged walk, not trusting himself to run, afraid of what might happen if his anger should shake itself completely free. He speeded up on his last few steps, and hit the dense-packed crowd like a shark slamming into a bloodied carcass. He bulled through the Procession, shoving, hitting, scooping the little men up and tossing them aside, much rougher than he had been with the crowd the previous night, not really caring if anyone got hurt. A Talisman went over, its weight pulling its bearer down with it. Another—a huge swollen-headed grotesquerie—swooped and wobbled like a comic drunk. A nose-flute was cut off with a squawk as Farber straight-armed a musician from behind. A tikan clattered under Farber’s feet, and he stomped on it with malicious pleasure. There was a shout, another, and a general discord of music that swept from the rear of the Procession to the front as Farber’s passage made itself felt. At last, Farber broke into the open. The musicians stopped playing entirely.
The twizan stepped into Farber’s path. “Citizen—” he began to say, placatingly, but Farber shoved him roughly aside. Farber made it to the front door of his house, and whirled.
Panting, he stared at the crowd.
The crowd stared back in stunned silence. The twizan on his knees, getting up from where he had fallen. The soúbrae—the one from Liraun’s Naming—looking levelly at him with eyes of ice. Genawen, a big grin frozen idiotically on his face. The rest of the marchers in various stages of disarray. There was no sound.
Farber was trembling, falling apart, trying to keep some semblance of control. Fear and fury impelled him to speech, but it was a while before he could get his voice working right.
“Out!” he shouted hoarsely.
Genawen’s fat face collapsed in dismay. “Joseph—” he said, in a quavering, incredulous voice.
The t
wizan was on his feet and edging backward.
“Get out!” Farber screamed. “Goddamn you all to hell!” He had more to say, but what control he’d kept was slipping, and his voice, as he continued to shout, passed into strangled incoherency. He came forward in a stumbling rush, swinging his arms.
The Old Woman made as if to stand her ground, but the appalled twizan seized her arm at the last moment and hauled her back. Reluctantly, she allowed the twizan to hustle her away, looking back at Farber all the time, her face like stone, her eyes brilliant with hate. Genawen hesitated, but Farber shoved him and shouted nearly in his face, and he gave ground too, staggering and almost falling, looking hurt and totally bewildered. Farber followed them for only a few steps, and then stopped, breathing heavily. He shouted again, in derision.
Dazed and horrified, they let Farber run them off.
With the retreat of its three principals, the Procession backed off in toto. Within seconds, it had turned into a slow-motion rout, everyone flowing away down the Row, confused and demoralized, turning their heads to look back, their faces showing every possible degree of dismay. Farber waited until he was sure they were leaving, then went into the house.
Liraun was sitting near the hearth, looking pale and tired. Standing next to her, with his back toward Farber, was Jacawen’s son, Mordana. He was leaning over her, one hand on the arm of her chair, talking urgently to her in a low, persuasive voice. Her face was drawn. She kept shaking her head in an exhausted, baffled way, but Mordana kept on at her, insistently.
Two iron thumbs behind Farber’s eyeballs, pushing out.
Farber crossed the room in three enormous strides. He clamped a big horny hand around Mordana’s shoulder and began to drag him away.
Mordana hissed, and spun around with terrifying speed, breaking Farber’s grip. A knife grew out of his fist, like magic.
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