Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  Robert Silverberg

  Strangers

  Joseph Farber met Liraun Jé Genawen for the first time during the ceremony of the Alàntene, the Mode of the Winter Solstice, the Opening-of-the-Gates-of-Dûn, that was observed annually in the ancient city of Aei, on the North Shore of Shasine, on the world of Lisle. “Lisle” was the Terran name, of course, after Senator Lisle Harris, the first human to visit the planet, and had come into common usage among the expatriate Terran Population of Aei because the Earthmen professed great difficulty in pronouncing the native Weinunnach, “Fertile Home.”

  This was about two decades after the Expansion, when a team of Silver Enye had opened 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 major and nearly terminal wars, whose biosphere was scummed and strangled by pollution—was immense. Governments toppled, amalgamations were formed, and the Terran Co-operative was hastily created to go out and get 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. In spite of everything, they took quite a load of arrogance along with them. And as they traveled from world to world, farther and farther 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, 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 too 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.

  Joseph Farber’s personal state of mind, on the eve of Alàntene, reflected the racial experience. He had left Earth, two years ago by his own subjective clock, as a cocksure and confidently ambitious man. Now, as he walked the broad ceramic streets of Aei New City, he was sad, apprehensive and bewildered. Two years of contact with creatures who were not necessarily superior but who were alien—inherently different, inherently strange—alien—had stripped him of much of his original assurance, and given him no real knowledge or wisdom to replace it. He had been on “Lisle” for about three weeks, and had only been outside the Enclave—the exclusive Terran district, or ghetto, however you wanted to look at it—on rare occasions. Tonight boredom and despondency had combined finally to shake him loose; he’d gone along with a group of expatriates who were walking down to the Alàntene, partially because Brody had assured him that “the Cian always put on a good show,” and partially because he was afraid of getting hopelessly lost without guides.

  It was a wet, chilly night, just this side of actual rain. Grey mists, up from the river, wound slowly through the high-walled streets, like sluggish snakes, or drifted in glistening, billowing curtains across the wide porcelain squares. The wet air carried the smell of spices, pollen, incense, musk. Sharp, sour, sweet, heavy and rank—the odors slid across the moist night like oil over water, most unidentifiable, all evocative. Occasionally the wind would rise, scooping the mists and cloud-scuts aside like an invisible hand, revealing the million icy stars of Aei’s night sky, dense and blazing against velvet black. None of the moons had yet risen, and the constellation of Winter Man was just thrusting its frosty, nebula-maned head up over the close northern horizon. Old City loomed there, to the north, on top of its three-hundred-foot-tall sheer obsidian cliff, silhouetted against the blaze of Winter Man’s upper body, with His head rearing terribly above its tallest towers. Its lights shone silver and yellow and deep, secret orange, glinting coldly from that cold stone place in the air. To Farber, it was as if Old City was watching him; not necessarily with disapproval, or even with interest, but just watching, staring down inscrutably, as if to drive home again the fact that this was not Earth.

  New City was friendlier, with its rounded ceramic homes, its tiles and mosaics, its glazed earthenware and pottery walls. Its lights were soft pastels, blinking and diffusing wetly through the languid mists. But still, the underlying ambiance was unsettling, and strange. They had been walking through New City—a small, nervously giddy group of humans, too loud in the alien hush—for an hour that had seemed like a year, and they had seen no one, no natives, no living thing at all. Farber was just beginning to wonder if the streets were always so empty, echoing and still, and if so, how anyone could ever stand to go abroad in them, when they sighted a group of Cian ahead, walking in the same direction they were. And at the same moment, they heard the first faint and distant mutter of the Alàntene. They were near the eastern outskirts of New City now, and the streets began to slant rapidly down toward the River Aome. The natives ahead slowed down—they had fetched up against another group of Cian, and in front of that group was another, and another, and Farber saw why New City was deserted. The whole population of Aei was on the move, down to the banks of the River Aome for the Alàntene, and the Earthmen had just caught up with the tail of the immense crowd.

  Ahead, as far as the eye could reach, the streets were packed solid with shuffling ranks of Cian. Most were walking, carrying children on their shoulders, holding baskets of fruit, or strangely shaped garlands of flowers, or various implements of polished wood and metal and obsidian whose function the Earthmen were unable to divine. There were numerous other objects, half-seen, that defied definition altogether. Some of the Cian were riding in six-wheeled carts pulled by huge, brindled animals that looked something like enormous boar hogs; their reins were hung with star-shaped black flowers, and with tiny crystal chimes, so that when the boars tossed their heads, the air was filled with tinkling melancholy music, and their spiral tusks flashed white in starlight. A few Cian—and Farber blinked, startled—were riding bareback on big, sinuous things like many-legged snakes, or reptilian centipedes. The crowds seemed to make the things skittish; occasionally they would moo, long and mournfully, and, looking around at the assemblage, blink their sad, intelligent eyes. The Cian themselves—short, slender humanoids, uncannily graceful of movement—were dressed mostly in dark colors, but in rich and fantastical costumes, of the finest fabric and workmanship. Jewelry of silver and amber and obsidian glinted here and there throughout the crowd, and the entire slow-moving procession had about it a curious mood of somber celebration.

  It took about another half-hour for the bulk of the remaining crowd to filter down into the place of ceremony. In that time, the sound of the Alàntene grew from a murmur, a whisper, to a vast rhythmical sea-surge that filled the night, that filled the blood, and brain, and bowels, until Farber found that he was breathing in time to the huge slow booming of the drums and the deep-throated susurrus of the chant, and he suspected that his heart was also beating in rhythm. Janet LaCorte said it gave her a headache. Sometimes the wind would bring them a snatch of faster music—crystalline, ringing and staccato—that was being played as counterpoint to the giant beating of the World-Heart. There was no other sound, except the whisper and scuff of a million feet over tile, the creak of wagon wheels, and the occasional plaintive lowing of the snake-things. The Cian around them did not speak at all. Brody was off on something—like many of the Earthmen, he was of the opinion that the Modes, the native ceremonies, were more enjoyable if you went to them stoned—and he was giggling constantly now, his eyes rolli
ng from one object to another, never quite focusing on anything. Farber had been quarreling bitterly with Kathy Gibbs for the last fifteen minutes over some trivial matter, their voices growing ever louder and more heated, and as they reached the bottom of the slope, Farber, stung by some final gibe of Kathy’s, broke away and whirled fiercely to face her.

  “You fucking bitch,” he said. He had gone pale, and he looked as if he was going to hit her.

  Kathy laughed in his face. She was flushed and bright-eyed from the argument, but she seemed in no way perturbed by his rage. “You’re no fun at all tonight, are you?” she said. Some of her hair had become plastered to her forehead with sweat, and Farber could see her breasts clearly through the semitransparent blouse; her nipples were hard against the fabric. A sudden rush of desire mixed with his anger, confusing him. His mouth worked on words, but she laughed at him again, and they died in his throat. She had read him well enough. “See you later, sweetheart,” she said, brushing the hair out of her eyes, giving him a knowing, cutting smile. “Here, about midnight. All right?” He said nothing. She looked at him with hard, taunting eyes, smiled again, and walked quickly away, mingling with the crowd. She vanished from sight within seconds. Farber stared after her, his fists balled impotently, his jaw tight.

  Brody giggled. He had listened openly to the whole exchange, without embarrassment, apparently getting a kick out of it. He slapped Farber on the shoulder. “Fuck her,” he said, in a voice that was a dreamy parody of hearty man-to-man comradery. “Fuck ‘em all, I always say. There’re millions of cunts in the world. Always another one along in a minute.”

  “Why don’t you mind your own goddam business?” Farber snapped.

  “Fuck you too, Jack,” Brody said pleasantly, without any hint of rancor. He was almost jovial about it. He giggled abruptly, seeming to startle himself, as if it had popped out before he was ready for it. He squinted at Farber. “You’ll find out,” he said, with listless, languid wisdom. Then he said, “Oh my!” plaintively, and tracked to follow something moving down on the beach. And he smiled and smiled.

  The other Earthmen had been hanging back while the fight went on; now they came up, and Fred Lloyd gave Brody a shove to get him walking in the right direction again. Ed Lacey and two friends went by, sniffing narcotic atomizers, followed by Janet LaCorte, who gave Farber a disapproving look as she passed; she was Kathy’s friend. Lloyd was wearing a complex expression of condescending boredom that—it occurred to Farber—must have taken him years of diligent practice to perfect. “You coming?” Lloyd asked. Farber shook his head. Lloyd shrugged, and the Earthmen went on. Farber was glad to see them go. Soured by the futility of the Terran enterprise, they were all self-consciously cynical and bitter, and liked to think that they were projecting an air of fin de siècle decadence. Actually, they were boring.

  Farber plunged into the thick of the crowd and started worming his way through the dense mass of bodies. He was filled with disgust and self-contempt. Kathy had only been his lover for a little over two weeks, and already she was so sure of him that she could laugh at him and walk away into a festival crowd, sure that he would be waiting for her when she chose to come back to him. And he would be. Once he’d swallowed that, his anger died to a dull resignation. Lightyears from his home and his people, he had to hang on to something—and she was it. Sullenly, he kept walking. He had run out of road. He was on sand now, and it shifted and whispered under his feet. A row of sand dunes rose up in front of him, interlaced and overgrown with tough sea-grass and ironwood shrub.

  He came up over a dune, and saw the Alàntene spread out below him. He paused, swaying, a little drunk, alone in the alien night. He was a big, slow-moving man, bullet-headed and bull-necked, with dark eyes and a shaggy mane of blond hair. He had a blunt, big-boned face, dominated by thick flat cheeks and a massive, stubborn jaw—square, jutting and truculent. It was an arrogant face, touched permanently now by a shadow of wistful puzzlement. His eyes were incongruously lost and vulnerable, set against those rough-hewn, brutal features—as if there was a frightened child inside, peering out, running the massive body by manipulating pedals and levers. The long, bone-deep soughing of the chant came up and hit him in the face, and the patient elemental thunder of the drums shook the dune under his feet, sending little rivulets of sand whispering down toward the beach. Listening now, as his anger died, he was submerged again by that endless sea-sound, drowned, dissolved, whirled away like a grain of sand in the tide, to be rolled across the secret places of the ocean bottom and then washed back to the shore after a decade or a thousand years. Calmly, he began to descend the dune, digging his heels in. He felt that if he should fall, or jump, the huge noise of the Alàntene would puff up to meet him, bearing him up, and he could ride the sound as a gull rides the currents of the air—

  Here the River Aome, rolling out of the west, met the sea, Elder Sea, the Great Northern Ocean, the World-Ocean. The Aome was a roaring grey turbulence to the right, a streak of lighter darkness rolling through a dead black night, more sensed and heard than seen. To the left, and at right angles to Farber’s path, the dunes stretched away in an unbroken line to the north; they, and their fringe of beach, extended for more than three hundred miles, ruler-straight: the North Shore of Shasine. South, beyond the Aome and invisible now, were endless leagues of saltwater marsh. Ahead, straight east, the night opened up into a feeling of echoing, infinite space. Ocean was there, behind the mists—the smell of its salt was in the wet wind that slapped Farber’s face, the hissing of its swells and surges could be heard under the derivative sound of the chant, and—beyond the ceremony—its waves gleamed in torchlight as they foamed against the beach.

  Farber passed the L-shaped bulk of Ocean House/River House, and made his way down as close as he could to the water. The Cian were packed in shoulder to shoulder here, by the thousands. Smoky red torchlight glinted from teeth and eyes—the large-pupiled, large-irised eyes and needle-pointed canines of nocturnal predators. They were all swaying side to side in a slow, ponderous rhythm, and doing a kind of shuffling dance step—one step forward, a step back, a step to the side, a step forward again, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. None of this seemed deliberate; the motion was an unconscious, instinctive response to the music, almost a tropism. The Cian were preoccupied with the ceremony, all their attention focused outward, and perhaps they were not even aware that their bodies were swaying and stamping in the wet smoky dark. After a while, Farber discovered that he was doing it too—without volition and in perfect time, as if he had been practicing all his life. At first Farber found that frightening, then oddly exultant, and then both emotions died, and there was nothing but the chant, the steady mesmerizing motion of the crowd, the enveloping heat of a hundred thousand close-packed bodies, the pungent stink of alien sweat.

  Beyond the crowd was the ceremony, the Alàntene itself. The musicians, playing drums, flutes, and tinkling stringed instruments like dulcimers and mandolins, sat crosslegged in a huge semicircle just beyond the first row of spectators, facing the Ocean. Their hands pounded and strummed and plucked with unvarying, unwavering, inhuman precision, as if they were all motley close-robed robots, and they rocked back and forth rapidly in time to their own music. To Farber’s extreme left, massed in between the musicians and the sea, were the chanters, the singers—more than a hundred brightly clothed Gan, all male, all old: snow-white hair, gleaming silver eyes, their faces intricately meshed with lines and wrinkles, expressionless as rock. They were doing a more complex, studied version of the crowd’s step-and-sway, some of them also making ritualized gestures and sweeps with their hands and arms, others periodically tossing handfuls of powder into the torches so that they flared up silver and amber-green and scarlet. Some of them were standing up to their waists in the water, as the tide rose; they continued to chant, unperturbed. On the far right, almost out of sight, another group of old men were involved in what seemed to be a kind of highly stylized dramatic performance, reminiscent of a Terran Noh pl
ay—their voices, speaking instead of chanting or singing, cut flatly across the rest of the ceremony from time to time.

  But the center of the ceremony, the heart of the Alàntene, were the dancers. They took up most of the torchlit stretch of beach, dancing next to the edge of Elder Sea on wet, hard-packed sand. There were perhaps two or three hundred dancers, of all ages, men, women and children. Some of them were naked, and the flaring torches played strange light-and-shadow games with their gleaming skin and the flashing motion of their limbs. Others were dressed in fantastic costumes, towering, nodding plumes, brilliant jewels and feathers, grotesque swollen-headed masks. Gods and demons danced on the beach, and their reflections danced with them across the glossy sand. Platforms had been built out into the ocean, only an inch above the surface, and the glittering creatures danced there too, half-awash, sometimes leaping into the air to tumble and jackknife down into the water. They sported and plunged there like solemnly drunken porpoises, as at home in the sea as on the land. The dancers were sure-footed, lithe, incredibly agile. They spun, pranced, stood vibrantly motionless for a long moment, twisted, somersaulted, leaped high into the air. They had been going on like this for hours, since sunset, and they would continue without pause until sunrise. Farber watched them for a long time. Only afterward, away from the beach, would he be able to estimate that at least three hours must have passed. Now, there was no time, no duration. Occasionally the crowd of onlookers around him would sigh or moan all at once, a vast articulate Ahhh going up to the coldly watching stars, sinking back under the chant, then welling irresistibly up again. Ahhh. As with their swaying motion, it was not a deliberate thing, a planned response as in a Terran religious ceremony. Rather it was a reaction, a muted, reluctant sound of awe, pulled from them—almost against their will—by the power of the Alàntene. Farber did it too, his lips opening as though yanked by fishhooks the sound coming jagged and low from his throat, Ahhh, Ahhh. And as he watched then, it seemed as if everything was knitted together—the motion of the dancers, the singing, the snapping flame-banners of the torches, the ecstatically pained crying of the instruments, the reflections in wet sand, the heat and sweat of the bodies around him—and the universe was crimped, a corner of the World folded over, and earth and sky and water became one, indistinguishable.