Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  And Farber pulled away, frightened. He pushed his way up from the beach, shoving and scrambling, until the sound of the ceremony was less overwhelming and some of his panic died. He had taken it too far, come too close to something alien, too near to intuitively grasping a thing he was not equipped to understand. He was shaken, dizzy with incense and torchlight and strangeness, and his legs were like jelly under him. Slowly, he staggered up the beach toward Ocean House. The Alàntene had spoken to something wild and sad and desperate in his blood, conjured up longings that he could neither name nor satisfy. There was a ghost-horde of chaotic, unidentifiable emotion in his skull now, peripheral, mocking, insistent. Their voices had faded somewhat by the time he reached the portico of Ocean House, but he was still dazed and unsteady, and more helplessly bewildered than ever. A group of Earthmen were standing out in front of the building, holding native drinks and atomizers, watching the ceremony down on the beach with amused tolerance, as if it was a fireworks display. Farber avoided them, and went inside.

  It was an enormous, L-shaped building, situated just to the north of the Aome’s juncture with Elder Sea. The side that faced south, overlooking the Aome, was called River House; the side that faced east, to the sea, was Ocean House. Both faces were glassed in floor to ceiling, so that they were actually two huge windows, divided horizontally by the building’s second story. It was purely a secular establishment, and had no real connection with the Alàntene, or with any of the Cian Modes, although it had been built—by the Cian—because of them. Here you could come in out of the weather—and there were Modes that were carried out in the middle of blizzards, or in the broiling, near-fatal heat of high summer—and watch the ceremonies through glass for a while; here you could relax on loungers and hammocks and refresh yourself with the variety of essences, liqueurs and foods that were on sale. The Modes had been around for a very long time, and the Cian were well aware of their entertainment value, and the possibilities for commercial profit that were created thereby. And had been so aware for hundreds of years, long before the first outworlder had arrived. It was not a matter of the Modes being exploited by crass aliens; the Cian exploited them themselves, cheerfully, and no one seemed to be upset by it. And yet there was a depth of solemn belief, a feeling of pure religiosity to the Modes that had died out of Terra generations ago. It was a point of contention among the Earthmen: whether the Modes were religion, or were considered by the urban Cian to be merely a body of quaint and charming tradition.

  Your opinion on this, Farber now believed, would be determined by where you stood during the Mode. Here in Ocean House, surrounded by Cian who were relaxing and watching the show through the huge window-walls, or chatting with their friends, or strolling on the portico, or devouring essences and batter-fried blackfish, as easy and sophisticated as any crowd of city people anywhere, one would certainly opt for tradition. Down on the beach packed in with the indefatigable mass of swaying, stamping groaning devotees, you would come to quite a different conclusion. But there were not two separate groups of Cian; they mingled indiscriminately—often the chefs and concessionaries of Ocean House/River House would come down to take part in the Mode after their work shift, and some of the sweating, earnest spectators would eventually drift up to the big building for rest and essences. It was a dichotomy that no Earthman understood, and now Farber intuited dimly that it was only the tip of an iceberg.

  He purchased a fuge—a gelatin concoction something like a cross between chocolate pudding and raw jellyfish—from a concessionaire, and strolled slowly through the corridors of Ocean House. Most of his terror had passed, leaving him sad and contemplative. He made his way up to the second story, which had a better overview of the beach. The lighting here was dim and diffuse, and Farber felt as if he was walking in a glass tunnel under the sea. He drifted over to the window-wall. The Alàntene glittered far below, the tiny figures swaying and whirling, a masque performed by animate, passionate dolls. Its flaring light struck odd reticulations from the vaulted ceiling of Ocean House, sent hunched shadows capering wildly across the stone floor. After a while, Farber became aware that someone was there with him, watching the fire and the night. The other had been there all along, hidden in the gloom at the bottom of a pillar, silent as a shadow, with only its presence to grow patient and gradual in Farber’s mind, until at last he must turn his head to look, not knowing why he did. He squinted. It was a woman. She felt his gaze and turned away from the window. The Alàntene washed half her face with fire-shot light, left the other half in shadow. One eye glinted clear silver, the other was a pale ember in darkness. She looked at him.

  “Hello,” she said. “I, do not speik, this, well.” Her voice was low. Her English—a tongue that this group of Earthmen had the audacity to represent to the Cian as the Terran language—was halting and heavily accented.

  “We, it is of no circumstance,” Farber answered, in her own language, which he had learned by subcerebral techniques. It seemed a curiously evasive tongue to him, its simple grammar and syntax masking a million quicksilver shifts in meaning that he could never quite grasp. He wondered if he had impressed the woman with his cosmopolitanism. She did not speak again, and at last he said, “Hello,” belatedly, to break the inscrutable silence. He felt inane.

  She nodded to him with somber formality. Then she smiled, quick and startling. “Do you”—she gestured with her head at the beach—“enjoy the Mode?”

  “Yes, I do,” he answered. Then honesty made him add: “Although I don’t understand it.”

  “Ah—” she said, wisely, squinting a little. “There are many things about the Modes that are not easy to understand, even for us perhaps, në? But still we must cope, as best we can.” Her tone was both mocking and melancholy—she was laughing at him, surely, but at the same time he sensed that she was pleading almost desperately for his company, for his regard. She seemed lonely, and yet ineffably remote. She spoke with economy, almost brusque, and yet her manner was relaxed and easy. Her smile was intense and abrupt, flash, striking like a chisel, gone—and yet, somehow, wistful. Her eyes turned to him again and again. He could see the liquid flash of them as they moved, to him, away, back. She fascinated him—almost in the old sense of fascinare, to bewitch, striking him motionless as a charmed bird. She was wild and sad, and she looked at him sidelong through the complex, shifting light-and-shadow cast by a thing that was older than either of their civilizations.

  Her name, he learned, was Liraun Jé Genawen. She was taller than the Cian average, which brought the top of her head up to Farber’s breastbone. She was resting against the window ledge, one long leg tucked up on the stone and under her, sitting easy and supple on her own calf. She seemed even more slender than the majority of her slender race, sleek and lithe—even in the minuscule movements of her head and neck as she sat otherwise motionless on the ledge there was apparent the sureness and total muscular control that marked the dancers on the beach. Her face was sharp-edged, angular, her nose straight and heavy, her lips long and full, her eyebrows like startled black brushstrokes. Her eyes were enormous, fierce and staring as an owl’s or a hawk’s. Her skin held something of the rich, breathing tone of mahogany, though muted and with more brown in it. Her hair, black, was long, thick-textured and glossy, and fell heavily about her shoulders. She was dressed in silver and black, and she wore a tight necklace of amber and obsidian. Looking at her, Farber realized for the first time—although he had known it intellectually all along—that Cian translated as “The People.”

  They talked for a while. She tried to explain some of the ceremony to him. “It is also called the Opening-of-the-Gates-of-Dûn,” she said. “Dûn is the otherworld, the Other Place, and it lies out there, deep below Elder Sea. The bones of the Ancestors rest there, naked, on the floor of Ocean, the Place of the Affliction—but it is not just that, not just the bottom of the water, në? It is a world in its own right, the place where some of the dead go, but more than that—there are demons, and People of Power,
and opein, and they live there in Dûn.” She shrugged, and smiled her somber smile. “Alàntene marks the end of the Summer World, the heat, the growing things, the reign of the Warm People who govern in that season. It is the end of the year—after Alàntene is the Winter, the snow, the ice, the withering of life, the reign of the Cold People at the start of a new year. The Gates of Dûn open then, under Elder Sea. Then the ghosts of those who died in the old year, and who are to go into Dûn, they rise up then on the wind and go into Dûn, for the Gates are open and the otherworld is touching this Earth. And also, those demons and opein who wish to come into the world of men, they come in then. And the Cold People come up through the Gates, and the Fertile Earth dies and turns to frozen ash, for the House of Dûn holds influence during this season. And so, the Alàntene.”

  “That’s—not quite what I expected,” Farber said, a little dismayed. “In fact, it’s kind of frightening. Why in—” he had been about to say hell, realized that the only possible equivalent would be Dûn, “—the world do you have a festival, a holiday, for such a thing? A ceremony I could see, maybe, but a celebration?”

  She shrugged again. “For all the cold and death to come, at least the old year is gone, drowned, taking all its old problems and sorrows with it. An old year gone, a new year born—however malign. That is something to celebrate perhaps, në?” She looked intently at Farber. “And time does not exist, during Alàntene. It is the pause between the fading of one rhythm and the beginning of another, the motionless unmoved center, the still place wherein the syncopations of the World wind up and wind down. Uncreated and eternal. So we are told. Në, would you like that? It means that we two have always been here together, talking on Alàntene, and always will be here. No matter where else we have been on Alàntene in other years—we are there too, always, yes, but are here too, always. Yes! Do you find that pleasant?” And she laughed, her face somber and set, her eyes unfathomable.

  It was impossible for Farber to determine how much of this she took seriously; every time he thought that he had pinned down her mood it would shift dramatically, or seem to, and the words she was speaking, and had spoken, would be open to a new interpretation. It was also impossible for her to tell him more than the barest surface of the Mode, and not all of that. Time and again she would lose him in trails of allegory and language and symbolism that he could not follow, and she would have to shrug and smile and say that he did not know enough to know. They fell silent for a while, until finally she said, speaking to her reflection in the window: “The opein come into the world at Alàntene. They are spirits who possess men and drive them to evil deeds. Or they take the shape of men themselves, and walk abroad in the World in flesh, or what seems to be flesh. You could be an opein,” she said, after a heavy pause. Then she broke into sudden silver laughter. “And so could I!”

  Silence again. She watched her reflection in the window, and did not look at him any more. He could see the tiny, rhythmical jerking of her belly as she breathed, the pulse in the hollow of her throat, the way her hair was sticking lightly to her skin at the temple, the cheek, the side of the neck. It was hot here, perhaps, but not that hot. She turned farther away from him then, as if to look at something way out on the beach. With her head averted and bowed, the buttons of her spine stood out taut against the material of her costume, and he could see her shoulder blades work slightly under her tight skin. She did not turn back, or speak. He had moved much closer, without volition—almost touching, but not quite. His blood had been speaking to him for some time, clearer than her words, and now it was the only sound that he could hear. He was intensely aware of her heat and her smell. He lifted his hand, slowly stretched it out—some distanced part of him thinking in horror: You don’t even know if she’s got a husband or a lover, or what their miscegenation laws are, prison, murder, castration—and closed it over her shoulder, feeling the flat muscle of her back under his palm, fingers brushing her neck, digging into the hollow of her collarbone. She stiffened—while he thought, That’s it! in tranced dispassionate despair—and then she slowly relaxed, muscle by muscle, and settled her long warm weight back against his chest, her head coming to rest against his cheek with a muffled bump, and she said “Ahhh—” in a whisper, a tiny sighing echo of the devotees on the beach. They stood quietly for a while, listening to each other breathe, and then he said, hoarsely, “Will you come home with me?” And she said, “Yes.”

  They fell in love.

  Farber himself never quite understood why, or how, this happened. Like everything else about “Lisle,” and the Cian, it was to him a thing that could only be seen out of the corner of the eye, that could only be intuited and never analyzed rationally. Love came to him subliminally, seeping up from some hidden wellspring and soaking imperceptibly through his mind. It was a peripheral thing, and Farber was not even aware of it until after it had happened. Later, when he had become irreversibly committed, he spent a good deal of time trying to puzzle out the reasons for it, but they did not admit of delineation.

  Sex was good with her, certainly, 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 night with Kathy, 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 musky, 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 as 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 2 x 2, 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—as he had been half-expecting her to slash him to ribbons. She was perhaps not as 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 that 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-grey 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. He asked her if she would come back, but she would not answer him. She smiled and shrugged, still wordless and noncommittal, and departed—leaving Farber bemused, to say the least. He didn’t even know how to find her again.

  His mood persisted throughout the day. He managed successfully to avoid Kathy and most of the other Earthmen, although Janet LaCorte gave him an indignant glare in front of the Terran Cooperative offices. After the passion and mystery of Alàntene night, the day seemed unreal—flat, insubstantial, dull, the colors less vivid, the vistas
of Aei less inspiring, the air itself stale. The routine minutia of his work seemed incredibly boring. He achieved nothing even remotely of value, and gave up on it in the early afternoon. 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 afternoon wore on. It was quite possible that he’d never see her again. Suppose she didn’t come back?

  But she did.

  And she returned the next day, too.

  And the next.

  And the day after that.

  On the sixth day after Alàntene, Farber got a little scared. He decided, coldbloodedly, that he was becoming too involved with Liraun—certainly they were seeing too much of each other—and he set out to remedy the situation. He had an intense, tearful reconciliation with Kathy, and within two hours they were back in her apartment, and in bed. Kathy spent the rest of the night inventing exotic ways of making love, in order to seal the bond. Farber worked at it grimly, but it was no good: he kept thinking about Liraun, he kept picturing her, he wanted it to be her instead. In spite of his resolve, he found he could only relate to Kathy absentmindedly; he kept fantasizing that she was Liraun, and it was this that sparked most of his desire, not Kathy herself.