Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “I’ll think about it,” Farber said, and brushing aside Ferri’s protests, he got ready to leave.

  He had already made the sixth step, although he didn’t realize it yet.

  He went out.

  On his way back to his apartment, Farber ran into Kathy Gibbs among the early-evening strollers on Washington Street. Kathy was by no means as much of a bitch as Farber would’ve liked to paint her, but she was an aging, unmarried, disillusioned woman who had been hurt by too many men, Farber the latest of them, and if she fought to draw blood, she might not be commended for it, but she could hardly be blamed.

  Her weapon this time was a smile that cut to the bone like a flensing knife, a contemptuous, knowing, humiliating smile that said, You’ll come back to me whether you want to or not, that said, Wait and see! with evil ancient patience.

  That smile was the seventh step.

  And Farber spent another night of years.

  The next morning, Farber rose very early, and, prompted by some obscure instinct, dressed in his best suit. Liraun lay in the big bed and watched him, her eyes following him as he wandered through the apartment. She didn’t get up to make breakfast for him, as she usually did; nor did he ask her to. She did not speak at all. Her expression was unreadable. Farber was equally mute; he finished dressing as quickly as he could, although he was far from being in a hurry—he wanted to avoid her patient, thoughtful eyes. Those eyes did not pressure him at all; that was why he couldn’t stand them.

  The pale red light of Fire Woman bled in through the blinds, polarizing dust motes in the air, throwing slats of radiance across the opposite wall. The Terran furniture that filled the apartment looked cheap and shabby in that pitiless light—plastic and machine-stamped, as indeed it was. Everything was bland, precise, artificial. Only Liraun was real here. Without moving or speaking, she remained the vital, vibrant center of the place. The apartment was filled with her presence, and with her warm musky smell. She was the extenuating factor, she lent the room what validity it had. Without her, it would be a stage set—flat and unreal. He pulled on his coat and left quickly, still wordless.

  Outside, it was very cold. Farber walked hurriedly through the wide streets of the Enclave, hands in his pockets, his feet making a hollow click-clack, his breath steaming in plumes and tatters. There was no one else about. Fire Woman was dipping in and out of corrugated grey clouds, and hoarfrost glistened over everything. The tall Terran-style buildings rose on either side, prefabricated glass-and-plastic hives, jarringly out of place. They were surrounded by lush groves of black feathertrees, a half-hearted decorator’s touch which only succeeded in increasing the contrast. A hidden something was singing in the cold morning hush—it sounded like a bird, but it was a lizard. Some of the streetlights—another Terran touch—were still on, looking wan and sadly pointless against the lightening grey sky. He reached the huge wall that surrounded the Enclave—What do they think they’re keeping out? he thought. With a wall?—passed the sleeping gate guard in his glassine booth, and struck out into Aei. The streets turned from asphalt to porcelain, and, as he cleared the horizon-swallowing Terran skyline, Old City loomed up on its obsidian cliff, way in the middle of the air.

  Twice, he stopped and turned back. One of these times, he retraced his steps for about a half-mile back toward the Enclave, until shame and indecision stopped him, turned him around again, and set him stumbling off toward his original goal. He couldn’t do it—he couldn’t go back and tell her that he was afraid to do it, that the marriage was off. She wouldn’t cry, she wouldn’t reproach him—she would accept it with patient, unaccusing despair, and that was what he couldn’t face, that was what he wouldn’t be able to stand. If he backed down, he wouldn’t be able to face any of them: Keane with his angry contempt, Jacawen with his cold scorn, Kathy with her smug complacent belief in his inevitable return to her. Not one of them believed he would go through with it, and if he proved them right, that would be the death blow to the surviving tatters of his pride. And without that pride, he would not live. It was the last thin membrane between him and a gaping black pit of futility; he could sense that pit very clearly, the depth of the fall that awaited him. So he continued to walk, jerky, grey-faced, like a clumsily made automaton.

  He took the high-speed line up to Old City. There, surrounded by high stone walls and steep cobblestone streets, the enormity of what he was about to do hit him with redoubled impact. He found a small terrace at the foot of a winding alley and stood there for almost an hour, looking out over the alien lands below. The Aome glinted like a silver-scaled snake as it wound through New City—it hadn’t frozen over yet, although it certainly wouldn’t remain clear too much longer. He flicked a pebble down toward the river, and was appalled to see how fast the pebble disappeared. Lost, lost. You have to be crazy, he told himself. You have to be crazy to think of doing a thing like this. Nothing’s worth it, nothing. He was shaking and his throat was dry. His skin felt feverish to his own touch. He started walking again, without volition. After a while, he noticed, in horror, that he was walking toward the Hall of Science. I won’t go in, he told himself. I’ll just take a look at it, and then go back. But he did go in, walking as though in a dream. For all his procrastination, he noticed, numbly, he was only five minutes late for his appointment.

  Jacawen sur Abut was waiting there for him. With a face like stone, he led Farber through the busy, echoing corridors to a room filled with unobtrusive machines and polite Cian technicians. Jacawen said nothing. Farber’s presence said all there was to say. Jacawen muttered to the chief technician, nodded to Farber, and left.

  The technician smiled politely at Farber, revealing even wet teeth, and bowed.

  Then they shut Farber off, put him into the machines, and did what they were supposed to do to him.

  Four hours later, they switched Farber back on again. He blinked, and sat up groggily. He was on a roll-away bed. His vision was swimming, and his head felt fuzzy, as if it had been stuffed with cotton batting. There was a horrible taste in his mouth. The technician, standing at Farber’s elbow, gave him exactly the same polite smile, tooth for tooth, and handed him a glass of the fiery native liquor. It sent him into a coughing spasm, but it cleared his head. The technician took Farber’s pulse, looked into his eyes, pressed a tubular machine against his upper arm and read the result off a dial, and then told Farber that he was to go now.

  Somehow, Farber found himself outside, stumbling through the streets of Aei Old City. He kept looking at his hands, turning them over and over, holding them up to his eyes. He pressed his palms against his cheeks, feeling the warmth and solidity of his flesh. He pinched himself, digging his fingernails in. Everything felt the same, looked the same, but it was not. Alienness was swimming inside of him, ticking inside of him, waiting in his seed. Numbly, he kept slamming into that terrible realization, over and over again.

  He was no longer human.

  Joseph Farber and Liraun Jé Genawen were married late that afternoon, on the Esplanade of the Terrace, with the towers of Old City above them, and the expanse of New City below them. The ceremony was short, simple, and incomprehensible to Farber, who couldn’t follow the dialect. The wind swept the length of the Esplanade to lash them, and it was bitterly cold. The thin voice of the Clan Elder, the Singer or twizan, sank under that wind, and then rose stubbornly above it once again. He was braced against the wind like a weathered grey rock, almost toothless, white-haired, very old. His bright ancient eyes gave no indication that he found this marriage unusual, though it had never happened before in the history of his race. There were no Earthmen present. Jacawen was there, standing silently to one side, looking cold and disapproving. Genawen sur Abut, Liraun’s father, was there. He was a fat, good-natured old man with huge floppy breasts and a heavy bristly beard. He was trying to take his cue from his half-brother, Jacawen, and look stern, but he kept forgetting and letting a big happy grin spread over his face—he had been afraid that his daughter would never marr
y, and he was glad to see her wed, even to an alien. Several other Cian men were present, but no women. That struck Farber as odd, but he was still too numb to think about it. He was devoting all his energy to putting up a good show for Liraun. Liraun was radiant—there was no other word for it. Several times Farber thought he saw a burst of light out of the corner of his eye, and turned to find that it was only Liraun’s face. The flash of her smile drew reflexive radiance from everyone, even dour Jacawen. As the ceremony ended, Fire Woman broke through the clouds on the horizon, and the world opened up. You could see all the way up the North Shore now, mile upon mile, the glinting bulk of Elder Sea, the dunes, the tidy checkerboarded fields and orchards of Shasine, Fire Woman sending shafts of smoky amber sunlight stabbing down into the rolling landscape below. Liraun turned to him, and put her hand into his.

  Her name was Liraun Jé Farber now.

  They spent their wedding night at Farber’s apartment, the last night they would spend there. He went to bed drunk and woke sweating and sober, with the full realization of what he’d done beginning to come home. Panicked, he sat up and started to swing himself out of bed. The touch of his hot, sweaty feet against the cold tile floor was nauseating; it froze him in mid-motion, as if his flesh had congealed, and he sat dispiritedly at the edge of the bed in a sagging, sweating, hunch-shouldered lump. His thoughts probed and gnawed at his situation, seeking a way out. There was none. There were no alternatives. It was too late. The finality of that was as cold and sick in his stomach as the evening’s sour wine. He lay down again. He catnapped feverishly, and woke again and again during the night, lying still and blinking at the darkness, listening to the small sounds of his apartment. They were all cold sounds, artificial sounds, dry sterile tickings and clickings and buzzings. The clock, the lamp post outside the window, the temperature control, the air filter—all dead things. They were loud enough to keep any sounds from outside, any living sounds, from reaching his ears. Each time he woke and listened, they seemed to grow more loud and distinct, until he felt as if he were closed up in the cold mechanical womb of some indifferent and unliving creature, he himself already dead before he could be born: a stone fetus. He rolled over, and tried to concentrate on the sound of Liraun’s breathing, setting that warm purr and bumble against the too-precise whispering of the clockwork things. After a while, he slept.

  Raymond Keane called in the morning, as expected. Farber felt better by then, clearer-headed and calm, as a man may when he has irreversibly committed himself. Resignation was almost a relief after the long interval of doubt and indecision. He watched without fear as Keane’s flushed waxen face swam into focus on the phone screen—he had used up all his apprehension the day before. Indeed, he was almost amused, Keane looked so hot and so earnestly angry. Farber had turned the volume control nearly all the way down, but the voice of the aging putty-faced zealot in the hologram still scritched unpleasantly loud in his ears. The Director was definitely not gemütlich today. Once again, Keane was demonstrating his basic incompetence, this time by peppering Farber with insults and threats in a ragged voice full of personal pique and vindictiveness that would never be used by a good administrator. Under any provocation. It was plainly evocative of a lack of control, and shattered the image of impartial omnipotence that men of Keane’s position were expected to cultivate. Another fool, Farber thought. I wonder if we all are? For a moment he had a vision of the snobbish, overbearing Earthmen as they might appear to Cian eyes. It was not a flattering thought. He was aware of Liraun standing somewhere behind him, out of sight of the hologram cube. She made no sound.

  The gist of Keane’s tirade was—expulsion from the Terran community. Farber had dared to step across the line that Keane had drawn, and he would be struck down for it. None of this was surprising to Farber either, although “struck down” was a rather strong way to put it. Farber had broken no Terran laws—in fact, laws covering this situation did not as yet exist but only the directives of the Co-operative. Keane had judicatory power over the Terrans in certain special circumstances, but they were sharply limited. He could not prosecute Farber. Nor could he exile him from Earth; as a Terran citizen he was entitled to eventual passage to Earth if destitute, although it might take him a couple of years to make the connections to get there. Nor could Keane keep from Farber a small regular stipend to be paid toward his support. The law—pushed through by Labor—insisted on this to keep the threat of firing by the Co-operative, and the possibly fatal abandonment of the discharged man in an alien society, from becoming the undefiable weapon it could have been. But Keane did have the power to dispose over the operation of the Co-operative on “Lisle,” and he could bar Farber from the use of any Co-operative facilities. As this included the Enclave and most of the Terran establishments on the planet, it was trouble enough for Farber.

  Effectively, it cut him off from all of his own people.

  Now he was really an expatriate.

  “—traitor to your race,” Keane was saying, pious and prissy, when Farber finally told him to go fuck himself.

  Without ceremony, they left the Enclave.

  That afternoon, they moved up to Old City.

  As a member of the Thousand Families, it was Liraun’s privilege to live in Old City, and, as her kin-by-marriage, it was also Farber’s. He would have preferred to waive privilege and live in New City, which he found a much more pleasant place, but Liraun was uncharacteristically adamant on this point. Too emotionally drained for a fight, Farber gave in to her.

  They moved into the same house Liraun had vacated when she’d come down to live with Farber—it had stood unclaimed and uninhabited all the weeks she’d spent at the Enclave, there being little population pressure in Aei as a whole, and none at all in Old City. The house stood just a little behind and above Kite Hill, fronting on a broad cobblestone alley known as the Row. In one of the dominant architectural styles of Old City, it was a slate-roofed oblong building of black rock, narrow across the base, consisting of three large rooms stacked directly one on top of the other, connected by stairs and ladders, with the topmost room used mostly for storage. It was already furnished, so moving was only a matter of bringing their small personal possessions in, and their clothes, putting them away, and then cleaning the house. It was done to the last detail within two hours.

  In the morning, Liraun returned to her old job, running a lathe in a precision machine shop in Toolmaker Way, near Cold Tower Hill in the New City. She picked up her work as though she had never been gone. Of course, no one commented on her absence, and, except for one or two polite words of greeting, no one remarked her return.

  Farber was left alone in the house.

  He had the uneasy feeling that everything had happened too fast.

  Farber was left alone in the house every day, from sunrise to sunset. Gradually, he began to go to seed.

  His deterioration was a slow and subtle thing, so imperceptible that it could not have been seen from day to day. Certainly he himself was not aware of it, and would have denied it if it had been pointed out to him. Nevertheless, every day he became a little bit more lethargic, did a little bit less. Every day—very gradually—his mind became a little bit duller.

  If he had been another man—if he had even been Ferri, with all of Ferri’s faults—it might not have happened. Another man might have tried to master his new alien environment, or analyze it, or let himself be assimilated by it; another man might have gone out and found things to do, found ways to occupy his mind, he might have manufactured new passions for himself, new interests, new tasks, new ambitions, new goals. But Farber was not another man. He was himself, and it happened. He went to seed. He was not a stupid man, or an insensitive one, but his mind and talents had been trained in the rigid, narrowly specialized way of his times, discouraging spontaneity, and he couldn’t deal with a situation to which none of the old learned answers would apply. Furthermore, he was in serious emotional trouble—having just gone through a series of long, slow-grinding sho
cks that had ground his identity to dust.

  He was himself, and he deteriorated. There was nothing to do. There was no point in trying to get a job—Liraun’s income plus his Co-op stipend was more than sufficient to support them both. He had wandered the city in a brooding daze until he was sick of it, Old City and New, up and down, east and west. So he stayed home, stayed indoors, more and more frequently. Stayed inside a week, and only realized that he had in retrospect, when he suspiciously counted up the days. He shrugged and smiled, and put it out of his mind.

  He went down.

  After a month of this, he roused himself and made an effort to break out of his dull flat purgatory. He would paint. He no longer had access to his sensie equipment, but artists had created by hand once, and he could do the same. So he bustled around for a while with a great forced show of artificial energy, going down to New City—the first time in how long?—and contacting Ferri, getting Ferri to buy easels and canvas and oils and brushes for him at the Co-op commissary, where they were stocked for the swarming hobbyists of the Enclave whom Farber had sneered at a few weeks before.

  He got his bootleg equipment, and spent the next three days trying to paint. He failed. He’d had a small amount of sketching in school, but nothing else helpful, and after working with a machine that could translate his thoughts into images, his fantasies into film, he didn’t have the patience to spend thousands of hours trying to coordinate hand and brush and eye. He failed miserably. He failed abominably. His colors were either sick and rancid, or totally insipid; his proportions were all wrong. His people looked like frogs, his trees were wilted featherdusters, his buildings were daubs of unmolded clay, his mountains were great slimy masses of broken-egg browns and yellows. Panting with rage, he broke the easels, tore the canvases, and burned everything in the fire-pit.