Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “What change?” Farber asked.

  “That’s where today’s findings come in,” Ferri said. “Lisle’s now in a major interglacial. According to my figures, the last big glaciation would have dropped the level of the oceans by quite a significant amount. Get it? This assumes that, before the glaciation, the Cian were amphibious hominids, living right on the shoreline, in the shallows. Probably they were almost as highly evolved as the modem Cian, intelligent, but not culture-transmitting in the same way that the Cian are now—I doubt if they’d have fire, or tool making, living in the water most of the time. Probably they had speech, and an oral tradition. I get the chilly feeling that some of the Cian myths are older than humans can imagine, that they’ve come down in an unbroken line from the days before the Cian left the sea. Spooky.” He finished his drink. “Anyway, the ice age comes, and the sea level drops, drastically. The continental shelves fall away very rapidly here, and very steeply. Drop the sea level enough, and you wouldn’t have any shallows, anywhere. So it was either adapt to life as a fully aquatic mammal again, or adapt fully to life on land. So they adapted to land life, some of them anyway, and they did it very quickly. The pressure on them must have been enormous, and the situation unbelievably harsh. I imagine that the majority of them died, but some of them made it. Think of it! I doubt if Terran life would have been capable of meeting the challenge in time, but the Cian did. They adjusted themselves.”

  “How’d they adjust?” Farber said harshly. “You make it sound like they tinkered around with their bodies and custom-modeled themselves to fit.”

  Ferri grinned. “That’s just about what I do mean. Fire Woman spews out a lot more ultraviolet than Sol. This planet is drenched with hard radiation. That makes its biomass a lot more fluid than Earth’s. Lots more mutations in every generation, and more of them viable.” He paused, and looked at Farber significantly. “Hell, you should’ve gotten a hint of that from your own experience. A lot of their legends seem to point to the fact that their females practice voluntary natural contraception. Reabsorption of the embryonic material. Your own experience with your wife seems to confirm that, and I have other instances. And, if they can do that, I don’t doubt that they’ve got a lot more control over their genetic material in other ways as well. There are hints of that, too. So, they were forced to live on land, to adapt to it in a very short time. For some reason, the transition interfered with the ability of the females to nurse. But their genetic fluidity saved them. Necessity jury-rigged this system with the males nursing the young. And that distortion was reflected throughout all the rest of their cultural development, until by the time their society reached the point where they were able to fix it—and they could, don’t kid yourself; their genetic technology is sophisticated enough now so that they can do just about anything they want—it’d become such an intrinsic, integral part of their culture that they couldn’t rip that thread out without destroying the rest of the weave as well.”

  “I don’t know.” Farber toyed with his glass, set it down. “It all seems very complicated to me. Ja?”

  “And so it is,” Ferri said. “That’s one theory. Here’s another. The Cian deliberately engineered these alterations in their own biological systems, within historical times. This is a very stable culture, Joe. Almost static. From the evidence, I’d say that they’ve had a biological technology more advanced than ours for at least three thousand years. A long time, right? Sometime during those three millennia, after they had developed the capability to do so, they ‘tinkered’ with themselves, to use your phrase. Why? Jesus Christ, I don’t know! But the minds of the Shadow Men aristocrats are so dark and unfathomable to us—who in hell knows why they do anything? They’re aliens. Right? What do we really know about the Way, what its goals are, what its motives are, what its dictates are? Nothing.”

  Ferri got up and made himself another large drink. His movements were a little unsteady—he was rapidly getting sloshed. “So that’s my second theory,” he told Farber. “I don’t like it as well as the other one, but I have to admit that Occam’s Razor favors it. Don’t forget, though, that the Razor often doesn’t cut it, when it comes down to real-world situations.” He chuckled at his own wit, finished his drink, made another. Farber refused a refill. Clutching his drink carefully, Ferri returned to his seat.

  The two men sat in silence for a moment. Ferri’s face had acquired a puckered expression, as though he was tasting something that had spoiled. It was obvious that his manic enthusiasm was souring under the influence of weariness and whisky. He grinned lopsidedly at Farber. “Two theories, and neither of them really accounts for all the weird sociological quirks of this society. So fuck it. I can spin a dozen more, if you want. What else have I got to do in this vacuum but sit here and make up fairy stories for myself?” He took a ferocious swig of his drink. “If the Cian would only cooperate!” he said bitterly. “If I could just get a female specimen to work on, get her down on the table and open her up, I might be able to figure this out. But they won’t let me dissect a female—it’s such a sacrilege to them they hiss in horror if you even hint at it.”

  Farber watched him in silence. Scientific objectivity was all very well, but, goddamn it, the man knew Farber’s situation, and there was such a thing as discretion. Farber’s mind insisted on flashing him a vivid picture of Liraun laying flayed and gutted on the rollaway bed, split from stem to sternum to satisfy Ferri’s curiosity. Farber’s jaw muscles clenched, and a pulse began to throb at his temple.

  “This doing you any good?” he said in a thick, harsh voice, tapping the telemeter-bracelet at his wrist.

  “It’s doing me too goddamn much good,” Ferri grumbled. He crossed to the bar and came up with a narcotic atomizer, pressed it into his nose, and inhaled deeply several times. When he spoke again, his voice was high-pitched and dreamily remote, as though he had gone away somewhere and left his body behind on automatic pilot to deal with Farber. “It’s driving me to distraction, it’s doing me so much good,” he said in his new passionless voice, waving his hands mechanically, looking like a robot programmed to act out emotional turmoil. He drifted back to his chair, walking with the leisurely slow-motion strides of an astronaut in low gravity, and proffered the atomizer to Farber. Farber refused, with a sudden twinge of distaste—he was just beginning to realize how much his life among the Cian had estranged him from his fellow Terrans. Ferri shrugged, gave him a dreamy scornful smile, and gave himself another long snort of the narcotic. When he came up from it, his eyes were opaque, and his voice was even further away. “We’ve known all along that the Cian language depends heavily on shifts in tone and inflection to convey meaning, like Chinese. Now it appears that words and sentences spoken exactly the same way can take on alternate, and usually totally different, meanings, just by the social construct of the moment in which they are spoken. Or maybe by infinitesimal hand-and-body gestures too, although that’s hard to prove. But Christ! I’m surprised we’ve ever understood anything these people have told us.”

  “How’d you know we have?” Farber said.

  Ferri grimaced, and stuck the atomizer back into his nose.

  After that, Farber didn’t see Ferri again for a while. He and Liraun were increasingly forced to depend on their own company. With Liraun in her present mood, that made it a lonely time for Farber. He was leading a celibate life again, but this time he accepted it with real equanimity, as he tried to accept Liraun’s sullenness, and the sudden apparent deterioration of her health. He was still content, he realized, in spite of everything. His old unrest, his Earthsickness, was gone. He didn’t want to be anywhere else, he didn’t want to do anything else—that knowledge seeped from the inside out, and left him in peace. When he looked to the future, he was full of confidence. He had his feet on the ground now, and he and Liraun had been working out fine. The pregnancy was upsetting everything at the moment, but after she’d had the kid things would settle down again, and they’d get back to normalcy. He was not a particula
rly patient man, but he could summon up enough patience to last until then. And then they’d be all right. Then they’d be fine. And the child—he found himself looking forward to that with a keener pleasure than he’d known he could feel.

  Wait until the child is born, he told himself. Wait until the child is born.

  Sometimes Tacawen 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. Ingrained Cian courtesy kept him from ignoring Farber or treating him as if he were invisible. The cold shoulder did not exist in Jacawen’s psychocultural set—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.

  The last month of pregnancy began, and Liraun underwent another sea-change. Although still physically weak and shaky, she seemed to tap some inner source of serenity and strength She was at peace with herself, once again the old Liraun. But now the Council began to take up more and more of her time, as if they were getting as much use out of her as possible while she was still a Mother of Shasine, and Farber was left to himself more than ever.

  He began to spend time with Genawen sur Abut, Liraun’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?”

  “Yes, Liraun mentioned them just the other day.”

  “Well,” Genawen continued, “the Procession will escort her to the Birth House, sort of like a—” he groped through his small stock of Terran referents.

  “—an honor guard?” Farber suggested.

  “Yes,” Genawen said, “that fits well, although you must realize that there are solemn religious aspects to it as well. That’s why those men are in costume, and why some are carrying Talismans, or idols, as you people would have it—though that doesn’t quite get the concept across. Many represent People of Power, or symbolize natural forces.”

  “What does that one represent?” Farber said, nodding toward a Cian who was dressed head to toe in an odd grey costume, which was covered in turn with soft dow
ny hair—he had big staring circles of red and black paint around his eyes, and gilded false canine teeth that were almost a foot long.

  “That’s one of the Fetuses,” Genawen replied, “and it is ill luck to talk of what they represent, especially for men in our position, with Mothers almost ready to go on Procession. The proper forms must be observed in these things. That’s why there are always at least two of the Twilight People with a Procession, a twizan and a soúbrae.”

  As if responding to a cue, a soúbrae picked that instant to come out of one of the encircling buildings and enter the courtyard. This was the same emaciated, hatchet-faced Old Woman who had presided at Liraun’s Naming, Farber realized. She glided like an iceberg through the sea of brilliant costumes, giving orders with a word, a nod, a curt gesture. They were instantly obeyed. The soúbrae, stopped momentarily, and stared at Farber. Farber returned her gaze. It was obvious that she recognized him. She flared her nostrils, gave him a look of cold disapproval, and moved on. She seemed to leave a chill behind her even in the dusty afternoon courtyard.

  “I don’t think she likes me,” Farber said.

  Genawen shrugged.

  “What does soúbrae mean anyway?” Farber asked.

  “It is an archaic word,” Genawen said. “It means ‘Sterile One.’”

  “She looks it, too,” Farber said. “Sterile as a rock.”

  Genawen grinned. “Oh, ho ho ho! You had best be careful, Mr. Farber. Some of them have power. She might curdle the milk in your paps!”

  “I’m not worried,” with a lazy grin.

  “Eh?” Genawen said. Then: “Oh, ho ho ho!” again as the joke hit him. Farber was counting. “How many men in this Procession, ah, twenty?”

  “Twenty-five in this one.”

  Farber whistled, then clicked his lips for Genawen’s benefit, as the Cian did not whistle in surprise. “That must be expensive.” He suddenly looked worried. “Am I supposed to pay for Liraun’s Procession?”