Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  If Farber had known more about guns, he would never have done what he did then. He lowered the pistol, aimed, and fired two quick shots into the cobblestone at the feet of the crowd. Instantly, he felt something hot whiz by his own ear; a window shattered; a tikan held by a musician splintered across its neck; another musician clutched his arm and almost fell; a jeweled eye flew off a Talisman—all at the same time, as it seemed. There was a sound such as a very rapidly ticking clock might make, if its gears were made of stone and iron, interlaced with little giggling echoes. In that narrow place, the bullets had ricocheted maybe thirty or forty times in a fraction of a second, from wall to wall to wall.

  Everyone was dazed by this—again including Farber—but Farber recovered first. He took three quick steps forward, shouting, and firing the pistol again, into the air this time.

  The crowd fell back.

  Farber pressed forward rapidly; the crowd parted and fell away as the Red Sea had for Moses, and there was Jacawen, just seeming to appear in Farber’s path—another conjuring trick—as the crowd fell back behind him, a small, somber, unyielding man, the only one in the street who was not in motion.

  Jacawen did not fall back.

  Farber stopped. He was aware that the rest of the Cian had kept retreating, leaving Jacawen to face him alone, but only subliminally aware—all his attention was fixed rigidly on Jacawen, so much so that he was losing color and detail around the periphery of his vision.

  “Our ways are not your ways, Mr. Farber,” Jacawen said.

  Farber’s fingers were turning white as they clutched the pistol grip. “Get out of here,” Farber said in a voice so strained that it gave every syllable in every word the same flat, unstressed emphasis.

  Jacawen said something in reply, too tight and fast for Farber to be able to follow the dialect—the only indication Jacawen gave of the intense emotional strain he himself was under. By the time his enunciation had flattened into partial intelligibility, he was saying, “know. I warn you; if you keep on with this”—mistake? sin?—too garbled—“you will be damning her to” hell? “you will be condemning your own wife.”

  “I don’t care about your goddamn religion,” Farber snapped.

  Another garbled reply, then: “(?) death. They do not suffer. At the Birth House we give them a drug that obliterates consciousness, without pain.”

  “I don’t want to hear how you rationalize your fucking little murders, either,” Farber said, a detached part of his mind wondering how his voice could possibly sound like that. “Now get out of here!”

  “You’re consigning your wife to agony!”

  “Let me worry about her soul, huh?” Farber shouted.

  “Mr. Farber—”

  Farber pointed the pistol at Jacawen’s abdomen.

  A silence. Then Jacawen said, “Our ways are not your ways, Mr. Farber.” Farber jacked a round into the chamber.

  A long moment, with Jacawen staring at Farber, a very odd expression on his face. Then Jacawen shook his head, and turned away. He walked off down the Row, moderately quick, a small stiff figure dwindling into the slit-eye sliver of red lidded with black that was all there was left of the sunset.

  Farber was alone in the street.

  When the eye on the edge of the world closed, and night was complete, he went back into the house. It was dark inside. For a moment, he thought that he couldn’t hear Liraun’s breathing, and then he caught it: very slow and thready. He fumbled his way to the heating globe and started it, flooding the room with golden light.

  Liraun was sitting in the chair, unmoving, just the way he’d left her.

  Farber stared at her. She stared back, blankly, though if he stepped out of her line of vision her eyes did not move to follow him. He made an impatient noise. “You don’t have to be afraid any more,” he said. “You’re safe now—I saved you, I scared them off. They won’t be back any more. You don’t have to die. Do you understand that?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Sighing, he sat down. He leaned his head back against the wall.

  Time seemed to stop then, or at least blur its edges. He very nearly fell into a trance state himself, nodding in and out of sleep. After a long time, someone outside in the street—possibly the soúbrae, from the sound—began to wail “Opein! Opein!” in a voice that thrilled with a kind of despairing horror. That roused Farber a little, and for a while he sat there thinking that the Twilight People had concluded that the whole mess had been caused by an opein who had possessed Liraun at the Alàntene, and how tidy an explanation that was, but the voice keening “Opein! Opein!” went on so long and monotonously, and it was such a droning thing even in its sorrow, that it lulled him back into his nod-and-daze, and it wasn’t until after the voice had been silent for a very long time that he realized, belatedly, that it had stopped. He skimmed on, right on the borderline of sleep, aware only of the slight purr of the heating globe, the beating of his own heart, of Liraun’s, of his slow breathing, Liraun’s, and so on in a diminishing spiral, until he became aware, again belatedly, that he had also been listening to an ascending series of sounds in counterpoint, a series of little panting sighs from Liraun, each one the smallest fraction hoarser than the one that had come before. Then—belatedly—silence.

  Huuunnn, said Liraun through the silence.

  He shook himself awake, shatteringly, and looked at her.

  Her thighs were drenching wet. Her face was ashen with pain.

  The diagnosticator, he thought, urgently. But somehow, in spite of his urgency, he found that he had not gotten up to get it. Instead, he was still sitting there, bemused, watching Liraun.

  She had turned her head, and was staring back at him. As their eyes met, another pain hit her, and she huddled herself around it, hugging it, shoulders hunched, head bowed, her lips wrenching open to emit a sound that was not quite a scream. Then it passed, and she slumped in the chair, panting. After a second, her breathing steadied a little. She looked back up at him. Her neck muscles were corded, and her skin was shiny with sweat, but her eyes were alive and alert now in her pain-soddened face. They watched him with incongruous calm. She studied him silently for a while, and then she began to speak in an even, passionless voice, without prelude, as though resuming a conversation already in progress.

  “When you came into Ocean House at Alàntene, and I saw you,” she said, “I knew that our souls had been told to twine about each other, by the People Under the Sea, who grow men as men grow flowers and fruits and vines. I knew, then, that they meant for our lives to be wound together, like vines that grow so interlaced around a trellis that no man can say where one ends and another begins. That came to me then, in a whisper from Under the Sea, as I watched you, long before you saw me, I watched you. And I thought—I thought many things. You were alone. I knew that you were one of the Distant Men, not of this world, but I also knew that even among them, the others of your race, you would be alone, always alone. In the heart of the Alàntene you walked alone and no one touched you, and only I saw that, only I. I saw. Because I too have been alone always among my own people, and I thought, Like me, he has only half a soul, and I thought, Put them together, the halves.”

  She stopped to fold herself around a pain, her eyes rolling into her head. Time the contractions, Farber’s subcerebral training told him, but he made no move to do so; like Coleridge’s Wedding Guest, he had been charmed. When she was able to use her breath for speech, she said: “And so you took me. So I let you take me. And because you wanted me I knew that the People Under the Sea had spoken to you as well as to me, and that the night was ordained for our use. I expected no more than the night that had been given us, the Alàntene night. But you asked me to come back again, and I did, and another night and another, and I did. You asked me to share your hearth, and I did even that, although it was against custom and caused disharmony with my people. And during all that time I did not dare to hope for fear the hope would be taken away from me. But then you said that we would ma
rry, and I thought, At last I have something that I can keep.” Another pain—this time it took longer to pass, and when she spoke again, her voice had deepened and hoarsened, as though she was controlling her diaphragm only by an intense effort of will. “And I was happy as your wife. But when weinunid came, and you said that you wished me to conceive, I was hurt, hurt that you did not want to take the full four years of life together that were ours by custom before I was obliged to conceive. I thought, He no longer wants me; he is tired of me and wishes to be rid of me. But these were thoughts not worthy of a daughter of the First Woman, one who must bear the Sacred Obligation. So I wrestled with my sorrow, and at last I told myself that it was, after all, an honor for you to waive our years of grace—He wishes our children to come into the world at once, I thought, for they will be special children, fair and full of grace. I told myself that this must also be the will of the People Under the Sea, Theirs the will behind your deed, and that our children would be Vessels of Power, Those-Who-Conduct-Radiance-to-Earth. And so, except for moments of unsynchronization and darkness, I was again at peace. But now—” She paused. “But now you do this to me. Now you damn me and destroy me, and I do not understand why.” Her voice faltered, then grew harsh again. “Do we always love those who’ll destroy us? Do we love them because they’ll destroy us? Because only they care enough to assume the burden of our destruction, to take it from our shoulders? Do you think that’s true? Because the thing that I cannot understand is, as you destroy me, I still love you—” And at that, she laughed, because it was very funny, laughing with the corroding irony of a ghost looking back over the anthill passions of its former, finished life.

  She stopped laughing suddenly, and looked at him with a strange expression on her face, hard and intricate and compassionate all at once, very similar to the expression Jacawen had worn at the end of his encounter with Farber. She kept looking at him in that way until a pain hit her that shattered her face, and blew her humanity out like a candleflame.

  Then she began to scream.

  When Farber became aware of himself again, he was sitting against the wall, knees hugged to chest, head on knees, as far across the room as he could get from the bulk of the unfolded diagnosticator.

  Liraun had stopped screaming hours ago.

  He moved his head, sluggishly, and with motion came pain and nausea, and with pain came another flicker of awareness. Instinctively, he tried to straighten up, and was rewarded with a rusty stab of agony, like tearing a scab off a wound, except that the scab was the top of his head. The pain kept coming, in rhythmic undulations, urging him back into the world.

  There was a dirty grey rag of light pressed against the window. That was the imminence of morning. He blinked at it.

  Are you still alive? he asked himself in mild surprise, not much interested.

  More pain as he moved.

  First, he had bitten completely through his lower lip; then, when that did not prevent him from hearing the screams—and he had heard them for a long time after they had actually stopped—he had pried his teeth free and bitten deeply into his hand, locking his jaws, and then, still hearing them, he had dashed his head against the wall twice, very hard. That hadn’t really worked either, although it had driven everything another step away, and at last his mind had accomplished the thing for him by simply shutting itself off, shutting him off, closing down shop.

  Now I know who the opein was, he thought, and then stopped thinking, because it seemed a useless thing to do after he was dead, after the world had ended.

  He tried to straighten up again, and, as if it had been jarred loose by the motion, an image of Liraun welled up under his eyelids: not, surprisingly, a picture of the way she had looked as she screamed, but instead her face as it had been the moment before the pain hit, suffused with that strange expression, the same kind of a look that Jacawen had given him at the end. He could name it now:

  Pity.

  Pity.

  Pity.

  He was sitting against the wall.

  Liraun had stopped screaming hours ago.

  Shuddering, he started again. His teeth were still half-embedded in his hand, and his hand was plastered to his face by crusted blood. Mechanically, he began to work the whole mess free, stopping occasionally to pant while the world faded in and out, for the small bones in his hand were certainly broken. When that task was done, he cast around for something else to do: stand up, instinct told him, and after a while, taking it slowly, he accomplished that too. On his feet, then, he again cast around for something to do. This time, he could think of nothing, no activity with which to absorb himself for the next five minutes. And in that case, he thought with a kind of dispassionate panic, what could he use to fill up the next hour, the day, the year? The years? Standing there then, a vacuum, he became gradually aware of a sound so persistent that it had not consciously registered on his hearing until this moment.

  Babies crying.

  Urged by something he did not understand, he began to drift across the room. The floor felt strange and rubbery under his feet. Automatically, he stopped to turn off the heating globe, and the golden radiance. He continued on through the wan half-light of morning, through the shadows like caves and stalactites. Ahead, the dull shine of polished metal and buffed leather: the diagnosticator, opened and expanded to form a narrow table surrounded on either side by banks of microminiaturized instruments. Farber stopped, took a few more steps toward it, stopped again.

  Somehow, he had gotten her into the diagnosticator, while she screamed and flailed mindlessly, and managed to strap her down. Ferri had taken over then as planned, directing the surgical waldoes by remote, and had done as much as he could. It had not been enough.

  Mercifully, Liraun’s face was to the wall.

  Ferri had exulted over the Cian’s marvelous genetic fluidity, but it had, after all, its limits. It had adapted semi-aquatic hominids into land-dwelling hominids in an amazingly short time, but the same frantic time pressure that had triggered the transition had also led inevitably to biological errors and oversights. One consequence of this forced-draft evolution was a drastic narrowing of the hips and pelvis as the skeleton was altered to allow for totally erect posture, so that as each subsequent generation was able to walk more and more completely upright its women also became increasingly inefficient childbearers—especially as multiple births were the norm. Finally, the pelvis became too narrow in most cases to permit normal births at all. In adapting for land, the species had gambled and lost: they were in an evolutionary dead end. A social adaptation had saved them for awhile, provided by the first primitive genius to pick up a flint knife and help his children into the world by inventing the Caesarean. But the universe had one final trick to play: a slow mutational shift in the metabolism of pregnant women that killed the Vitamin-K-producing bacteria in their intestines during the final weeks of pregnancy. Now women didn’t stop bleeding after a Caesarean—they hemorrhaged and died. It was an incredible price to pay, but it was paid because there was no other choice. The Cian survived.

  Later, Ferri would meticulously explain all this and more to Farber. But although the diagnosticator had flashed and shrilled at Farber while he was earnestly attempting to dash out his brains, Ferri himself had not come over to help—there had been only one humane thing to do, and he had not done it. Ferri was probably sleepless, apprehensive and full of remorse, but not full enough to risk coming himself. He was still hiding behind his machine.

  Farber rounded the end of the machine. It had thrust a padded shelf out of itself at floor level, and in the shelf were the babies that Liraun had died to birth. They were all crying. Using the waldoes, Ferri had gotten them breathing and cleaned them up, and they seemed healthy—born more advanced than Terran babies, they already had their eyes open and were making their first fumbling attempts to crawl. Probably they were crying from fear and lack of attention as much as from hunger: four girls and two boys, red naked things, mewing and bumping into each other lik
e kittens. Farber studied them for a very long time, while daylight grew in the room. His face was like stone. Once he raised his foot as if to crush them—he put it down again. He was quiet for a longer time, and then, still stone-faced, he reached down and picked up one of the boys. His son. Farber lifted him into the light. He seemed to weigh almost nothing at all, but he squirmed lustily in Farber’s hands. He had three sets of nipples. He was screaming furiously. Farber held him stiffly for a few moments, and then, hesitantly, he began to rock him. Tentatively at first, but his motions gradually assumed a gentle authority, and he started, unconsciously, to croon as he rocked.

  After a while, the baby stopped crying.

  Editors’ Afterword

  The stories were primarily selected by Gardner Dozois, with the editors urging him to select stories which were not overly familiar through reprinting, and which were not already available for free. We wanted the reader to have something that could not be easily or cheaply gotten any other way. We originally considered presenting the stories in chronological order, but decided instead on this mixture, in hopes of providing a kaleidoscope effect rather than a more spectrum-like one.