Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (66 page)

“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.

Early the next evening, Liraun appeared at Farber’s apartment, as though alerted to the change in Farber’s thinking by telepathy. She didn’t say a word about his absence the previous night; she never mentioned it at all. Neither did Farber. He relaxed gratefully into the familiar strangeness of her company, suffused with a feeling of having come home again. Kathy rang the bell about ten, and kept ringing incessantly until Farber was obliged to shout for her to go away. Liraun said nothing about that either.

After this, Farber stopped trying to avoid further emotional involvement with Liraun, although if you had mentioned the word
love
to him at any one point he would have denied it quickly and emphatically. In fact, though, he was coming to depend on her presence more and more. She was a prop; she held him up, she kept him going. She was a tranquilizing drug to assuage the loneliness and horror of exile on an alien earth. She helped him forget that he could stare at the stars here forever, and never once see a configuration he could recognize from a thousand boyhood nights spent dreaming on a hill in the Fränkische Alb near Treuchlingen. He had been set up for Liraun, certainly, by that loneliness and bewilderment. Much of his pride had been leached away by contact with races like the Enye, who treated Terrans like animals—or, even worse, with creatures so different they could barely interact with humans at all—and he was unable to retreat behind a wall of defensive snobbery and cultivated disdain, as had most of his fellows. The path of his life, once so straight and obvious, had been lost in a morass of confusion and futility. His career—once the vital, central thing in his existence—now seemed insipid, unimportant, meaningless. But over and above these factors, it was Liraun’s character itself that seduced him. He was drawn powerfully by her enigmatic and bottomless nature. With other women, his interest had ended at the moment of sexual conquest—the affair might coast on for weeks or even months afterward, but that was only momentum: the tension was gone. With Liraun, sex was only a beginning. Her mind and spirit were still masked from him, as by a thousand thicknesses of distorting semitransparent gauze, and physical intimacy was only a means to strip away the first of those layers. The prospect of peeling the rest of them was one of the things that held him. Also, Farber, who had been used to the aggressive, self-assertive women of Earth, was delighted by Liraun’s apparent submissiveness. He quickly became comfortably accustomed to having her defer to his will, cook his supper, serve him in a hundred little ways.

Three weeks after
Alàntene,
he asked Liraun if she would move in with him. She would not answer him—with that unshakable stubbornness that came over her occasionally, she refused to acknowledge that she had even heard the question. The more he persisted, the more blank and unlistening she became, until finally he gave it up. She was abstracted and withdrawn the rest of that night. In the morning, as she was preparing to leave, she told him quietly that, yes, she would come to live with him.

She showed up that evening with a backpack of possessions, and moved in. It only took her about fifteen minutes to get settled. As Farber watched her moving around his apartment, putting away her things, he was overcome by a feeling of amazement that was almost awe. Even after three weeks, he still knew next to nothing about her. Getting personal information from her was like pulling teeth. He didn’t know what she did during the day, after she left him, where she went or why. He didn’t even know where she lived—they had strolled around Aei innumerable times, but she had never taken him there, or said anything about its location, and something in her manner had discouraged him from asking. She was quite willing to talk about her people and their society, but only on the most general and theoretical of grounds. The philosophy, sometimes and to a limited degree, but the specifics, never. He really knew nothing about her life at all. And yet, here she was—moving in with him. This alien, living in his house, day in and day out. It was incredible and wonderful. Already—as she put supper on to boil, unasked, and sat tranquilly playing the
tikan,
a mandolin-like instrument—he could feel her neat, quiet, calming presence spreading throughout the apartment, seeping into his body like radiant heat, thawing his hopes, loosening his fears.

They fell in love.

That was the easy part.

The next month was probably the happiest part of Farber’s life. Certainly, it was the period during which he produced most of his best work. Farber was a graphic artist, although, like most artists of his generation, he had seldom even touched paints or oils or clay or bronze. He worked instead with a sophisticated device—exported by the Jejun, master craftsmen for this entire section of the spiral arm—that enabled him to transpose his internal fantasies and visualizations directly onto holographic film. The results of this process, rather inevitably known as “sensies” in popular parlance, could be exhibited either as a movie or as blown-up stills—there were conflicting views as to which was the proper method—and were gradually replacing the old arts of painting, sculpture, and photography, now regarded as passé and intolerably primitive by the young turks, among the highly civilized nations of Earth. With the advent of the sensies, and the concurrent exodus of men to distant starsystems, the old school of landscape painting crossbred itself with the travelog and regained something of the prestige and popularity it had enjoyed in the eighteenth century—with the additional advantage that these visualizations of alien lands were filtered through and colored by the perception of the individual sensie artist, giving rise almost overnight to critics and connoisseurs who would argue endlessly over the precision of Tunick’s eye as contrasted to the passion of Frank’s. It became common practice for sensie artists to be sent along with the outbound trading missions and exploratory expeditions, to record them for the folks back home. This was Farber’s position with the mission to “Lisle,” and during the beginning of his affair with Liraun he produced several stills which would later attract a moderate amount of attention on Earth, among them
Woman at Rest, Alàntene Night, Riverman,
and the fairly well-known
Esplanade—Looking East to the Sea.
He was as content as he had ever been. He had the pleasure of work that he enjoyed, the satisfaction of that work done well, a reasonable prospect of future success—and Liraun. And, as men are always ready to disregard the most painfully learned lessons the moment they think the wind has changed, he even began to regain some of his old cockiness.