Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (67 page)

Naturally, it could not last.

It would take a book to explain in detail why Farber became determined to marry Liraun, and much of it would be guesswork at that. Again, it was not so much a conscious decision, but rather something that—he realized, in retrospect—he had become committed to at some point along the line. Exactly when that point, that moment of commitment, had been reached, he himself did not know. But there were seven specific things that took him toward it, seven long steps into deep water.

Perhaps the first step occurred when he realized that Liraun was unhappy.

Or if not unhappy exactly—for they still took much delight in each other—then troubled at least, and divided of soul. Even in her gayest moments, there had always been an edge of melancholy to her, but now it seemed to deepen and widen daily. He noticed it, responded to it with concern, but couldn’t find out why it was happening. As usual, she was intensely reluctant to talk about her feelings, and would either change the subject when Farber questioned her, or become withdrawn if he pressed her to answer. It wasn’t until they attended the monthly Co-op mixer—still referred to as a “cocktail party,” although amphetamines and hallucinogenics were served as readily as alcohol—that he began to understand what was wrong. Prominent members of the Cian community were regularly invited to the mixer, and some of them actually came; they called the parties “Little Modes,” and seemed to regard them with tolerant, amused condescension, as one would an absurd play put on by kindergarten children. The Cian were very chilly toward Liraun. The didn’t quite snub her—as it was impolite to ignore any living being—but there was a thinly veiled hostility behind everything they said and did; it was clear that they disapproved of her. Liraun was strained and silent that night, and kept to herself as much as possible.

It took Farber a few more days to dig it up, but at last after much persistence and persuasion, the story came out in disjointed sections. Pieced together, it looked like this: Cian morality saw nothing wrong with an unmarried girl taking a lover, as long as she did not conceive; there was no special premium on virginity. Until she was married, however, she was expected to live by herself. There
was
a special symbolism to this—a girl was said to go “from under her father’s roof to her husband’s.” It was a matter of ownership, of transference of title, and there was no room in the equation for her accepting the protection of any other male. So Liraun’s sin was not that she was sleeping with Farber—a matter of utter indifference to the other Cian—but
that she was living with him,
“under the roof” of a man who was not her husband. Odd as this seemed to Farber, it was serious enough to get her ostracized.

All this gave Farber a sleepless night. If he had been born twenty years earlier, or ten years later, he probably wouldn’t have worried about Liraun’s welfare at all, but amorality had gone out of fashion, as it periodically did, and his generation had rediscovered humanism and a sort of studied naiveté. So he stayed up to figure out the Decent Thing To Do. On the one hand, he sincerely loved Liraun, didn’t want her hurt on his behalf—but didn’t want to lose her either. On the other hand, he was as terrified of marriage as most young men of his day, especially the artists and the intelligentsia, among whom it had long been a truism that “marriage” equated with “trap.” But no matter how he nagged it, it always came down to that: he should either marry her, or leave her; nothing else would help her situation.

Toward dawn, he decided—rather callously, but a man can often identify coldbloodedness as practicality if he squints at it hard enough—that the best thing to do would be to marry Liraun, but only under the Cian rites. That would make her a respectable woman again in the eyes of the Cian, and yet, as far as his fellow Terrans were concerned, it would be only a native marriage: it wouldn’t be binding on Earth, and if his relationship with Liraun soured, he could leave at the end of his hitch without worrying about legalities. In the morning he sent an application to the Cian Liaison, and a note to the Co-op explaining what he was proposing to do.

Then he went to sleep.

He hadn’t thought to tell Liraun about it yet.

Liraun’s eyes, when he asked her. The second step.

The next afternoon, Farber had an interview with the Co-op Director.

Most of the Earthmen played at being embittered because it was the style of their times, but with Raymond Keane, the Director, it was not an assumed thing. He
was
embittered. He was a bitter, troubled, cynical, beat-out, burnt-up man, with just enough energy left to him to form a reservoir of weary malice. He had been here since the very beginning of Terran involvement with “Lisle,” in one capacity or another. In all that time, he had been unable to come up with a really viable trade commodity. The last great white hope had been a native drug—used for an entirely different purpose on Weinunnach—that the Co-op had imported to Earth as a serum to overcome organ rejection in transplant cases, and which had turned out to have the unfortunate side effect of dissolving all the cholinesterase in a user’s body two years after the initial dose, something that had never happened here in years of testing. Apparently the reaction had been triggered by something in the environment of Earth; something had switched on an episome that remained latent on “Lisle.” That was the trouble with interstellar commerce: too many wild factors, and the rules of the game shifted constantly and unpredictably. Keane, a minor executive at the time, had been swept into the Director’s office by the cholinesterase scandal, but had not been able to get out from under its shadow. Time after time, his experts went wrong, soured, failed of their expectation—never as spectacularly as the first fiasco, never drastically enough to shake him out of office, but consistently. This had been going on for almost five years. It had eaten him. He looked like a man who no longer had the strength to go on, but who must, and so goes on without strength, held together only by a set of complex and rigidly interlocking weaknesses.

He kept Farber on the carpet for more than an hour.

Farber had not been passionately attached to his matrimonial plans when he came to the office—it was the day after, and he was beginning to see some of the difficulties involved. He had half-expected to be talked out of it, and half-wished that he would be. But instead of persuading, Keane had chided, threatened, fumed, ranted, finally working himself into such a red-faced rage that he had almost begun to scream. At first, Farber had been amazed. He worked for the Co-op on the loosest of contractual bases, with effectively no supervision at all, and he wasn’t used to this type of vicious dressing-down. Then he began to get mad. Keane blustered on—the marriage would stir up bad feelings among the Cian, it would be a step toward diluting the cultural identity of the Earth Enclave, it might encourage other Earthmen—or worse, women—to do the same, it would split Farber’s loyalties, take up too much of his time . . . a plethora of reasons, some good, some bad, all of them false. Farber watched Keane’s face as he talked. The Director’s face was flat and dull, his skin the seeming texture of horn, crosshatched with shiny dead places, like scales of congealed lard, where a dream had died and turned to chitin. No matter what he said, the real reason he was against the marriage was that he hated the Cian. That was something that went beyond logic, or duty, or even self-interest. He hated the Cian, he hated the Co-op, “Lisle,” his job, Farber. Most of all he hated himself. It was a weary, helpless hatred, all the blacker because it was impotent. It could not even destroy. All it could do was negate.

Farber could be a very obstinate man indeed when aroused to it, and now that mulish streak became dominant. He began to flush. Unconsciously, he braced himself, settling down more firmly in his chair, flattening his feet against the floor.

Keane ran down at last, and the room filled with a silence that went on and on. Farber sat perfectly still. He had not said a word since Keane began his tirade. He did not speak now. He just sat motionlessly in the center of the office—a gleaming antiseptic cave, steel, plastic, chrome, shiny tile, glass, filled with oddments, plaques, framed certificates, charts, stacked banks of files, a huge computer terminal, a hologram tank that filled half a wall—and stared levelly at Keane.

Keane fiddled with the litter on his desk.

“The Cian Liaison has granted you an interview tomorrow,” Keane said, after an uneasy pause, “to discuss this proposal of yours. My advice to you is not to keep it. If you do keep it, then you must assure the Liaison that this has all been some sort of mistake or misconception on your part. Do you understand that?”

“My personal life is none of your business,” Farber said flatly.

“Under no circumstances will you pursue this matter any further, Mr. Farber.”

“Your authority does not extend to my private life,” Farber said, with a touch of heat. “I’ll do what I like with it.”

“Farber—” Keane said, and Farber simultaneously said, “It’s none of your business!”

Another pause.

“I can make a great deal of trouble for you, you know,” Keane said. That was the third step.

Doggedly, Farber took the following afternoon off and went to see the Cian Liaison to the Terran Mission, Jacawen
sur
Abut.

Jacawen had his office in Old City.

Farber had been up to Old City before, but he hadn’t stayed long because he didn’t like it there. It was a place of precipitous cobblestone streets, towers and spires and domes, steep stairways, terraced balconies and plazas, long narrow alleys that wound claustrophobically between high walls of black rock until they opened onto sudden startling vistas of the wide country or the restless sea below. It was a place of levels, of shafts that dropped down deep into the rock of the cliff itself, going down and down with lights and windows sparkling silver and orange in the depths like phosphorescence at the bottom of an old dry well; of honeycombed bluffs of more adamant rock that rose like cliffs atop a cliff from a terrace or a square, looming up like the stern of a great dark ship and lifting a twinkling freight of windows high above the rooftops of the level below, with more buildings built atop it, and still more built atop them, mazy roofs climbing up and up into the deep blue-black sky. It was a place that was banded by little vertical jungles, growing right up and over the city like creeper vines. All of Aei was crisscrossed with Feral Strips, kept wild to provide the citizens with relief from urban existence, but the Feral Strips in Old City were almost straight up-and-down, weeds and ropy bushes and little stunted trees that clung to fissures and slanting crevasses in the outer walls, full of shaggy agile creatures—something like goats, something like squirrels—that leapt in serene silence from hummock to hummock, pursued by little mewling predators with needle-tipped tails and perpetually apologetic grins on their fox muzzles. It was a place of little commerce or overt activity. There were no shops or stores in Old City, although there were many administrative offices and private homes. There were two open-air markets during the daytime, and hot-food vendors along the Esplanade, but only a few small restaurants that operated after dark, and no commonhouses or entertainment places at all, unlike New City. It was a restricted place, in some ways. Any Cian could visit Old City, but only a member of one of the Thousand Families could live there. In New City, you would often see nulls or clones or genetically altered beings in the street—the Cian possessed an immensely sophisticated biological technology, and their genetic surgeons, the “tailors,” produced strange creatures to order as one of Weinunnach’s major exports—but they were not allowed to set foot in Old City. Offworlders like the Terrans were allowed to visit, but reluctantly. It was a place made primarily of rock and dressed obsidian, interwoven with wood, iron, glass and slate. Its predominant colors were black and silver, with a few slate greys and reds, and an occasional startling patch of orange or earth brown. It smelled of clean naked rock, and ozone, and sea-wind with a lingering undertang of musk. There were few loud sounds, but the silence was a vibrant humming one—as of a million constant voices a bit too subdued to be heard. The mood of Old City balanced on the razor edge between “brooding” and “serene.”

Today, to Farber, it was brooding. He took the cablecar up, walked along the Esplanade at the edge of the great cliff, went up a stairway, along an alley, through a tunnel, up another stairway, along another alley, penetrating ever deeper and higher into Old City. At last he was so deep inside it that he saw Fire Woman, the sun, only occasionally and at a distance as it peered over the jumble of high roofs and down into the narrow warrens and passageways. Everything was bathed in shifting half-light now, and he walked on through alternating strips of bright hazy radiance and shadows so deep that they looked like glistening black solids. He felt like a worm inching his way through black rock and wet earth, until he came out onto a staircase that led up and across the domed roof of a building on a lower level, dizzying and sundazzled, with a sheer unprotected drop on one side, and then he felt like an insect crawling across the naked shoulder of a mountain. Jacawen’s office was nearby, in a building that jutted out from the city mass like a gable, its windows opening on nothing except air and distances.

Jacawen’s heir-son, Mordlich, showed Farber in. He was a tall, taciturn young man with a face like a scornful angel: remote, handsome, full of pride and disdain. He moved like a tiger, like a warrior gliding into battle; his eyes blazed with feral intelligence and an almost fanatical intensity. It was obvious that he disliked Farber on sight, that Farber’s very existence was somehow an affront to his conception of the universe. With a stiff, self-absorbed face, like that of someone who smells a bad odor, he took Farber to the inner office and departed quickly.

“Sit down, Mr. Farber,” Jacawen said.

Farber sat down. The floor here was carpeted with what appeared to be a kind of pale fungus, and he sank into it as he would a cushion. Jacawen sat on a low dais a few feet away. The office was roomy, neat, uncluttered, with stone walls and a half-timbered ceiling. There was a window in the east-facing wall, looking out over the tidelands of Elder Sea; it was open, and they could hear surf and the crying of seabirds, brought near by the wind, then fading away again into distance as the wind died. That wind, whistling in through the window with its freight of ocean sounds, was thin and cold, and tasted of salt, which tasted in turn of blood. Some sunlight leaked in with the wind, also thin and cold, but pure as clear crystal—it played on the rich tapestry covering the opposite wall, meticulously picking out gods and men, cold-eyed demons and beautiful women, births and battles, deliverance and death.