Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (70 page)

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 shocks 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.

That night he woke crying from unremembered dreams.

He slid further downhill.

The horror and isolation of his situation began to hit home with exaggerated strength. They had been jabbing at him since his first moment on the planet, but now that he had been cut off from his fellow humans, and now that his career was gone, they were hitting him squarely and solidly, and Liraun’s companionship and love were no longer enough to shield him.

She had been his prop, and now even she had been kicked out from under him.

He woke screaming every night for a week, not knowing why.

Then—and this was much worse, this was horrifying—he began to remember his dreams.

He dreamed often of the
Alàntene,
long slow-motion nightmares full of blaring, ear-grating, slowed-down sound and dead, inching, almost imperceptible zombie motion, full of horrible sluggish avatars of himself and Liraun, intolerable because the
Alàntene
was the center of time and all this would go on forever, as it already had.

He would dream of Treuchlingen, the farms, the smell of mown hay, the mountains, the dusty white town asleep in the sun, the red-tiled roofs, the tall church steeples, the people in the marketplace, the chalk cliffs, the Danube coming through those cliffs at Kelheim—and then the dream would change. Earthquake! The ground smoking and sinking as if struck by a great cloven hoof, the earth opening, tossing, grinding, the neat, tile-roofed towns being kicked to flinders, going up in flames—War! Only minutes from the border, the gleaming silver needles flashing down, nothing left but ash and ghosts and fused puddles of quartz, fused ashen ghosts, quartzite bones—Nova! That burst of clear light stripping the air away, flashboiling the seas, baking the land to slag—The meteor pulverizing the globe; the toppling axis whipping the world away; the moon falling like a pregnant porcelain cow; the seas marching over the land in war; the Ice Age making the planet safe for silence; the fungus whispering over the Earth in a rusty bronze shroud—Any or all of them, night after night. Even in sleep, his reason said that none of those things was likely to be happening, but his gut said, Who knows what’s happening to an Earth lost among the stars?, and it was the gut that ruled the dreams. It had an unreasoning solipsistic bias that made him feel the Earth couldn’t continue to exist without him; now that he was gone from her, his protection would be withdrawn, and all the disasters he had been keeping from Earth by personal force of will would
happen,
all at once. They did, in his dreams. And he would twist awake to the ugly sound of his own screaming.

He would dream that he was awake, and he would get up and walk to the foot of the staircase on his way upstairs, and the mirror on the wall there would give him his reflection—distorted, twisted, slimy, skin running with pustules, scabs, horns, claws, demon eyes: a monster.

He dreamed that Liraun gave birth to a worm that howled.

He began to drink.

Farber had never been averse to an occasional drink, but now he started to drink in earnest—moderately heavy at first, then heavily, and then very heavily indeed. It helped; it definitely helped. Deaden the nerves enough, numb the brain sufficiently, and he didn’t worry about bad dreams. He didn’t worry about much of anything. He kept drinking. He began to buy pills from the Enclave black market, rationalizing it magnificently every step of the way, and from then on chased his liquors with downers, and vice versa. He experimented with native brews. With wines and whiskeys fermented from odd alien substances. He found a soapy native root that looked something like a yam, and which, when dissolved in wine, was even better than the pills. It was cheaper too.

He was blotto most of the time now.

He was beginning to get fat.

Thanks to an iron constitution, he was still amazingly healthy, considering what he was inflicting on his body every day. But his hands, he noticed, were just starting to develop a fine tremor.

How long until he pushed himself beyond the chance of recovery?

A little more wine.

At least he was a courtly drunk, he told himself. Although he might get maudlin when he sloshed, he was never abusive or discourteous to Liraun. He never beat her up or bullied her around. He didn’t let himself get mean with her, pulled himself up sharp if he saw it building in himself. Least he could do. Least he owed her. She deserved better that having some drunken fool slap her around when she came home from working to support them. Don’t let that happen! he told himself, feeling like he was shouting into a deep dry well. Liraun still seemed fairly happy, although she must be disappointed in him—she still treated him the same way she always had, comforting him when he’d wake up screaming, cooking for him, ignoring his delicate condition. Putting up with him, poor woman, he told himself. Poor woman.

A little more wine.

Somewhere in his head, the first sly, insidious thought of suicide.

A few days later, Liraun suddenly became withdrawn, nervous, and rather grim. Farber wondered if she hadn’t finally gotten fed up with him, and cut back visibly on the booze for almost three days, in a half-sly, half-sincere effort to placate her. But this was wasted effort on Farber’s part—it wasn’t his drinking that was on her mind.

Early in the evening on Farber’s third night of semi-abstention, she told him what really was on her mind. It was the beginning of
weinunid,
she explained, one of the times that came every four years when a wife was allowed by custom to conceive. If Farber wished to “start” children to be born in the current surge, he would have to impregnate her within the next four days. Otherwise he would have to wait four years to the beginning of the next surge, when she could be required by custom to conceive anyway—four years being the maximum time a couple could remain childless. Most couples waited the maximum four years before starting children. But by custom, the decision was Farber’s—he could make her conceive now instead, if he wished.

All this was explained in a halting, reluctant voice, as the words were being yanked out of her on a string, against her will. The taboo against discussing personal matters—even with your husband, apparently, or was that because he was Terran?—was a powerful one. Most of the time it was satisfied by discussing such things only in the most circuitous and symbolic of speech; when bald words were necessary, as now, it was enough of a strain to make a normally loquacious woman into a tongue-tied stutterer.

But there was something else wrong, this time. He studied her closely. She was still nervously grim. She was standing stiffly, feet braced. Her eyes were narrowed, a muscle in her jaw was tensed. A few beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. She was still trying, clumsily, to talk about the
weinunid.

So that’s it,
he suddenly realized.
She wants a child! and she knows if I don’t opt for one now, she’ll have to wait another four years. And of course it would be against custom to try to influence my decision. That’s the reason for this grim waiting silence. She wants a child.

He stared at her, waiting for the idea to sink in.

When it did, his first reaction was,
Well, why not?
She had to have something for herself. God knows, she got little enough out of him these days. If she really wanted it, why not let her have it? He owed her that much, or more, putting up with a sad fool like himself all this time. Besides, maybe it would settle her down some. Settle things down all around. Even him? Well—if he got better they’d have a family, and if he got worse at least the baby would be some comfort to her.

“Would you like to have a child, Liraun?” he asked her in a careful voice. Her face went blank.

“My husband,” she said, after a considerable pause, “at the
Alàntene,
do you recall a group of Elders at the far end of the beach,
twizan
who spoke instead of dancing or singing?”

“Yes.”

“Those
twizan
were enacting the story of the First Woman. And this, in different words, is that story.” She struck a posture, and began in a subtly altered voice: “In the First Days, before the world was wholly made, and before Harmony had yet been established, there was no life on the land. All People who then lived dwelt in Elder Sea. Among them were the Ancestors, for at this time the Ancestors were still in the Womb of the Sea, for the world had not yet been born from out of it, and time had not begun. Now the Ancestors went up and down in the Womb of the Sea, and they went to and fro in it, and in their pride they called themselves the Lords of All Things, for they were yet ignorant, and thought that the Womb was already the World-to-Be. And they named the Womb the World-That-Is, and themselves masters of it. This was an offense against Harmony Unborn. So the First High One, perceiving this, sent an Affliction upon the Ancestors from beyond space. So it struck them down, and the manner of the smiting was this: that the Womb of the Sea, the Womb-That-Was-Ocean, became blighted and shriveled, and the Ancestors were every one of them killed, save two. The bones of the dead Ancestors were sunk to the Place of Affliction on the bottom of Elder Sea, but the two who were spared were cast up naked on the land, because the Womb would hold them no more. They were the First Man and First Woman. They stood in barren desert, and nothing moved in all the World though time had begun, because the land could bring forth no life. Seeing this, the First Woman knew what she must do, and she said, ‘I will give of myself, and infuse the World with the life of my blood.’ And so then the First Man took the First Woman’s blood, and with it he made the clear rivers that run over the land, and the pools that lie in the land. And he took the First Woman’s dung, and with it he made the Fertile Earth that covers the land and is the house of life, and with the First Woman’s hair he made all the plants and the trees that are in the World and grow in the Fertile Earth. Then the First Man broke the First Woman’s body into parts, and she cried out in great pain, but he sculpted the parts of her body as clay, and from them he made all the beasts who roam abroad in the World, and all the People who dwell on the Fertile Earth. But the First Woman’s cry of pain shattered and escaped, and the four shards of it became the four winds that wander forever about the World, looking for a surcease of pain that is not in it. And so it has always been the duty of the descendants of the First Woman to replenish the World with their bodies, and to bring forth life out of themselves with pain.”