Strangers

by Gardner Duzois

  Farber stumbled backward in dismay, suddenly feeling clumsy and slow and vulnerable, an ungainly clay-footed golem matched against a creature of tigerish grace and ferocity. He made an awkward warding gesture with his open hand. It was sluggish and ineffective, even to his own eyes, and he became suffused with a dull, incongruous embarrassment that made him even slower. He never thought of the pistol inside his pack. Instead, he took another step backward. It seemed as if he was swimming through syrup.

  Dropping into a crouch, Mordana shuffled forward, his arms low and extended, the point of the knife making slow, minuscule circles in the air. His face was intent and very serious. His eyes were opaque with rage. He began to edge sideways like a crab, coming a step nearer with every few steps to the side, turning Farber in a circle to get the sun in his eyes. Numbly, Farber let himself be turned—he felt ponderous and stupid, and he kept his useless hand out, palm open, as if he would simply push the knife aside, gently, as he would something proffered but not desired. He blinked as the sunlight hit his face. Instantly, Mordana started to come in at him, fast and low, going for the belly.

  “Mordana!” Liraun cried.

  She had found her voice, and she was on her feet. The blood had drained from her face. She was swaying.

  Mordana pulled back in the middle of his stride, as though he had been yanked by a rope. He glanced at Liraun, then stared intently at her. Then, reluctantly, grimacing fastidiously, he straightened up. He shook himself, like a cat, and was once again poised and remote. The knife disappeared—Farber could not tell where it had gone. Mordana nodded politely to Liraun, turned, spat deliberately at Farber’s feet, and then went quickly out of the house.

  Farber and Liraun were left alone to stare at each other through an enormous silence.

  “Sit down before you fall down,” Farber said at last, with less authority than he would have liked. He was shaking, and bathed in cold sweat, and something of that had crept into his voice.

  Liraun ignored him. She had braced herself against the back of her chair, and she was looking through him, not at him. Something complex was happening in her face, it was settling into new, hard lines, it was taking on determination and purpose even as he watched. At last, she focused her eyes on him. Her gaze was calm and adamant, and she came very close to frightening him, in her moment. She let go of the chair and stood unassisted, staring levelly at him. “Listen to me, Joseph,” she said quietly. “I’m going to go out to them.”

  “Like hell you are,” Farber grated.

  “You can’t try to keep me here, Joseph. It’s wrong.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said blindly. “Just sit down. Sit down and keep quiet, for God’s sake.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I have to think. Oh Christ.” Wearily: “Will you sit down?”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “No, damn straight, I don’t understand! Too fucking right!” He was amazed at the harshness of his own voice. The flare of temper took him two quick steps forward, then it guttered abruptly. He stopped, slump-shouldered. Liraun was watching him intently, looking hard as nails in spite of the soft swell to her stomach. In her last few days, pregnancy seemed to have invested her with an odd, ponderous invulnerability, a finality, an irresistible momentum. He wondered, uneasily, if he could stop her. “Oh hell,” he said. “Look, we’re going to work this out. But you’re not going anywhere, understand?”

  “That is a very wrong thing,” she said flatly. “That will destroy all Harmony.”

  “But to let them throw you away like garbage, that’s okay,” he said sullenly. “To pack you in a box, like garbage, and scratch out a hole in the hills and kick dirt in over you, by you that’s fine. That’s all right.”

  “What is left of me after I am dead is no better than garbage,” she said, with equanimity. “The flesh is boiled away; it has its uses: genetic material for the Tailors, fertilizer, other things. The bones are buried, with respect, yes, but with no need for ceremony—all the sacred parts are already gone, can’t you see?”

  Farber turned away from her. His face had gone slack. His hands were shaking. “You’re making me sick,” he muttered. “Christ. I can’t— You are crazy. Why? How can you—”

  “Joseph!” she cried, pain openly in her voice for the first time. “I can’t talk about it any more. It’s the most private thing in my life, between me and the People of Power, and it’s so wrong to talk of it, even to you. Can’t you see that?”

  “Taboo,” he said, scornfully.

  Not understanding that: “Joseph, I must go now.” Her voice had become strained and unsteady. “Please—let me go with your blessing and your love. That would mean very much to me.”

  “Sit down,” Farber said.

  Grimly, Liraun set her lips. She began walking toward the door.

  “You’re my wife!” Farber cried.

  “And you are my husband,” Liraun said in her new hard voice as she made her way slowly, painfully and patiently across the room. “But my children belong to my people. Nothing must jeopardize them. Not even you.”

  Farber stepped into her path, and she kept coming. He felt tired and dispirited and bitter, and for a moment—contemplating the emotional effort it would take to keep her here—he was very tempted to give up and step aside, to let her go, to let her do what she wanted to do. In a way, it would be a relief. In a way, he would be satisfied just to get this whole thing over with, at any cost. He would almost be glad. But in the wake of that realization, triggered by it, came a surge of sharp-edged, unbearable guilt. Unable to take that, he found an ember of rage inside him and fanned it to life. All this in a second: so that by the time Liraun reached him his muscles were taut and his face was flushed, and he reached out and seized her by the arms. Something wild blazed up in her eyes. Wordlessly, they wrestled back and forth, pitting one leverage against another, their feet hardly moving. She was amazingly strong, but not strong enough to break free of him. Apparently she realized this—her face became pinched, her eyes desperate. Her lips had ridden back from her canines, and Farber wondered—with a stab of real fear—if she would try to bite him. Instead she began throwing herself back and forth in his grip, panting, thrashing as wildly as a bird in a net, thrashing with such frantic violence that Farber became afraid that she would seriously injure herself. Dispassionately, almost mechanically, he struck her across the face.

  At once, she went limp in his arms. He stood, supporting her weight, too burnt out to feel much remorse. He had even enjoyed it a little. Liraun was getting heavy. He tried pushing her erect, and found that she would stay where he put her, her muscles reshaping like putty under steady pressure. She was not conscious. Her eyes were open, but they were bland—fused over and opaque. There was a tarry, glistening streak of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth.

  Like a doll, she let him walk her to a chair.

  She would not speak. He talked to her gently for a long time, coaxing, explaining, pleading, admonishing, finally blowing up and shouting at her. Nothing worked—she would not answer. She gave no indication that she had heard him, or that she was even aware of her surroundings. She just sat there, where he had put her, not moving, her hands in her lap in front of her.

  Finally, he gave it up. He bustled about the room for a while, then he came back and sat down next to Liraun. He tried to think if there was anything he’d forgotten to do. He’d set up the diagnosticator, and used it to put a call through to Ferri to make sure the remote linkage was working. He’d hired a wet nurse on the way up this morning, a crusty, middle-aged man who kept himself in permanent lactation by the use of artificial hormone injections. He had the pistol, thrust through his belt. He drew it, slid out the clip to check it. One thing in his advantage: the city didn’t seem to have a police force, not the kind they had on Terra, anyway. The Cian seemed to rely mostly on tradition and taboo, and peer-group pressure: the terrible threat of ostracism. But the system was not designed to cope with a total maverick l
ike himself. There was a core of doctor-monitors who dealt with the insane, and with the occasional berserker or rowdy drunk, but, unlike Terrans, the Cian were not hypocritical enough to judge him insane simply because he insisted on doing something they didn’t like. Not yet, anyway. The Twilight People acted as arbitrators in ethical disputes, and sometimes as referees for the more formal duels, but they had no punitive capability. What did that leave? A lynch mob? Possible—but it should take them a fair while to work themselves up to that. Religion? Moral persuasion? Would he have to shoot any of them?

  He pushed the clip into place, and put the gun back into his belt. He hoped that he wouldn’t have to shoot any of them. Wearily, he put his face in his hands. All his rage had died, leaving him empty and sick. If he could have figured a way to back out of the situation then, he would have taken it. But there was no way.

  He waited, silently, while the day began to die out of the room around him.

  It seemed to him then, sitting in the gathering dusk with his catatonic wife, that Ferri had been right about them, about the Earthmen. They were the wrong people. They had come for the wrong reasons, and they were looking for the wrong things in the wrong places at the wrong time. They had brought their wrongness with them, transported it at enormous cost over hundreds of light-years—for certainly they had committed the same litany of errors at home, lived the same wrong ways: look at the shape Earth had been in when the Enye had come to give it the ambivalent gift of stars. It seemed to him that the governments at home had made a basic—and possibly fatal—racial error in sending men like the men of the Enclave out to represent Earth to the galaxy. The worst of them, these emissaries, were shallow, jaundiced, neurotically repressed, buttoned-down reflex machines, out for the main chance, proud of their efficiency even though it achieved nothing. Certainly Earth had better men than these to offer. Even the best of them—Ferri, for instance—had demonstrated repeatedly that they were incapable of thinking of the Cian as people, and that false objectivity had warped the very observations it was intended to protect. At the end, Ferri had not helped Farber because of honest concern or sympathy, but merely because he was afraid Farber would do violence to him. Even he, Farber, himself—so smugly proud of being an “artist.” How innocuous his work must have been, for the Co-op to be unafraid of sending him to the stars as chronicler of its activities. What was another name for a government-supported artist? A mediocrity? A whore?

  He heard them then, coming back. The Cian.

  Unsteadily, he got to his feet, and stood blinking around him. “Liraun?” he said, aware of how flat and dull his voice sounded through the dusty silence. She did not move or answer—she sat lifelessly, gleaming faintly in the darkening room, like a statue carved of old dark wood. Outside: crowd noises, murmurings, footsteps, all drawing closer. He leaned against a wall, trying to call up the rage he knew he needed to survive this. He couldn’t find it. But, probing past exhaustion, he came upon a stew of fear and guilt and sullen injured pride. That would be a good enough substitute.

  Farber went outside. It was nearing dusk. At the end of the Row, framed by black rock and seeming to sit on the cobblestone street, Fire Woman peered at him down a long tunnel of masonry—a lidless red eye staring dispassionately through a microscope at the tiny world inside. For the first time in months, it was warm enough to rain. A fine mist hung in the street, beading on windows, sweating from old stone walls. The wind that carried it smelled of spring, unlocking, wet rich earth. Spring was still a good distance off, but it was coming, fast enough to make the Cold People shift uneasily on their rock-and-ice thrones, jar them from their frozen reveries and get them to thinking about working up a last, killing frost. Farber looked down. It was Liraun’s Procession, back for another try. The other instruments were mute, but the drums had been keeping up a low tattoo on the march; now, as the members of the Procession filled up the space in front of Farber’s house, even they fell silent. There was no one else in sight; all up and down the Row, the doors were closed, the windows were shuttered and blind. Farber stepped forward and stopped, bracing his legs.

  Scores of eyes staring up at him, gleaming like wet yellow stones.

  The twizan stepped out from the crowd. He looked nervous but determined. “Citizen,” he said, “we have come for our daughter. Send her out to us.”

  Farber drew his pistol.

  “Citizen,” the twizan said, “you must not try to prevent us. There is no other shape for things to be. Since the time of the First Ancestor—”

  “Listen to me now,” Farber said in a flat, quiet voice, leveling the gun. “Liraun is not coming out to you. There isn’t going to be a Procession, now or ever. Do you understand that? Now get away from my house. Go on—all of you, get out!”

  The twizan faltered, looked at the soúbrae whose face was cold and adamant, and then looked at Farber. The twizan drew himself up, and took a step forward. Another. The Procession pressed up close behind him, Talismans held high—Fire Woman threw their weird twisted shadows across Farber, banding his face with darkness.

  Farber raised the pistol. One of the Talismans, off to his left, was bigger than the others, a huge, ruddy, puff-cheeked head representing the Person of the Winds—it was actually a sewn leather balloon, filled with hot gas, used at only the most distinguished of Processions and needing two husky Impersonators to brace it down. Farber fired at it. The roar of the heavy-caliber pistol was horrendously loud in the narrow, high-walled street, and it froze everyone, Farber included, into stunned immobility. Only the head of the Person of the Winds moved: it billowed, a ripple going from cheek to cheek, seemed to swell monstrously for an instant, and then hissing in dismay, began to fold up. the puffed cheeks caving in like a consumptive’s, the fierce eyes collapsing onto the nose which collapsed in turn onto the mouth, the lower lip swelling as the head was compressed, the huge, sagging face assuming an expression of bemused petulance, pouting as it hissed itself flat. The entire thing sagged down over the two Impersonators like a collapsed tent, forcing them to their knees with stately relentlessness. The crowd—no longer a Procession, after this—stared in horror. But here and there, someone took another step toward Farber.

  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 his 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 old 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?”