Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  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.

  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 phosphore
scence 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.”