Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “No, the government, by custom, will always finance at least a small Procession for any Mother of Shasine. Of course, if you want extra marchers, or expensive costumes, then you must pay for it, as I have here. Oh, ho ho ho! Though I won’t be able to afford it for long, by the Second Dead Ancestor, if Owlinia keeps mismanaging the budget.”

  But Farber wasn’t listening. There was a thought in the back of his head that kept itching for attention, but he couldn’t quite reach it to scratch.

  He forgot it.

  A week later, Farber met Genawen again in a little park at the foot of Kite Hill. Genawen and a young Cian woman were strolling six babies in a complicated, crowded wheelbarrow-wagon.

  Farber greeted them, and Genawen insisted on picking up one of the babies and thrusting it enthusiastically under the Earthman’s nose. The baby began to cry, just as enthusiastically.

  “Oh, ho ho ho!” Genawen said. “A fine litter, don’t you think! Just listen to him squall!”

  “They look very healthy,” Farber said.

  “Too healthy,” Genawen replied. He had switched the baby to one of his fat, glistening breasts, now left exposed in the fashion of nursing fathers. “They hurt when they suck too hard.”

  Farber suppressed a smile. They stood in silence for a moment, looking down over the sprawl of New City below, while Genawen fed another insistent baby. The young woman remained in the background, looking on.

  Finally Genawen noticed her. He beckoned her forward, and put a meaty hand on her shoulder. They both smiled at Farber, Genawen enthusiastically, the girl shyly. “Mr. Farber,” Genawen said enthusiastically, “I’d like you to meet my new wife.”

  The next time, Farber managed to catch the elusive thought in his head.

  He instantly wished that he hadn’t.

  Farber left work early the next day and went in search of a Birth House. They were not easy to find—the Cian sense of propriety dictated that they must be unadorned, nondescript buildings, and there was no Cian equivalent of a telephone directory. But one of Farber’s workmates had taken his wife to the Birth House a few days before, and although he had stonily refused to answer any of the Earthman’s excruciatingly impolite questions about the process, Farber had overheard him describing the route of the Procession to his friends. Farber had a vague idea, then, as to the location of one of the Birth Houses anyway.

  He set off on foot through Aei New City, following River Way along the bustling Aome waterfront. There were no Birth Houses in Old City, he had picked up that much information in the past few days—apparently it was forbidden. He doubted that there would be any in this district either; as he understood it, Birth Houses were located in quiet, out-of-the-way pockets of the city, not because they were considered shameful, but because they were so sacred that they must not be unduly contaminated by the mundane flow of urban life. So he walked rapidly, almost at a dogtrot, until the city began to dwindle and fall away on either hand, and he turned onto the North Road. Here he must walk slowly and keep alert. The Birth House could be anywhere.

  The North Road paralleled the shore of Elder Sea, about a quarter-mile inland from the unbroken wall of the Dunes. Farber followed it up the coast for miles, while the scattered clumps of buildings that served Aei for suburbs became less and less frequent. They had all been places with some obvious utility—truck farm, heavy machine shop, pottery works—and none of them could be the Birth House. Doggedly, he kept walking. The towering monolith that was Old City had been looming ahead and to the left; now it pulled abreast, and then slowly fell behind him, its mazy roofs and towers glinting against the muted afternoon sky. As it fell behind, the world opened up, as the city had opened to suburb when he turned onto the North Road. He had the feeling that the Eye of God had just done a long slow dolly-back, like some preternatural television camera, reducing him to a tiny black spot toiling across an immense field of white. The wind now tasted of distances, of all the places he had never been, the unimaginable expanses of an alien world, open to the horizon. It was both daunting and madly exhilarating. He realized that he had never been out of sight of Old City on this world, that his experience of Weinunnach was bounded by a twenty-mile circle. Now, as the obsidian cliff and its burden of stark towers began to sink under the horizon behind him, like a skeleton-masted ghost ship going down, Farber felt a sudden overwhelming urge to just keep walking, heedless of his original goal. To keep going on and on across the snowy plain until Aei disappeared, until everything he knew was gone—to forget about Liraun, about their child, about Ferri, about Earth, to put away and forget all of his old life, to go on until he came to a new place, a new city, to start again. That went through him like a sexual thing, like an electric current, like a hot drugged wind. It shook him and staggered him. For a moment it straddled and rode him like a succubus, then he tore it free. The wind whipped it away, and it was gone. He blinked. He shook his head.

  He kept walking.

  Still no Birth House.

  The countryside around him was buried under at least ten inches of snow, although the North Road itself had somehow been kept spotlessly clear. Nothing grew here now, except for the snowtrees that were scattered in groves over the low hills to the west. These were tall, lustrous, translucent plants, something like giant asparagus, something like wax beans, with spiky ebony-leafed heads. They were heliotropic, and they hunted the sun as it slid across the horizon from east to west. They flourished in this season, in the deepest winter, and the air was full of the drifting white clouds of their pollen. For a while then, walking the road, Farber underwent a strangely pleasant attack of déjà vu that persisted until he had puzzled out the reason for it. The bright sunlight, the hazy blue sky, the drifting pollen, all combined to reproduce for him—if you ignored the snow—the effect of a balmy spring day on Earth, shirtsleeve weather, birds singing invisibly behind the bright sky, sweet-smelling clouds of cherry blossoms. They all ignored Farber completely, and he made no attempt to attract their attention. He sat stolidly on the rock, saying nothing, and in a little while the Procession had passed down the hill and out of sight, into a snowtree grove.

  He gave them five minutes, and then got up and followed them.

  The Birth House was another three-quarters of a mile down the Road. It was a low, long, flat-roofed structure, made of rough grey rock, fronting on the road and recessed into a low hill that rose up behind it to the west; probably the hill was excavated inside. There were no windows, and only one door that Farber could see. It was a most unremarkable building, and he might easily have taken it for a warehouse, except that the Procession had drawn up in a semicircle before it. As he arrived, they were going through the Ritual of Imminence, celebrating the Translation-to-come. Farber watched from a position about thirty yards away, standing hunch-shouldered against the cold. Again he was in plain sight, and again he was ignored as if he did not exist—Farber had no business here, and if he chose to snoop, then that was a manifestation of his poor taste, his boorishness; no one else would take a chance on contamination by deigning to notice him. The ritual was short: after being anointed by the twizan, the soúbrae escorted the Mother up to the Birth House, up to the tall iron door of the featureless stone wall. The door opened. There was a glimpse of someone inside, white-costumed, vague. The Mother entered the Birth House. The door closed behind her.

  The soúbrae turned away from the Birth House, and the Procession was over. The marchers ceased to be a precision unit, and became again an informal aggregation of individuals. They straggled back toward Aei in no particular order, talking, laughing at a joke, the musicians with their instruments slung over their backs, the Impersonators resting their long poles across their shoulders. Most of them glanced surreptitiously at Farber as they passed. Only the soúbrae and the twizan did not look, and they radiated a chill disapproval almost tangible enough to cause frostbite. Within minutes, they had disappeared up the Road, and Farber was alone again.

  He waited.

  The wind m
oaned in from the sea, and the sun slid west across the horizon.

  Nothing else moved—everything was cold silence and suspension.

  He waited, freezing, hugging himself against the cold, finally doing calisthenics to keep warm, jumping jacks, squat thrusts, running in place, wondering what the Cian who were probably watching made of these unorthodox obeisances, feeling conspicuous and absurd but keeping grimly at it anyway, his feet slapping circulation back into themselves, his breath coming in violent little explosions of vapor, like an old steam engine building up working head, and still, doggedly, he waited. He haunted the Birth House for another hour and a half, while the long afternoon guttered to night around him. During that time, two more Processions arrived from Aei. These were less elaborate affairs, from poorer households—neither of them were made up of more than twelve members, and their panoplies were not quite so sumptuous. All the marchers ignored him, as the inhabitants of the Birth House had ignored him during the long intervals between Processions. While Farber watched, the last Procession delivered their Mother to the Birth House, lit smoky, punk-smelling torches—for it was full dark now—and headed back to Aei, their torches growing smaller, becoming tiny bobbing matchflames, winking out one by one. Again Farber was alone, staring at blank secret rock.

  Three women had entered the Birth House.

  Nobody had come out.

  Shivering, Farber slid forward abruptly, off the Road, crunching through knee-deep snow. He didn’t know where he was going, or what he was going to do—like an arrow held at full draw that is suddenly released, he went because he was impelled to go. An intuition had brought him here; suspicion had kept him here, and it was suspicion, having been screwed intolerably tight, that now snapped like a bowstring and whipped him away toward the target. That suspicion was wordless, unfounded, irrational; he had not even really entertained it yet, in his conscious mind. But on some subcortical level it had been accepted and believed—now he was looking for proof. He began to circle the Birth House, thrashing through stiff winter-stripped brush. Twigs snapped under his feet like bones, and branches raked at his eyes. The snow was now thigh-deep. Now waist-deep. He floundered through it like a moose, breaking a path for himself. Off to the side rose the grey featureless walls of the Birth House. He grinned at them nervously as he fought the snow. The place didn’t even have any windows.

  Around the far side of the hill, he found another door. It was a plain thing of ironbound wood, almost a hatchway, set flush in the side of the snow-covered hillside. There was a tramped-down area in front of the door, and sitting in it were two or three oblong boxes, about four-by-four. Garbage, was Farber’s first thought, so homely and commonplace was the scene. But the boxes were built of hardwood, unvarnished but planed smooth, and they looked sturdy and well made. Nobody went to that much trouble for garbage. He had started forward to investigate when there was a loud metallic click from the door, followed by a rusty ratcheting sound. Farber froze, half-crouched, watching warily.

  The door swung open. Yellow light spilled out across the packed snow. Two white-coated Cian technicians emerged from the tunnel, carrying one of the oblong boxes between them. They set it down near the other boxes, talked together in low voices for a moment, their breath steaming silver and blue in the bright light from the tunnel, their spindly backlit shadows stretching out into the barren winter country. Then they went back inside. The door closed. The light went out.

  Farber tobogganed down the slope on his butt, kept sliding when it leveled out—on his back, feet helplessly in the air—as he had built up too much momentum to stop, and ended up inside a snowdrift. He got to his feet, slapped snow from his clothes, and came cautiously up to see what he could see. There was, he noticed, a faint trail leading back from the cleared area before the door, and winding away to the north and west into the remote, winter-locked hills. It was hardly more than a path trampled in the snow, but Farber was willing to bet it was used to pack the boxes out, by courser probably, or by some other big draft animal. He broke from the drifts onto the packed snow, and stopped to listen for an alarm. Nothing. Nervously, he padded up to the boxes, and knelt by one of them. He ran his hands over it, exploring, picking up splinters from the wood. He tugged experimentally at the lid. It was nailed down, apparently, but not too tight. Abruptly, he decided to risk it. He dug his fingers in under the lid and found purchase for them. He took a deep breath, held it, and seemed to swell like a puffing toad. His big hands tensed, his wrists arched, his shoulders bent—there was the crisp sound of splintering wood, and the lid flew open. He swayed above the box, panting for breath. The two brightest moons had risen, hurtling up the sky like meteors—they cast a dim lactescent light over the evening snowscape, but it was still hard to see, and the shifting double shadows they caused compounded the problem. Farber squinted, then, gingerly, he reached into the box and rummaged around. His hands encountered something smooth and hard—it rolled under his touch, he groped for it, got it again, and lifted it quickly out of the box and up into the light.

  It was a skull.

  Farber grunted, as if he had been hit in the stomach, and dropped it. The skull hit the packed snow with a chitinous thunk, spun, and rolled leisurely away into the shadows. The world pulsed and time stopped—Farber hanging in suspension, his fingers outstretched as they had been when he dropped the skull, while a decade went by, a century, a millennium—then pulse, and time started again, the world tilting and whirling around his head as he wrenched his whole body back and away so that he sat down heavily on his heels, shaking his hand convulsively as if he had touched something very hot, screwing his eyes shut and instantly opening them again. The spasm passed, and the world stopped spinning. He put his hand to his throat, put it down again. “No,” he said aloud, in a flat, almost matter-of-fact voice. He discovered that he was grinning, involuntarily, mirthlessly, grinning with horror. At the same time, a distant part of himself was saying, You knew what it would be, dispassionate, unafraid, and not at all surprised. He blinked. Then, grimly, he reached back into the box. Brittle dead things, rustling, rolling things that scuttled under his fingertips. A cold, unpleasant texture. Like porcelain, he thought inanely. Bones. Ribs, vertebrae, finger bones, femurs, a pelvis. He lifted that into the light and examined it closely. A female pelvis.

  He scrambled over to the next box—scurrying along on hands and feet without bothering to straighten up, like a crab—and wrenched it open, heedless of noise, hitting it a savage, splintering blow with the palm of his hand when a nail stuck, the lid rising into the air with dreamlike slowness, as if it were a butterfly, and then, suddenly fast, clattering away end over end. There was now a long splinter wedged painfully under his fingernail, but he ignored it. Recklessly, he reached into the box and scooped out a double armful of its contents. Yes—bones. And more bones. He froze again, face turned up to the sky, squatting grotesquely with his arms full of brittle white bones, like a ghoul caught gathering firewood. There was an odd, dangerous vacuum inside him, waiting to be filled by the panic and horror he knew were there, insulated from him as if by a thin layer of glass. Calmly and patiently, he crouched there in the dark, waiting for the glass to break.

  Behind him, the door made a loud ratcheting sound.

  The glass shattered. The vacuum filled. Before the light from the opening door could even spill out across the cleared area, Farber was off, dropping the bones and springing away in a single enormous bound, like a startled cat. Three strides took him to the edge of the packed snow, up the icy slope then—scrambling straight up it with hands, feet, knees, elbows, fingernails—and be was running and plunging away through the drifts, battering and bulling his way forward, floundering, falling, snowplowing, almost swimming through the snow as he breasted it. Up again. A hoarse shout behind him, and he ran faster, snapping his knees up as high as he could with each stride to get his feet clear of the snow. Then his feet bit air. He fell from the drifts to the surface of the road, hit jarringly, rolled, and came up ru
nning. Fortunately when he came up he was pointed south, in the direction of Aei, because he was in no condition to navigate. His mind had whited out under an overload of panic and superstitious terror. But his body had orders to run as fast as possible, and, to it, the hard, dry pavement underfoot and the sudden release from the encumbering snowdrifts were a benediction. He ran.

  Somewhere in the smothering night behind him, there was another shout. Already it was faint with distance, diminishing, left behind.

  Farber kept running anyway.

  Afterward, Farber was unable to remember much about the trip back to Aei. Cold, jarring motion, darkness, the stars doing a stately jig around his head, the rasping sound of his breathing loud and ugly to his own ears. He ran or dogtrotted most of the way, occasionally slowing down to a walk when he was blown, but running again as soon as he got his wind back. He didn’t look behind him. Sometimes he would miss his footing in the dark and fall—rolling with it if he was lucky, rattling his teeth and cutting himself on pebbles and grit if he was not—but always he would scramble up again immediately and keep on. He ran because it was the practical thing to do, a defense against the amazing cold, but he also ran to stay ahead of the horror that ghosted along at his heels like a vast black shadow, stopping when he stopped, watching him without eyes, following after again when he ran, patient and indefatigable.

  Somewhere just outside of Aei, it caught him, swallowed him in a single velvet gulp, and he was thinking again, the thoughts scribbling themselves unstoppably across the blank slate of his mind. My God, how could he tell Liraun! She wouldn’t believe him. How could she believe him? How could he convince her, how could he make her see through the monstrous deception that had been perpetrated on the women of her race for—Christ, hundreds of years? Millennia? How many victims, across all that gulf of time? The horror and pity of it squeezed his heart. Think of them, the countless millions of women who had gone unsuspecting to be slaughtered, consenting happily to the rituals without realizing where it would lead them, believing the pious lies of the butchers. And then the Birth House, the door closing behind, the sudden terror and shock, the knives. Slaughter. The ignoble burial in the secret hills. And all because of some dark superstition, some god-haunted paranoia, some murderous holy flummery! The pastel lights of New City were winking languidly ahead, and, feverish and shivering, he ran madly toward them.