Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  At the junction of the North Road and River Way, he took his last and hardest fall, skidding down the steep slope on his stomach for about thirty yards, embedding gravel deeply in his hands and face. The impact stunned him for a moment, and he lay peacefully on his elbows in the dark, breathing raggedly. When he lifted his head, his eyes were drawn irresistibly across the low roofs of Aei New City to the towering obsidian cliff that rose up out of them—such an imperative upsweep that it eventually sucked all vision to itself, wherever else you tried to look—and then—head tilting back to take it in—up the column of glistening black rock to the cold stone place at its top. Old City of Aei. As he stared at it, he underwent a swell of such profound and complex emotion that his vision blurred, and Old City danced and shimmered on its cliff.

  Then he was walking through its narrow, secret streets.

  Black rock, high walls, shuttered doors. Along the Esplanade, up Kite Hill.

  The Row. His own house, orange light leaking from the windows. As he made his way up to it, the door opened and Jacawen came out.

  The two men stopped, and stared at each other. Then Jacawen closed the door behind him, and walked slowly forward. Until now, Farber had felt panic and terror and dismay, but he had not had time to get angry. That caught up with him now, in an enormous wave of detestation and rage, as he watched the small, somber figure ghost quietly toward him. It was all the fault of the ones like Jacawen, the Shadow Men, with their feculent darkness of spirit, and their hard, pitiless, flinty minds. They were the ones who wanted to take Liraun from him and destroy her. Jacawen stopped walking—they were almost nose to nose. Bristling, they locked eyes, each instinctively circling a step or two to the other’s left. Jacawen’s eyes were intense, sober, unflinching. Farber had to clench his fist hard to keep from striking him. But he could not hold that brilliant, agate-hard gaze for long; against his will, his own eyes flicked uneasily aside. As they did, Jacawen calmly said “Hatatha, greetings to you.” Farber made a sullen reply. Jacawen nodded politely, and started walking again. Farber pushed himself against the wall to let him go by. The thought of touching him was suddenly amazingly repugnant, and Farber gave him plenty of room.

  Then he was gone. Farber turned and slammed into the house.

  Liraun looked up from a chair, saying, “Joseph—?” Then she stopped. Farber’s clothes were grimy and torn, he was scratched in a dozen places and there was dried blood on his face. He looked ghastly. Liraun stared at him in amazement.

  “What was he doing here?” Farber demanded.

  “My husband—?”

  “What was he doing here?”

  “I don’t understand,” Liraun said. She got painfully to her feet. “You mean Jacawen?”

  “Yes. I don’t want him around here, and I want to know why he was sucking around when I was gone. You understand?”

  “But—” She made a bewildered, tentative gesture, almost taking his arm but letting her hand drop before it could touch. “He was here,” she said, more firmly, “to make the arrangements for my Procession. I will go to the Birth House tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” Farber said.

  “That is why I was alarmed when you didn’t come home,” she said, boring into his sudden silence. “You see? My time is very close now. A few days perhaps, në? They will not let me wait any longer. But Jacawen will take care of it all, we won’t have to worry, and we have until the morning. Joseph—” stopping and looking at him in a frightened, plaintive way, not understanding him. “You are my husband. I wanted us to be together. Joseph—”

  Farber groped behind him to find a chair, and collapsed into it. All the rage and bluster had gone out of him. He looked sick. “Liraun,” he said, heavily.

  “What is it?” she cried, immediately becoming even more alarmed.

  “My God, Liraun,” he said. His voice was flat and dull. He sat there like a stone, growing more sodden and inert by the second, while Liraun hovered apprehensively nearby. He raised a heavy dead hand to ward her off, then tangled it clumsily in his hair, saying, “Christ, how can I tell you!” Liraun instantly said, “What’s wrong?” and Farber, not hearing her, overpowering her, at the same time said, “But I have to. We’ve got to face it.”

  After the tangled words, there was a moment of silence. He looked at her as if he was really recognizing her for the first time that evening. “Sit down,” he said. She stared uncertainly at him, shrugged, and moved back to her chair. She sat down. Another stretch of silence then, with the feeling under it that his spirit was swimming back from some deep, dank place. He firmed himself up, grimly, almost visibly. “Liraun,” he said, “I want you to try to understand this, and try to believe me. Okay? I know it’s not going to be easy for you. But I’m not going to let it happen to you. I’m going to protect you.” Liraun, impatiently: “Joseph, what—” but he cut her off, waving her to silence, saying, “Listen, goddammit!” A nervous silence, then, plunging in to get it over with: “Liraun, try to understand. If you let them take you to the Birth House, you’ll never come back. They’ll kill you.”

  “I know,” Liraun said.

  Blankness, then he ran the program again: “No, baby. Listen to me—you’ll die. You’ll be dead.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Oh,” Farber said stupidly. His face went dead again.

  “Joseph,” with a hint of agitation, “do we have to talk about it now? Why—”

  “Wait a minute,” slowly, bewilderedly, floundering, “you mean you know?” He stared at her helplessly. Then something else rose up in his face. “My God! Oh my God! You knew all the time.”

  She said, “Joseph, please.” And he said, “You didn’t tell me!” simultaneously.

  They stared at each other wildly, like things at bay.

  “Joseph—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me!”

  Totally bewildered now, and beginning to cry: “But I did. I have—”

  And that stopped him cold. Maybe she had. When she talked philosophy, he seldom understood much of it. It was so easy to get lost in a maze of allegory and indirection, so much was oblique and subtly implied. Maybe she had. But—He had risen to his feet in his passion; now the strength drained out of him again, and he fumbled blindly for the chair. He couldn’t find it—he stood in a daze, making pathetic groping motions with his hands. His mouth was working weakly, without sound.

  For the first time that he could remember, Liraun was crying openly.

  “But,” he said, looking puzzledly at her, as if he were a schoolboy and she was a problem he had to solve, “if you knew—to go along with such a thing, to let them—Why you must be crazy,” trembling, all his defenses being sluiced away by horror. “You must be crazy! Dear God. Jesus God! Darf es Wirklich Sein!”

  Desperately: “No—it’s not a ‘letting.’ Don’t—Joseph!”

  But he was not listening. He was staring at her in total fascination. He had looked at her every day and every night for months, but he had never seen her. Never. She was a stranger to him. He had never known her at all.

  “Tonight we must—recall and cherish what we’ve been together,” the stranger said.

  He backed away from her.

  “Please, this is the last night we have,” the stranger said.

  He turned away from her.

  “Joseph!” said the stranger.

  Blind and deaf, he ran from her.

  Stumbling, lurching, wet wind, cold rock, black earth below.

  He went down to New City.

  It was the night of one of the minor Modes, the Imminence of Spring, and in New City the streets were filled with light. It glinted from demon masks, flashed from jeweled costumes, and made odd amalgamations of flesh and cloth and shadow. Someone had built a bonfire in Potter’s Square, and the flames ate holes in the sky. The noise was overwhelming. Music stitched through sudden silences. The ceramic streets and squares and alleys were crowded with prancing, drunken demigods. They clutched at Farber, trying to get him to s
tay and celebrate, and he pulled roughly away. Using knees and elbows, he forced his way through the crowd like a trickle of ink working through a rich and vibrant tapestry. The air smelled of ginger, resin, musk. A demon with a horned, wooden face offered him a half-empty bottle of wine. He slapped it aside, spraying wine. The demon face was swallowed by the crowd.

  Walpurgisnacht, he thought.

  By the time he found a commonhouse, fireworks were making luminous pastel novas behind the steep slate roofs. Inside, it was dusty, dark, and almost empty. What patrons there were nursed their own thoughts and ignored him. He bought a flask of strong native liquor from the concessionaire, and took it to a remote corner of the common room.

  For the first time in months, he drank himself into oblivion.

  When he woke up in the morning, he felt like a dead man.

  No part of his body seemed to be working properly. The Cian, who had let him wallow alone in his corner all night, stared at him with opprobrium. He stared back at them without shame or interest. The concessionaire, his face frozen with distaste, suggested politely that—since this establishment was far too poor to serve him appropriately—Farber might care to grace another commonhouse with the honor of his patronage.

  Out into the bright morning, sweating and stinking.

  “I can’t help you,” Ferri said. “Keane will kill me if I do.”

  “I’ll kill you if you don’t,” Farber said.

  Ferri glanced sidelong at Farber, and felt the blood begin to drain out of his face. There was something in Farber’s voice that he had never heard before in anyone’s, a hard, weary, backed-to-the-wall desperation. It was there in his face as well: cold and expressionless as a mannikin, eyes like two daubs of lead. He sat slumped in his chair as if he was too heavy to move. And yet it was that very heaviness that was ominous—instinct told him that anything with that much inertia would possess a terrifying amount of kinetic energy when it finally did start to move, the mountain coming down with the landslide. Ferri suddenly accepted that Farber might well be capable of killing him, not so much in passion as out of a sodden bitter stubbornness: because Ferri was blocking the only road Farber knew how to follow, and the man simply did not have the energy to trailblaze a new one.

  Nervously, Ferri licked his lips.

  “Look, Joe,” Ferri said, in as reasonable a voice as possible, “this thing you’ve stumbled on, the ritual murder of the Mothers—that’s the missing factor in the social equation here, and it explains a lot. But don’t you realize how all-pervasive a thing it is? Using hindsight, it’s easy to see how that one thing is reiterated throughout their whole society, art, religion, the home, everything. That inscription on the eikon, remember? The one you couldn’t read? It’s: ‘From Sacrifice—Life,’ as near as I can get it. There are hundreds of things like that, in front of our faces all the time, that prove—in retrospect—that the average Cian not only accepts this killing of the Mothers, he believes in his bones that it’s sacred. It’s not just the Shadow Men; however much of an aversion you’ve taken to them, you can’t say that—although they may have been responsible for this mass indoctrination in the first place, millennia ago. But by now it’s a thread that’s woven right through their entire culture.” He glanced at Farber’s face, looked away quickly. “Dammit, don’t you see how difficult it would be to buck a tradition that firmly entrenched? Remember, the women accept it too. It’s sacred to them, too; in fact, it’s a transcendental thing to them, a way of becoming a god, if only for a few months. And Liraun has all the prejudices and values of her society, you know.”

  “It will work,” Farber said. His accent was coming back, as it only did under extreme stress, so that he actually said, “it will vork,” like a comic-opera Prussian. “I had a lot of time to think about this last night.” He closed his eyes tiredly. “She’ll get over it. Once she has the child, and she realizes that she doesn’t have to die, that a bolt of lightning will not come down and fry her because she didn’t go to the Birth House—It’ll be hard, sure, but she’ll get over it. I’ll re-educate her.”

  “It won’t work,” Ferri said flatly.

  “Goddammit! It better!” Farber blazed. His eyes flew open—they were muddy and ill-tempered, like those of a snapping turtle. “I refuse to lose my wife to a bloodthirsty pagan superstition. D’you understand me, Mister? And you’re going to help me, aren’t you?”

  Ferri wiped his face—it had gone white. Very carefully, he said: “This is going to raise a hell of a stink. You know that. I don’t believe this kind of a situation has ever come up before—the Cian are temperamentally unsuited for it. God knows how they’ll react to it, except I doubt if it’ll be phlegmatically. If you kick that bee’s nest over, Keane is going to find out about it, very soon.”

  “He already knows,” Farber said. “You know what I did this morning?” he continued in an artificially light voice. “Before I came here? I called Keane up, and I asked him if I could put Liraun into the Co-op Hospital. I crawled on my belly to him. Do I have to tell you what he said? No, I thought not. Easy to guess, huh?” He shrugged with elaborate casualness. “So, Liraun will have to have her baby at home. And you’re going to deliver it.”

  “I can’t,” Ferri said. He looked sick. “Joe, listen. I can’t help you that openly. You know Keane has it in for you. If I delivered Liraun, he’d find out, and then he’d have it in for me too. He sends efficiency ratings on me back to Cornell, you know that. Listen, dammit. A really bad report from him could ruin my career, invalidate this expedition and all the work I’ve done. Lose me my tenure—”

  “Are you going to help me? Or not?” Farber said. His voice had become very quiet, and his face had gone dead. He was not moving at all.

  “Christ,” Ferri said. He reached out for the drink that had been sitting, unsampled, on a sidetable, and then drew his hand back with a grimace, as if the touch of his fingers against the cold sweating glass had made him nauseous. He put his fingers to his lips, as though he wanted to suck on them. “Look, Joe,” he said, coming alive, “this is what I’ll do for you. Right? I’ve got a scanner here, on loan from the Co-op. I’ll use it to give you a subcerebral course on childbirth, take about an hour. We’ve got a package on it in the First Aid program, ‘Basic Midwifery,’ or somesuch. Then you can go home and deliver Liraun yourself, and Keane won’t be any the wiser. Right?” He winked at Farber, as though in relief at solving the problem, but there was a fine tremor to his hands.

  Farber was silent for a long time. “What if there’re complications?” he said at last.

  “Unlikely,” Ferri replied. “Ninety percent of the time you won’t run into anything you can’t handle after the subcerebral training. Christ, don’t forget women did it all by themselves for thousands of years.” At Farber’s unsatisfied look, he said passionately, “Goddammit, how much do you want from me?” Admitting defeat: “Okay, listen. You can borrow the diagnosticator. Its Jejun work, beautiful thing, you can fold it up small enough to fit it in a backpack, though it’s fairly heavy. And for God’s sake, be careful with it—it’s at least a century advanced over any medical equipment made on Terra, and it’s as expensive as shit. I only got one because I’m doing critical field work. Now the thing telemeters, and it’s got waldoes on it, surgical ones, micro stuff. I’ll monitor everything, when the big moment comes, and if anything serious goes wrong, I’ll take over. But I won’t be there in the flesh, oh no! And if we’re careful and you keep your mouth shut, friend, then Keane won’t find out about it. Okay? I swear to God,” he added, belligerently, “that’s the best I can do for you. Take it or leave it.”

  Another long silence, then Farber seemed to untense a little for the first time, slumping back against the cushions. He closed his eyes again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll take it.”

  Ferri drained his glass in one fervent gulp.

  Farber made one more stop on the way home, visiting a rat-faced steward who worked in the Co-op VIP Mess.

  Fro
m him, Farber bought a gun.

  It was an outdated, secondhand projectile weapon, one of thousands on the Co-op black market, and nowhere near as classy as the kilowatt lasers used by the honor guards at the Enclave.

  But it worked.

  Thinking grey, coagulated thoughts, Farber took the cablecar up to Old City. He watched the pastel sea of roofs spread out and fall away below as the car rose, and he told himself, I will not let it happen. He repeated it aloud, but the Cian riding with him were too polite to stare. Perhaps they edged infinitesimally away, perhaps not. Farber was oblivious of them in either case. “She isn’t responsible,” he announced to the air. “She doesn’t know any better.” Almost to the top now, and he felt his stomach and thighs tightening, as if he was unconsciously preparing himself for combat. The car ratcheted as it swung through the coupling and up to the station platform, bright reticulations shook across the windows, the walls vibrated. He rested his forehead against the cool, buzzing metal, and was instantly overwhelmed by the smell of her body, the taste of her secret flesh, the texture of her skin, her voice, her calm eyes, the soft pressure of her hands and mouth and tongue—more a cellular remembrance than an ordinary memory. She was imprinted on him; he was surprised it hadn’t left visible marks on his skin. I will not let it happen, he thought. “I won’t let them take her,” he remarked conversationally to the alien standing next to him. The Cian smiled noncommittally, and edged away. The car stopped.