Strangers (11 page)

Museum or shrine, there were some wonderful things there: ancient tools; bells; plows; keys; painted screens; coins; bronze cooking utensils turned green with age; elaborate bone combs; lengths of rusty chain; massive obsidian sculptures; little porcelain gods; nails; wooden carriage wheels; vases; bridles set with yellowstar gems; faded cloth costumes with elaborate gold brocade; broken pots; musical instruments of all varieties and degrees of repair; pitchforks; scrolls with ancient poem-plays written on them; old bricks and pieces of paving stone; masks; carved demons; bent spoons; monstrous false heads; and thousands of other objects he couldn’t even begin to recognize. It was an archeologist’s paradise, a midden without the mud and garbage (although some of the stuff looked suspiciously like junk to him), and he wondered if Ferri knew about it—having a brief amusing daydream of Ferri sticking artifacts under his coat and trying to smuggle them out, alarm gongs going off, invisible guards materializing out of nothingness and menacing the startled little ethnologist with energy guns and halberds. . . .

In a back room, where the only light was a dusty golden sliver of afternoon sunlight coming through a high slit-window, Farber found an entire suit of armor of an odd chain-link kind, standing upright against a wall. It held a two-pronged spear in one hand and a spike-studded club in the other; a broad, triangular-bladed sword was at its belt, along with something that looked like an oversized nutcracker; boots, gloves, and the one-piece leather body-tunic were black, the overlying chain-armor was a dusty dented silver; on the chest was a flat metal plate, black again, decorated in silver with rows of children’s faces—serene and hauntingly melancholy—and with a lidless orange eye; the helmet was of silver metal, crowned by a rack of bone antlers that towered an additional three feet into the air. The visor of the helmet was thrown back, and inside was the glint of bone—Farber suddenly realized that there was a skeleton inside the armor, the skull leering out from under the visor with sightless empty sockets that had once been eyes. He felt the short hairs bristle along the back of his neck, and all at once his mouth was dry. It was uncanny to look at this fierce armored ghost and think of the ages of strife and turmoil that he represented, that stretched endlessly behind him like a long bloody shadow to the days—unimaginably long ago, known to him only by intuition—when the Cian had been warlike barbarians, when the chieftains of Shasine and the masters of Aei had carved out an empire here with slaughter and sword and fire, perhaps subjugating whole races of unknown and vanished alien peoples. . . .

Bemused, Farber left the museum by a side door, also open. He found himself on the edge of the Esplanade, and stopped for a moment to lean on the railing and look out over the New City. There was the Enclave, its tall glass towers glaringly out of place with the rest of the city around it, and it struck him forcefully how alien it looked, how enigmatic and strange the enormous buildings were with their blank black glass and razor-sharp angles, how cold and arrogant they looked, how unfathomable and fierce must be the race of giants that built them.

This was his home now, Farber realized, this cold stone city around him, and that was the alien place, forbidden and proscribed.

As he walked back up Kite Hill, into the rock-bound interior of the Old City, he felt the brooding silence of his new home rise up over him like a wave, and once again he shivered.

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, for 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, flash-boiling 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 of all of them, night after night. Even in sleep, his reason said that none of those things was likely to be 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 drunk 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 was 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 than 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 would 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 if 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 tonguetied 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.