Strangers (5 page)

Janet LaCorte gave him an indignant glare as he ducked into Admin Office B.

Wincing, feeling the beginnings of an acid roiling in his stomach, he picked up the backpack and the sensory crown and started back through the complex toward the Enclave gates. He thought he felt disapproving eyes on him several times, and caught himself wondering, uneasily, how many people knew that he had slept with Liraun, and what the general reaction to the news had been. At the same time, one train of thought running consecutively with the other, he was angry with himself for his uneasy fear of censure, and disgusted that he should automatically start reevaluating a beautiful experience as sullying as soon as he thought that the judgment of his peers would be against him. Those two things ground together in his head, working first one way and then the other, leaving him pinched and uncomfortable at their center, where the grinding edge was.

To his displeasure, he ran into Dale Brody on the way past the Records and Supply Building. Brody looked elaborately—almost pretentiously—dissipated, as though he had been dipped by the hair into a quick-drying lacquer to preserve him, but only after he had already died and been left to rot for several days. There was a crackly, shiny film to him, but underneath it his flesh was the putty gray of corrupted meat. He walked stiffly and slowly, barely moving his arms and legs away from his body, and his eyes were small and red and mean.

“Hello, boy,” Brody said hoarsely. “A night among the niggers, eh?” His voice was heavy with phony camaraderie. Farber nodded sheepishly, reflexively, and then flushed red to the ears with a curious mixture of embarrassment and rage—the grinding edge again. Brody was still speaking, lazily, reminiscently: “You know, I always wondered what that was like, that nigger cunt, running all sideways and all, like they say—but shit, son, how’d you get past the smell? That’s ’ut always hung me up, you know? I just don’t see any dang way you could do it at all, now, ’less you just don’t have a nose.” He grinned a yellowed, snaggletoothed grin that was without warmth or humor.

Distanced from all this somehow, hiding in some cave in the back of his head, Farber watched his own reactions with fascination. Part of him was definitely reacting to the locker-room overtones in Brody’s voice with that kind of shamefaced, hangdog embarrassment that, although it humiliates you, still leaves you a part of the social mechanism, if only in the role of scapegoat, simply because you have been humiliated.
Ah, hell, Dale,
he knew that he should say now, in that whining, half-angry tone,
I was just drunk. You know, Dale, you know—shit, ain’t you ever tied a real blind pisser of a load on? Goddammit, a man just ain’t responsible for what he’s doing when he’s got a load like that on. Ah, come on now, Dale
. . . and Brody would humiliate him for a while more, the laughter “open” now in that insidiously accepting locker-room way that assured that Farber would laugh weakly along with his tormentor while Brody got his licks in:
Goddamn, Ol’ Joe, man—whew, you get a load on, Ol’ Joe, ol’ son, you gonna fuck just goddamn all anything, ain’t you, goats, knotholes, don’t make no nevermind to you,
Farber smiling his sickly, humiliated smile all the while, metaphorically turning his underbelly up, exposing his vulnerable parts to the stronger animal—and then Brody would give him a final metaphorical thump, bastinado, and walk away, leaving Farber to slink off, nurse his wounds, comfort himself as best he could with the knowledge that at least he was still a member of the pack.

Farber knew this game well—in his hometown of Truechlingen, the accent would have been different, and the language and the idioms, but the rules would have been the same.

Conversely, he could flare up in rage and indignation, shout obscenities at Brody, maybe even hit him—and Brody would probably back off. But from then on Farber would be a pariah, an outcast. Untouchable.

Farber acted on neither alternative. Instead cravenly, perhaps—he opted for a neutral gear: “Ah, Christ, Dale,” he said querulously. “Don’t jack me around today, all right? I got a fucking bitch of a hangover. A fucking
bitch
of a hangover.” And he let a little sliver of a leer flash out through the peevishness, as though to say
Oy! What a night! You wouldn’t believe it.
. . .

Brody stared uncertainly at Farber, tugged off balance by another traditional locker-room gambit, not sure which way to respond. After a flat pause, he said, tentatively, “I saw that Kathy woman today, that one you ditched last night, and she ain’t too fond of you anymore, boy—matter of fact, son, you’re going to have to come up with some
hell
of a line to get that little lady to open her legs again.”

“Fuck her,” Farber said, only partially aware that he was echoing Brody’s speech of the night before. “There’s always another cunt along in a minute, right?”

“Right,” Brody said, unwittingly forced into agreement and so into a faint unwanted sense of camaraderie—he was more uncertain now than ever, and less of a threat. Within a couple of minutes, Farber was able to untangle himself from the facedown and walk away, leaving Brody to rub a hand over his stubbled, lacquered face and frown a faintly puzzled frown at Farber’s retreating back.

As Farber hurried away, reaction began to hit him. He was fiercely disappointed with himself, abashed that he had felt it necessary to compromise with Brody even as much as he had, that he had felt obliged to collaborate with Brody in his game, even—one part of his ego busily throwing up defenses for itself, while another part tried to break them down with guilt—even though he
had
played it defensively.

Snaky black storm clouds began to pile up behind him as he walked—almost too tidily analogous to his mood—and he cursed himself root and branch all the way down into Aei New City, shame and anger building up inside him as thick and dark and smothering as the clouds gathering over his head.

The rain broke when he was halfway to the waterfront, a cold stinging rain that he trudged through dourly without making any attempt to seek shelter, glad for the sting and discomfort of it, flagellating himself with the rain as surely as if it had been a flail. By the time the rainsquall passed, sweeping out across the bay to be absorbed by Elder Sea, Farber’s anger had ebbed to a sour scum of melancholy that made his stomach queasy and left a foul sulphur taste in the back of his mouth. He was soddenly wet now, and cold to the bone, but he slogged on, his mood getting lower and blacker by the heartbeat. He paid no attention to his surroundings, didn’t know if he was alone or jostling through crowds of people, didn’t know where he’d just been, didn’t know where he was going.

Ocean House/River House was in sight before he realized that he was retracing his journey of the night before. He sneered at his own sentimental credulity. Did he expect to find Liraun there, too? The
Alàntene
, the night there to be lived again? Well, he wouldn’t—he told himself that with the glum utter certainty of defeat that comes very close to being pleasurable. He would find nothing, nothing there.

And perhaps because that was what he was looking for, that’s just what he did find there—nothing. The L-shaped bulk of Ocean House/River House was empty, a big abandoned glass box streaked with the shiny tracks of the rain. The day was still gray and wet, the air sodden as a sponge, and the beach was desolate and deserted. He walked up the empty beach, the wet sand crunching under his feet, the mist beading in his hair, on his upper lip; as far as he could see there was nothing alive or moving on the whole North Shore of Shasine. Elder Sea looked flat and tired, and, incongruously, like it was uncomfortable out in the rain, getting wet; its waves curled listlessly in to shore, making only a senile muttering in the throat of the sea.

Ocean House was still dimly visible from here, its window-wall glinting through the mist, and, looking at it from the beach, Farber remembered the
Alàntene
, the indefatigable dancers who had stamped and swayed on this very spot, Liraun’s assertion that the Mode was co-existent with every moment of time. Was it here, then, the
Alàntene
, here somewhere behind the mist and drizzle and emptiness? Co-existent—Liraun here somewhere, Farber himself, the passionate dancers of the surf, interpenetrating him right this moment perhaps, passing through his body like ghost ships on their way to insubstantial seas? Listening to wet disgruntled “birds” shrieking their discomfort above the raw gray mist, feeling his feet sink deeper in the cold gritty sand, he shook his head: no. It was not here for him. If it was here at all, it was not here for him—or if it was, then the one who could have brought him to it was gone, was not here, would not be here. Not for him.

Feeling wronged, bereaved, and pleasantly morose, he walked back up the beach.

The sky had cleared by the time Farber had plodded up the Way of the Third Dead Ancestor into the Winterchild district. A brisk wind had come up from the east, and, before it, puffy blue clouds chased themselves like kittens around a sky that still looked cold and wet. Fire Woman, the sun, peered wanly out through flying black lines of scud, pale and feeble and drawn. Even Farber’s flamboyant despair had by now sifted down into a numb spiritual exhaustion, like sludge settling to the bottom of a fish tank. Every so often, as he trudged sullenly up the slope from Winterchild to Brundane, he dutifully unlimbered the sensory crown and looked around for a subject—at last remembering the original purpose behind this sodden, miserable hike—but after the passion and mystery of
Alàntene
night, after the physical and emotional storms just past, the day seemed unreal: flat, insubstantial, dull, the colors less vivid, the vistas of Aei less inspiring, the air itself stale.

Wrapped in wet black gloom like a magpie in wet black feathers, damp and dispirited, Farber came into the Enclave with the dying of the day. He went past the gates and offices, down to the strip of stone that was foundation to his apartment building, and she was there, a small woman standing patiently alone in the shadows, still as a post.

“Liraun,” he said in a kind of stupid wonder, feeling gladness and something else—fear?—rise up in his throat like bronze.

She said nothing. Her eyes glinted like pearls in the darkness, and she watched him levelly.

“I didn’t know if I’d see you again,” he said at last, awkwardly.

“Nor did I,” she said. She was calm, unsmiling, enigmatic. “The People Under The Sea decide these things, little things, births, deaths, joy—” She smiled. “They spin out our lives like cloth, and who are we to know what things they weave?”

She came to him then, across the stone, across the dying light, and they touched, turning, bumping gently together, like falling leaves.

4

In the days that followed, they saw each other steadily. Even after a week, two weeks, as lovers, he still knew next to nothing about her. She was quite willing to talk about her people and her society, but only on the most general and theoretical of grounds. The philosophy sometimes and to a limited degree, but the specifics, never. About herself, never. He didn’t know what she did during the day, after she left him, where she went or why. He still didn’t know where she lived—she had never taken him there, or said anything about its location, and something in her manner had discouraged him from asking. Always she would leave by dawn, like the enchanted girl in an old fairy tale.

But always she came to him again. Sometimes she would come to his apartment at night, silently, hovering in the darkness outside his door like a wraith that the winds might blow away, like an insubstantial embodiment of the night itself, until he pulled her gently inside, where she would be fleshed by the light, given life and warmth and substance. Sometimes she would meet him in the late afternoon, and they would walk down through Aei together in the long, slow twilight, while Fire Woman sank painfully below the bare western hills, like an arthritic crone lowering herself into a tub of tepid brown water.

By an unspoken agreement, they stuck to the New City in their rambles, shunning the foreboding stone needle of Aei Old City, although its monolithic bulk and sometimes its long cold shadow were unavoidable; always the Old City dominated one of the horizons wherever in Aei New City they went. Occasionally Farber would start toward the Old City, a tourist’s interest smouldering to life, but always Liraun would somehow communicate her reluctance to approach it—without a word being spoken—and they would go someplace else instead.

Once Farber brought his sensie equipment, and they sauntered through the ceramic squares and broad avenues of the New City, past Ugly Man Street, down through the tangle of small alleys in the quarter known as Fish Head Bay. The alleys were narrow and cheerfully crowded, their walls overgrown with lush black vines and blazing with red, orange, and silver flowers; the walls were peppered with balconies, ledges, windows, and Cian lounged or balanced precariously or thrust themselves out of all of them, calling to their neighbors across the way, or talking, or singing, so that to walk down the alleys, between the walls, was like walking beside an Arizona cliff dwelling, replete with colorfully dressed and cheerfully waving Indian ghosts, or like being under a moss-grown aviary filled with chattering rooks and magpies and starlings. Small groups of children dodged past them occasionally, the only living things in sight that seemed to be in a hurry. Occasionally the interlacing alleys would open up into small terra-cotta squares, overhung by limegreen ghost-finger trees or ruddy golden
wellá
, and here someone would have set up a brazier shaped like the open mouth of a fish and would be cooking redfins and sandcrawlers, someone else would have a stand selling snow nectar and blue wine and essences, and the long dusk would be filled with the smells of frying meat and wood smoke and strange spices, and with the tinkling crystalline sound of a
tikan
being played somewhere out of sight in a roof garden or a hidden patio.

They walked down beside the Aome for awhile to look at the boats, the bustling River-Docks, the swirling silver water that seemed—to Farber, anyway—to contain faces and voices and phosphorescent kindoms of foam. They stopped at a stand to buy pungent strips of marinated snapper meat, and at another stand for skullcups—these turned out to be big mellon-shaped silver fruits that had been baked in ashes; the leathery rind was warm to the touch, but when the fruit was split open the meat inside was cool and firm; it was a marbled pearl-and-turquoise color, and tasted like a pleasantly odd combination of cantaloupe, yam, and passion fruit. After eating, they strolled back through Ethran and Vandermont and Lothlethren, past the dazzling, sinuous five-hundred-foot-long gold-and-scarlet mosaic mural in Serpent Street.