Strangers (6 page)

On Ice Woman Way, near the crest of Cold Tower Hill, Farber stopped to unlimber his sensie equipment again. There was a black stone bridge here, over a deep crevasse, and to the north the Old City rose like a frozen black wave over the steep-peaked, pastel-colored roofs of Brundane. A thin line of water dropped from the Old City on this side, twisting and waving with the wind, like a plume of moving white feathers. Liraun watched as Farber unslung his pack, took out the sensory crown, adjusted it on his head, connected it to the equipment in the backpack, adjusted dials and knobs and pushplates—watched him silently, as she had when he had done this before, at the River-Docks, in the terra-cotta squares, at the giant mosaic. At last, reluctantly, speaking as though against her will, she asked him what he was doing, and he explained.

Surprisingly, she frowned. “Can’t they see things for themselves?”

“Of course they can—but most of them will never come here, to Lisle, or see any of this, so I have to see it for them.”

“And they agree to that? To see through your eyes?” She spoke with distaste. “They let themselves see the world through someone else’s eyes? Why would they do that?”

Farber was puzzled by the vehemence. “Because, for instance, if they didn’t, they’d never see any of this—the Old City, the bridge, the crevasse—”

“Let them come here, then, if they wish to see it! Better to see nothing at all than to see a lie. How can they know the world, or themselves, or the proper paths to take in life, if they are foolish enough to let other men do their seeing for them?”

Shrugging, a bit annoyed, Farber busied himself with his scanning of the scene, juxtaposing the image in his mind’s eye and the actual vista before him—like focusing an old split-image lens camera—to produce the still shot he wanted, fiddling subjectively with the lighting and the texture, accentuating the curve of the bridge, adding a thunderhead bank of cloud behind the Old City, then fixing the image in his mind and activating the recorder. He had included Liraun, her pose subtly altered to make a more dramatic composition, as a foreground figure, and it was obvious that she realized it: she grimaced, one long canine tooth glistening wetly, shifted her weight restlessly, frowned again. For a moment, Farber thought, with a surprising flash of scorn and amused condescension, that she was afraid to have her “picture” taken, that—like some primitive tribesman on Earth—she feared that the machine would steal a slice of her soul. Then, almost reluctantly, he realized that wasn’t so: her reaction was more complex than that, her reluctance stemming from aesthetic rather than superstitious grounds, arising from some opaque kind of philosophy or mysticism that he could not understand. Now he was the one to frown. He had been thinking of her almost as a human woman—in some vague way on “his” side against the strangeness of Aei—and to run into this unfathomable core of alien thought in her shattered the illusion, and left him cold and uneasy.

In silence, they went back down Cold Tower Hill into Lothlethren, the light dying behind them in long black and lavender bars across the pale plum sky.

As they came into the outskirts of Brundane, they encountered a ceremony of some kind in progress in Glassblower Square. Six or seven Cian men, elaborately and bizarrely costumed, were dancing in the middle of the square to the skirling music of a
tikan
and a nose flute, surrounded by a ring of about thirty spectators. Some of the dancers capered drunkenly about on stilts with great black bat wings flapping from their backs, some squirmed bonelessly across the cool blue tiles on their bellies, some whirled and hopped and genuflected, but the center of attention was a huge, grotesquely jigging false head—also on stilts—with three carved and painted faces: one looking straight ahead, one looking right, one looking left. The faces were inscrutable and fierce, so contorted and stylized that it was difficult to tell if they were supposed to be men or demons or beasts, or amalgamations of all three. The forward-looking face, done in dull gray and brown, had both eyes closed; the left-hand face. done in black and silver with streaks of orange, had its eyes turned upward toward the sky; the right-hand face, done in pale green and blue and yellow, had its eyes turned to the ground—the center face was inlaid with bits of ivory or bone; the left with flint and obsidian; the right with feathers and jade. The great three-faced head jigged ponderously around the square, tilting precariously first to one side and then the other, while a
twizan
stood at the edge of the crowd and declaimed in a sing-song dialect that Farber found hard to follow.

With a lightning change of mood, Liraun became voluble and enthusiastic and gay, and insisted on “explaining” the ceremony to him.

First of all, she told him, it wasn’t a ceremony. This was a secular performance, not a Mode—an interpretation of Danau
sur
Nestre’s classical poem-play
The Exaltation of Little Dead Crawlers
. The hero—heroine? the language was ambiguous—was a small worm who lived in the silt at the bottom of Elder Sea. For no reason that Farber could grasp, the worm one day changed into a crawling insect, and the crawling insect subsequently turned into a fish (a sort of flippered eel, actually). The fish (or eel) could have lived a long and peaceful life in the ocean, but as it turned out, the fish was “seahearted.” Farber could not quite tell, either from the
twizan’s
chant or from Liraun’s cryptic commentary, exactly what “seahearted” meant—possibly “daring,” possibly “restless,” possibly “extraordinarily pious” or “blessed,” possibly “incautious” or even “stupid.” At any rate, it was seahearted, and because it was it resolved to swim from one end of the Great Northern Ocean to the other. And so it did, but by the time it reached the farther shore it had built up such great speed that it continued to swim up onto the land, beating its flippers into legs against the rocky shoreline as it did.

This part of the poem-play was very long, and, to Farber, extremely tedious; it described the fish’s emergence from the ocean with an incredible profusion of oddly mundane detail: the kind of mud the fish crawled over; its consistency; where the rocks were, and how big they were, and what they were made of, and how they looked that day; where the firm sand was; where the patches of sea grass were; the direction and strength of the currents; the temperature of the water; the taste and degree of salinity of the water; the other kinds of fish in the area at the time, numbered, named, and described; how the surface of the water looked from underneath just before the fish shattered it and emerged into the open air; how the sky looked, seen for the-first time; what the temperature of the air was; how strong the wind was and from what direction it was blowing . . . and so forth. If it had not been for some fairly spectacular gymnastics the stiltless dancers were going through in accompaniment to this recitation, Farber might well have fallen asleep on his feet.

Once the fish did make it up onto the land, though, things picked up. The first thing the fish—now a sandcrawler, by the way—did was either to have a litter of baby sandcrawlers or to split itself up into a number of parts, each of which would then eventually grow up to be a baby sandcrawler—the dialect made it difficult for Farber to tell. The babies (or parts) did an odd, intricate dance, and then
kwians
—winged marsupials, although here they seemed to be symbolic of or synonymous with supernatural creatures of some kind—swept down and snatched up the mother sandcrawler (or one of the parts) and deposited it on a barren plain of rock. Here the sandcrawler (or part) was visited by a Person of Power, jet black and puissant, who told it that it must change again, and for the final time, in order to protect its children (or fellow parts) from the barrenness of the world and the fierceness of the sun. The Person of Power offered it three choices: it could turn into a rock, high and remote, and shelter the others from predators with its adamant bulk; it could change into moss, cool and moist, and shelter the others with its dampness and softness from sun and sharp rocks and biting wind; or it could die, and turn into a pool of blood that would provide life-giving nourishment for the others.

The dance ended then, and the Cian snapped their fingers in applause, hissing like teakettles.

“But what did it do?” Farber asked. “Which one of the three things did it turn into?”

“It turned into all three, of course,” Liraun said, smiling radiantly.

“But it couldn’t! They’re mutually exclusive—it would have had to’ve turned into one or the other. They can’t all be true at the same time.”

“But they are! Of course they are,” Liraun said, still smiling, but looking at him now with an odd, intent expression. “It turned into all three things, at once. It did. That is the point of the story—if it had become only one thing, the story would be meaningless. Do you see? Do you understand? It’s important that you understand.”

Farber muttered polite acquiescence, understanding nothing. As they left the square—she still exuberant, he puzzled and unsettled—he looked back in time to see the two dancers who had operated the huge false head crawling out from inside it, like parasites emerging from the torn and paralyzed body of their unwilling host, and it struck him that the faces of the dancers were no less remote and strange than the flint-and-wood-and-obsidian masks of the great totem that they inhabited and haunted, that they strained to animate, succeeding only for a few brief seconds in bringing it to a passionate and totally transitory kind of life.

Hugging each other against the gathering evening chill, hip slapping hip, they wandered back to the Enclave while, like transcendent fireflies, glowing pastel lanterns came on one by one around them in the luminous darkness of the alien night.

5

Ecstasy is perhaps too large a word to use in connection with sex, or even lovemaking, but that night was the most perfect that Farber could remember, sweet and hot and fine; they were alternately tender and fierce, exuberant and pleasantly melancholy—and at last they sank down peacefully together into soft black sleep, like twins settling into an ocean of dust and downy feathers.

When Farber awoke, it was that cold and bitter hour just before dawn, and Liraun was gently disentangling herself from him preparatory to leaving. Feeling her softness and warmth slipping away over his skin, feeling the chill empty air rush in to fill the void, so that he was suddenly naked where before he had been handsomely clothed in flesh, Farber opened his eyes. He watched her face, luminous as a moon in the darkness, rise up over him, pull away from him, seeming to fall away from him like a spaceship falling from an orbiting satellite toward the bronzy disk of its home planet, like a tiny phosphorescent fish swimming away and down into the living darkness of the sea. Something complex and painful rose up in him, tightening his throat and burning behind his eyes. Without volition, his voice began to speak—the words ringing oddly in the silent room—and he heard it asking Liraun to stay, to stay with him, to live with him, to never leave—

Liraun’s face went blank, as though something had flown from it, shooting away as the pheasants had shot up into the damp German night. She did not, would not, answer him. While he beseeched her to tell him what was wrong, she put her clothes on, moving stiffly and mechanically, her usually agile fingers fumbling with the fastenings. Her face was cold and empty as wax. She would not look at him. When she had finished dressing, she paced aimlessly around the apartment, darting first one way and then the other, like a caged animal. Farber was on his feet now, trying to touch her, hold her, but she brushed by him as if he didn’t exist. She stood quiveringly still for a moment, her eyes glassy and blind.

Then she ran from the room.

The door slammed with finality behind her.

Farber was left to stand alone in the darkness, listening to the cryptic tickings and buzzings of household appliances, and slowly, through the bewilderment and pain, came the frozenly rueful realization that he still did not know how to find her again.

That evening, Liraun did not come to visit him. He sat up waiting for her half the night, dozing in his chair, starting up expectantly at every sound, going over that final scene again and again in a futile attempt to figure out what had happened, reliving some of their past moments together with an almost hypnotically intense recall.

Liraun didn’t show up the next night, either.

On the third evening, Farber stormed out of his apartment, furious and hurt, went to the Co-op Mess, and had an unreasonable number of drinks. He also had an intense, tearful reconciliation with Kathy, and within two hours they were back in her apartment, and in her bed. Kathy spent the rest of the night inventing exotic ways of making love, in order to seal the bond. Farber worked at it firmly, and managed to come consecutively more times than he ever had in his life, but it was no good: he kept thinking about Liraun, he kept picturing her, he kept wanting it to be her instead. In spite of his boozy resolve, he found that he could only relate to Kathy absentmindedly; he kept fantasizing that she was Liraun, and it was this that sparked most of his desire, not Kathy herself.

Early the next evening, Liraun appeared at Farber’s apartment, seeming almost literally to materialize from the darkness beyond his door. She didn’t say a word about her absence, or his the previous night, or the fight they’d had, if that’s what it had been. She never mentioned any of it again. 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.

They didn’t again discuss the prospect of living together, but a few nights later, unasked, she showed up 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. He really knew nothing about her at all, nothing about her life. 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
—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.