Strangers (7 page)

After this, Farber stopped trying to avoid further emotional involvement with Liraun, although if you had mentioned the word
love
to him at any one point he would have denied it quickly and emphatically. In fact, though, he was coming to depend on her presence more and more, especially now that he was a virtual outcast in the Terran community, shunned by everyone. She was a prop; she held him up, she kept him going. She was a tranquilizing drug to assuage the loneliness and isolation of exile on an alien earth. She helped him forget that he could stare at the stars here forever, and never once see a configuration he could recognize from a thousand boyhood nights spent dreaming on a hill in the Frankische Alb near Treuchlingen. He was drawn powerfully by her enigmatic and bottomless nature. Her mind and spirit were still masked from him, as by a thousand thicknesses of distorting semitransparent gauze, and physical intimacy was only a means to strip away the first of these layers. Also, Farber, who had been used to the aggressive, self-assertive women of Earth, was delighted by Liraun’s apparent submissiveness, although like most men of his generation he seriously believed himself to be “liberated.” Nevertheless, he quickly became comfortably accustomed to having her defer to his will, cook his supper, serve him in a hundred little ways.

The next month was probably the happiest Farber had yet experienced in his bland young life. Certainly it was the period during which he produced his best work. During the weeks he lived with Liraun he created several stills which would later attract a moderate amount of attention on Earth, among them
Woman at Rest
,
Alàntene Night
,
Riverman
, and the fairly well-known
Esplanade—Looking East to the Sea
. He was as content as he had ever been. He had the pleasure of work that he enjoyed, the satisfaction of that work done well, a reasonable prospect of future success—and Liraun. And, as people are always ready to disregard the most painfully learned lessons the moment they think the wind has changed, he even began to regain some of his old cockiness.

Naturally, it could not last.

Authors and scholars have argued for years about why Farber became determined to marry Liraun. In actuality, Farber himself was never sure. It was not so much a conscious decision, but rather something that—he realized, in retrospect—he had become committed to at some point along the line. Exactly when that point, that moment of commitment, had been reached, he himself did not know. But there were six specific things that took him toward it, six long steps into deep water.

Perhaps the first step occurred when he realized that Liraun was unhappy.

Or if not unhappy exactly—for they still took much delight in each other—then troubled, at least, and divided of soul. Even in her gayest moments, there had always been an edge of melancholy to her, but now it seemed to deepen and widen daily. He noticed it, responded to it with concern, but couldn’t find out why it was happening. As usual, she was intensely reluctant to talk about her feelings, and would either change the subject when Farber questioned her or become withdrawn if he pressed her to answer.

It wasn’t until they attended the monthly Co-op mixer—a flamboyant gesture of defiance on Farber’s part, from which he derived a good deal of bittersweet enjoyment—that he began to understand what was wrong. Prominent members of the Cian community were regularly invited to the mixer—still referred to as a “cocktail party,” although amphetamines and hallucinogens were served as readily as alcohol—and some of them actually came; they called the parties “Little Modes,” and seemed to regard them with tolerant, amused condescension, as one would an absurd play put on by kindergarten children.

Tonight the Cian were very cold toward Liraun, even colder than the Terrans were to Farber. They didn’t quite snub her openly, but there was a thinly veiled hostility behind everything they said and did that indicated their disapproval of her. Jacawen
sur
Abut was there, that chilly man—as Liaison, he almost had to be there, but it was clear that he hated attending; unlike the other Cian, who participated in the spirit of celebration with a whooping gusto that was not without a certain overtone of sarcasm, he watched the crowds of noisy partygoers with distaste, eyed the dancing with scorn (never, never trying the Terran dances himself, as some of the other Cian sometimes did, the grace and suppleness of their movements far outshining the dancing Terrans even when they amusingly bungled the steps, good-naturedly leading the laughter their attempts to master the Scorpian or the Dustdevil Three-Step inevitably evoked), and imbibed nothing, neither food nor drink nor drug. And, also unlike the other Cian, he alone was openly hostile to Liraun, his flinty eyes snapping with displeasure whenever he saw her, stalking abruptly from rooms if she entered them, refusing to speak to her or acknowledge her presence in any positive way.

Liraun was strained and silent throughout the party, and kept to herself as much as possible. Farber was chagrined: it had never occurred to him that their miscegenation might have caused Liraun to be ostracized by her people as he had been by his; he had realized that the Terrans would be distant with her, but had not stopped to think that by bringing her to the party he would be exposing her to the hostility and scorn of the Cian as well.

That night, for the first time since he’d known her, she was preoccupied and unresponsive during their lovemaking. At first he thought she was angry with him for taking her to the party, but then he realized that her distress was made up more of pain and humiliation than of anger. They lay quietly together in the darkness, her sweaty thigh still thrown over his legs, her head on his shoulder and three of her nipples—still hard—pressing into his side, feeling the sweat drying on their bodies, the body fluids and semen turning sticky in their pubic hair, watching the creamy shimmer of light the streetlamp outside the window cast across the ceiling and along the top of one wall. The silence was too heavy and too long there in the musk-smelling darkness, her body too inert a weight, and so to break the silence he said, “What was it like for you when you were a child?”—not so much because he thought she would answer him, or even necessarily because he really wanted to know, but because these were the only words, the only conversational gambit, he could find in his tired, intoxicated head.

Surprisingly, she did answer him, raising up a little on an elbow to speak musingly, ironically, bitterly: “What was it like, to be a child? I remember mostly emptiness and wind, and that no one would play with me. Being alone. Walking on the Esplanade in the snow and the icy wind, looking at the shuttered houses. Knowing that every day, every minute, that went by brought me that much closer to the day I would die.”

Farber stared at her, appalled. “It was really that bad for you?” he asked, but she merely shook her head, indicating not a negative reply but that she no longer wanted to talk about it. Instead she propped herself higher on her elbow, her thigh sliding over him as she moved, and stared down at him in a languid but intent way that finally reminded him—with an odd thrill of embarrassment—that she could see much better in the dark than he could. She touched his face with her fingertips, gently tracing the ridge of his eyebrows, his cheekbones, the line of his massive jaw. “So strange,” she said dreamily, “so strange. Like an animal, almost. Bestial. Like one of the scurrying little rockbabies who live in the western hills.” Farber, who had seen a rockbaby, realized that she was comparing him to the closest analog of an ape that Weinunnach possessed, and—after the initial half-amused flash of pique—it startled him to hear that she thought of him as ape-like, because he had often thought how much like a cat she was; a cat, or an otter, perhaps: some sleek, graceful animal, self-possessed and beautiful. Bestial, yes. Like a beast. Like him. Feeling obscurely guilty, he reached up and touched her cheek, the silken, crackling cascade of her hair. She blazed up at his touch like tinder. They made love in a desperate hurry, Liraun forcing the pace, as though she feared the ceiling would fall in or the ground swallow them before they could finish.

Afterwards they rested in each other’s arms, the cat and the ape (neither was either, though both were aliens)—but Liraun slept fitfully, tossing and moaning as she worked her way through the turbulent country of her dreams, and Farber, who held her and stroked her throughout the night, slept not at all.

6

It took Farber a few more days to dig out the cause of Liraun’s ostracism, but at last, after much persistence and persuasion, the story came out in disjointed sections. Pieced together, it looked like this: Cian morality saw nothing wrong with an unmarried girl taking a lover, even an alien lover, as long as she did not conceive; there was no special premium on virginity—rather the opposite, in fact. Until she was married, however, she was expected to live by herself, or in her father’s house. There was a special symbolism to this—a girl was said to go “from under her father’s roof to her husband’s.” It was a matter of ownership, plain and simple, of transference of title, and there was no room in the equation for her accepting the protection of any other male. So Liraun’s sin was not that she was sleeping with Farber—a matter of utter indifference to most of the other Cian—but
that she was living with him
, “under the roof” of a man who was not her husband. Odd as this seemed to Farber, it was serious enough to get her ostracized.

All this gave Farber another sleepless night. If he had been born thirty years earlier, or ten years later, he probably wouldn’t have worried about Liraun’s welfare at all, but amorality had gone out of fashion, as it periodically did, and along with their Horatio Alger optimism and drive to succeed, his generation had rediscovered humanism—limited to their own class of people, of course, i.e.: “humans”—and a sort of studied naiveté. So he stayed up to figure out the Decent Thing To Do. On the one hand, he sincerely loved Liraun, didn’t want her hurt on his behalf—but he didn’t want to lose her, either. On the other hand, he was as terrified of marriage as most young men of his day, especially the artists and the intelligentsia. But no matter how he nagged it, it always came down to that: he should either marry her, or leave her; nothing else would help her situation.

Toward dawn, he decided—rather cold-bloodedly, but a man can often identify cold-bloodedness as practicality if he squints at it hard enough—that the best thing to do would be to marry Liraun, but only under the Cian rites. That would make her a respectable woman again in the eyes of the Cian, and yet, as far as his fellow Terrans were concerned, it would be only a native marriage: it wouldn’t be binding on Earth, and if his relationship with Liraun soured, he could leave at the end of his hitch without worrying about legalities. In the morning he sent an application to the Cian Liaison (that cold little man probably wouldn’t approve it anyway, judging by his reaction to Liraun at the party), and a note to the Co-op explaining what he was proposing to do.

Then he went to sleep.

He hadn’t thought to tell Liraun about it yet.

Liraun’s eyes, when he told her. The second step.

The next afternoon, Farber had an interview with the Co-op Director.

Most of the Earthmen played at being embittered because it was the style of their times, but with Raymond Keane, the Director, it was not an assumed thing. He was embittered. He was a bitter, troubled, cynical, beat-out, burnt-up man, with just enough energy left to him to form a reservoir of weary malice. He had been here since the very beginning of Terran involvement with “Lisle,” in one capacity or another. In all that time, he had been unable to come up with a really viable trade commodity. The last great white hope had been a native drug—used for an entirely different purpose on Weinunnach—that the Co-op had imported to Earth as a serum to overcome organ rejection in transplant cases, and which had turned out to have the unfortunate side effect of dissolving all the cholinesterase in a user’s body two years after the initial dose, something that had never happened at the Enclave in years of testing. Apparently the reaction had been triggered by something in the environment of Earth; something had switched on an episome that remained latent on “Lisle.” That was the trouble with interstellar commerce: too many wild factors, and the rules of the game shifted constantly and unpredictably. Keane, a minor executive at the time, had been swept into the Director’s office by the cholinesterase scandal, but had not been able to get out from under its shadow. Time after time, his exports to Terra went wrong, soured, failed of their expectation—never as spectacularly as the first fiasco, never drastically enough to shake him out of office, but consistently. This had been going on for almost five years. It had eaten him. He looked like a man who no longer had the strength to go on, but who must, and so goes on without strength, held together only by a set of complex and rigidly interlocking weaknesses.

He kept Farber on the carpet for more than an hour.

Farber had not been passionately attached to his matrimonial plans when he came to the office—it was the morning after, and he was beginning to see some of the difficulties involved. He had half-expected to be talked out of it, and half-wished that he would be. But instead of persuading, Keane had chided, threatened, fumed, ranted, finally working himself into such a red-faced rage that he had almost begun to scream. At first, Farber had been amazed. He worked for the Co-op on the loosest of contractual bases, with effectively no supervision at all, and he wasn’t used to this type of vicious dressing-down. Then he began to get mad. Keane blustered on—the marriage would stir up bad feelings among the Cian, it would be a step toward diluting the cultural identity of the Earth Enclave, it might encourage other Earthmen—or worse, women—to do the same, it would split Farber’s loyalties, take up too much of his time . . . a plethora of reasons, some good, some bad, all of them false. Farber watched Keane’s face as he talked. The Director’s face was flat and dull, his skin the seeming texture of horn, crosshatched with shiny dead places, like scales of congealed lard, where a dream had died and turned to chitin. No matter what he said, the real reason he was against the marriage was that he hated the Cian. That was something that went beyond logic, or duty, or even self-interest. He hated the Cian, he hated the Co-op, “Lisle,” his job, Farber. Most of all he hated himself. It was a weary, helpless hatred, all the blacker because it was impotent. It could not even destroy. All it could do was negate.