Strangers (9 page)

He was right. Farber knew it too.

The shame that Farber felt as he pushed out of the office, that was the fourth step.

It was late afternoon by the time he reached the Enclave, so Farber stopped off at the Co-op Mess to have a drink. He found Dale Brody at the bar, already well on his way into a stinking, falling-down drunk. The Co-op grapevine must have been working as well as ever, because, after a few minutes of silent, cold-shoulder drinking, Brody leaned over to Farber, and said, in a hoarse malodorous voice: “You can fuck niggers if you want, but don’t you think about marrying them! We don’t marry our niggers back home.”

Farber raised his big fist—feeling like a character in an old-time movie, but doing it anyway—and knocked two of Brody’s teeth out.

That was the fifth step.

When Farber checked back at his office at last, there was a note waiting for him, asking him to call on Dr. Anthony Ferri, the Co-op ethnologist.

Ferri was a phlegmatic, reclusive man, but his cool reticence was a mask for voracious ambitions of a sort that must have burned themselves to slag in Keane years before. He worked for the Co-op, but he was simultaneously doing field work for Cornell—
really
doing field work for Cornell is the way he himself would have put it, if you caught him in a confiding mood—and all his dreams were centered on the marvelous monographs he would publish, on the books he would write, on the honors he would earn, on grants and university chairs and lecture tours and tenure. He wanted to be famous, to be well respected, to be a giant in his field. That was his one passion; everything else had been sublimated into it. And it was possible that he would yet translate dream into reality. He had a brilliant mind, an enormous—though somewhat specialized—store of erudition, and enough practicality to realize that he would have to work like a demon every moment of his stay on “Lisle” if he were ever to realize his ambitions. All that was on the credit side of the ledger. On the debit side was his own personality. Most men found him cold, distant, and unfriendly. Actually, he was a fairly sociable man, and, when he noticed them, sincerely liked people. But he seldom noticed them—he was too absorbed by work, too haunted by the sense of time ticking by and taking him no closer to his goal. He was taciturn to the point of insult. That was because, basically, he had nothing to say about most things. But when he judged that a bit of communication might advance his career, and especially when the subject under discussion fell within his own sphere of expertise, he could suddenly become affable, loquacious, enthusiastic, persuasive, even glib.

He was all of those things that evening.

He wanted Farber to work for him. More precisely, he wanted Farber to be a “research assistant,” gathering the type of data that he was unable to get himself. Ferri was too much of a cold fish—although he didn’t put it quite that way when he was explaining it to Farber—to become really friendly with the Cian, to be accepted into their homes; he had tried, in his most ingratiating manner and with all the professional wiles he could command, and he had been rebuffed—with characteristic Cian politeness, but decisively. That meant that some doors were forever closed to him in Shasine. But Farber was already intimately involved with a Cian, and if, as the gossip had it, he was going to marry her, then the chances were that he’d eventually be able to penetrate even deeper into Cian society. Ferri, seeing that Farber was getting angry, admitted hastily that it was none of his business whether Farber married Liraun or not, but if he did, if he
did
— The job wouldn’t be very demanding, Ferri explained, mostly a matter of keeping his eyes open, surreptitiously recording conversations—here Ferri exhibited a bracelet containing a hidden microminiaturized recorder—and telemetering the stuff back to Ferri. Just the raw data; he wouldn’t have to try to analyze it or draw conclusions. Ferri and his semantic and anthropological computers would do that. But only Farber could get the data in the first place.

“Joe, listen to me,” Ferri said urgently. “You’re new here, you don’t realize yet what a godawful
secretive
culture this is. On the surface it looks like a pretty open and relaxed society, everybody friendly and polite, almost stress-free when compared to an Earth society like America or Russia, low incidence of neurosis, lower incidence of insanity, suicide relatively rare, stress-induced illness infrequent, psychosomatic illness almost completely unknown. But they’re so completely obsessional in guarding their privacy! Their private lives are sacrosanct, they won’t talk about them, they won’t let us investigate them. We’ve been here more than a decade, and we still don’t know anything about them, except what they let us see. Nothing, not a damn thing! We’ve never even been able to put a Cian through a physical examination, let alone dissect one. Joe, you
have
to cooperate.”

“I don’t know,” Farber said.

“I can pay you for your help, out of my Cornell budget. Middling well.”

“It isn’t that.”

“What, then?”

“I just don’t know if I’d want to do something like that. I don’t think I would.”

“There’re one hell of a lot more questions about this world than there are answers, you know that, Joe?” Ferri said, as if he hadn’t heard Farber, as though the possibility of a negative answer just didn’t exist. “For one thing, I’d like to know how in the world the Tailors think they’re going to change your karyotype. They’re going to open up each and every cell in your body and tinker around with the chromosomes with their little hammers and screwdrivers, right? Sure they are. And yet, who knows—I’m told that their genetic science is one of the most sophisticated known, and that they get plenty of interstellar trade on that basis. . . . It’s so damn frustrating trying to figure out the technological level of this society, it really and truly is. As far as I can tell, the Cian have the capacity for space flight, if they’d put all the various pieces of their technology together in the right way, and’ve had that capacity for thousands of years. They just don’t want to—it doesn’t interest them. Goddamn it, none of it squares. Look at the primitive way they live, animal-drawn carts, all the rest of it. They don’t have to! The technology is there, has been available for over a thousand years, so they say—but they just don’t use it much. They have efficient mass communications and high-speed transportation, but they use them so damn sparingly; most of the time they’d rather walk, and there isn’t a public phone system in all of Aei, except for ours at the Enclave. What kind of cultural development produces a psychology like that?” He paused to wipe his face, glaring at Farber.

“I don’t know,” Farber said mildly; he had decided it was no use even trying to breast the floods of talk Ferri was capable of unleashing—just sit patiently and wait for them to crest and ebb, that’s all you could do.

“You’re damn right you don’t know!” Ferri said angrily, mopping at his face again. “No one does. There never was anything like it in Earth history. In spite of occasional Luddites and back-to-nature freaks, there never has been a human society that had all the gadgets and benefits of a high-production machine technology available to it, and yet just didn’t bother to use it, whose members just didn’t
feel
like using it—and I don’t think there ever will be such a society, either. The simple life, noble savages, all that—that’s just a bunch of crap. Primitive people always snatch eagerly at the comforts of a higher technology, even if those comforts do them harm in the long run, even if the civilized, convenient methods just don’t
work
as well as the old primitive ones did: look at the Eskimos, for Christ’s sake! How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, right? After they’ve seen a shopping center, even, let alone Paree.”

“The Cian aren’t Eskimos,” Farber said.

“Damn right! Damn right!” Ferri said, nastily. “You hit it on the head again, friend. The Cian aren’t Eskimos, damn right. And yet we act as if they were. The Cian are dangerous because they
look
so much like humans compared to the other kinds of aliens we’ve met, that we tend to think of them as people in make-up and furry costumes, we tend to think of them as human and relate to them on that basis—and yet they are not human, and there is an insidious danger in relating to them as if they were. They are aliens, with alien thought processes that are very different from ours beneath a seductive surface similarity. Actually, we have few points of similarity, and we’d be better off thinking of them as animals or even monsters, rather than pretending that they’re people.”

“They’re human enough to sleep with,” Farber snapped, without thinking, and then flushed red to his ears.

“Sex!” Ferri sneared. “So you can
schtup
them—so what? Back on Earth, people fuck goats, sheep, dogs, horses, cows. . . . Does that make a cow human, because you can lean it up against a stump and
schtup
it? You’re as bad as those idiots over at the Co-op. Every day I can see them settling a little deeper into their role-playing—they’re the agents of the British East India Company, and the Cian are the ragged native hordes, right? Right? They’re even calling them ‘niggers’ now, aren’t they, even people who wouldn’t think of calling a real Negro that—even the
Negroes
are calling them that, for Christ’s sake! Colonialism, that’s what it is. We’re all settling into this fantasy that Earth is a colonial power and the Cian are backward savages to whom we’re bringing the benefits of civilization. But the Cian aren’t a backward people, in spite of the carts and hand labor and barbaric splendor, and all that—they were members of the Commercial Alliance a thousand years or more before we showed up, and the Enye, at least, think a lot more of them than they do of us. And yet we deal with them as though they were nineteenth-century tribesmen from India or Africa, and call them ‘niggers.’ Because we think we know them, but we don’t. I don’t. You don’t.”

“Maybe I know them a little better than some others do,” Farber said quietly, but with a trace of smugness.

“And maybe you don’t, either. They don’t even have the same conception of time that we do. They’re not as prone to think of time as a linear flow. Verbs in their language don’t even have tenses, just aspects and validity forms, like Hopi. You can say ‘remembered eating’ or ‘eating expected,’ but you can’t say ‘He ate’ or ‘He will eat.’ For Christ’s sake, they shouldn’t have men like us to deal with these creatures; we’re wrong for the job, completely wrong. They should have sent Asians, Amerinds, Polynesians, Eskimos, even Bushmen or Abos—somebody who’d at least have a
chance
of understanding the Cian!”

“You know the political situation back home,” Farber said, shrugging.

“Yes, I do,” Ferri said. He was silent for a moment, then: “The women have a very strange role in this society. You’re living with one, maybe marrying one! Don’t you want to learn about them? Don’t you want a fair chance of understanding the motivations of your own woman? I don’t understand them, now. You won’t either. Unmarried women are the
property
of the father. Married women, at least at first, are the property of the husband. No status, few rights. A textbook patriarchal society. But it doesn’t stay that way—somehow some of the wives change their status, and go right to the top; they run everything then, they’re almost worshipped. Why does that happen? I don’t know. I do know that a woman usually changes her surname three times in life. Your woman’s surname is Jé Genawen, I think I remember. Right? That means, approximately. ‘belonging to Genawen,’ her father. If she marries you, her surname will change to Jé Farber, believe it or not: ‘belonging to Farber.’ If she makes the status leap, however it’s done, her surname becomes ‘belonging to—’ whatever the name of the female First Ancestor of her line is. What is all this rigmarole for? I don’t know, but you could help me find out.” He put his hand on Farber’s arm with studied sincerity. “Joe, this is the first time a Cian has ever become intimately involved with a Terran. In a decade or more. It might never happen again. That’s why this is so important. Don’t you see, you’re in a better position to learn about them than any man in the history of this mission! You must help me.”

“I’ll think about it,” Farber said, and brushing aside Ferri’s protests, he got ready to leave.

He had already made the sixth step, although he didn’t realize it yet.

And Farber spent another night of years.

7

The next morning, Farber rose very early, and, prompted by some obscure instinct, dressed in his best suit. Liraun lay in the big bed and watched him, her eyes following him as he wandered through the apartment. She didn’t get up to make breakfast for him, as she usually did; nor did he ask her to. She did not speak at all. Her expression was unreadable. Farber was equally mute; he finished dressing as quickly as he could, although he was far from being in a hurry—he wanted to avoid her patient, thoughtful eyes. Those eyes did not pressure him at all; that was why he couldn’t stand them. The pale red light of Fire Woman bled in through the blinds, polarizing dust motes in the air, throwing slats of radiance across the opposite wall. The Terran furniture that filled the apartment looked cheap and shabby in that pitiless light—plastic and machine-stamped, as indeed it was. Everything was bland, precise, artificial. Only Liraun was real here. Without moving or speaking, she remained the vital, vibrant center of the place. The apartment was filled with her presence, and with her warm musky smell. She was the extenuating factor, she lent the room what validity it had. Without her, it would be a stage set—flat and unreal. He pulled on his coat and left quickly, still wordless.

Outside, it was very cold. Farber walked hurriedly through the wide streets of the Enclave, hands in his pockets, his feet making a hollow
click-clack
, his breath steaming in plumes and tatters. There was no one else about. Fire Woman was dipping in and out of corrugated gray clouds, and hoarfrost glistened over everything. The tall Terran-style buildings rose on either side, prefabricated glass-and-plastic hives, jarringly out of place. They were surrounded by lush groves of black feathertrees, a half-hearted decorator’s touch which only succeeded in increasing the contrast. A hidden something was singing in the cold morning hush—it sounded like a bird, but it was a lizard. Some of the streetlights—another Terran touch—were still on, looking wan and sadly pointless against the lightening gray sky. He reached the huge wall that surrounded the Enclave—
What do they think they’re keeping out?
he thought.
With a wall?
—passed the sleeping gate guard in his glassine booth, and struck out into Aei. The streets turned from asphalt to porcelain, and, as he cleared the horizon-swallowing Terran skyline, Old City loomed up on its obsidian cliff, way in the middle of the air.