Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (68 page)

Farber and Jacawen looked each other over, silently.

Jacawen himself was a small, somber, self-possessed man, with the jet-black hair and wide golden eyes of most of his race. He was sleek as an otter, giving the impression of sturdiness, of a compact and supple muscularity. His breasts were no larger than those of an ordinary Earthman, as he was not in lactation at the time, but his thin shirt showed the impression of three pairs of nipples, spaced two by two down along his ribcage, and six small bumps to go with them. His face was calm, almost dispassionate, but it looked somewhat satanic to Farber because of the tiny points of the canine teeth that protruded beyond the lips. Jacawen was even more intelligent and adamant than his son, but in him the fanatic intensity had been banked down into a more assured, controllable, useful force, a steady, smokeless flame. Both were Shadow Men, a quasi-religious sect that ran much of the government of Shasine, but Jacawen had the maturity and the wisdom of experience—Mordlich was still full of worldly pride, but Jacawen had passed beyond that to the curious arrogant humility of a senior Shadow Man, and he aspired to be like the angels, beyond shame and pride. With that, he had varying degrees of success.

“Did you know that Liraun is my half-niece?” Jacawen asked abruptly.

Oh Christ,
Farber thought.

After a moment, he managed to say: “No, I didn’t know that.”

“I tell you this,” Jacawen said, with equanimity, “not because it is important in itself, but because it is proof that I know her mind, that I have had much time to observe her. On Weinunnach, it is the custom to have our children in surges, Mr. Farber, four years apart. Liraun was born in the fallow period between surges, one and a half years after the previous surge, two and a half years before the surge to come. It almost never happens that our women conceive when they are not supposed to conceive, but sometimes it happens regardless, and this was one such time. Do you understand, Mr. Farber? Liraun grew up alone, with no age group to fit into, with no companions. Not even wombmates—the Mother, who did not realize for months that she had conceived, did not have time to cherish the growth in the proper way: most of her wombmates were stillborn, one sister died in early childhood. Liraun survived, but she grew up sad and wild, and she still is so. She has been out of Harmony on other occasions.” He stopped and stared at Farber. “Do you understand, Mr. Farber? I am talking openly to you of private matters, against the custom of our people, and it is distasteful to me—but I wish you to understand.”

Farber scowled. “It seems like you’re telling me that Liraun’s—affair—with me is just one more wild prank in a life of unfortunate rebellion.”

“That is oddly put, but basically accurate.”

“And that’s all you think it is?”

Jacawen sat impassively for a moment, then started again. “Mr. Farber, I don’t think you’ve understood me after all,” he said drily. “I am not talking about your proposal of marriage to Liraun. What I have been saying to you is in the way of an apology for the strain and disharmony this thing must have caused you, and an assurance that it was not your responsibility. This mating between Cian and Terran should never have happened at all, but if it was going to happen, then it does not surprise me at all that Liraun should be the one woman in all of Shasine that it happened to. Who
caused
it to happen, Mr. Farber. That is all I wished to convey to you.”

“What about my proposal of marriage?” Farber said, in a tight voice.

“That, of course, cannot be. It is unallowable.”

“Why?”

“Because your race and mine are not interfertile, Mr. Farber!” Jacawen said, a hint of passion in his voice for the first time. “Can’t you
see
that? A marriage between you and Liraun would be a sterile one. A marriage that does not produce children is an abomination in the eyes of the People of Power, it is an offense to all Harmony. There has never been such a thing on the face of Weinunnach! There never will be!” All the intensity had flared up, the steady flame roared and swelled behind his
eyes.
Then it slowly guttered, leaving him shaken. “No, I’m sorry, Mr. Farber,” he said. “It cannot be. I speak to you frankly now, Mr. Farber, perhaps to my own dishonor: even if the marriage were not impossible, I would be against it, I would disapprove, but by our custom I could not stand in the way of your free choice. However, as it is, I have no need: all Weinunnach stands in your way and prevents you. It is unallowable. I cannot say that I am sorry.”

That’s it, then,
Farber thought, and felt only a vast wave of relief. But even while it was washing over him, some distanced part of himself that he did not understand was making him say: “Are you sure there’s no way around that? Are you
sure?
No way at
all?”
in a tone of petulant, chivvying desperation.

Jacawen stared at him, and something new came into his face, disgruntlement, annoyance, malice, reluctance, regret—all of these perhaps. He said: “There is a way, Mr. Farber. If you wish, you may have our Tailors adjust your karyotype, change it to match with ours. Then you could marry, Mr. Farber. Making that adjustment would not change you into a Cian in the gross physical sense, but it would affect your cytological material, and it would change the number and morphology of your chromosomes. It would have little real effect, except on your offspring. It would change your seed, Mr. Farber, it would change your seed. You see? You and Liraun would no longer be sterile. If you impregnated her, your children would be full-blooded Cian, with no trace of Terra in them at all.” He smiled cuttingly at Farber, the malice now only thinly veiled. “Well, Mr. Farber, do you want me to put you down for an appointment with the Tailors? I assure you that is the only possible way you could marry Liraun, and I’m
sure
of that, Mr. Farber. Well?”

Farber was flushing with shame and puzzled anger. In an attempt to save some semblance of face, he let his voice say: “Yes.”

“You do wish to see the Tailors, then?”

Flatly: “Yes.”

“Excellent!” Jacawen said. His hand broke a light beam. A control panel, of compact Jejun make, slid up out of the floor. Jacawen studied a dial, turned a switch, hit three keys, and said something in a dialect too swift to follow. The panel slid back into the floor. Jacawen looked at Farber. “Now,” he said, “you have an appointment at the Hall of Tailors, here in Old City, tomorrow, at 1125 by your time. I wish you good luck.” And Jacawen smiled with calculated blandness, with aloof contempt, mocking Farber, pouring his scorn onto him—a scorn so much more devastating than Mordlich’s, because it was so much less automatic, and so much more earned. Farber had tried a bluff, and it had been called; he had been forced right out of the game. Jacawen knew that Farber would never keep the appointment, that the price was too high, that Farber never had any intention of going at all. Farber had tried to brazen it through, and had lost face enormously. Jacawen knew that Farber would not have the courage to go through with it.

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 be 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 response just didn’t exist. “As far as I can tell, the Cian have the capability for spaceflight if they’d put all the pieces of their technology together in the right way, and’ve had that capability for thousands of years. They just don’t put the pieces together. They don’t want to—it doesn’t interest them. And yet their genetic science is one of the most sophisticated known, and they get plenty of interstellar trade—it doesn’t square. Look at the primitive way they live. They don’t have to! They have efficient mass communications and high-speed transportation, but they use them so sparingly. There isn’t a public phone system in all of Aei, except for ours at the Enclave. That doesn’t interest them either. What kind of cultural development produces a psychology like that?” He wiped his face, almost angrily. “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 sent men like us to deal with these creatures! They should have sent Asians, Yaquis, Polynesians, Amerinds, Eskimos, even Bushmen—somebody who’d have a chance of understanding the Cian!”

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

“Yes, I do,” Ferri said. He was silent for a moment, then: “The women have a 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’re almost worshipped. Why does that happen? I don’t know. I do know that a woman changes her surname three times in her 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.”