Strangers (14 page)

That was an exceptional incident, but more commonplace accidents were avoided by inches—if they were avoided at all—every day. Most of them involved pedestrians. The people who worked on the river started their tasks well before dawn, but by noon there were many individual citizens of Aei out and about on the ice as well, many of them on their way to the great saltwater marshes on the far side of the Aome, for one reason or another. Hunters out after lizards and snappers and mud-devils. Potters hoping to collect certain rare clays and earths needed for special ceremonial glazes. Holy Men on the Shadow Path. seeking solitude to facilitate their efforts to find Syncopation with Harmony. Madmen, failed men, on the Lightless Path, seeking degradation and pain. Parties of young women, off to gather lizard eggs and fungus and winter mushrooms. Strollers and sightseers. All walking across the traffic lanes on the River, all oblivious to any danger from the hurtling iceboats, which occasionally came quite close to splattering them all over the ice.

Most endangered—and most oblivious—were the hordes of young children who appeared in the late afternoon to play on the frozen river. They would scatter out across the ice, tobogganing on their stomachs, skating, playing at curling with long stick-and-twig brooms and flat-bottomed ceramic disks—none of these pastimes imported from Terra, as Farber had first suspected, but independently derived, as will almost inevitably happen on a world where there is a juxtaposition of playful, humanoid biped children and ice for them to play on. Inevitable or not, the playing children were nearly invisible during the long hours of twilight, and were a terrible headache to the iceboats pilots. It was an odd quirk of racial psychology that the Cian, living in what was in many ways an intensely regulated society, made no attempt to keep private citizens off the ice, or to interfere with their right to amble across the busiest traffic lanes. Of course, this meant that the ice-ambling pedestrians were left to take their own chances, but if they didn’t mind risking a collision with a ten-ton ice-boat, then the pilots weren’t going to worry too much about it either. They contented themselves with sounding their fogwhistles if children ventured too near the major lanes, and the children, unperturbed and unimpressed, shouted happily back. The low, mournful hooting of the iceboats and the faint, shrill cries of the children floated constantly at the edge of Farber’s hearing as he worked.

It was hard, heavy, fast-paced work, loading and unloading the iceboats, hauling cargo to warehouses and staging areas. It was the kind of work that would have been performed by robot machinery on Terra, but nothing in Shasine was automated unless it was absolutely unavoidable. Farber had always been a powerful man, but his robustness was the product of spas and intramural athletics—he’d never had a job that required prolonged physical labor, day after day. To his shame he found the work amazingly hard. The first week was a blur of fatigue, a nightmare that he stumbled through like a leaden-limbed automaton. He was head-and-shoulders taller than the biggest of his Cian workmates, and would lift a heavier weight than they, but their endurance was incredible. Any of them could outlast him with ease, and keep working smoothly and efficiently while he slumped in exhaustion, blown, gulping at the needle-sharp arctic air. He was stronger than they were, but he didn’t have their stamina, and that was what counted.

Instead of deriding him, Farber’s workmates were friendly and encouraging, sympathetic without being condescending.

They gave him advice on cold-weather working, and tips on how to load and unload heavy cargo.

Grimly, Farber kept at it.

Weeks went by, and Farber gradually settled into his job. He grew more used to the pace, and the work went easier. He burned off his excess fat, and became more lean than he’d ever been before—in fact, he was almost gaunt. But what meat he did keep was tough, firm-packed, and hard as iron. He had never been healthier.

He was also happier than he’d been since leaving Earth, although it took him a long time to realize it. At first, Farber had regarded his job as a grim, degrading necessity, but he had slowly become reconciled to it, and now drew a good deal of satisfaction from it. It was hard, honest work that kept him out in the sun and the clean air—more important, although he never verbalized this, it gave him something concrete to do, something he could accomplish with his own hands, a way to carve order from chaos. It gave him the feeling that he could manipulate his destiny, and that assurance—illusion or not—killed some of the panic of existing in a milieu he did not understand. For the first time, he stopped fighting Weinunnach quite so much. In fact, he started thinking of it as Weinunnach, instead of mentally insisting on “Lisle.” A lot of the tension went out of him when he did, as though he had set down a load he hadn’t been aware of carrying. He stopped seeing his workmates as remote alien figures, and began to form friendships with them. They were a relaxed, equable crew—although Shasine had a sharply defined caste system, you didn’t get that feeling of fastidious class-consciousness from the individual Cian that you got from an Englishman or a Hindu. Manual labor was not a despised, menial thing here, as it was on Earth; for the most part, it imparted no more and no less prestige than any other profession. Thus, the equanimity of the crew, who were given no reason to feel inferior to anyone in their society. Farber found them easier to get along with than the Thousand Families, or the brooding Shadow Men aristocrats like Jacawen. He found himself looking forward with pleasure to the day’s work.

He was content, he realized.

Liraun seemed happier too, although there was still an edge of sadness to her. Much of the inexplicable dissatisfaction and wildness was gone, or banked down to embers, at least. She had accepted—resigned herself to?—the role that she was to play. With that had come a new serenity. Their marriage had settled down. They were more relaxed with each other, and more tolerant. Liraun’s duties with the Council kept her busy, but not so busy that she couldn’t spend plenty of time with her husband. In the early months of her pregnancy, they would often borrow mounts and a pack of coursers—long, lean carnivores something like giant shrews, but without a shrew’s viciousness—from Liraun’s father, Genawen, and go hunting in the great salt marshes south of Aei. They rarely caught anything, but it was pleasure enough just to ride through the sprawling marshland, the air crisp and cold and the sky dazzling, listening to the plaintive mooing of their snaky mounts and the shrill
yip-yip-yip
of the running coursers, cantering with a hollow iron clatter across the rude stone bridges that connected the strips of higher ground, surrounded by polished green ice, snow, and endless miles of gaunt, winter-stripped reeds, meeting only the vast flocks of silver-scaled lizards that would thunder into the sky at their approach to soar and circle and sob petulantly until the intruders were safely past. Sometimes they would go without the coursers, penetrating deep into the marshes to avoid hunters and mushroom-gatherers, and Liraun would go swimming—it was always well below freezing, but Liraun would casually pull off her clothes, knock a hole in the milky ice, thinner here because it was over sluggishly moving salt water, and churn through the shallow pools like an icebreaker, disappearing into the reed-ceilinged tunnels that formed over the tidal channels, sloshing into view again on the far side, splashing and whooping and making a terrible uproar, dozens of tiny otterlike creatures scattering in panic before her, lizards and redfins screaming hysterically skyward, Farber holding the mounts and watching her, laughing, affectionate, bemused, his breath steaming in the cold air and condensing into frost on his lips. When she emerged from her swim, she would shake herself free of water like a dog, using a piece of rough cloth to scrape away the patches of ice that had formed on her skin.

Sometimes then they would make love, on a bed of crackly reeds strewn over the frozen ground. Liraun would always be amused when Farber refused to take off his clothes. Occasionally, when they were on their way back to Aei, they would see a marshman, distant cousins of the Cian: a gnarled, dwarfish man with bone-white skin, wearing ragged furs and artfully worked iron, his hair lacquered into two enormous upthrust beehives, his face painted a garish blue and orange, a string of freshly killed snappers and redfins hanging head down from a belt slung over his shoulder. His eyes very bright and sharp, like black volcanic glass. Calm and solemn, with great dignity. the marshman would watch them ride by. Then he would raise his fist in a salute of—not adulation, exactly, but rather an unbowed but respectful acknowledgment of their presence. The marshmen believed that the Cian were ghosts. What they believed Farber to be, there is no telling. The ghost of a ghost, perhaps.

12

The weeks passed, and Shasine shouldered deeper into Winter. Snow piled up in the streets of Aei, and there were stretches during bad blizzards when no one ventured outside for a half a week—the city then seemed desolate and deserted, only the yellow and orange gleam of the windows to hint at life. Farber got Ferri to buy an arctic skier’s mask for him at the Co-op commissary. He wore it to work, and the Cian gaped at him in the streets. His co-workers at the Docks were delighted by it. They began, jovially, to refer to him as “No-Face.” Farber didn’t care. His nose would almost certainly have become frostbitten without the mask, and the snow goggles sewn into it helped him tolerate the glare Fire Woman kicked up against the icefields. His workmates used contact lenses grown from a transparent lichen-like substance for the same purpose, but the lenses were “alive” in that they had to be stored in nutritive fluid and needed to be trimmed back into shape every few weeks, and the thought of one of them in contact with his naked eyeball made Farber queasy. No, he would stick to his mask, and tolerate the good-natured jibes of the rest of the crew. He hadn’t “gone native” to quite that degree yet.

It had finally become cold enough to make Liraun admit to discomfort. They obtained a featureless, four-foot sphere that was placed in the corner of the downstairs room. It radiated heat and a smoky golden light, without any fuel source that Farber could discern, and was apparently inexhaustible. Here was a viable trade commodity for Keane! Certainly, this device was almost supernaturally efficient. Too efficient for Liraun—sometimes the room became too hot for her and she would retreat to one of the upstairs rooms that still held the evening chill. She spent much of her time there anyway. Her pregnancy had finally caught up with her. She was just entering her fifth month, and Cian women usually came to term in six. Her stomach had hardly swelled at all, but suddenly she had become ponderous and weak. She moved painfully now, carrying herself with slow caution, as if her belly was a membranous sack of water that she feared would rupture and spill. And in a way, it was just that. She still answered the summons of the Council, but now when she returned home there would be no expeditions to the marshes, no strenuous bareskin swims, no rambles around Aei. Instead she would sit in the upstairs room, sometimes for hours, and stare out through the open window at the hilly winter streets of Old City. She was sinking into her old melancholia again. This time it was deeper and more fully in possession of her than ever. She spoke little. She laughed not at all. Her face was drawn, and her complexion pale, as if she was continually in pain.

It seemed to Farber that pregnancy was not so stark and debilitating a thing with most healthy women, and that worried him. But those were healthy Terran women, after all. Who understood the quirks of Cian physiology, who knew what to expect? Certainly not Farber. None of Liraun’s relatives seemed worried, and Farber decided that he had no choice but to accept their assessment of the situation. Liraun herself was not worried, although she was deeply sad. Whenever he asked her, she assured him that everything was proceeding normally. These were about the only words he did get out of her—she became more uncommunicative by the day. But now it was Liraun who would wake up crying, and who would need to be held and comforted. She would not say why. She was ashamed of it, refused to talk of it, and would have liked to pretend that it did not happen at all. But it did. And when it did, she would cling desperately to Farber, as if by pressing hard enough she could weld their flesh together inseparably.

One afternoon on his way back from work, Farber dropped in on Anthony Ferri. The ethnologist seemed delighted to see him. In fact, Farber had never known him to be so animated, so crackling with energy and good humor. Ferri’s eyes were alive and sparkling, and his long, horsy face was radiant. His arms were stained with blood to the elbows, and he was grinning like an unrepentant ax murderer the moment after his crime.

Farber stared at him. Ferri seemed unable to stand still. He shifted his weight continuously from one foot to another, unconsciously doing a shuffling little dance of joy. Dancing vigorously, Ferri explained that he had finally, after months of complex and delicate negotiations, managed to obtain the corpse of a male Cian for dissection.

“You have to see this!” Ferri exclaimed. “The things I’ve found! I’ve learned more today than I have all year.” Enthusiastically, he grabbed Farber’s arm and began hustling him toward the rear of the apartment. “You just have to see this!”

Reluctantly, Farber allowed himself to be dragged along.

The long corridor leading to the kitchen had been set up as a dissecting room, jammed with lights and machines, a jury-rigged tangle of extension wires snaking across the floor. It smelled strongly of blood and formaldehyde. There was a roll-away bed against the wall, doing duty as an operating table, and, on it, a carved, flayed thing that no longer bore much resemblance to human or humanoid. Ferri seized a scalpel and jabbed at the body. “See? There’s a real thick extra layer of subcutaneous fat. Cold adaptation, of course. But there’s more to it than just that, I think. There’s real hair only on the head and the crotch, and the underarms. This other stuff, this down, is really a kind of fine-textured fur, very close-meshed fibers—it’s water-resilient, like duck feathers. Look at the musculature here. And the bone structure in the legs. The dorsal ridges aren’t quite as pronounced as they are in a human. The ilia in the pelvis aren’t quite as flared, and the hips are a tiny bit longer and narrower. The shoulders are narrower, the chest less rounded. See? The forearms are just a bit shorter. All minuscule things, but, taken together, they might be significant. And the feet, they’re not as broad and clublike as ours, not as good a weight-carrying base. I’ll bet there’s a lot of foot trouble among the Cian! And look! Here, the most interesting thing of all—I found the remnants of an inner eyelid, a transparent, aqueous-filled lid. Atrophied, of course, but there.”