Strangers (15 page)

Farber shrugged. “So what does this mean?”

“I don’t know,” Ferri said. “I suppose we may never know for sure. But I’ve been dreaming up half-baked theories all day. The way I read it is that the Cian evolved from aquatic mammals—or amphibious ones, anyway—a remarkably short time ago. Short in a geological sense, of course. The layer of fat, the waterproof down, the transparent eyelid, they all point to that. If they didn’t start out as a land animal, then they haven’t had as much time to adjust to an erect posture as
Homo sapiens
has had. The musculature, the bone structure, the hips. Most especially, the feet. Naturally, all this is speculation. I’ve got another specimen on ice, and tomorrow I’ll go over it with the medical computer at the Co-op Hospital, see if I can’t get some evidence to confirm some of this stuff.”

“Interesting,” Farber said, in a neutral voice. Actually, he was not interested at all. It was hot and close in the corridor, and the stink of death was overpowering. He was hoping that Ferri would get off this jag so that they could go back into the living room.

Ferri glanced quizzically at Farber. “You’re not very impressed by all this, are you?”

Farber shrugged. “It’s interesting. But don’t expect me to jump and shout, Tony. I don’t have the bias of your specialty, to make it exciting for me, yes? And it doesn’t seem to be anything of immediate relevance.”

“No?” Ferri arched an eyebrow, and then waved his bloodstained scalpel at Farber. “You might be surprised!” Some of the aggressive bounce went out of him. For the first time, he seemed to realize that he and his clothes were heavily splattered with blood. “Hell,” he muttered, “let me get some of this muck off of me.” He disappeared into the bathroom. A moment later, Farber heard the shower come on.

Farber went back out into the living room. He found the chair that was the farthest away from the corridor, and sat down. Even there, a faint smell of corruption reached him. He waited.

A few minutes later, Ferri came out, dressed in slacks and a sweatshirt. He switched on the exhaust blower to carry away the odor, and then went to a portable bar and built them drinks. He gave one to Farber and sat down in an opposing chair.

“Christ!” Ferri sighed, settling in, letting the foam cup itself to his shape. “A long day.” He sipped at his drink. Now he looked tired. Evidently Farber’s lack of enthusiasm had brought him down from his manic edge. “Sorry to’ve rattled all that gibble-gabble off at you, Joe, but God! This means a lot to me, and I guess I’m kind of wound up, you know? If you had any idea how hard it is to get any kind of cooperation out of the Cian, how damn suspicious they are, how much sweet-talking and double-dealing I had to do to spring these two lousy specimens—” He sighed again, and took a bigger drink. “You think this is all a bunch of doubledomed pedantry, don’t you?”

Farber smiled noncommittally. He swirled the murky stuff in his glass. Strange to be drinking Scotch again. At last he said, politely, “It does seem a bit academic.”

“Not at all,” Ferri said, emphatically. “I’ll bet on it. This might be the key to everything. Hell.” He paused. “There’s something very odd about the Cian culture. Goddamn it, there’s something almost
artificial
about some of this. This business of the males nursing the young, for example. I hooked the specimen in there over with a diagnosticator, and the enzymic and hormonal changes in the basic male system needed to make it possible are incredibly complex. And the thing’s complex in execution too—lactation in the males is triggered by the secretion of musk by the pregnant female, and by minute amounts of hormones that osmose through her skin and are transferred to the male by touch. Dammit, a system like that could
never
evolve naturally. I don’t think so, anyway. Not in a sophisticated mammal. It’s way overcomplicated. And it’s unnecessary. Why can’t the females nurse? They do in the low-order mammals I’ve been able to examine, so it isn’t some universal quirk of this planet’s eco-system.” He shook his head. “No, everything points to the idea that the Cian were faced with some sudden, drastic change—they adjusted themselves to meet it, and that adjustment warped the development of their whole culture.”

“What change?” Farber asked.

“That’s where today’s findings come in,” Ferri said. “Lisle’s now in a major interglacial. According to my figures, the last big glaciation would have dropped the level of the oceans by quite a significant amount. Get it? This assumes that, before the glaciation, the Cian were amphibious hominids, living right on the shorelines, in the shallows. Probably they were almost as highly evolved as the modern Cian, intelligent, but not culture-transmitting in the same way that the Cian are now—I doubt if they’d have fire, or tool making, living in the water most of the time. Probably they had speech, and an oral tradition. I get the chilly feeling that some of the Cian myths are older than humans can imagine, that they’ve come down in an unbroken line from the days before the Cian left the sea. Spooky.” He finished his drink. “Anyway, the ice age comes, and the sea level drops, drastically. The continental shelves fall away very rapidly here, and very steeply. Drop the sea level enough, and you wouldn’t have any shallows, anywhere. So it was either adapt to life as a fully aquatic mammal again, or adapt fully to life on land. So they adapted to land life, some of them anyway, and they did it very quickly. The pressure on them must have been enormous, and the situation unbelievably harsh. I imagine that the majority of them died, but some of them made it. Think of it! I doubt if Terran life would have been capable of meeting the challenge in time, but the Cian did. They adjusted themselves.”

“How’d they adjust?” Farber said harshly. “You make it sound like they tinkered around with their bodies and custom-modeled themselves to fit.”

Ferri grinned. “That’s just about what I do mean. Fire Woman spews out a lot more ultraviolet than Sol. This planet is drenched with hard radiation. That makes its biomass a lot more fluid than Earth’s.
Lots
more mutations in every generation, and more of them viable.” He paused, and looked at Farber significantly. “Hell, you should’ve gotten a hint of that from your own experience. A lot of their legends seem to point to the fact that their females practice voluntary natural contraception. Reabsorption of the embryonic material. Your own experience with your wife seems to confirm that, and I have other instances. And, if they can do that, I don’t doubt that they’ve got a lot more control over their genetic material in other ways as well. There are hints of that, too. So, they were forced to live on land, to adapt to it in a very short time, by evolutionary standards. For some reason, the transition interfered with the ability of the females to nurse. But their genetic fluidity saved them. Necessity jury-rigged this system with the males nursing the young. And that distortion was reflected throughout all the rest of their cultural development, until by the time their society reached the point where they were able to fix it—and they could, don’t kid yourself; their genetic technology is sophisticated enough now so that they can do just about anything they want; your own case is proof of that—it’d become such an intrinsic, integral part of their culture that they couldn’t rip that thread out without destroying the rest of the weave as well.”

“I don’t know.” Farber toyed with his glass, set it down. “It all seems very complicated to me.
Ja
?”

“And so it is,” Ferri said. “That’s one theory. Here’s another. The Cian
deliberately
engineered these alterations in their own biological systems, within historical times. This is a very stable culture, Joe. Almost static. From the evidence, I’d say that they’ve had a biological technology more advanced than ours for at least three thousand years. A long time, right? Sometime during those three millennia, after they had developed the capability to do so, they ‘tinkered’ with themselves, to use your phrase. That male-lactation Tashup
is
suspiciously complicated and cumbersome; it would be easier to explain it away as a deliberate act of genetic engineering than to try to figure out how much a screwy system could have naturally evolved. So they did it to themselves, then. Why? Jesus Christ, I don’t know! But the minds of the Shadow Men aristocrats are so dark and unfathomable to us—who in hell knows why they do anything? They’re
aliens
. Right? What do we really know about the way, what its goals are, what its motives are, what its dictates are? Nothing.”

Ferri got up and made himself another large drink. His movements were a little unsteady—he was rapidly getting sloshed. “So that’s my second theory,” he told Farber. “I don’t like it as well as the other one, but I have to admit that Occam’s Razor favors it. Don’t forget, though, that the Razor often doesn’t cut it, when it comes down to real-world situations.” He chuckled at his own wit, finished his drink, made another. Farber refused a refill. Clutching his drink carefully, Ferri returned to his seat.

The two men sat in silence for a moment. Ferri’s face had acquired a puckered expression, as though he was tasting something that had spoiled. It was obvious that his manic enthusiasm was souring under the influence of weariness and whisky. He grinned lopsidedly at Farber. “Two theories, and neither of them really account for all the weird sociological quirks of this society. So fuck it. I can spin a dozen more, if you want. What else have I got to do in this vacuum but sit here and make up fairy stories for myself?” He took a ferocious swig of his drink. “If Cian would only cooperate!” he said bitterly. “If I could just get a female specimen to work on, get her down on the table and open her up, I might be able to figure this out. But they won’t let me dissect a female—it’s such a sacrilege to them they hiss in horror if you even hint at it.”

Farber watched him in silence. Scientific objectivity was all very well, but, goddamn it, the man knew Farber’s situation, and there was such a thing as discretion. Farber’s mind insisted on flashing him a vivid picture of Liraun laying flayed and gutted on the rollaway bed, split from stem to sternum to satisfy Ferri’s curiosity. Farber’s jaw muscles clenched, and a pulse began to throb at his temple.

“This doing you any good?” he said in a thick, harsh voice, tapping the telemeter-bracelet at his wrist.

“It’s doing me too goddamn much good,” Ferri grumbled. He crossed to the bar and came up with a narcotic atomizer, pressed it into his nose, and inhaled deeply several times. When he spoke again, his voice was high-pitched and dreamily remote, as though he had gone away somewhere and left his body behind on automatic pilot to deal with Farber. “It’s driving me to distraction, it’s doing me so much good,” he said in his new passionless voice, waving his hands mechanically, looking like a robot programmed to act out emotional turmoil. He drifted back to his chair, walking with the leisurely slow-motion strides of an astronaut in low gravity, and proffered the atomizer to Farber. Farber refused, with a sudden twinge of distaste—he was just beginning to realize how much his life among the Cian had estranged him from his fellow Terrans. Ferri shrugged, gave him a dreamy scornful smile, and gave himself another long snort of the narcotic. When he came up from it, his eyes were opaque, and his voice was even further away. “We’ve known all along that the Cian language depends heavily on shifts in tone and inflection to convey meaning, like Chinese. Now it appears that words and sentences spoken exactly the same way can take on alternate, and usually totally different, meanings, just by the social construct of the moment in which they are spoken. Or maybe by infinitesimal hand-and-body gestures too, although that’s hard to prove. But Christ! I’m surprised we’ve ever understood
anything
these people have told us.”

“How’d you know we have?” Farber said.

Ferri grimaced, and stuck the atomizer back into his nose.

13

After that, Farber didn’t see Ferri again for a while. He and Liraun were increasingly forced to depend on their own company. With Liraun in her present mood, that made it a lonely time for Farber. He was leading a celibate life again, but this time he accepted it with real equanimity, as he tried to accept Liraun’s sullenness, and the sudden apparent deterioration of her health. He was still content, he realized, in spite of everything. His old unrest, his Earthsickness, was gone. He didn’t want to be anywhere else, he didn’t want to do anything else—that knowledge seeped from the inside out, and left him in peace. When he looked to the future, he was full of confidence. He had his feet on the ground now, and he and Liraun had been working out fine. The pregnancy was upsetting everything at the moment, but after she’d had the kid things would settle down again, and they’d get back to normalcy. He was not a particularly patient man, but he could summon up enough patience to last until then. And then they’d be all right. Then they’d be fine. And the child—he found himself looking forward to that with a keener pleasure than he’d known he could feel.

Wait until the child is born,
he told himself.
Wait until the child is born.

14

The last month of pregnancy began, and Liraun underwent another sea change. Although still physically weak and shaky, she seemed to tap some inner source of serenity and strength. She was at peace with herself, once again the old Liraun. But now the Council began to take up more and more of her time, as if they were getting as much use out of her as possible while she was still a Mother of Shasine.

Sometimes he would accompany her to Council meetings, or pick her up after work on his way back to the Row, and he saw and heard enough, in snatches, during those times to realize that what Ferri had said was true: Liraun, along with the six other Mothers who composed the Council at the moment, was literally running Shasine. It was a huge and complicated task, and Farber understood only enough of it to be glad that it wasn’t his. Finance, for instance, was a game to the Cian, in a way that it never could be to a Terran. They treated it as an agreed-upon fantasy, understood as such; that, of course, was true on Earth as well, although it was seldom understood or admitted—but never on Earth would they agree to cancel or change all the rules in the middle of the game, as they periodically did in Shasine, sometimes even wiping out all debts and starting again, or “agreeing upon” a new value for money; “national debt” was an unknown concept among the Cian. Dealing with this sort of thing was the least complicated part of being a Mother of Shasine, and Farber was content enough to leave it to Liraun, although his new role as First Lady, so to speak, took him awhile to get used to. Liraun was the important one now—if he had any importance at all (and he didn’t have much), it was only because he was connected to her, because she liked to have him around, as if he were her favorite cat.