Strangers (18 page)

He set off on foot through Aei New City, following River Way along the bustling Aome waterfront. There were no Birth Houses in Old City, he had picked up that much information in the past few days—apparently it was forbidden. He doubted that there would be any in this district either; as he understood it, Birth Houses were located in quiet, out-of-the-way pockets of the city, not because they were considered shameful, but because they were so sacred that they must not be unduly contaminated by the mundane flow of urban life. So he walked rapidly, almost at a dogtrot, until the city began to dwindle and fall away on either hand, and he turned onto the North Road. Here he must walk slowly and keep alert. The Birth House could be anywhere.

The North Road paralleled the shore of Elder Sea, about a quarter-mile inland from the unbroken wall of the Dunes. Farber followed it up the coast for miles, while the scattered clumps of buildings that erved Aei for suburbs became less and less frequent. They had all been places with some obvious utility—truck farm, heavy machine shop, pottery works—and none of them could be the Birth House. Doggedly, he kept walking. The towering monolith that was Old City had been looming ahead and to the left; now it pulled abreast, and then slowly fell behind him, its mazy roofs and towers glinting against the muted afternoon sky. As it fell behind, the world opened up, as the city had opened to suburb when he turned onto the North Road. He had the feeling that the Eye of God had just done a long slow dolly-back, like some preternatural television camera, reducing him to a tiny black spot toiling across an immense field of white. The wind now tasted of distances, of all the places he had never been, the unimaginable expanses of an alien world, open to the horizon. It was both daunting and madly exhilarating. He realized that he had never been out of sight of Old City on this world, that his experience of Weinunnach was bounded by a twenty-mile circle. Now, as the obsidian cliff and its burden of stark towers began to sink under the horizon behind him, like a skeleton-masted ghost ship going down. Farber felt a sudden overwhelming urge to just keep walking, heedless of his original goal. To keep going on and on across the snowy plain until Aei disappeared, until everything he knew was gone—to forget about Liraun, about their child, about Ferri, about Earth, to put away and forget all of his old life, to go on until he came to a new place, a new city, to start again. That went through him like a sexual thing, like an electric current, like a hot drugged wind. It shook him and staggered him. For a moment it straddled and rode him like a succubus, then he tore it free. The wind whipped it away, and it was gone. He blinked. He shook his head.

He kept walking.

Still no Birth House.

The countryside around him was buried under at least ten inches of snow, although the North Road itself had somehow been kept spotlessly clear. Nothing grew here now, except for the snowtrees that were scattered in groves over the low hills to the west. These were tall, lustrous, translucent plants, something like giant asparagus, something like wax beans, with spiky ebony-leafed heads. They were heliotropic, and they hunted the sun as it slid across the horizon from east to west. They flourished in this season, in the deepest winter, and the air was full of the drifting white clouds of their pollen. For a while then, walking the road, Farber underwent a strangely pleasant attack of
déjà vu
that persisted until he had puzzled out the reason for it. It was an unseasonably warm day, for Shasine in winter, and the bright sunlight, the hazy blue sky, the drifting pollen, all combined to reproduce for him—if you ignored the snow—the effect of a balmy spring day on Earth, shirtsleeve weather, birds singing invisibly behind the bright sky, sweet-smelling clouds of cherry blossoms on the wind, probably a crowd of raucous children playing soccer somewhere ahead. The illusion was so real for him that he nearly took off his coat, absentmindedly. But the “birds” were lizards or small winged marsupials, the pollen had a pungent, rusty smell, and whatever lay ahead of him would certainly not be a game of soccer. That hit him in an eyeblink, dissolving the illusion. Again and again he fell into the trap of preconceptions, of old ways of thinking and perceiving that could no longer apply, and repeatedly Weinunnach betrayed him, brought him up short, snatched the ground away, kicked his teeth in. How long would it take him to realize, emotionally, that this was not Earth?

Suddenly, he was shivering. There was a bitter, bone-deep chill in the air that the direct sunlight could only momentarily disguise. A sudden turn in the road brought him to a roadside shrine, deserted, open to the road and sunk a bit into the ground, the crescent wall that cupped it made of patchwork sections of marble and porcelain and ceramic. The shrine was crowded with stone deities, squat, staring gods about four feet high, with grotesque faces and knobby hands, vaguely Aztecan in style and execution. He recognized some of them. The Warm People, carved jade inlaid with silver and bone, had been turned so that their faces were to the wall. For the remainder of the winter, they would look away from a world whose destiny they no longer controlled and whose suffering they could in no way abate. The Cold People, weathered rock and polished obsidian, had been moved to the front of the shrine, and glowered out over the road. Their faces were dour, unhappy, and fierce. Their blank, black obsidian eyes seemed to follow him as he passed.

A quarter-mile beyond the shrine, Farber gave it up. He stopped, defeated, on a small rise and tried to catch his breath. Behind, Old City poked up like a stump, up over the edge of the world; away to the west, he could see the winterstripped trees of an orchard, tiny as twigs with distance; ahead, to the north and east, were the snow-shrouded Dunes—like a mountain range in miniature—and Elder Sea. The water was cold and metallic and sluggish, and the beaches were locked in ice. The only sounds were the wind, and the groan of the pack ice breaking and reforming under the slow shrugging of the waves. The light was beginning to die, and it was growing colder. The desolation of the scene was unbelievable—it was more than could be borne. There was nothing left to do but pack it in, and go back to Aei. He had failed in the search anyway; he’d come almost three miles from the junction of the North Road, and the Birth House couldn’t be this far out. Reluctantly, Farber turned around to go back. He raised his foot for the first step. Then he hesitated, not quite letting his weight down on it.

The wind brought him a ringing crystalline music.

For a moment, he thought it was in his mind, a waking return of his old dream of the
Alàntene
, but it grew steadily in volume and distinctness, shimmering staccato arpeggios that nailed themselves to the air with the vivid authority of silver spikes through jet-black wood. Under that was a slow walking thunder of drums.

Farber watched the road to the south, back toward Aei, and in a little while he saw the dusty sunlight flash from bronze masks and iron hauberks, shimmer across rich fabric, pick out the tall nodding silhouettes of plumes, wink back brilliantly at him from onyx and amber and amethyst. At this distance, the figures of the marchers were small and close together—they looked like some fantastical centipede, cloth-bodied and varicolored, dozens of tiny legs scissoring rhythmically, scores of booted feet slapping stone in step. Flashing, rippling, stamping, swaying, casting a clangorous music up before it, the centipede wound out of the hills toward him.

He sat down on a rock to wait for it.

Ten minutes later, the Procession reached him. He sat and watched it pass, expressionless and unmoving as any of the statues in the shrine, although the cold stone had numbed his buttocks and the chill was spreading down his legs. This was the Procession of a rich household, probably one of the Thousand Families—it was made up of over twenty marchers. First came the Impersonators, carrying the Talismans on tall poles or wearing them over their shoulders as false heads, then the cluster of Twilight People around the Mother; following them were the musicians, with their drums and
tikans
and nose-flutes. Everyone seemed fresh and unfatigued. The marching was crisp and well coordinated, the musicians played steadily, the Talismans were held high and erect on their poles, apparently without effort, although some of them must have weighed thirty or forty pounds. In spite of his obvious age, the
twizan
was doing a complicated step-and-sway as he marched, darting from one side of the road to the other, whirling and leaping, scattering handfuls of fine brown powder into the air—it smelled something like nutmeg, something like onions, and it made Farber want to sneeze. The
twizan
was not even breathing hard, although he must have been eighty years old. Farber had not taken the incredible Cian stamina into consideration. A forced march of three or four miles through near-zero-temperatures would certainly have killed or miscarried a Terran woman in the last month of pregnancy, but, somehow, the Cian Mother was still on her feet, walking between the
soúbrae
—this Old Woman was fat, strapping, and nearly bald, but equally cold, equally ancient—and the silent, costumed Fetuses. The Mother’s face was drawn and blank, and as gray as putty. Her skin was shiny-slick with sweat, in spite of the cold. Occasionally, she would stumble, and the
soúbrae
would put out a hand to steady her. But she kept going.

They all ignored Farber completely, and he made no attempt to attract their attention. He sat stolidly on the rock, saying nothing, and in a little while the Procession had passed down the hill and out of sight, into a snowtree grove.

He gave them five minutes, and then got up and followed them.

The Birth House was another three-quarters of a mile down the Road. It was a low, long, flat-roofed structure, made of rough gray rock, fronting on the road and recessed into a low hill that rose up behind it to the west; probably the hill was excavated inside. There were no windows, and only one door that Farber could see. It was a most unremarkable building, and he might easily have taken it for a warehouse, except that the Procession had drawn up in a semi-circle before it. As he arrived, they were going through the Ritual of Imminence, celebrating the Translation-to-come. Farber watched from a position about thirty yards away, standing hunch-shouldered against the cold. Again he was in plain sight, and again he was ignored as if he did not exist—Farber had no business here, and if he chose to snoop, then that was a manifestation of
his
poor taste, his boorishness; no one else would take a chance on contamination by deigning to notice him. The ritual was short: after being anointed by the
twizan
, the
soúbrae
escorted the Mother up to the Birth House, up to the tall iron door of the featureless stone wall. The door opened. There was a glimpse of someone inside, white-costumed, vague. The Mother entered the Birth House. The door closed behind her.

The
soúbrae
turned away from the Birth House, and the Procession was over. The marchers ceased to be a precision unit, and became again an informal aggregation of individuals. They straggled back toward Aei in no particular order, talking, laughing at a joke, the musicians with their instruments slung over their backs, the Impersonators resting their long poles across their shoulders. Most of them glanced surreptitiously at Farber as they passed. Only the
soúbrae
and the
twizan
did not look and they radiated a chill disapproval. Within minutes, they had disappeared up the Road, and Farber was alone again.

He waited.

The wind moaned in from the sea, and the sun slid west across the horizon.

Nothing else moved—everything was cold silence and suspension.

He waited, freezing, hugging himself against the cold, finally doing calisthenics to keep warm, jumping jacks, squat thrusts, running in place, wondering what the Cian who were probably watching made of these unorthodox obeisances, feeling conspicuous and absurd but keeping grimly at it anyway, his feet slapping circulation back into themselves, his breath coming in violent little explosions of vapor, like an old steam engine building up working head, and still, doggedly, he waited. He haunted the Birth House for another hour and a half, while the long afternoon guttered to night around him. During that time, two more Processions arrived from Aei. These were less elaborate affairs, from poorer households—neither of them were made up of more than twelve members, and their panoplies were not quite so sumptuous. All the marchers ignored him, as the inhabitants of the Birth House had ignored him during the long intervals between Processions. While Farber watched, the last Procession delivered their Mother to the Birth House, lit smoky, punk-smelling torches—for it was full dark now—and headed back to Aei, their torches growing smaller, becoming tiny bobbing matchflames, winking out one by one. Again Farber was alone, staring at blank secret rock.

Three women had entered the Birth House.

Nobody had come out.

Shivering, Farber slid forward abruptly, off the Road, crunching through knee-deep snow. He didn’t know where he was going, or what he was going to do—like an arrow held at full draw that is suddenly released, he went because he was impelled to go. An intuition had brought him here; suspicion had kept him here, and it was suspicion, having been screwed intolerably tight, that now snapped like a bowstring and whipped him away toward the target. That suspicion was wordless, unfounded, irrational; he had not even really entertained it yet, in his conscious mind. But on some subcortical level it had been accepted and believed—now he was looking for proof. He began to circle the Birth House, thrashing through stiff winterstripped brush. Twigs snapped under his feet like bones, and branches raked at his eyes. The snow was now thigh-deep. Now waist-deep. He floundered through it like a moose, breaking a path for himself. Off to the side rose the gray featureless walls of the Birth House. He grinned at them nervously as he fought the snow. The place didn’t even have any windows.

Around the far side of the hill, he found another door. It was a plain thing of ironbound wood, almost a hatchway, set flush in the side of the snow-covered hillside. There was a tramped-down area in front of the door, and sitting in it were two or three oblong boxes, about four-by-four.
Garbage
, was Farber’s first thought, so homely and commonplace was the scene. But the boxes were built of hardwood, unvarnished but planed smooth, and they looked sturdy and well made. Nobody went to that much trouble for garbage. He had started forward to investigate when there was a loud metallic click from the door, followed by a rusty ratcheting sound. Farber froze, half-crouched, watching warily.