Strangers (20 page)

“But,” he said, looking puzzledly at her, as if he were a schoolboy and she was a problem he had to solve, “if you knew—to go along with such a thing, to let them—Why, you must be crazy,” trembling, all his defenses being sluiced away by horror. “You must be crazy! Dear
God
. Jesus God!”

Desperately: “No—it’s not a ‘letting.’ Don’t—Joseph!”

But he was not listening. He was staring at her in total fascination. He had looked at her every day and every night for months, but he had never seen her. Never. She was a stranger to him. He had never known her at all.

“Tonight we must recall and cherish what we’ve been together,” the stranger said.

He backed away from her.

“Please, this is the last night we have,” the stranger said.

He turned away from her.

“
Joseph!
” said the stranger.

Blind and deaf, he ran from her.

Stumbling, lurching, wet wind, cold rock, black earth below. He went down to New City.

18

It was the night of one of the minor Modes, the Imminence of Spring, and in New City the streets were filled with light. It glinted from demon masks, flashed from jeweled costumes, and made odd amalgamations of flesh and cloth and shadow. Someone had built a bonfire in Potter’s Square, and the flames ate holes in the sky. The noise was overwhelming. Music stitched through sudden silences. The ceramic streets and squares and alleys were crowded with prancing, drunken demigods. They clutched at Farber, trying to get him to stay and celebrate, and he pulled roughly away. Using knees and elbows, he forced his way through the crowd like a trickle of ink working through a rich and vibrant tapestry. The air smelled of ginger, resin, musk. A demon with a horned, wooden face offered him a half-empty bottle of wine. He slapped it aside. The demon face was swallowed by the crowd.

Walpurgisnacht
, he thought.

By the time he found a commonhouse, fireworks were making luminous pastel novas behind the steep slate roofs. Inside, it was dusty, dark, and almost empty. What patrons there were nursed their own thoughts and ignored him. He bought a flask of strong native liquor from the concessionaire, and took it to a remote corner of the common room.

He nursed the bottle for an hour, staring down at the scarred planking of the table, unaware of the passage of time.

When he looked up again, Tamarane was sitting at his table.

He blinked at her, startled. He hadn’t heard her come in, he was sure of that—she had just appeared there, like smoke, like a brokenfaced ghost.

“My friends told me that you were here, the Earthman,” Tamarane said. “I came to see what sort of thing you were.”

“And what sort of thing am I?” he asked bitterly.

“I don’t know—a strange sort of thing. A thing not worth Liraun’s death, that much I know.”

Farber flushed. “Look here, now—”

“She was the best of us, you know,” Tamarane said, ignoring him. “I never told her that, we were never really close, but she was the best of us. And now it is too late to tell her. Now she is dead.”

“Goddamn you, you witch! She’s not dead yet!”

“Yes, she is,” Tamarane said calmly. She studied him intently but with seeming dispassion, as though he were a specimen on a laboratory slide. “You failed her miserably, do you know that? She always was the rebel, the lone one, the stranger—rescuing me from the
opeinad
, no one else in Aei would have done that. She had the potential to get free of here, this bleak deadly country, to ignore custom, to escape from Shasine. She couldn’t quite get all the way out, though; for her rebellion and defiance, all out in the open with no fear of consequence, she could not quite get free of custom, as some of us, less brave, did in silence and dissemblance while pretending to obey. She deserved someone who would help her to get all the way out. Instead, you came along and pushed her right back in.”

“I didn’t make up your damn barbaric customs, missy,” Farber snapped, breathing harshly. “I didn’t notice you helping her, eh? I didn’t notice you telling her she should ‘get out.’ After all, you knew about all this crap—I didn’t. No, all I notice you doing is pretending to be a good loyal wife like everybody else and keeping your mouth shut, right?”

Tamarane studied her hands, clenching and unclenching her fingers, and there was silence between them for a long time.

“I failed her too,” she said at last. “We all failed her. She failed herself—she could have gotten out, but she did not. Damn her!” she blazed suddenly, using the Terran word. “Goddamn her! Why couldn’t she have pressed a little harder?” Her snapping black eyes flicked to Farber. “And damn you! Why couldn’t you have seen, why couldn’t you have helped her? And damn me . . .” Her eyes filmed over, became opaque, and there was another long pause. “There is too much silence, too much fear, too much of living only from day to day, too much of doing what is easy. Not enough questions, not enough talk, not enough work. We all failed ourselves, all of us.”

She took a long swig from Farber’s bottle, shuddered, and stood up. “I go downriver tonight,” she said. “Smuggled south in an iceboat to Katrine, like contraband. There are other places on this world beside Shasine, after all, other cities than Aei to live in, even if the Shadow Men don’t seem to think so. That’s what you should have done with your wife, Earthman—long ago, before it was too late.”

“It’s not too late,” Farber said doggedly. “There is still time to do that later, if I want to, and maybe I will someday; it’s not a bad idea at that, although it’s going to be hard to get away entirely from Shasine’s influence anywhere on this miserable planet.” He wagged his hand at Tamarane. “You are counting me out, eh? But you’re wrong. I’ll protect Liraun, don’t you worry about that—I’ll even protect her from herself if I have to. Nothing’s going to happen to her while I’m around!”

Tamarane looked at him quizzically, that hard bitter irony coming back into her face now that pain and guilt had ebbed. “When this is over, Earthman, remember one thing—the Shadow Men could save Liraun if they wanted to. They could save all of us. They have the knowledge, the technology— But then, one cannot interfere with religion, can one? And of course, the Modes are
so
beautiful—” She grimaced, her battered face wincing in some complex variety of pain. “Goodbye, Earthman,” she said. “I mean you no ill, but I wish you’d stayed there, I wish you’d died there—on Earth.”

“Goodbye, Tamarane,” Farber said harshly. “I wish I could say we’ll miss you around here, but goddamn it! I don’t think anyone will.”

“Oh, I’ll be back!” Tamarane said, almost jovial now. “Life in Shasine is a hard and unyielding thing. Hard things are brittle.” She smiled. “Brittle things break.”

She went out.

Farber ordered another bottle. He noticed, dispassionately, that his hands were trembling.

For the first time in months, he drank himself into oblivion.

When he woke up in the morning, he felt like a dead man. No part of his body seemed to be working properly. The Cian, who had let him wallow alone in his corner all night, stared at him with opprobrium. He stared back at them without shame or interest. The concessionaire, his face frozen with distaste, suggested politely that—since this establishment was far too poor to serve him appropriately—Farber might care to grace another commonhouse with the honor of his patronage.

Out into the bright morning, sweating and stinking.

19

“I can’t help you,” Ferri said. “Keane will kill me if I do.”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t,” Farber said.

Ferri glanced sidelong at Farber, and felt the blood begin to drain out of his face. There was something in Farber’s voice that he had never heard before in anyone’s, a hard, weary, backed-to-the-wall desperation. It was there in his face as well: cold and expressionless as a manikin, eyes like two daubs of lead. He sat slumped in his chair as if he was too heavy to move. And yet it was that very heaviness that was ominous—instinct told him that anything with that much inertia would possess a terrifying amount of kinetic energy when it finally did start to move, the mountain coming down with the landslide. Ferri suddenly accepted that Farber might well be capable of killing him, not so much in passion as out of a sodden bitter stubbornness: because Ferri was blocking the only road Farber knew how to follow, and the man simply did not have the energy to trailblaze a new one.

Nervously, Ferri licked his lips.

“Look, Joe,” Ferri said, in as reasonable a voice as possible, “this thing you’ve stumbled on, the ritual murder of the Mothers—that’s the missing factor in the social equation here, and it explains a lot. Your second ‘Lord Vrome,’ for instance. Even with multiple births, even with the majority of the babies female, their population would slowly and inevitably decline if they lose the mother every time, especially as a certain percentage of the women are sterile. A diminishing spiral. They must clone certain individuals, important individuals, to bring the population back to its usual steady level. Genetically unsound in the long run, but feasible, and possibly even another reason why this society has been static for so long.

“But don’t you realize how all-pervasive a thing it is? Using hindsight, it’s easy to see how that one thing is reiterated throughout their whole society, art, religion, the home, everything. That inscription on the eikon, remember? The one you couldn’t read? It’s: ‘From Sacrifice—Life,’ as near as I can get it. There are hundreds of things like that, in front of our faces all the time, that prove—in retrospect—that the average Cian not only accepts this killing of the Mothers, he believes in his bones that it’s sacred. It’s not just the Shadow Men; however much of an aversion you’ve taken to them, you can’t say that—although they may have been responsible for the mass indoctrination in the first place, millennia ago. But by now it’s a thread that’s woven right through their entire culture.” He glanced at Farber’s face, looked away quickly. “Dammit, don’t you see how difficult it would be to buck a tradition that firmly entrenched? Remember,
the women accept it too
. It’s sacred to them, too; in fact, it’s a transcendental thing to them, a way of becoming a god, if only for a few months. And Liraun has all the prejudices and values of her society, you know. Damn it, I warned you not to roleplay with these people. You’re treating Liraun as if she were Madame Butterfly, but she’s not—she’s one of the heads of Shasine government, a leader of their whole society, and, under these circumstances, high priestess more than victim. You’ve got to understand that. Face it—it’s too late to do anything about this, change anything.”

“It will work,” Farber said. His accent was coming back, as it did only under extreme stress, so that he actually said, “it vill vork,” like a comic-opera Prussian. “I had a lot of time to think about this last night.” He closed his eyes tiredly. “She’ll get over it. Once she has the child, and she realizes that she doesn’t have to die, that a bolt of lightning will not come down and fry her because she didn’t go to the Birth House— It’ll be hard, sure, but she’ll get over it. I’ll re-educate her.”

“It won’t work,” Ferri said flatly.

“Goddammit! It better!” Farber blazed. His eyes flew open—they were muddy and ill-tempered, like those of a snapping turtle. “I refuse to lose my wife to a bloodthirsty pagan superstition. D’you understand me, Mister? And you’re going to help me, aren’t you?”

Ferri wiped his face—it had gone white. Very carefully, he said: “This is going to raise a hell of a stink. You know that. I don’t believe this kind of a situation has ever come up before—the Cian are temperamentally unsuited for it. God knows how they’ll react to it, except I doubt if it’ll be phlegmatically. If you kick that bee’s nest over, Keane is going to find out about it, very soon.”

“He already knows,” Farber said. “You know what I did this morning?” he continued in an artificially light voice. “Before I came here? I called Keane up, and I asked him if I could put Liraun into the Co-op Hospital. I crawled on my belly to him. Do I have to tell you what he said? No, I thought not. Easy to guess, huh?” He shrugged with elaborate casualness. “So, Liraun will have to have her baby at home. And you’re going to deliver it.”

“I
can’t
,” Ferri said. He looked sick. “Joe, listen. I can’t help you that openly. You know Keane has it in for you. If I delivered Liraun, he’d find out, and then he’d have it in for me too. He sends efficiency ratings on me back to Cornell, you know that.
Listen
, dammit. A really bad report from him could ruin my career, invalidate this expedition and all the work I’ve done. Lose me my tenure—”

“Are you going to help me? Or not?” Farber said. His voice had become very quiet, and his face had gone dead. He was not moving at all.

“Christ,” Ferri said. He reached out for the drink that had been sitting, unsampled, on a sidetable, and then drew his hand back with a grimace, as if the touch of his fingers against the cold sweating glass had made him nauseous. He put his fingers to his lips, as though he wanted to suck on them. “Look, Joe,” he said, coming alive, “this is what I’ll do for you. Right? I’ve got a scanner here, on loan from the Co-op. I’ll use it to give you a subcerebral course on childbirth, take about an hour. We’ve got a package on it in the First Aid program, ‘Basic Midwifery,’ or somesuch. Then you can go home and deliver Liraun yourself, and Keane won’t be any the wiser. Right?” He winked at Farber, as though in relief at solving the problem, but there was a fine tremor to his hands.

Farber was silent for a long time. “What if there’re complications?” he said at last.

“Unlikely,” Ferri replied. “Ninety percent of the time you won’t run into anything you can’t handle after the subcerebral training. Christ, don’t forget women did it all by themselves for thousands of years.” At Farber’s unsatisfied look, he said passionately, “Goddammit, how much do you want from me?” Admitting defeat: “Okay, listen. You can borrow the diagnosticator. It’s Jejun work, beautiful thing, you can fold it up small enough to fit it in a backpack, though it’s fairly heavy. And for God’s sake, be careful with it—it’s at least a century advanced over any medical equipment made on Terra, and it’s as expensive as shit. I only got one because I’m doing critical field work. Now the thing telemeters, and it’s got waldoes on it, surgical ones, micro stuff. I’ll monitor everything, when the big moment comes, and if anything serious goes wrong, I’ll take over. But
I
won’t be there in the flesh, oh no! And if we’re careful and you keep your mouth shut, friend, then Keane won’t find out about it. Okay? I swear to God,” he added, belligerently, “that’s the best I can do for you. Take it or leave it.”