Strangers (22 page)

He pushed the clip into place, and put the gun back into his belt. He hoped that he wouldn’t have to shoot any of them. Wearily, he put his face in his hands. All his rage had died, leaving him empty and sick. If he could have figured a way to back out of the situation then, he would have taken it. But there was no way.

He waited, silently, while the day began to die out of the room around him.

It seemed to him then, sitting in the gathering dusk with his catatonic wife, that Ferri had been right about them, about the Earthmen. They were the wrong people. They had come for the wrong reasons, and they were looking for the wrong things in the wrong places at the wrong time. They had brought their wrongness with them, transported it at enormous cost over hundreds of light-years—for certainly they had committed the same litany of errors at home, lived the same wrong ways: look at the shape Earth had been in when the Enye had come to give it the ambivalent gift of stars. It seemed to him that the governments at home had made a basic—and possibly fatal—racial error in sending men like the men of the Enclave out to represent Earth to the galaxy. The worst of them, these emissaries, were shallow, jaundiced, neurotically repressed, buttoned-down reflex machines, out for the main chance, proud of their efficiency even though it achieved nothing. Certainly Earth had better men than these to offer. Even the best of them—Ferri, for instance—had demonstrated repeatedly that they were incapable of thinking of the Cian as
people
, and that false objectivity had warped the very observations it was intended to protect. At the end, Ferri had not helped Farber because of honest concern or sympathy, but merely because he was afraid Farber would do violence to him. Even he, Farber, himself—so smugly proud of being an “artist.” How innocuous his work must have been, for the Co-op to be unafraid of sending him to the stars as chronicler of its activities. What was another name for a government-supported artist? A mediocrity? A whore?

He heard them then, coming back. The Cian.

Unsteadily, he got to his feet, and stood blinking around him. “Liraun?” he said, aware of how flat and dull his voice sounded through the dusty silence. She did not move or answer—she sat lifelessly, gleaming faintly in the darkening room, like a statue carved of old dark wood. Outside: crowd noises, murmurings, footsteps, all drawing closer. He leaned against a wall, trying to call up the rage he knew he needed to survive this. He couldn’t find it. But, probing past exhaustion, he came upon a stew of fear and guilt and sullen injured pride. That would be a good enough substitute.

Farber went outside. It was nearing dusk. At the end of the Row, framed by black rock and seeming to sit on the cobblestone street, Fire Woman peered at him down a long tunnel of masonry—a lidless red eye staring dispassionately through a microscope at the tiny world inside. For the first time in months, it was warm enough to rain. A fine mist hung in the street, beading on windows, sweating from old stone walls. The wind that carried it smelled of spring, unlocking, wet rich earth. Spring was still a good distance off, but it was coming, fast enough to make the Cold People shift uneasily on their rock-and-ice thrones, jar them from their frozen reveries and get them to thinking about working up a last, killing frost. Farber looked down. It was Liraun’s Procession, back for another try. The other instruments were mute, but the drums had been keeping up a low tattoo on the march; now, as the members of the Procession filled up the space in front of Farber’s house, even they fell silent. There was no one else in sight; all up and down the Row, the doors were closed, the windows were shuttered and blind. Farber stepped forward and stopped, bracing his legs.

Scores of eyes staring up at him, gleaming like wet yellow stones.

The
twizan
stepped out from the crowd. He looked nervous but determined. “Citizen,” he said, “we have come for our daughter. Send her out to us.”

Farber drew his pistol.

“Citizen,” the
twizan
said, “you must not try to prevent us. There is no other shape for things to be. Since the time of the First Ancestor—”

“Listen to me now,” Farber said in a flat, quiet voice, leveling the gun. “Liraun is not coming out to you. There isn’t going to be a Procession, now or ever. Do you understand that? Now get away from my house. Go on—all of you, get out!”

The
twizan
faltered, looked at the
soúbrae
whose face was cold and adamant, and then looked at Farber. The
twizan
drew himself up, and took a step forward. Another. The Procession pressed up close behind him, Talismans held high—Fire Woman threw their weird twisted shadows across Farber, banding his face with darkness.

Farber raised the pistol. One of the Talismans, off to his left, was bigger than the others, a huge, ruddy, puff-cheeked head representing the Person of the Winds—it was actually a sewn leather balloon, filled with hot gas, used at only the most distinguished of Processions and needing two husky Impersonators to brace it down. Farber fired at it. The roar of the heavy-caliber pistol was horrendously loud in the narrow, high-walled street, and it froze everyone, Farber included, into stunned immobility. Only the head of the Person of the Winds moved: it billowed, a ripple going from cheek to cheek, seemed to swell monstrously for an instant, and then hissing in dismay, began to fold up. the puffed cheeks caving in like a consumptive’s, the fierce eyes collapsing onto the nose which collapsed in turn onto the mouth, the lower lip swelling as the head was compressed, the huge, sagging face assuming an expression of bemused petulance, pouting as it hissed itself flat. The entire thing sagged down over the two Impersonators like a collapsed tent, forcing them to their knees with stately relentlessness. The crowd—no longer a Procession, after this—stared in horror. But here and there, someone took another step toward Farber.

If Farber had known more about guns, he would never have done what he did then. He lowered the pistol, aimed, and fired two quick shots into the cobblestone at the feet of the crowd. Instantly, he felt something hot whiz by his own ear; a window shattered; a
tikan
held by a musician splintered across his neck; another musician clutched his arm and almost fell; a jeweled eye flew off a Talisman—all at the same time, as it seemed. There was a sound such as a very rapidly ticking clock might make, if its gears were made of stone and iron, interlaced with little giggling echoes. In that narrow place, the bullets had ricocheted maybe thirty or forty times in a fraction of a second, from wall to wall to wall.

Everyone was dazed by this—again including Farber—but Farber recovered first. He took three quick steps forward, shouting, and firing the pistol again, into the air this time.

The crowd fell back.

Farber pressed forward rapidly; the crowd parted and fell away as the Red Sea had for Moses, and there was Jacawen, just seeming to appear in Farber’s path—another conjuring trick—as the crowd fell back behind him, a small, somber, unyielding man, the only one in the street who was not in motion.

Jacawen did not fall back.

Farber stopped. He was aware that the rest of the Cian had kept retreating, leaving Jacawen to face him alone, but only subliminally aware—all his attention was fixed rigidly on Jacawen, so much so that he was losing color and detail around the periphery of his vision.

“Our ways are not your ways, Mr. Farber,” Jacawen said.

Farber’s fingers were turning white as they clutched the pistol grip. “Get out of here,” Farber said in a voice so strained that it gave every syllable in every word the same flat, unstressed emphasis.

Jacawen said something in reply, too tight and fast for Farber to be able to follow the dialect—the only indication Jacawen gave of the intense emotional strain he himself was under. By the time his enunciation had flattened into partial intelligibility, he was saying, “know. I warn you, if you keep on with this—” mistake? sin?—too garbled—“you will be damning her to” hell?—“you will be condemning your own wife.”

“I don’t care about your goddamn religion,” Farber snapped.

Another garbled reply, then: “(?) death. They do not suffer. At the Birth House we give them a drug that obliterates consciousness, without pain.”

“I don’t want to hear how you rationalize your fucking little murders, either,” Farber said, a detached part of his mind wondering how his voice could possibly sound like that. “Now get
out
of here!”

“You’re consigning your wife to agony!”

“Let me worry about her soul, huh?” Farber shouted.

“Mr. Farber—”

Farber pointed the pistol at Jacawen’s abdomen.

A silence. Then Jacawen said, “Our ways are not your ways, Mr. Farber.”

Farber jacked a round into the chamber.

A long moment, with Jacawen staring at Farber, a very old expression on his face. Then Jacawen shook his head, and turned away. He walked off down the Row, moderately quick, a small stiff figure dwindling into the slit-eye sliver of red lidded with black that was all there was left of the sunset.

Farber was alone in the street.

When the eye on the edge of the world closed, and night was complete, he went back into the house. It was dark inside. For a moment, he thought that he couldn’t hear Liraun’s breathing, and then he caught it: very slow and thready. He fumbled his way to the heating globe and started it, flooding the room with golden light.

Liraun was sitting in the chair, unmoving, just the way he’d left her.

Farber stared at her. She stared back, blankly, though if he stepped out of her line of vision her eyes did not move to follow him. He made an impatient noise. “You don’t have to be afraid any more,” he said. “You’re safe now—I saved you, I scared them off. They won’t be back any more. You don’t have to die. Do you understand that?”

She didn’t answer.

Sighing, he sat down. He leaned his head back against the wall.

Time seemed to stop then, or at least blur its edges. He very nearly fell into a trance state himself, nodding in and out of sleep. After a long time, someone outside in the street—possibly the
soúbrae
, from the sound—began to wail “
Opein! Opein!
” in a voice that thrilled with a kind of despairing horror. That roused Farber a little, and for a while he sat there thinking that the Twilight People had concluded that the whole mess had been caused by an
opein
who has possessed Liraun at the
Alàntene
, and how tidy an explanation that was, but the voice keening “
Opein! Opein!
” went on so long and monotonously, and it was such a droning thing even in its sorrow, that it lulled him back into his nod-and-daze, and it wasn’t until after the voice had been silent for a very long time that he realized, belatedly, that it had stopped. He skimmed on, right on the borderline of sleep, aware only of the slight purr of the heating globe, the beating of his own heart, of Liraun’s, of his slow breathing, Liraun’s, and so on in a diminishing spiral, until he became aware, again belatedly, that he had also been listening to an ascending series of sounds in counterpoint, a series of little panting sighs from Liraun, each one the smallest fraction hoarser than the one that had come before. Then—belatedly—silence.

Huuunnn
, said Liraun through the silence.

He shook himself awake, shatteringly, and looked at her.

Her thighs were drenching wet. Her face was ashen with pain.

The diagnosticator
, he thought, urgently. But somehow, in spite of his urgency, he found that he had not gotten up to get it. Instead, he was still sitting there, bemused, watching Liraun.

She had turned her head, and was staring back at him. As their eyes met, another pain hit her, and she huddled herself around it, hugging it, shoulders hunched, head bowed, her lips wrenching open to emit a sound that was not quite a scream. Then it passed, and she slumped in the chair, panting. After a second, her breathing steadied a little. She looked back up at him. Her neck muscles were corded, and her skin was shiny with sweat, but her eyes were alive and alert now in her pain-soddened face. They watched him with incongruous calm. She studied him silently for a while, and then she began to speak in an even, passionless voice, without prelude, as though resuming a conversation already in progress.

“When you came into Ocean House at
Alàntene
, and I saw you,” she said, “I knew that our souls had been told to twine about each other, by the People Under the Sea, who grow men as men grow flowers and fruits and vines. I knew, then, that they meant for our lives to be wound together, like vines that grow so interlaced around a trellis that no man can say where one ends and another begins. That came to me then, in a whisper from Under the Sea, as I watched you, long before you saw me, I watched you. And I thought—I thought many things. You were alone. I knew that you were one of the Distant Men, not of this world, but I also knew that even among them, the others of your race, you would be alone, always alone. In the heart of the
Alàntene
you walked alone and no one touched you, and only I saw that, only I. I saw. Because I too have been alone always among my own people, and I thought,
Like me, he has only half a soul
, and I thought,
Put them together, the halves
.”

She stopped to fold herself around a pain, her eyes rolling into her head.
Time the contractions
, Farber’s subcerebral training told him, but he made no move to do so: like Coleridge’s Wedding Guest, he had been charmed. When she was able to use her breath for speech, she said: “And so you took me. So I let you take me. And because you wanted me I knew that the People Under the Sea had spoken to you as well as to me, and that the night was ordained for our use. I expected no more than the night that had been given us, the
Alàntene
night. But you asked me to come back again, and I did, and another night and another, and I did. You asked me to share your hearth, and I did even that, although it was against custom and caused disharmony with my people. And during all that time I did not dare to hope for fear the hope would be taken away from me. But then you said that we would marry, and I thought,
At last I have something that I can keep
.” Another pain—this time it took longer to pass, and when she spoke again, her voice had deepened and hoarsened, as though she was controlling her diaphragm only by an intense effort of will: “And I was happy as your wife. But when
weinunid
came, and you said that you wished me to conceive, I was hurt, hurt that you did not want to take the full four years of life together that were ours by custom before I was obliged to conceive. I thought,
He no longer wants me; he is tired of me and wishes to be rid of me
. But these were thoughts not worthy of a daughter of the First Woman, one who must bear the Sacred Obligation. So I wrestled with my sorrow, and at last I told myself that it was, after all, an honor for you to waive our years of grace—
He wishes our children to come into the world at once, I thought, for they will be special children, fair and full of grace.
I told myself that this must also be the will of the People Under the Sea, Theirs the will behind your deed, and that our children would be Vessels of Power, Those-Who-Conduct-Radiance-to-Earth. And so, except for moments of unsynchronization and darkness, I was again at peace. But now—” She paused. “But now you do this to me. Now you damn me and destroy me, and I do not understand why.” Her voice faltered, then grew harsh again. “Do we always love those who’ll destroy us? Do we love them
because
they’ll destroy us? Because only they care enough to assume the burden of our destruction, to take it from our shoulders? Do you think that’s true? Because the thing that I cannot understand is, as you destroy me, I still love you—” And at that, she laughed, because it was very funny, laughing with the corroding irony of a ghost looking back over the anthill passions of its former, finished life.