2
All this took place about two decades after the Expansion, when a team of Silver Enye had opened the Earth up for trade by “inducing” her to join the Commercial Alliance, as cynically, and with as little concern for the inevitable impact on native culture, as Perry had opened Japan.
As a matter of fact, the impact of this on Earth—whose technology had not yet freed man of the solar system when the Enye arrived, whose cities were scarred and half-ruined by a series of vicious and nearly terminal “tactical” wars, whose biosphere was scummed and strangled by pollution, whose natural resources were nearly depleted—was immense.
Although he had been only a child when the Enye came, Farber was old enough to remember the tension, the fear, the knots of people in the streets of his little German village who spent half the night staring apprehensively at the sky; most of all, he remembered his parents’ frightened voices, coming dimly to him through his bedroom door as he lay sleepless and watched dusty moonlight on the cracked wood of his windowpane, thinking about the worlds beyond the sky, the endless black depths into which one could fall out and up forever.
For a day and a night and a day, the seven great egg-shaped spacecraft—each over a mile long, defying both Terran weaponry and our understanding of natural law—hung in the air above Stockholm, Rio De Janeiro, Chicago, Addis Ababa, Tokyo, Melbourne and Ulan Bator, and then the Enye emerged with their offer of incorporation, with the gift of stars.
In the months that followed, brushfire wars flared, guttered and died all across Earth; governments toppled, nations vanished as viable political entities. When the shooting stopped, amalgamations were formed among the survivors, the Terran Co-operative was hastily created, and its members were charged with the task of going out and getting a nice juicy piece of the pie in the sky for impoverished Earth. Earthmen went forth to the stars, first as paying passengers on alien ships, then, later, in human-crewed ships purchased at staggering cost from other worlds. Terran trade missions were gradually established on some of those other worlds, while meantime the Enye—and later, the Jejun—mission on Earth was doing a land-office business, mostly in “quaint” Terran trinkets and primitive native art.
Amidst all this forced-draft confusion and hothouse change, Farber grew up, and, growing up, partook of the rapacious spirit of the times. For many, the arrival of the Enye had been a miracle, divine intervention, an eleventh-hour reprieve for an exhausted civilization that had been just about to start an inevitable, irreversible spiral down into barbarism and degeneracy. The common response to this reprieve was buoyant relief and a sudden giddy sense of destiny. Suddenly, just when things had seemed darkest, the top was off the sky again—in fact, the polluted gray sky of Earth was nowhere near being the limit anymore, now that the alien cavalry had ridden to our racial rescue at the last possible minute. If there was any shame attached to the realization that we had needed the Enye to pull us out of the hole we had dug for ourselves—and the condescending, scornfully blunt Enye were hardly easy on Terran egos—then that very shame would make us work harder and scramble higher to blot it out. All at once, “manifest destiny” meant something again, was believed in again with a naïve, almost religious optimism that had not been a serious political force since the muddled, saddening middle of the twentieth century. It was the age of the Robber Barons again, with those very Third World powers who had suffered most under the colonial yoke the most eager to go and carve some sort of colonial empire in the sky.
God was alive, after a long dry spell of atheism, and God helped those who helped themselves.
Like most of his compatriots—especially those who, as adolescents, had scored high on their aptitude tests and had been inducted into the Co-op—Farber grew up into a cocksure and confidently aggressive man. By the time he was ready to space, Earth’s sweet imperialistic dreams had begun to sour and darken a little, but Farber remained untouched by any hint of pessimism. Perhaps he was even more headstrong and arrogant than the majority of his fellows—or perhaps he was just young. At any rate, he was cocksure, ambitious, and naïve, which in any culture and in any age has always been an unstable combination.
Farber spent the night before he was to report to the Outbound Center drinking in a small rural gasthaus in Zirndorf, the air heavy with the smell of spilled beer and cooking sauerkraut, listening to the bawdy jokes and naughty songs of his classmates, watching the proprietor’s half-blind old German shepherd beat its dusty tail against the floorboards and dream doggy dreams of youth. At midnight, ignoring the sounds of breaking crockery and Teutonic abandon, Farber got to his feet, carefully skirted two classmates who were wrestling on the floor next to the fussball machine while the proprietress slapped at them with a wet mop and the ancient shepherd growled reminiscently, and thrust himself out into darkness.
The stars were out in their chill white armies, and, moving under them, Farber felt almost too big for the night, for the narrow cobblestone path under his feet—big and raw and new, he felt, filled to bursting with life like a skin full of living green water, charged with blind energies that left him hot and flowing in the cold country silence. Walking unsteadily, he made his way through the sleeping streets and shuttered squares, out through the harvested stubble of the surrounding fields (dirt under his feet now, and rutted frozen furrows), and ultimately down onto the dry floodbed of the river. It was black and still here, the lights of the town left far behind, only the dim blinking red eyes of the hydroelectric plant downstream to remind him of civilization. Then the ground sloped down slightly toward the river channel, and he lost even the lights of the hydroelectric plant, left them behind him in darkness. He could hear the river now, a soft toothless muttering of water, and he was surrounded chest-high by cane and thickets of wild wheat that rustled and creaked and reformed around him. Thick black mud squelched under his feet, and he could smell manure and wet earth and dampness. He had reached the center of things, and it was dark and still and wet—and he was the only one there. He was the only one there was, or ever had been, on the Earth and under the sky—
A ghost exploded skyward from the grass at his feet, was a spread-armed gray shadow against the stars, was gone. Farber swayed in shock, scared sober. Another ghost-explosion, a half-seen form erupting upward from the ground as if it had been shot from a cannon; this time he heard the wet-canvas beating of wings against the damp river air. Pheasants, he thought, with a surge of astonishment and laughter he was still too scared to accept, pheasants, sleeping in the tall cover, frightened into flight by his blundering approach. He took a few more clumsy steps ahead, the undergrowth crackling and roaring around him. Another group of pheasants, four or five of them this time, exploded into the air a split-second apart, like shotgun blasts, like rockets going off, like spaceships hurtling outward to their destiny. He tilted his head up to follow the birds aloft, losing them almost instantly but being caught and transfixed instead by the million icy eyes of the stars. As he stood in rustling silence and stared up at the stars, he was shaken by such a surge of desire and awe and lingering terror that the stars seemed to spin and swirl into tight pinwheel squiggles, throwing down their light like spears, and he danced in rage and lust and exultation in the wet black mud.
Then back through the dampness and the manure-smelling dark, with the liquor dying in him and his clothes wet against his body, through the translucent gray fog that was coming up to the town that was still asleep and the night that was somehow no longer his.
And then—too quickly, too brutally sudden, before his hangover had even had time to dissipate—he found himself alone with aliens, locked into a vibrating steel box with them, watching Earth shimmer and disappear into Ur-space, into the scummy darkness laced with shooting pastel blurs that looked like nothing so much as the inside of his own mind.
###
In spite of everything, most of the Terrans took quite a load of arrogance along with them into space. And as they traveled from world to world, further and further from Earth, that arrogance slowly died; some of it was drained away at every planetfall, like an intense electrical charge being grounded, and with it—oh, so gradually and grudgingly!—went the expansionist dreams of Empire, went even the more modest hope of financial dominance, fading from them as it had faded in turn from every star-faring race. Space was too big. Everything was too complex and too strange, the distances were too vast, the travel times too great, the communications halting at best. Even the Commercial Alliance was the loosest of organizations; some of its members had not had contact for hundreds of years. Establishing dominance—or even much continuity—across that gaping infinity of night was something that seemed possible only from the provincially narrow viewpoint imposed by looking up from the bottom of a gravity well. The vastness swallowed everything; it was too much for any corporeal creature.
By the time the Enye ship phased into existence again before Weinunnach, Farber was no longer the cocky, ambitious boy who had shipped from Earth a year before. The Enye looked something like big gray-green boulders with watery oyster eyes and fringes of squirming chartreuse cilia. They were dour creatures who liked to coat themselves with saliva on social occasions (different kinds of saliva, and therefore different odors, on different occasions), and who “talked” (to Earthmen) by modulating air through a sphincter in a series of controlled belches or flatulences. They treated Terrans with barely restrained contempt—and sometimes open contumely—and were reluctant to deal with them on any sort of interpersonal level at all, feeling put-upon in much the same way a Terran might if he were obliged to open diplomatic negotiations with his dog, especially if the dog had fleas, doggy breath, and had recently been rolling in something nasty. Most of the time they ignored Farber, and when they did deign to interact with him—cilia curling in distaste—it was often worse: he couldn’t understand their games and pastimes (whose rules changed every few minutes according to a system he could never figure out but was expected to grasp without instruction), their casual conversation was bewildering, their “humor” was unfathomable, and the most everyday shipboard gadgets baffled him in humiliating ways that frustrated his desire to force the Enye to admit the equality of his intelligence. When they made planetfall along the Enye trading circuit, the other kinds of aliens he met—most of whom had never seen an Earthman before—tended to treat him as a pet of the Enye, or as part of their luggage, or to ignore him in a totally dispassionate way that indicated that he wasn’t even significant enough to be rude to.
Farber had more than a year of this, in a ship that went subjectively from gigantic to much too small before the first two months were out.
Other writers had speculated about Farber’s state of mind on Alàntene eve, reading into him the prejudices and passions of their day. Thus Nemerov’s The Barbarian has him full of jingoistic energy and choler, while Innaurato’s Till Human Voices Wake Us written decades later, after breast-beating for our cultural insensitivity had lost its popularity among the intelligentsia, and reaction had set in, has him the innocent victim of sinister alien machinations. Most bizarre is Darcy’s Comic-Mazes, in which we find Farber characterized as an Absurdist Sage, manipulating people’s lives in random directions for no reasons to no ends, when in actuality the sinister cult of Noism would not even begin to spread from the rancid Detroit slum wherein it had spawned until nearly fifteen years after Farber left Earth.
The fact is, Farber’s state of mind reflected the racial experience of his time. Thousands of young Terrans were going through similar kinds of culture shock in a dozen other places, although seldom were the consequences so drastic, or, in their own left-handed way (one thinks of the controversial Alternate Lives Society, founded by Eileen Ross and Tamarane, that had—and is having—enough of an effect on Cian culture as to nearly force the closing of the Terran mission) so far-reaching.
Far from being the strutting egotist described in Nemerov and Gershenfeld, Farber was sad, bewildered, and apprehensive as he prepared to land on Weinunnach. A year of contact with the Eyne—and, even worse, with creatures so alien they could barely interact with humans at all on any level—had stripped him of most of his original assurance, and given him no real knowledge or wisdom to replace it. Most of his pride had been leeched away, and he was unable to retreat behind a wall of defensive snobbery and cultivated disdain, as had many of his fellows. The path of his life, once so straight and obvious, had been lost in a morass of confusion. His career—once the vital, central thing in his existence—now seemed insipid, unimportant, meaningless.
He didn’t even bother to watch as the orbot descended onto Weinunnach.
When they reached the spaceport, in the low hills west of Aei New City, he took the high-speed line direct to the Terran Enclave, and, for all intents and purposes, did not come out again until Alàntene eve—either out of the Enclave, or up out of the stagnant depths of his own soul.
###
Now, tonight, Alàntene eve, he had been drawn up out of himself again, and for the first time since leaving Earth he felt young and expansive and alive.
Liraun had drawn him up, Liraun and the velvet intensity of the night itself—although the effect on him seemed more acute than even sex and strangeness could explain.
Sex was good with Liraun, certainly (they had walked through the empty, echoing streets to the Enclave, to Farber’s apartment, without speaking at all, hand in hand, stealthily, like naughty children sneaking back to their rooms after some illicit escapade), but no better than it had been on occasion with other women. Their lovemaking that night was not a blaze of transcendental pleasure; like any other couple, they needed time to adjust to each other, and their first attempts were not without a certain element of clumsiness. It was the usual sweaty business, full of small mutual discoveries, disappointments, elations—not much different from his first time with Kathy a few days before, on a purely sexual level. Liraun was different, though, and the night was steeped through with her strangeness, as the air of Farber’s bedroom was soaked with the musty erotic smell of her body. She spoke little. She would laugh or sob at unpredictable times, for—to Farber—unanalyzable reasons. She was playful, and at the same time intently, almost grimly, serious; Farber could never be sure which mood to respond to, and couldn’t master her apparent trick of mixing the two. Physically, she was odd, although not enough so to be repugnant—rather the opposite, in fact. She had no breasts, or rather she had only vestigial ones, like Farber himself; the Cian men nursed the young, not the women. Her nipples were also vestigial—three pairs of them, spaced two by two, down along the rib cage, flat and almost unnoticeable except for large, smoky-dark aureoles. Most of her body was covered with a light, fine down that might once, millennia ago, have been fur. Her pubic hair was unusually thick and heavy, stretching down her thighs and up along her belly. Her canines weren’t really too much longer than a human’s, and she was very careful not to bite too hard, to Farber’s relief—and, almost, regret—since he had been half-expecting her to slash him to ribbons. She was perhaps not as self-consciously expert as Kathy—although she was by no means unsophisticated, sexually—but there was an exquisitely restrained desperation to her responses that puzzled Farber even while it delighted him. At orgasm—their second try, finally working their slow, patient way up to it—she hugged him with a strength almost greater than his own, nearly cracking his ribs, and cried out harshly, as though terrified and elated by something he could never understand.
In the morning, Liraun got up and dressed without a word. Watching her pad around his apartment in the cold, slate-gray dawnlight, shrugging herself into her skintight outfit, Farber felt a rush of idiot desire and would have been ready to tackle the night’s business all over again, eager as a schoolboy, although he was probably too drained and exhausted physically to take it. Liraun looked much less frazzled than Farber; her movements were still crisp and supple, her face was fresh and unshadowed, and she moved like a dancer through the mundane interstices of his room.
Farber was so enthralled by the grace and fluidity of her motions that he let her glide all the way to the door before the spell broke and he sat up in sudden dismay to stammer, “Wait, I—Will I see you again? Will you come back? I’d like you to come back again”—he paused, intimidated by her silence, adding lamely—“if you want to.”
She turned at the door to stare at him, her expression unreadable; then she shrugged, still wordless and noncommittal, and left.
A few moments later, sitting in bed and staring at the blank white door, it occurred to Farber that he didn’t even know where she lived, or how to find her again.