3
Farber remained bemused throughout the morning rituals of washing and dressing and eating. His mind was divided. Half of it was moronically happy, and tried to keep him whistling and humming when the other half wasn’t paying attention. That half was filled with increasing anxiety, almost with fear, as the morning wore on. Suppose she didn’t come back? It was quite possible that he’d never see her again.
Later than usual, he made it out into the flat white windy morning and headed for the Terran Co-operative Offices.
Here in the Enclave the streets had Terran names—Washington Street, Pine Street, Second Avenue, Sutton Place, Rainbow Terrace—and the architecture was Terran as well: lots of glassine and plastic and fiberbond, lots of jutting arrogant angles, everything as tall as possible, like nothing in Aei, like nothing on all of “Lisle.” The high wall that encircled the Enclave was also reassuring, blotting out as it did all sign of the alien city beyond. Farber could almost pretend he was still on Earth as he walked up the black asphalt of Washington Street toward the futuristic alphabet blocks that were the main Co-op offices; New York, Frankfurt. Chicago, Tokyo—dozens of cities on Earth looked just like this.
The Co-op offices were busy, as they usually were on all except Mode-days, but Farber was beginning to entertain suspicions about just how much of the swarming activity he saw ever actually accomplished anything. Daily the Cian would bring in sample goods from all over the planet, but they did so in a spirit of play, as a game—the Cian found the Terran Mission uproariously funny, as they did most Terran customs, and Farber wondered if they didn’t simply enjoy bringing useless and possibly insulting objects thousands of miles to place under the weary eyes of the Co-op evaluation teams. Every day the Co-op offices would be multifarious, multitudinous, malodorous, clangorous: stacked full of strange artifacts, bales of cloth, ore samples, pungent spices, art objects, plants of every kind (fruits, samples of food crops, flowering shrubs, bushes, whole trees, whole jungles it sometimes seemed, all adding their various fragrances, subtle or overpowering, to the manifold alien stink that even the nightly antiseptic spraydowns couldn’t wholly obliterate), animals of all descriptions (from a spherical, dead-black thing the size of a small elephant to small shaggy predators no bigger than lobsters that had scurried about nipping the clerks, though not, somehow, the Cian; from fairly normal-looking insects and worms to “birds” that were actually “lizards”—few of which were worthwhile exporting even as exotic pets, and almost none of which were housebroken), crates of household goods, samples of drugs and medicines and Cian haute cuisine, and even strange genetically altered beings produced by the Cian “tailors.” And of course, the Cian themselves were there, obviously having a hell of a good time at Terran expense, all the while managing to keep their demeanors good-natured and solemn at the same time; “like dealing with a planetful of cigar store Indians,” one harried factor had said.
Jacawen sur Abut, the Cian Liaison to the Terran Mission, struck Farber as about the only Cian connected with the Enclave who actually was as solemn as the others sometimes pretended to be, and he seemed not only solemn but downright grim. Of course, as “parent of appointment” to the Terrans, to use the Cian term, he was personally responsible for any damage to Cian society that might result from use of Terran trade goods or from interfacing with Terran social systems, but somehow Farber sensed more darkness of soul there than could be justified even by such heavy administrative responsibility. Jacawen was a Shadow Man, the old station hands said, and even though Farber wasn’t completely sure what a Shadow Man was, or what being one entailed, the name had a sinister enough sound to it—especially when considered in light of the alien’s brooding grimness—that Farber had already decided to avoid Jacawen as completely as he could.
Most of Jacawen’s work was concerned with that small fraction of the vast influx of potential trade goods that had already been established as being of value to the Terrans—primarily art objects, some exotic chemicals and minerals, artifacts, spices, and bizarre foodstuffs at this point, as it was in the early years of trade between most planets—and, of course, with the corresponding Terran goods that, for whatever reason of caprice of (incomprehensible) economics, had taken the Cian’s fancy: goods as diverse as harmonicas, ball bearings, and English muffins. Jacawen dealt primarily with the sour-faced Co-op Director, Raymond Keane, and with the scurrying, babbitlike little Ethnologist, Dr. Ferri, causing them trouble enough to keep the Director sour-faced and the Ethnologist scurrying, merely by refusing to allow the Terrans to use their big forklift trucks to haul trade goods back and forth from the Enclave to the Cian warehouses on the banks of the Aome; no, instead, Jacawen insisted that the goods be hauled by sweating levies of Cian laborers—who seemed to enjoy the work immensely, laughing and singing as they worked, as the mythical “happy darkies” of Southern propaganda were wont to do—with occasionally a few centipede-drawn carts to help with the really heavy loads, which not only slowed down business but assured that cheerfully rowdy Cian laborers would be penetrating the sacrosanct boundaries of the Enclave at all hours. All of which meant that Jacawen, Keane, and Fern were tied to the Enclave most of the time, and that meant that Farber could successfully avoid all three of them, none of whom he liked very much.
Now that Farber’s initial sensory studies of the Enclave and of Co-op routine were completed (including, among other things, footage of the sweating Cian laborers, which he eventually did incorporate into a satirical still shot called Down on the Old Plantation, decking the grinning Cian out with torn slave clothes, floppy straw hats, mint juleps, and banjos), he could, if he wished, stay away from the Co-op offices the entire day, knowing that the hours he spent prowling Aei as a sightseer would be both officially sanctioned and legitimate work—that, in fact, it was what he was supposed to be doing.
Farber was a graphic artist, and thought of himself as such, although, like most artists of his generation, he had seldom even touched paints or oils or clay or bronze. He worked instead with a sophisticated device known as a sensory crown—exported by the Jejun, master craftsmen for this entire section of the spiral arm—that enabled him to transpose his internal fantasies and visualizations directly onto holographic film. The results of this process, rather inevitably known as “sensies” in popular parlance, could be exhibited either as a movie or as blown-up stills (there were conflicting views as to which was the proper method) and were gradually replacing the old arts of painting, sculpture, and photography—now regarded as passé and intolerably primitive by the Young Turks—among the more highly civilized nations of Earth. With the advent of the sensies. and the concurrent exodus of men to distant star systems, the old school of landscape painting crossbred itself with the travel log and regained something of the prestige and popularity it had enjoyed in the eighteenth century—with the additional advantage that these visualizations of alien lands were filtered through and colored by the perception of the individual sensie artist, giving rise almost overnight to critics and connoisseurs who would argue endlessly over the precision of Tunick’s eye as contrasted with the passion of Frank’s.
Janet LaCorte gave him an indignant glare as he ducked into Admin Office B.
Wincing, feeling the beginnings of an acid roiling in his stomach, he picked up the backpack and the sensory crown and started back through the complex toward the Enclave gates. He thought he felt disapproving eyes on him several times, and caught himself wondering, uneasily, how many people knew that he had slept with Liraun, and what the general reaction to the news had been. At the same time, one train of thought running consecutively with the other, he was angry with himself for his uneasy fear of censure, and disgusted that he should automatically start reevaluating a beautiful experience as sullying as soon as he thought that the judgment of his peers would be against him. Those two things ground together in his head, working first one way and then the other, leaving him pinched and uncomfortable at their center, where the grinding edge was.
To his displeasure, he ran into Dale Brody on the way past the Records and Supply Building. Brody looked elaborately—almost pretentiously—dissipated, as though he had been dipped by the hair into a quick-drying lacquer to preserve him, but only after he had already died and been left to rot for several days. There was a crackly, shiny film to him, but underneath it his flesh was the putty gray of corrupted meat. He walked stiffly and slowly, barely moving his arms and legs away from his body, and his eyes were small and red and mean.
“Hello, boy.” Brody said hoarsely. “A night among the niggers, eh?” His voice was heavy with phony camaraderie. Farber nodded sheepishly, reflexively, and then flushed red to the ears with a curious mixture of embarrassment and rage—the grinding edge again. Brody was still speaking, lazily, reminiscently: “You know, I always wondered what that was like, that nigger cunt, running all sideways and all, like they say—but shit, son, how’d you get past the smell? That’s ’ut always hung me up, you know? I just don’t see any dang way you could do it at all, now, ’less you just don’t have a nose.” He grinned a yellowed, snaggle-toothed grin that was without warmth or humor.
Distanced from all this somehow, hiding in some cave in the back of his head, Farber watched his own reactions with fascination. Part of him was definitely reacting to the locker-room overtones in Brody’s voice with that kind of shame-faced, hangdog embarrassment that, although it humiliates you, still leaves you a part of the social mechanism, if only in the role of scapegoat, simply because you have been humiliated. Ah, hell, Dale, he knew that he should say now, in that whining, half-angry tone. I was just drunk. You know, Dale, you know—shit, ain’t you ever tied a real blind pisser of a load on? Goddammit, a man just ain’t responsible for what he’s doing when he’s got a load like that on. Ah, come on now, Dale . . . and Brody would humiliate him for a while more, the laughter “open” now in that insidiously accepting locker-room way that assured that Farber would laugh weakly along with his tormentor while Brody got his licks in: Goddamn, Ol’ Joe, man—whew, you get a load on, Ol’ Joe, of son, you gonna fuck just goddamn all anything, ain’t you, goats, knotholes, don’t make no nevermind to you. Farber smiling his sickly, humiliated smile all the while, metaphorically turning his underbelly up, exposing his vulnerable parts to the stronger animal—and then Brody would give him a final metaphorical thump, bastinado, and walk away, leaving Farber to slink off, nurse his wounds, comfort himself as best he could with the knowledge that at least he was still a member of the pack.
Farber knew this game well—in his hometown of Treuchlingen, the accent would have been different, and the language and the idioms, but the rules would have been the same.
Conversely, he could flare up in rage and indignation, shout obscenities at Brody, maybe even hit him and Brody would probably back off. But from then on Farber would be a pariah, an outcast. Untouchable.
Farber acted on neither alternative. Instead—cravenly, perhaps—he opted for a neutral gear: “Ah, Christ, Dale.” He said querulously. “Don’t jack me around today, all right? I got a fucking bitch of a hangover. A fucking bitch of a hangover.”
And he let a little sliver of a leer flash out through the peevishness, as though to say, Oy! What a night! You wouldn’t believe it.
Brody stared uncertainly at Farber, tugged off balance by another traditional locker-room gambit, not sure which way to respond. After a flat pause, he said, tentatively, “I saw that Kathy woman today, that one you ditched last night, and she ain’t too fond of you anymore, boy—matter of fact, son, you’re going to have to come up with some hell of a line to get that little lady to open her legs again.”
“Fuck her,” Farber said, only partially aware that he was echoing Brody’s speech of the night before. “There’s always another cunt along in a minute, right?”
“Right.” Brody said, unwittingly forced into agreement and so into a faint unwanted sense of camaraderie—he was more uncertain now than ever, and less of a threat. Within a couple of minutes, Farber was able to untangle himself from the facedown and walk away, leaving Brody to rub a hand over his stubbled, lacquered face and frown a faintly puzzled frown at Farber’s retreating back.
As Farber hurried away, reaction began to hit him. He was fiercely disappointed with himself, abashed that he had felt it necessary to compromise with Brody even as much as he had, that he had felt obliged to collaborate with Brody in his game, even—one part of his ego busily throwing up defenses for itself, while another part tried to break them down with guilt—even though he had played it defensively.
Snaky black storm clouds began to pile up behind him as he walked—almost too tidily analogous to his mood—and he cursed himself root and branch all the way down into Aei New City, shame and anger building up inside him as thick and dark and smothering as the clouds gathering over his head.
The rain broke when he was halfway to the waterfront, a cold stinging rain that he trudged through dourly without making any attempt to seek shelter, glad for the sting and discomfort of it, flagellating himself with the rain as surely as if it had been a flail. By the time the rainsquall passed, sweeping out across the bay to be absorbed by Elder Sea, Farber’s anger had ebbed to a sour scum of melancholy that made his stomach queasy and left a foul sulphur taste in the back of his mouth. He was soddenly wet now, and cold to the bone, but he slogged on, his mood getting lower and blacker by the heartbeat. He paid no attention to his surroundings, didn’t know if he was alone or jostling through crowds of people, didn’t know where he’d just been, didn’t know where he was going.
Ocean House/River House was in sight before he realized that he was retracing his journey of the night before. He sneered at his own sentimental credulity. Did he expect to find Liraun there, too? The Alàntene, the night there to be lived again? Well, he wouldn’t—he told himself that with the glum utter certainty of defeat that comes very close to being pleasurable. He would find nothing, nothing there.
And perhaps because that was what he was looking for, that’s just what he did find there—nothing. The L-shaped bulk of Ocean House/River House was empty, a big abandoned glass box streaked with the shiny tracks of the rain. The day was still gray and wet, the air sodden as a sponge, and the beach was desolate and deserted. He walked up the empty beach, the wet sand crunching under his feet, the mist beading in his hair, on his upper lip; as far as he could see there was nothing alive or moving on the whole North Shore of Shasine. Elder Sea looked flat and tired, and, incongruously, like it was uncomfortable out in the rain, getting wet; its waves curled listlessly in to shore, making only a senile muttering in the throat of the sea.
Ocean House was still dimly visible from here, its window wall glinting through the mist, and, looking at it from the beach, Farber remembered the Alàntene, the indefatigable dancers who had stamped and swayed on this very spot. Liraun’s assertion that the Mode was co-existent with every moment of time. Was it here, then, the Alàntene, here somewhere behind the mist and drizzle and emptiness? Co-existent—Liraun here somewhere. Farber himself, the passionate dancers of the surf, interpenetrating him right this moment perhaps, passing through his body like ghost ships on their way to insubstantial seas? Listening to wet disgruntled “birds” shrieking their discomfort above the raw gray mist, feeling his feet sink deeper in the cold gritty sand, he shook his head: no. It was not here for him. If it was here at all, it was not here for him—or if it was, then the one who could have brought him to it was gone, was not here, would not be here. Not for him.
Feeling wronged, bereaved, and pleasantly morose, he walked back up the beach.
The sky had cleared by the time Farber had plodded up the Way of the Third Dead Ancestor into the Winterchild district. A brisk wind had come up from the east, and, before it, puffy blue clouds chased themselves like kittens around a sky that still looked cold and wet. Fire Woman, the sun, peered wanly out through flying black lines of scud, pale and feeble and drawn. Even Farber’s flamboyant despair had by now sifted down into a numb spiritual exhaustion, like sludge settling to the bottom of a fish tank. Every so often, as he trudged sullenly up the slope from Winterchild to Brundane, he dutifully unlimbered the sensory crown and looked around for a subject at last remembering the original purpose behind this sodden, miserable hike—but after the passion and mystery of Alàntene night, after the physical and emotional storms just past, the day seemed unreal: flat, insubstantial, dull, the colors less vivid, the vistas of Aei less inspiring, the air itself stale.
Wrapped in wet black gloom like a magpie in wet black feathers, damp and dispirited, Farber came into the Enclave with the dying of the day. He went past the gates and offices, down to the strip of stone that was foundation to his apartment building, and she was there, a small woman standing patiently alone in the shadows, still as a post.
“Liraun.” he said in a kind of stupid wonder, feeling gladness and something else—fear?—rise up in his throat like bronze.
She said nothing. Her eyes glinted like pearls in the darkness, and she watched him levelly.
“I didn’t know if I’d see you again,” he said at, last, awkwardly.
“Nor did I,” she said. She was calm, unsmiling, enigmatic. “The People Under The Sea decide these things, little things, births, deaths, joy—” She smiled. “They spin out our lives like cloth, and who are we to know what things they weave?’
She came to him then, across the stone, across the dying light, and they touched, turning, bumping gently together, like falling leaves.