4
In the days that followed, they saw each other steadily. Even after a week, two weeks, as lovers, he still knew next to nothing about her. She was quite willing to talk about her people and her society, but only on the most general and theoretical of grounds. The philosophy sometimes and to a limited degree, but the specifics, never. About herself, never. He didn’t know what she did during the day, after she left him, where she went or why. He still didn’t know where she lived—she had never taken him there, or said anything about its location, and something in her manner had discouraged him from asking. Always she would leave by dawn, like the enchanted girl in an old fairy tale.
But always she came to him again. Sometimes she would come to his apartment at night, silently, hovering in the darkness outside his door like a wraith that the winds might blow away, like an insubstantial embodiment of the night itself, until he pulled her gently inside, where she would be fleshed by the light, given life and warmth and substance. Sometimes she would meet him in the late afternoon, and they would walk down through Aei together in the long, slow twilight, while Fire Woman sank painfully below the bare western hills, like an arthritic crone lowering herself into a tub of tepid brown water.
By an unspoken agreement, they stuck to the New City in their rambles, shunning the foreboding stone needle of Aei Old City, although its monolithic bulk and sometimes its long cold shadow were unavoidable; always the Old City dominated one of the horizons wherever in Aei New City they went. Occasionally Farber would start toward the Old City, a tourist’s interest smoldering to life, but always Liraun would somehow communicate her reluctance to approach it—without a word being spoken—and they would go someplace else instead.
Once Farber brought his sensie equipment, and they sauntered through the ceramic squares and broad avenues of the New City, past Ugly Man Street, down through the tangle of small alleys in the quarter known as Fish Head Bay. The alleys were narrow and cheerfully crowded, their walls overgrown with lush black vines and blazing with red, orange, and silver flowers; the walls were peppered with balconies, ledges, windows, and Cian lounged or balanced precariously or thrust themselves out of all of them, calling to their neighbors across the way, or talking, or singing, so that to walk down the alleys, between the walls, was like walking beside an Arizona cliff dwelling, replete with colorfully dressed and cheerfully waving Indian ghosts, or like being under a moss-grown aviary filled with chattering rooks and magpies and starlings. Small groups of children dodged past them occasionally, the only living things in sight that seemed to be in a hurry. Occasionally the interlacing alleys would open up into small terra-cotta squares, overhung by lime-green ghost-finger trees or ruddy golden wellá, and here someone would have set up a brazier shaped like the open mouth of a fish and would be cooking redfins and sandcrawlers, someone else would have a stand selling snow nectar and blue wine and essences, and the long dusk would be filled with the smells of frying meat and wood smoke and strange spices, and with the tinkling crystalline sound of a tikan being played somewhere out of sight in a roof garden or a hidden patio.
They walked down beside the Aome for a while to look at the boats, the bustling River Docks, the swirling silver water that seemed—to Farber, anyway—to contain faces and voices and phosphorescent kindoms of foam. They stopped at a stand to buy pungent strips of marinated snapper meat, and at another stand for skullcups—these turned out to be big melon-shaped silver fruits that had been baked in ashes; the leathery rind was warm to the touch, but when the fruit was split open the meat inside was cool and firm; it was a marbled pearl-and-turquoise color, and tasted like a pleasantly odd combination of cantaloupe, yam, and passion fruit. After eating, they strolled back through Ethran and Vandermont and Lothlethren, past the dazzling, sinuous five-hundred-foot-long gold-and-scarlet mosaic mural in Serpent Street.
On Ice Woman Way, near the crest of Cold Tower Hill, Farber stopped to unlimber his sensie equipment again. There was a black stone bridge here, over a deep crevasse, and to the north the Old City rose like a frozen black wave over the steep-peaked, pastel-colored roofs of Brundane. A thin line of water dropped from the Old City on this side, twisting and waving with the wind, like a plume of moving white feathers. Liraun watched as Farber unslung his pack, took out the sensory crown, adjusted it on his head, connected it to the equipment in the backpack, adjusted dials and knobs and pushplates—watched him silently, as she had when he had done this before, at the River Docks, in the terra-cotta squares, at the giant mosaic. At last, reluctantly, speaking as though against her will, she asked him what he was doing, and he explained.
Surprisingly, she frowned. “Can’t they see things for themselves?”
“Of course they can—but most of them will never come here, to “Lisle”, or see any of this, so I have to see it for them.”
“And they agree to that! To see through your eyes?” She spoke with distaste. “They let themselves see the world through someone else’s eyes? Why would they do that?”
Farber was puzzled by the vehemence. “Because, for instance, if they didn’t, they’d never see any of this—the Old City, the bridge, the crevasse—”
“Let them come here, then, if they wish to see it! Better to see nothing at all than to see a lie. How can they know the world, or themselves, or the proper paths to take in life, if they are foolish enough to let other men do their seeing for them?”
Shrugging, a bit annoyed, Farber busied himself with his scanning of the scene, juxtaposing the image in his mind’s eye and the actual vista before him—like focusing an old split-image lens camera—to produce the still shot he wanted, fiddling subjectively with the lighting and the texture, accentuating the curve of the bridge, adding a thunderhead bank of cloud behind the Old City, then fixing the image in his mind and activating the recorder. He had included Liraun, her pose subtly altered to make a more dramatic composition, as a foreground figure, and it was obvious that she realized it: she grimaced, one long canine tooth glistening wetly, shifted her weight restlessly, frowned again. For a moment, Farber thought, with a surprising flash of scorn and amused condescension, that she was afraid to have her “picture” taken; that—like some primitive tribesman on Earth—she feared that the machine would steal a slice of her soul. Then, almost reluctantly, he realized that wasn’t so: her reaction was more complex than that, her reluctance stemming from aesthetic rather than superstitious grounds, arising from some opaque kind of philosophy or mysticism that he could not understand. Now he was the one to frown. He had been thinking of her almost as a human woman—in some vague way on “his” side against the strangeness of Aei—and to run into this unfathomable core of alien thought in her shattered the illusion, and left him cold and uneasy.
In silence, they went back down Cold Tower Hill into Lothlethren, the light dying behind them in long black and lavender bars across the pale plum sky.
###
As they came into the outskirts of Brundane, they encountered a ceremony of some kind in progress in Glassblower Square. Six or seven Cian men, elaborately and bizarrely costumed, were dancing in the middle of the square to the skirling music of a tikan and a nose flute, surrounded by a ring of about thirty spectators. Some of the dancers capered drunkenly about on stilts with great black bat wings flapping from their backs, some squirmed bonelessly across the cool blue tiles on their bellies, some whirled and hopped and genuflected, but the center of attention was a huge, grotesquely jigging false head—also on stilts—with three carved and painted faces: one looking straight ahead, one looking right, one looking left. The faces were inscrutable and fierce, so contorted and stylized that it was difficult to tell if they were supposed to be men or demons or beasts, or amalgamations of all three. The forward-looking face, done in dull gray and brown, had both eyes closed; the left-hand face, done in black and silver with streaks of orange, had its eyes turned upward toward the sky; the right-hand face, done in pale green and blue and yellow, had its eyes turned to the ground—the center face was inlaid with bits of ivory or bone; the left with flint and obsidian; the right with feathers and jade. The great three-faced head jigged ponderously around the square, tilting precariously first to one side and then the other, while a twizan stood at the edge of the crowd and declaimed in a sing-song dialect that Farber found hard to follow.
With a lightning change of mood, Liraun became voluble and enthusiastic and gay, and insisted on “explaining” the ceremony to him.
First of all, she told him, it wasn’t a ceremony. This was a secular performance, not a Mode—an interpretation of Danau sur Nestre’s classical poem-play The Exaltation of Little Dead Crawlers. The hero—heroine? the language was ambiguous—was a small worm who lived in the silt at the bottom of Elder Sea. For no reason that Farber could grasp, the worm one day changed into a crawling insect, and the crawling insect subsequently turned into a fish (a sort of flippered eel, actually). The fish (or eel) could have lived a long and peaceful life in the ocean, but as it turned out, the fish was “seahearted.” Farber could not quite tell, either from the twizan’s chant or from Liraun’s cryptic commentary, exactly what “seahearted” meant—possibly “daring,” possibly “restless,” possibly “extraordinarily pious” or “blessed,” possibly “incautious” or even “stupid.” At any rate, it was seahearted, and because of it, it was resolved to swim from one end of the Great Northern Ocean to the other. And so it did, but by the time it reached the farther shore it had built up such great speed that it continued to swim up onto the land, beating its flippers into legs against the rocky shoreline as it did.
This part of the poem-play was very long, and, to Farber, extremely tedious; it described the fish’s emergence from the ocean with an incredible profusion of oddly mundane detail: the kind of mud the fish crawled over; its consistency; where the rocks were, and how big they were, and what they were made of. and how they looked that day; where the firm sand was; where the patches of sea-grass were; the direction and strength of the currents; the temperature of the water; the taste and degree of salinity of the water; the other kinds of fish in the area at the time, numbered, named, and described; how the surface of the water looked from underneath just before the fish shattered it and emerged into the open air; how the sky looked, seen for the first time; what the temperature of the air was; how strong the wind was and from what direction it was blowing . . .and so forth. If it had not been for some fairly spectacular gymnastics the stiltless dancers were going through in accompaniment to this recitation, Farber might well have fallen asleep on his feet.
Once the fish did make it up onto the land, though, things picked up. The first thing the fish—now a sandcrawler—did was either to have a litter of baby sandcrawlers or to split itself up into a number of parts, each of which would then eventually grow up to be a baby sandcrawler—the dialect made it difficult for Farber to tell. The babies (or parts) did an odd, intricate dance, and then kwians—winged marsupials, although here they seemed to be symbolic of or synonymous with supernatural creatures of some kind—swept down and snatched up the mother sandcrawler (or one of the parts) and deposited it on a barren plain of rock. Here the sandcrawler (or part) was visited by a Person of Power, jet black and puissant, who told it that it must change again, and for the final time, in order to protect its children (or fellow parts) from the barrenness of the world and the fierceness of the sun. The Person of Power offered it three choices: it could turn into a rock, high and remote, and shelter the others from predators with its adamant bulk; it could change into moss, cool and moist, and shelter the others with its dampness and softness from sun and sharp rocks and biting wind; or it could die, and turn into a pool of blood that would provide life-giving nourishment for the others.
The dance ended then, and the Cian snapped their fingers in applause, hissing like tea kettles.
“But what did it do?” Farber asked. “Which one of the three things did it turn into?”
“It turned into all three, of course,” Liraun said, smiling radiantly.
“But it couldn’t! They’re mutually exclusive—it would have had to’ve turned into one or the other. They can’t all be true at the same time.”
“But they are! Of course they are,” Liraun said, still smiling, but looking at him now with an odd, intent expression. “It turned into all three things, at once. It did. That is the point of the story—if it had become only one thing, the story would be meaningless. Do you see? Do you understand? It’s important that you understand.”
Farber muttered polite acquiescence, understanding nothing. As they left the square—she exuberant, he puzzled and unsettled—he looked back in time to see the two dancers who had operated the huge false head crawling out from inside it, like parasites emerging from the torn and paralyzed body of their unwilling host, and it struck him that the faces of the dancers were no less remote and strange than the flint-and-wood-and-obsidian masks of the great totem that they inhabited and haunted, that they strained to animate, succeeding only for a few brief seconds in bringing it to a passionate and totally transitory kind of life.
Hugging each other against the gathering evening chill, hip slapping hip, they wandered back to the Enclave while, like transcendent fireflies, glowing pastel lanterns came on one by one around them in the luminous darkness of the alien night.