Strangers by Gardner Duzois Read Free Book Online

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