Strangers by Gardner Duzois Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

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 smouldering 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