Strangers by Gardner Duzois Read Free Book Online Page B

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 limegreen 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 awhile 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 mellon-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