Strangers Gardner Dozois

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.Then hestepped to the edge of the roof, raised his arms like a diver going off thehigh board, and threw himself out into space.The man seemed to hang in the air above Farber for a long time, armsoutstretched to either side, hair floating in the wind, face serene, andthen, suddenly moving very quickly, he plunged down and past, havingcalculated his leap to take him past the outer edge of the Esplanade.Heplummeted down through the gulfs of air toward the New City, down thesheer three-hundred-foot drop toward the roofs of Brundane, dwindling,becoming a manikin the size of a fingernail paring, a dot, a speck,disappearing from sight entirely, swallowed by distance and death.Farberhad recognized him.It was Lord Vrome.Or perhaps one should say, it hadbeen Lord Vrome.A week or two later, at dusk, Farber was making his way through one ofthe narrow, high-walled, winding alleys in the interior of Old City when hecame face to face with a man coming the other way.A fugitive ray ofwine-colored sunlight, falling down a shaft past dust and old black stone,illuminated the man's face.It was Lord Vrome.Farber gasped and fell back against the wall, too stunned even to beafraid."Lord Vrome!" he whispered, feeling the blood drain out of his faceand his lips go numb.The man turned to look at him, that impossible faceunruffled and remote, and said, "You are mistaken.I am not Lord Vrome.My name is Tanar sur Rine." He brushed past Farber who shrank awayfrom his touch and continued on down the alley, and was lost in mustydarkness within five paces.Farber stared after him long after there was anything to see.It hadbeen Lord Vrome: the face was the same, line for line, the body andposture and gait the same, only the style of clothes different.But, at the same time, it couldn't have been Lord Vrome.Farber started walking again, his skin crawling, looking fearfully intodark corners as he passed them, the uncanny silence and mystery of theOld City pressing down on him like a hand.That night.Farber dreamed that he was present at the Creation of Life.This was before anything had come into being, even mountains andoceans, and the world was smooth and gray as a billiard ball.Farber or Farber's viewpoint, rather, since he had no body washovering just above a flat ashen plain that seemed to stretch to infinity inall directions.As he watched, the gods appeared on the horizon, lookingdown into the world.There were two of them, immensely tall, vaguelyhumanoid, with the blank, rough-hewn, oversized faces of Easter Islandstatues.Stiffly, the two gods each miles high, storms and lightningsplaying unheeded around them began to walk ponderously forward, theashy ground sinking and smoking under their weight.They walkedsteadily forward, side by side, looking straight ahead, past Farber'sviewpoint and away toward the horizon, shrinking to the size ofbig-headed Tiki totems, disappearing around the curve of the planet.Behind them they left a long double-line of deep-sunken footprints, eachfootprint filled with water and suffused with an eerie blue glow.Slowly,the footprints began to widen, merging together, spreading out inever-increasing circles, and the Elder Creatures who inhabited the ashenplain, creatures who lived without being alive and without recourse toflesh, dwellers in the primordial Chaos, drew back in dismay before thesteadily spreading advance of these pockets of causality and life whenthey joined together, meeting each other after spreading around theplanet, Chaos would be exiled, time would have begun, and the FertileEarth would be born.Farber tilted his viewpoint to look down into the puddle of water at thebottom of one of the gods' footprints, at the squirming, wiggling life thatbred there.The puddle was full of worms.The worms had Liraun's face.15Sometimes Jacawen sur Abut, Liraun's half-uncle, would come to visitthem.Apparently this was motivated by polite custom more than byfamilial affection, as both Liraun and Jacawen were very formal with eachother, most of their exchanges seeming to conform to a set ritual.ButJacawen didn't know what to do with Farber.There was no ritual there totell him how to act the situation was unique.The man was there, hemust be treated with, an interrelation must be formed.But what?Jacawen knew how to relate to out-worlders: it was part of his job, andappropriate custom had evolved.But, like it or not, Farber could no longerbe considered an outworlder he was now tied by blood to Jacawen's ownHouse and Tree, he was, by law, a relative.Jacawen, however, found itimpossible to accept him fully in that role either.Try as he might,Jacawen could not wholeheartedly attune himself to familial ritual withthis huge, obstreperous alien.And Farber's ignorance of the proper formsmade things even more difficult.There was nothing left but to attempt todeal with Farber on an extemporaneous, one-to-one basis, unguided bycustom or ritual, neither knowing what the other expected of him ahorrifying prospect for a Cian, especially one of Jacawen's aloof andaristocratic caste.To give Jacawen his due, he made a conscientious attempt to do it.Jacawen was a Shadow Man.Like the Apache Netdahe or the Yaqui-Yoriof Old Earth, his philosophy was one of unwavering hostility to alloutlanders, to all intruders.Unlike the Netdahe, he was not obliged to killthem on sight [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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