Free Strangers by Gardner Duzois Page B

entertainment places at all, unlike New City. It was a restricted place, in some ways. Any Cian could visit Old City, but only a member of one of the Thousand Families could live there. In New City, you would often see nulls or clones or genetically altered beings in the street—the Cian possessed an immensely sophisticated biological technology, and their genetic surgeons, the “tailors,” produced strange creatures to order as one of Weinunnach’s major exports—but they were not allowed to set foot in Old City. Offworlders like the Terrans were allowed to visit, but reluctantly. It was a place made primarily of rock and dressed obsidian, interwoven with wood, iron, glass, and slate. Its predominant colors were black and silver, with a few slate grays and reds, and an occasional startling patch of orange or earth brown. It smelled of clean naked rock, and ozone, and sea-wind, with a lingering undertang of musk. There were few loud sounds, but the silence was a vibrant humming one—as of a million constant voices a bit too subdued to be heard. The mood of Old City balanced on the razor edge between “brooding” and “serene.”
    Today, to Farber, it was brooding. He took the cablecar up, walked along the Esplanade at the edge of the great cliff, went up a stairway, along an alley, through a tunnel, up another stairway, along another alley, penetrating ever deeper and higher into Old City. At last he was so deep inside it that he saw Fire Woman only occasionally and at a distance as it peered over the jumble of high roofs and down into the narrow warrens and passageways. Everything was bathed in shifting half-light now, and he walked on through alternating strips of bright hazy radiance and shadows so deep that they looked like glistening black solids. He felt like a worm inching his way through black rock and wet earth, until he came out onto a staircase that led up and across the domed roof of a building on a lower level, dizzying and sundazzled, with a sheer unprotected drop on one side, and then he felt like an insect crawling across the naked shoulder of a mountain. Jacawen’s office was nearby, in a building that jutted out from the city mass like a gable, its windows opening on nothing except air and distances.
    Jacawen’s heir-son, Mordana, showed Farber in. He was a tall, taciturn young man with a face like a scornful angel: remote, handsome, full of pride and disdain. He moved like a tiger, like a warrior gliding into battle; his eyes blazed with feral intelligence and an almost fanatical intensity. It was obvious that he disliked Farber on sight, that Farber’s very existence was somehow an affront to his conception of the universe. With a stiff, self-absorbed face, like that of someone who smells a bad odor, he took Farber to the inner office and departed quickly.
    “Sit down, Mr. Farber,” Jacawen said.
    Farber sat down. The floor here was carpeted with what appeared to be a kind of pale fungus, and he sank into it as he would into a cushion. Jacawen sat on a low dais a few feet away. The office was roomy, neat, uncluttered, with stone walls and a half-timbered ceiling. There was a window in the east-facing wall, looking out over the tidelands of Elder Sea; it was open, and they could hear surf and the crying of “seabirds,” brought near by the wind, then fading away again into distance as the wind died. That wind, whistling in through the window with its freight of ocean sounds, was thin and cold, and tasted of salt, which tasted in turn of blood. Some sunlight leaked in with the wind, also thin and cold, but pure as clear crystal—it played on the rich tapestry covering the opposite wall, meticulously picking out gods and men, cold-eyed demons and beautiful women, births and battles, deliverance and death.
    Farber and Jacawen looked each other over, silently.
    Jacawen himself was a small, somber, self-possessed man, with the jet-black hair and wide golden eyes of most of his race. He was sleek