Strangers by Gardner Duzois Page A

up, the steady flame roared and swelled behind his eyes. Then it slowly guttered, leaving him shaken. “No, I’m sorry, Mr. Farber,” he said. “It cannot be. I speak to you frankly now, Mr. Farber, perhaps to my own dishonor: even if the marriage were not impossible, I would be against it, I would disapprove, but by our custom I could not stand in the way of your free choice. However, as it is, I have no need: all Weinunnach stands in your way and prevents you. It is unallowable. I cannot say that I am sorry.”
    That’s it, then, Farber thought, and felt only a vast wave of relief. But even while it was washing over him, some distanced part of himself that he did not understand was making him say: “Are you sure there’s no way around that? Are you sure ? No way at all ?” in a tone of petulant, chivvying desperation.
    Jacawen stared at him, and something new came into his face, disgruntlement, annoyance, malice, reluctance, regret—all of these perhaps. He said: “There is a way, Mr. Farber. If you wish, you may have our tailors adjust your karyotype, change it to match with ours. Then you could marry, Mr. Farber. Making that adjustment would not change you into a Cian in the gross physical sense, but it would effect your cytological material, and it would change the number and morphology of your chromosomes. It would have little real effect, except on your offspring. It would change your seed, Mr. Farber, it would change your seed. You see? You and Liraun would no longer be sterile. If you impregnated her, your children would be full-blooded Cian, with no trace of Terra in them at all.” He smiled cuttingly at Farber, the malice now only thinly veiled. “Well, Mr. Farber, do you want me to put you down for an appointment with the Tailors? I assure you that is the only possible way you could marry Liraun, and I’m sure of that, Mr. Farber. Well?”
    Farber was flushing with shame and puzzled anger. In an attempt to save some semblance of face, he let his voice say: “Yes.”
    “You do wish to see the Tailors, then?”
    Flatly: “Yes.”
    “Excellent!” Jacawen said. His hand broke a light beam. A control panel, of compact Jejun make, slid up out of the floor. Jacawen studied a dial, turned a switch, hit three keys, and said something in a dialect too swift to follow. The panel slid back into the floor. Jacawen looked at Farber. “Now,” he said, “you have an appointment at the Hall of Tailors, here in Old City, tomorrow, at 1125 by your time. I wish you good luck.” And Jacawen smiled with calculated blandness, with aloof contempt, mocking Farber, pouring his scorn onto him—a scorn so much more devastating than Mordana’s, because it was so much less automatic, and so much more earned. Farber had tried a bluff, and it had been called; he had been forced right out of the game. Jacawen knew that Farber would never keep the appointment, that the price was too high, that Farber never had any intention of going at all. Farber had tried to brazen it through, and had lost face enormously. Jacawen knew that Farber would not have the courage to go through with it.
    He was right. Farber knew it too.
    The shame that Farber felt as he pushed out of the office, that was the fourth step.
    It was late afternoon by the time he reached the Enclave, so Farber stopped off at the Co-op Mess to have a drink. He found Dale Brody at the bar, already well on his way into a stinking, falling-down drunk. The Co-op grapevine must have been working as well as ever, because, after a few minutes of silent, cold-shoulder drinking, Brody leaned over to Farber, and said, in a hoarse malodorous voice: “You can fuck niggers if you want, but don’t you think about marrying them! We don’t marry our niggers back home.”
    Farber raised his big fist—feeling like a character in an old-time movie, but doing it anyway—and knocked two of Brody’s teeth out.
    That was the fifth step.
    When Farber checked back at his office at last,