Strangers by Gardner Duzois

City. There, surrounded by high stone walls and steep cobblestone streets, the enormity of what he was about to do hit him with redoubled impact. He found a small terrace at the foot of a winding alley and stood there for almost an hour, looking out over the alien lands below. The Aome glinted like a silver-scaled snake as it wound through New City—it hadn’t frozen over yet, although it certainly wouldn’t remain clear too much longer. He flicked a pebble down toward the river, and was appalled to see how fast the pebble disappeared. Lost, lost. You have to be crazy, he told himself. You have to be crazy to think of doing a thing like this. Nothing’s worth it, nothing. He was shaking, and his throat was dry. His skin felt feverish to his own touch. He started walking again, without volition. After a while, he noticed, in horror, that he was walking toward the Hall of Tailors. I won’t go in, he told himself. I’ll just take a look at it, and then go back. But he did go in, walking as though in a dream. For all his procrastination, he noticed numbly, he was only five minutes late for his appointment.
    Jacawen sur Abut was waiting there for him. With a face like stone, he led Farber through the busy, echoing corridors to a room filled with unobtrusive machines and polite Cian technicians. Jacawen said nothing. Farber’s presence said all there was to say. Jacawen muttered to the chief technician, nodded to Farber, and left.
    The technician smiled politely at Farber, revealing even wet teeth, and bowed.
    Then they shut Farber off, put him into the machines, and did what they were supposed to do to him.
    Four hours later, they switched Farber back on again. He blinked, and sat up groggily. He was on a roll-away bed. His vision was swimming, and his head felt fuzzy, as if it had been stuffed with cotton batting. There was a horrible taste in his mouth. The technician, standing at Farber’s elbow, gave him exactly the same polite smile, tooth for tooth, and handed him a glass of the fiery native liquor. It sent him into a coughing spasm, but it cleared his head. The technician took Farber’s pulse, looked into his eyes, pressed a tubular machine against his upper arm and read the result off a dial, and then told Farber that he was to go now.
    Somehow, Farber found himself outside, stumbling through the streets of Aei Old City. He kept looking at his hands, turning them over and over, holding them up to his eyes. He pressed his palms against his cheeks, feeling the warmth and solidity of his flesh. He pinched himself, digging his fingernails in. Everything felt the same, looked the same, but it was not. Alienness was swimming inside of him, ticking inside of him, waiting in his seed. Numbly, he kept slamming into that terrible realization, over and over again.
    He was no longer human.

8
    Joseph Farber and Liraun Jé Genawen were married late that afternoon, on the Esplanade of the Terrace, with the towers of Old City above them, and the expanse of New City below them. The ceremony was short, simple, and incomprehensible to Farber, who couldn’t follow the dialect. The wind swept the length of the Esplanade to lash them, and it was bitterly cold. The thin voice of the Cian Elder, the Singer or twizan , sank under that wind, and then rose stubbornly above it once again. He was braced against the wind like a weathered gray rock, almost toothless, white-haired, very old. His bright ancient eyes gave no indication that he found this marriage unusual, though it had never happened before in the history of his race. There were no Earthmen present. Jacawen was there, standing silently to one side, looking cold and disapproving. Genawen sur Abut, Liraun’s father, was there. He was a fat, good-natured old man with huge floppy breasts and a heavy bristly beard. He was trying to take his cue from his half-brother, Jacawen, and look stern, but he kept forgetting and letting a big happy grin spread over his face—he had been afraid