Strangers Read Online Free PDF Page B

to slash him to ribbons. She was perhaps not as self-consciously expert as Kathy—although she was by no means unsophisticated, sexually—but there was an exquisitely restrained desperation to her responses that puzzled Farber even while it delighted him. At orgasm—their second try, finally working their slow, patient way up to it—she hugged him with a strength almost greater than his own, nearly cracking his ribs, and cried out harshly, as though terrified and elated by something he could never understand.
    In the morning, Liraun got up and dressed without a word. Watching her pad around his apartment in the cold, slate-gray dawnlight, shrugging herself into her skintight outfit, Farber felt a rush of idiot desire and would have been ready to tackle the night’s business all over again, eager as a schoolboy, although he was probably too drained and exhausted physically to take it. Liraun looked much less frazzled than Farber; her movements were still crisp and supple, her face was fresh and unshadowed, and she moved like a dancer through the mundane interstices of his room.
    Farber was so enthralled by the grace and fluidity of her motions that he let her glide all the way to the door before the spell broke and he sat up in sudden dismay to stammer, “Wait, I—Will I see you again? Will you come back? I’d like you to come back again”—he paused, intimidated by her silence, adding lamely—“if you want to.”
    She turned at the door to stare at him, her expression unreadable; then she shrugged, still wordless and noncommittal, and left.
    A few moments later, sitting in bed and staring at the blank white door, it occurred to Farber that he didn’t even know where she lived, or how to find her again.

3
    Farber remained bemused throughout the morning rituals of washing and dressing and eating. His mind was divided. Half of it was moronically happy, and tried to keep him whistling and humming when the other half wasn’t paying attention. That half was filled with increasing anxiety, almost with fear, as the morning wore on. Suppose she didn’t come back? It was quite possible that he’d never see her again.
    Later than usual, he made it out into the flat white windy morning and headed for the Terran Co-operative Offices.
    Here in the Enclave the streets had Terran names—Washington Street, Pine Street, Second Avenue, Sutton Place, Rainbow Terrace—and the architecture was Terran as well: lots of glassine and plastic and fiberbond, lots of jutting arrogant angles, everything as tall as possible, like nothing in Aei, like nothing on all of “Lisle.” The high wall that encircled the Enclave was also reassuring, blotting out as it did all sign of the alien city beyond. Farber could almost pretend he was still on Earth as he walked up the black asphalt of Washington Street toward the futuristic alphabet blocks that were the main Co-op offices; New York, Frankfurt, Chicago, Tokyo—dozens of cities on Earth looked just like this.
    The Co-op offices were busy, as they usually were on all except Mode-days, but Farber was beginning to entertain suspicions about just how much of the swarming activity he saw ever actually accomplished anything. Daily the Cian would bring in sample goods from all over the planet, but they did so in a spirit of play, as a game—the Cian found the Terran Mission uproariously funny, as they did most Terran customs, and Farber wondered if they didn’t simply enjoy bringing useless and possibly insulting objects thousands of miles to place under the weary eyes of the Co-op evaluation teams. Every day the Co-op offices would be multifarious, multitudinous, malodorous, clangorous: stacked full of strange artifacts, bales of cloth, ore samples, pungent spices, art objects, plants of every kind (fruits, samples of food crops, flowering shrubs, bushes, whole trees, whole jungles it sometimes seemed, all adding their various fragrances, subtle or overpowering, to the manifold alien stink that