Snow piled up in the streets of Aei, and there were stretches during bad blizzards when no one ventured outside for a half a week—the city then seemed desolate and deserted, only the yellow and orange gleam of the windows to hint at life. Farber got Ferri to buy an arctic skier’s mask for him at the Co-op commissary. He wore it to work, and the Cian gaped at him in the streets. His co-workers at the Docks were delighted by it. They began, jovially, to refer to him as “No-Face.” Farber didn’t care. His nose would almost certainly have become frostbitten without the mask, and the snow goggles sewn into it helped him tolerate the glare Fire Woman kicked up against the icefields. His workmates used contact lenses grown from a transparent lichen-like substance for the same purpose, but the lenses were “alive” in that they had to be stored in nutritive fluid and needed to be trimmed back into shape every few weeks, and the thought of one of them in contact with his naked eyeball made Farber queasy.
