North Wind (14 page)

Lydia giggled. Suddenly, she looked up.

said Bella, standing in the rain, holding the soup bowl.

Lydia stared. “I spat in that soup,” she announced.

To an Aleutian it was an odd insult. Bella accepted it in the spirit intended. He returned the stare calmly. Sid’s wards were not mutilated. Lydia’s nose was narrow and straight, her eyes level, her mouth cleanly sculpted. Contrary to Aleutian lore about local reproduction, she did not look in the least like Sid. But Sid had said that didn’t matter. “Race is bullshit,” he said. “Culture is everything. I don’t care who they look like: or where the sperm came from. They’re my kids now.”

His fierce love was returned. Bella knew that last night, as she stood in her Daddy’s arms, looking over his shoulder at the alien guest, Lydia had divined in an instant everything that had happened between Bella and her father: and in the same instant had silently declared war. Her jealousy was Bella’s opportunity.

said Lydia at last, accepting that they were to parley. Bella was drenched. He ran his hands over his soaking clothes, dumbfounded.

Bella knelt under the waterproof sheet, gazing at the rods of silver that lanced from the sky. Lydia, pretending indifference, picked up her lump of dough. The flower-fairies came out from hiding. The tiny turquoise pony approached, and sniffed at the alien’s knee. Lydia was smiling slyly. Bella gasped.

He saw the fairies, and gave a convulsive start.

“They’re toys, don’t be scared. They’re deadworld things,” she added spitefully. “They’re a kind of matte. Don’t you know what a matte is? It’s a deadworld image. You can have them any size. They can be the size of city blocks, for decor. Or you can wear them, or you can play with them. See.” She showed a round medallion, strapped to her wrist: made an adjustment. The pony reared, and tossed its tiny, sparkling mane. “I control them. Don’t worry; I won’t let them hurt you.”

they hurt me?> asked Bella, coolly.

Lydia gave the alien a sour glance, disappointed at the quick recovery. But she noticed that Bella didn’t reach out to touch. She didn’t answer the question. “Mother T hates them because they’re anti-Aleutian. But my Daddy bought them for me, so I don’t care about her.”

Abruptly, the pony and the flower-fairies vanished. Lydia put her griddle to heat on the brazier.

Bella watched the halfcaste girl’s averted face.

Lydia’s mouth tightened.

Lydia looked around: her large white-circled eyes wary.

explained Bella.

Lydia’s soft dark cheeks had grown pinched and grey, her eyes enormous. Bella almost felt guilty, it was so easy. she quavered. Suddenly her face cleared, her eyes brightened. “Ah,” she said aloud. “I get it! Yes, I can help. I’ll take you to the temple.”

The Temple had once been a particularly holy place, forbidden ground to any but devout Hindus in sacred dress. Nowadays a diminishing band of priests sat in the cloisters chatting; or performed sacred rituals with ash and flowers, rarely troubled by worshippers. The carved courtyards belonged to the parakeets, the palm squirrels and the bats; and the occasional sightseer. The temple stood between Woman Town, and the nest of alleys where the halfcastes, the
neti-neti,
lived alongside the poorest of the poor. Children of all three communities used the approach as a playground: it was neutral territory.

Lydia had been kept indoors since the violence began. Most of the time she’d been shut up in the safe room. She’d lain awake listening to the mobs of purebreds prowling, yelling threats and smashing fragile walls; breaking windows and setting fires. She had heard the screams of the people of her kind who had failed to get out of the way. She was still forbidden to go out. But the aliens were gone, so there was no reason to kill halfcastes anymore. For days the city had been quiet. When she and Bella arrived the neutral playground was busy.

A group of purebreds, Women and Men’s children, were playing cricket in the rain. A gaggle of little noseless brats ran around the pitch, rags tied over their heads for imitation gaming visors, deep in an imaginary virtuality game. By the sacred tank, some halfcaste huckster stalls had reappeared. Before the Protest, the halfcastes had been the storytellers, fortune-tellers and tinkers of Trivandrum. They had a magical knack with faulty decoders or old video equipment. Lydia glanced at the stalls, feeling reassured. She scanned the playground for faces she recognized: and turned to Bella. The alien, shrouded in her chador, had crumpled to the ground.

“Get up! What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

Bella got to his feet and looked back in amazement at the descent he and Lydia had made from the
neti-neti
rooftops

he said, faintly.

“Remember to speak aloud. Purebreds hate it if you talk in Common Tongue in front of them. Always say words.”

She took Bella to the pavilion—a den built of irregular sheets of
shado,
the Aleutian heat-absorbing material, up against the outer wall of the temple, concealed from passing adult eyes by a mass of purple-flowering creeper.

“It’s still here,” crowed Lydia, “I hoped it would be. I helped to build this! But the purebred kids think it’s theirs.”

The den was empty. They settled in its shelter. “Keep well back. See that Woman girl, going in to bat? That’s Hafzan… D’you know what
going into bat
means?”

The chador nodded.

“She’s the one you want. Her whole family are
deprogrammers
. You know what that is?”

“I don’t know the word.”

“It’s when purebreds kidnap halfcaste kids to turn them back into purebreds: give them noses and fix their brains so they can’t speak Common Tongue anymore. In Kerala it’s against the law. But if they can get you to say you want the treatment, then it’s legal, as long as you’re not a baby. I’m going to tell her you come from Goa. All your people were killed and you’ve lost your memory. That way you won’t have to make up lies and remember them. Daddy says, always keep the lies to a minimum.”

She folded her arms on her skinny knees. “Daddy says being a halfcaste is a spiritual thing, we’ve no need to cut our noses off. I’m not sure. I’m going to decide when I’m older.”

The tall girl in white stood gripping her bat, in a slightly stooping pose that was full of springy tension. From far away the bowler ran. His white-clad arm seemed to float, in a beautiful, aspiring gesture. There was a loud crack. Hafzan half stumbled, half-crouched into short run. Her partner crossed her coming the opposite way. Bella saw the configuration of fielders come to life, as if in response to a chemical touch. He remembered Sid’s dogged voice in the wilderness.

“I wish you could see Daddy play. He’s a terrific bowler. He can bat too. I’m going to be the same. You can already see that our style is identical. I’m his truechild, you know. I haven’t told him yet. I want him to recognize me for himself.”

How young Lydia seemed! But Bella didn’t laugh. He had rarely known affection for a parent: but he remembered feeling just as passionately about Maitri, when he was too young to understand that it would be grotesque for a parent and ward to be lovers: Maitri had never laughed at him.

The sacred tank was surrounded by decrepit iron railings set in a curb of stone. The devout had bathed in this green, glaucous pool, used it for washing clothes and drunk the water, for hundreds of years—without serious ill effect, as long as their general health was good. More recently the tank had shown signs of alien infestation. It was a widespread problem, on the Subcontinent. Some people said all the ground water in India was affected, through Aleutian irrigation projects. The
neti-neti
and the very poor were unconcerned. They claimed that bathing in commensal-infested water would cure any disease. There’d been no investigation of this claim in Trivandrum. The infestation had been ignored before the Protest, and escaped attention at the height of the violence. This was about to change.

As Lydia and Bella watched the cricket match, two rival processions were converging on the temple. A column of Men, all of them biological males, marched into the temple approach first. They were dressed in white, and led by a gaunt old man in a green turban and flowing snowy robe. Youths in the front ranks unslung the metal drums they were carrying, and stacked them. Close behind, coming up from the south of the temple, was a party of Women, with a few biological males among them. The Women’s procession was gaudy. Music played; bursts of colored light sprang into the air. Everyone in the front ranks was wearing a “matte” mask. A glittering phalanx of demons, beasts, goddesses, tree-spirits, walking mountains, advanced on the tank: and made another pile of containers.

“I wonder what’s going on!” exclaimed Lydia.

The halfcastes at the huckster stalls were not curious. They had hurriedly started to pack up. The children playing the imaginary virtuality game stopped and stared. The cricketers attempted to continue play. Hafzan shouted: “Get on with it! Bowl!” A lone scrawny old man emerged from the water and stood in his dripping underwear, gaping through the railings.

An eight-armed goddess, a weapon in every hand and a necklace of skulls draping her blood-daubed breasts, consulted with the green-turbaned imam. Everything seemed friendly.

Lydia was torn between commonsense and determination.

A crystal-clear amplified voice cut through the rain. “The tank is
ours
and
we
will cleanse it! This is Women’s Town!”

A chant rose from the masked ranks: “Hammerhead! Hammerhead!”

The cricket match had collapsed. The
neti-neti
children vanished, up into the safety of the roofs. The young cricketers and the hucksters’ customers drew together, uncertain whether or not this pleasing spectacle was going to turn dangerous. Before the imam’s side could respond to the “Hammerhead” challenge, a new figure appeared on the scene. A halfcaste in garishly-colored Aleutian overalls, with a mass of fizzy black hair, came running from the site of the market stalls. Without a word he swarmed over the railing, his guitar swinging from his neck.

“It’s Jimi!” cried Lydia. “He must have been at the market!”

Jimi stood with gold-flecked scum slapping around his ankles. “You can’t clean them out!” he shouted. “The Aleutians are everywhere! In your bodies, in your blood, in the air you breathe. They are the future. You’ll never get rid of them!”

Lydia gave an inarticulate wail. The bystanders scattered. Men and Women from the rival processions poured over the railings and through the gates. Jimi ran. He turned, stooped, and flung handfuls of scum at his pursuers, spattering them with the alien miracle—and then he disappeared under a tide of bodies. There was one wild splash.

“We’ve got to save Jimi!” sobbed Lydia.

Bella thought Lydia had better save herself. Now,
while they’re distracted!>

Lydia scuttled. Bella knew he couldn’t have managed to get up onto the roofs again. In any case he didn’t intend to run away. He tried to feel calm. He told himself the deadworld images were illusions. Those were not dead things walking, drawn out of void by evil forces. It was done with “fearo”-things. Maitri had told him about those human chemical signals, like wanderers but not so efficient. They could be used to produce hallucinations. Maitri said that was the basis of most local “magic.”
Pheromones,
that was it.

He pulled off the chador, and stumbled onto the erstwhile cricket pitch, where the processions were mingling in battle. An eight armed monster stood in front of him. Out of the hallucinatory forest of arms a real hand grabbed him.

“Hey, little halfcaste. Get out of here! Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

Bella raised his face. “Please help me. I want to be human.”

Monster confronted monster.

“My,” said the goddess, impressed. “You certainly need help.”

By the time Sid arrived it was over. Fragments of the hawkers’ booths strewed the mud. Patches of the water surface were still burning in the tank: empty fuel drums rolled about. The combatants had taken their casualties away with them. They’d taken Jimi’s body too.