North Wind (2 page)

Sid had become important to Goodlooking. When he wasn’t feeling well, it was Sid who would sit with him for hours, entertaining him with tales of Old Earth. The “halfcaste” did not find it odd that Lord Maitri went on caring for his grown up invalid child, and the secret identity story couldn’t mean anything to him. His friendship was sincere. The others called him impertinent. They said “halfcastes” were a shifty lot. But Goodlooking knew that Maitri trusted Sid. He’d been staring upwards absently, through the branches of the pine trees that surrounded this sunken chamber. Thinking of his friend, he gazed at the person who was looking down without at first feeling any alarm. The local’s ruddy features were divided by that jutting growth they called the “nose.” From the bottom of it sprang a flourish of black, bushy facial hair, seeming to defy gravity. At this angle, everything looked upside-down. Those swollen purple lips could be a single grotesque eye. The deep-set, white-ringed eyes could be two small open mouths with white teeth.

The local was fully dressed, his clothes covered in marks of status and fashion. He must think the Aleutians looked funny. It had taken the traders some time to realize that people on Earth
never
slobbed around in public in a state of undress. They must have created a ridiculous impression in the early days, when they went to grand receptions in their bare overalls. What did the human up there see? A party of slick-haired, flat-faced people in long underwear, making silly gestures at each other (normal people always overdid it, in their effort to converse through the quarantine)—

The librarian realized that his mind was babbling in panic.

No one noticed his faint alarm. But others had seen the face. Bokr straightened his burly frame. His height was imposing. He towered over most locals; as over most Aleutians. He spoke, in the dialect of the region. The person answered. Goodlooking caught the word
archaea,
old things. The face retreated.

“He just wanted to know what we were up to,” announced Bokr. The Trading Post staff exchanged glances. Their guest looked at the ground, embarrassed. There were things he was not supposed to understand. “I think we should be getting back,” Bokr went on, casually. He gave the invalid a smile of mild social apology. “I’m afraid you won’t see the ancient palace today.”

“Never mind,” replied Goodlooking, automatically. He could only help by joining the charade. “Another time.”

Panisad the minor trader put an arm around his shoulders he told Goodlooking, earnestly distinct.

They had all seen the frank murder in the local’s eyes and felt the threat and hatred. Nobody mentioned these things. Someone fetched the droms. Bokr took the invalid in his arms to carry him out of the tomb. Through the trees the shape of the old palace could be discerned, it was so near. Goodlooking knew that he would never see it now. He would not leave the Trading Post again, until the evacuation shuttle—which was surely on its way—came to take him to safety. He would never see these stones again, nor the yellow sun nor the blue sky. Suddenly he was horrified. Had he really wasted such a precious hour, brooding on his neurotic wrongs? But it was too late for regrets. The adventure was over.

ii

The Aleutian pipeline ran north to south across the Argolid plain: a regular trace of darker soil, diminishing until it disappeared into conifer plantation. It was part of a pump that was drawing thick foul brine from the gulf of Korinth, and churning out clean seawater at Nafplion to the south. Where it passed near the site of ancient Mycaenae, above the road from Argos to Korinth, Sid Carton was at work, supervised by Maitri.

Sid was chipping away at a splash of grey concrete that marred the neat dark band. Anti-Aleutian protestors had dug up the channel and poured in a plug of quick-hardening liquid stone, which they had laced with a wide-spectrum bactericide. The technicians at the Trading Post monitored their water-plant constantly, and were unconcerned. Aleutian industrial bacteria could deal with anything the locals threw at them. But Maitri liked to keep his pipeline looking
nice.

The protestors were amateurs. On either side of their plug, the “pipe” of sterile soil that surrounded the bacterial flow was broken. There was every chance that alien micro-organisms had made a break for freedom: an ironic result for the anti-Aleutians. But Sid had seen too much of the reality of so-called Total Quarantine Enforcement to be upset. The living powertools used by the Aleutian artisans had to be kept inside the quarantined compound, and they had no local-style equivalents. Sid was using a hammer and chisel. They were his own. He liked to see himself as a simple, old-Earth handyman. And if something needed fixing in his quarters, he didn’t want aliens nosing around. If you lived with the Aleutians you learned to keep your territory clearly defined. Otherwise they’d be all over you.

It was hard work. Sweat trickled on his forehead. The film, which he had to wear the same as the aliens, licked it up with a million tickling mouths. He squatted back to scratch the itch. His slickly encased hand dropped, defeated. Quarantine was a pain.

Maitri dropped into an animal crouch beside him.

“Let me have a turn.”

They were half-hearted bipeds, slipping easily and strangely into a four-footed gait. They’d been called man-sized baboons in clothes: it was close enough. The hairless, noseless, muzzle of a super-sentient monster with formidable fangs, leaned cozily by Sid’s shoulder. He was careful not to flinch.

“No thanks, sahib. Your prestige is my safety. I don’t want some partisan with an antique Kalashnikov to come over the hill, and spot one of the immortal superbeings stooping to manual labor.”

But the sunburned landscape was empty.

“No messages at all,” mused the alien, gloomily.

Ostensibly they were here to chip concrete. In fact they’d come out so that Sid could scoot down the road, to the place where the modern town of Mykini had been resettled, when the Aleutians moved in. That prefabricated huddle had been abandoned before it was finished, but there was a functioning public cablepoint. Sid sneaked down there often, on his weekly half-day, to keep up with the human world’s news. (The feudal Aleutians were bemused by the notion of private “holidays” and “working hours.” But he’d squeezed the concession out of them).

They didn’t like human telecoms. All their technology involved living material, tailored secretions that oozed from the skins of their artisans. In some sense everything they used and touched was a physical extension of themselves, every communication mediated by living physical contact. They had their own science of audio-visual records, but it was almost exclusively for religious purposes. They were immortal—at least in their own estimation—and had no dread of death itself. But they called the place on the other side of a screen
the deadworld,
and feared the unliving images on their blurry video screens. To talk to someone who appeared to you in a screen; or to a free-standing dead image; or to answer a voice propagated through emptiness as
dead
signals: for an Aleutian this was very like speaking to a ghost.

Maitri’s staff would have been shocked to know that their tame local went in for eerie native rituals. But Maitri was a special case. Sid had few secrets from him.

“Nothing,” he said. “Cable cut somewhere up the line, complete services collapse. This is a very bad sign, Maitri. Our local amateurs wouldn’t cut cable.”

The Peloponnese had been encabled for longer that the Aleutians had been on Earth. Rural encablature had been a matter of regional pride back then. The population had shifted further into the cities and the system had fallen into disuse. The public points remained as lingering beacons of a lost global civilization: Sid’s last beacon had gone out.

“What about the LOE GPS system?”

Lord Maitri was a “Japanese,” which meant he’d been a member of the original landing parties; the aliens’ first patron on Earth had been an ex-Japanese billionaire. That was where the Sanskrit names came from. Sanskrit being, Sid had been told, a sacred language for Japanese Buddhists. Sid grinned, a little nervously. Maitri was very knowledgeable!

“Low-orbit ephemeral satellite communication’s no use to us. It’s controlled by the military. And the snowflakes get shot down right off, if something’s going on.”

Involuntarily they both stared around. They were unarmed, in accordance with the Landing Party Treaty.

“Is it Men I’m looking for, or Women?” wondered Maitri.

Sid groaned. “Both: if we’re very unlucky.”

“Of course. I understand that. There are
biological males
on the Women’s side, and
biological females
on the Men’s side. I’m not completely ignorant.”

Aleutians were “hermaphrodites,” to borrow a human term. They could all give birth, and there was no strict equivalent to the male role in their reproduction. Maitri pronounced the technical terms with care. Sid looked at him suspiciously, wondering if the boss was being deliberately obtuse. The alien’s shoulders lifted. The planes of his face moved upward, under the glinting quarantine film. This complex shrug was their smile. Bared teeth meant something else: but Maitri never snarled. He was the most gentle, the kindest of baboon-fanged telepathic superbeings.

“But it does seem odd. Individual treachery is one thing. This
en masse
mingling, between two nations at war, still strikes me as bizarre.”

Sid was tired of trying to explain the Gender War to Aleutians. “It’s not about “the Men versus the Women.” That’s
your
perception. It’s about an attitude of mind. About ways of relating to the cosmos, to the WorldSelf, as you would say.” He attacked the concrete violently. “I don’t know why you’re complaining to me, anyway. I’m not involved.
I’m a halfcaste.
Why can’t you remember that?”

Maitri considered his human friend. He remembered the first meetings between humans and Aleutians, when the whole giant planet had been in the grip of “Aleutian fever.” Some locals had gone to extremes. They cut off their noses; they gave up the Spoken Word. They had their “male” or “female” bodies altered in imitation of the ungendered traders. They declared themselves immortal, and searched human moving-image records for traces of their past selves. Their fellows had called them “Aleutian-lovers,” and regarded them as crazy.

Now they clustered wherever Aleutians could be found, hungry for contact with their idols, and they were called “halfcastes”—a term that had nothing to do with the facts. The “purebreds” (another term that made no sense), both Men and Women, despised them. Sidney Carton came from the halfcaste community: this Maitri knew. But his human appearance was unmutilated. He’d kept his nose intact, and—as was detectable even in roomy overalls—the male lying-down equipment. He spoke English aloud, for preference; though he could understand the Common Tongue. He used deadworld communications without shame—

He also did not seem to regard his employers with undue reverence.

To Maitri, all this was proof of Sid’s good sense. The others didn’t agree. Unfairly and inevitably, Aleutians despised the “halfcastes” as much as other humans did. Even more unfairly, people then decided to be suspicious of Sid because he
didn’t
make a groveling fool of himself. Maitri sighed. He recalled humans with whom one could be friends; he remembered mutual respect. Somewhere along the way that meeting had been lost.

“Maybe you should cut off your nose after all,” he teased. “Your nose and um, so on. That might help.”

The opaque goggles Sid wore over his quarantine managed to express his disdain. “To me, being an Aleutian-lover is a spiritual thing.” He studied the end of his chisel. “Mutilation is a mug’s game, and “halfcaste” is an idiot’s word. There’s no such thing. We can fuck each other, I have heard tell. But the congress is sterile. To get a
real
halfbreed Aleutian-human, you’d have to grow the bugger in a vat. And who’d want to do that?”

He looked up, the blank goggles mildly curious now.

Maitri shrugged. “Who indeed?”

Sid resumed his bashing. “Truth is, I don’t know what I am. I’m not a Man, not a Woman, not an Aleutian. Whichever role I take, I feel like one of the others playing a part. That’s why I call myself Sidney Carton. He’s a character in a drama-movie, chiefly famous for pretending to be someone else. Played by the lovely Dirk Bogarde in my favorite version. It’s called
A Tale of Two Cities:
a tragedy of human redemption.”

“Ah, a former life. We must view the tape together,” said Maitri politely. “When we have a quiet moment.”

To the Aleutians, watching a movie was sacred ritual. You were either “learning to be yourself” by studying the records of your past lives. Or you were saying your prayers by studying the adventures of other selves. That was their religion: they worshiped the Ur-Self, WorldSelf, in its myriad aspects, each aspect an Aleutian person. At First Contact, when the landing parties had seen humans glued to their tv screens night and day, they couldn’t grasp that humans didn’t feel the same. They still couldn’t, not even Maitri. Aleutians were like that: not good at changing their minds.