North Wind (24 page)

she said, without turning.

The intruder knelt behind Beautiful Girl, lifted a bunch of black ribbon-hairs and buried his face in her cool nape.

Aditya’s shoulders lifted. she marveled. incredibly
silly idea.>

Why
would I want to do it with a cripple? For nasty fun? Out of vulgar curiosity? I don’t have
that
sort of bad reputation, thank you very much. I’m supposed to be his friend. D’you think he’d believe I’d fallen in love? Don’t be ridiculous. Maitri’s librarian is not an idiot.>

The beauty’s visitor conceded the point.

something>,
Aditya’s tone became modestly complacent.

They laughed together silently, enjoying their alien game: perfectly innocent. he coaxed, sure of her.

The Beauty smiled on him, mother and whore: unsparingly honest, endlessly indulgent. Because,
my dear. Because.>

7  
The Braemar Wilson Trail

i

On the morning after they arrived in London, Bella stood looking out of the window of his hotel room. It was a strange room, filled with ramshackle and gaunt non-living furniture that didn’t seem to belong. Between the buildings he saw a figure worked in high relief on a slab of grey stone, the remains of a larger monument. A four-wheeled cab hummed by, interrupting his view. In Trivandrum young locals: Hafzan, Katalamma, had spoken of Old Earth with pride and envy. It was the real world, where humanity’s life was lived. But it seemed to Bella that he’d traveled into the past. This remote city, untouched by Aleutia, was the earth of Maitri’s first-contact records: full of dead vehicles, dirt, foul smells and grotesque sights.

Last night the Allies, their hosts, had taken Aditya’s party on an excursion through the fitfully lit streets. In a night-market they saw a stall selling live figurines: adult female humans, half life size. They sat or lounged on dusty draped shelves in scraps of bright colored clothes, gazing around them idly. Aditya instantly wanted one. But the stallholder had objected and the Allied soldiers burst into scandalized laughter. Their guide, a government official, said the figures were “sextoys”— “not sentient, but grown from living tissue. Like your commensals.”

Everything was in decay. Yet there was a scale of construction under the dirt that gave the Aleutians vertigo. London had been built by giants. The giants had vanished, or else something had shrunk them until they crept about the broken bones of their city, the size of wanderers.

Aditya came into the room, and stood looking over Bella’s shoulder. “Who is that?” asked Bella. “The statue?”

They had traveled straight to London, in long stages by chartered air cruiser. Aditya had decreed on their arrival that the Signifiers had to speak formal English on all occasions. He wanted to relive the Landing Parties’ triumphant world tours.

“Someone called Edith Cavell.”

“What does the lettering say?”

“You can’t read, of course. If I remember, it says ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’ Strange but true. They have their Clavel; we have ours, with the same obligation to goodie-goodie. Funny if they should meet!” He gave Bella a sly glance.

“I think I’ll wait until I’m invited.”

Aditya grinned at the reproof. But he became unwontedly serious, looking at the statue:

Though England was supposedly secure Traditionalist territory London was unsafe, a haunt of terrorists and bandits. This didn’t bother Aditya, but the constant interference of their military escort annoyed him. The tourists left almost immediately for Manchester, another city further north.

A few days later Bella was in a green garden on the outskirts of that place, looking at a small stone cross that stood half buried in wildlife growth. A select core of Signifiers from the “little clan” of Uji clustered around: Gilberte and Albertine, Viloma the materialist; and a dour almost silent middle-aged person who was Aditya’s long-suffering housekeeper. Bella didn’t know him and had not noticed him much at Uji. He’d been called “Morel”—another
Les Intermittences
character. There was a running joke about this, because they were trying to get Viloma call himself “Baron Charlus,” and in the tv serial, Morel was the Baron’s faithless lower-rank lover. Neither Viloma nor the housekeeper seemed to find the idea amusing.

Albertine had Aditya’s
Braemar and Johnny Guidebook
open and was scanning the frames. It was a local artifact from before the War, made for the Aleutian tourist market. Aditya had produced it when they left Uji, and he unveiled his travel plans. Albertine found the place and the little clan compared glyphs on the stone with the recorded image.

CONSTANCE MARY WILSON
(BRAEMAR)
1980 – 2044
 
“Fail again. Fail better.”

A gardener who had followed them from the gates stood staring. He was not hostile. He remarked informally that they were the first holefaces he’d met. He was wondering why they were here.

Aditya, forgetting that it wasn’t Old-Earth etiquette to notice an informal question from a stranger, swept over to him and cast a friendly arm around his shoulders.

The gardener gaped, staring goggle eyed at the hand on his shoulder. “Marcel Proust?” he repeated, in accents of utter bewilderment. Suddenly, wailing he dragged himself free and fled across the graves.

“How odd—”

“I think he was frightened of you,” explained Bella.

Aditya recovered from the shock of having failed to charm. “Nonsense. That was your fault, librarian. You and your obsolete soap-operas. You told me they adore Proust.”

The Signifiers, having seen the required sight, drifted away to peer at other graves: Albertine exclaiming what a charming idea it was to plant the dead in gardens. Bella stayed.

For a short period, in the years before the War, Aleutians had visited earth freely. Braemar Wilson’s burial spot had been part of a recognized tourist trail. There’d been a trodden path to this spot, stalls of “Braemar” memorabilia at the gates. Bella preferred the melancholy quiet. He shared the poet-captain’s famous view of foreign travel. People are the same everywhere; strangers are strangers wherever you meet them. The strange
place
is what one wants…. Traffic hummed on an ancient road. From the ground the dead returned, particle by particle into the life of their world. The wildlife grasses stirred and murmured, tiny flying things darted about. There was more lettering under the dates, inscribed within a smaller, elaborately worked cross. Bella peered at it. He always looked carefully at local lettering in odd places, in case he spotted Seeker-after-truth’s password.

“It says, FOR VALOR. That’s the Victoria Cross. The highest military honor we have. It was awarded posthumously, at the time of the Panama Trench crisis.” Bella didn’t look around. He stayed very still, poised between exasperation and joy. He knew the voice, of course.

“They awarded her a posthumous rank as well. She’s Captain Wilson. She’d’ve liked that. She was a confirmed-and-out Traditionalist, our Braemar. She knew it was poisonous nonsense: the sex-games, the nationalism, death and glory. She loved it anyway. I’m sure you remember the Trench incident. It could have been our first Protest, but it never got that far. A few governments made provocative gestures—like awarding the VC to the woman who tried to destroy you. It fizzled out and Braemar was forgotten again. You’re the ones who remember the saboteurs.”

Bella turned. There was Sidney Carton. He was wearing dull green and standing barely an arm’s length away, just within the encroaching shrubbery.

“What month is it?”

The corners of the apparition’s mouth twitched, his stubby lashes flickered. “It’s June,” he said. “It’s a year since you left me. Why d’you want to know?”

He had wanted to know because Sid, speaking aloud about Braemar, was speaking informally about a dreadful lapse of time. Bella was not aware of one. He’d asked the question without thinking: he realized that the ghost had answered. This must be an interactive letterbomb. Then like a breaking and reforming of reality, he knew that it was Sid, standing there.

How long is a year? He saw Sid walking out of the safe room in Trivandrum: preoccupied, guilty and haggard from their long journey. How long since that night? That interlude with Sid had been a fantasy, an illusion…so he’d told himself. But Bella had forgotten how real illusion could seem. He couldn’t speak or move. There was a murmur of chatter, like a tinge of Aleutian identity slipping through his quarantine: the others were coming back. Sid vanished into leafy darkness.

Their host in Manchester was someone called Kershaw, an old friend of Aditya’s who had once worked for the Aleutian Affairs Office of the Government of the World. Some of his men were waiting at the cemetery gates for the Aleutians, in armored jeeps. His security was less officious than the Allied government version, but it was impossible to get rid of an escort entirely.

Bella said nothing about Sid. The Aleutians returned to the big house on Kershaw’s fortified estate, where they had a sealed suite, cleared of occult devices and the eerie amenity of indoor running water, in which they could dispense with quarantine. Bella went to rest as usual. On his way to rejoin the others he met a human child with arrogant eyes, who was lurking on the stairs.

“Are you as ancient as Aditya?” demanded the infant, staring through the antibiotic screen.

“Aditya’s not ancient!”

“She is! Old as old! My grandfather says so!”

The child scurried away. On the wall of the stairway hung a large and bad still portrait, lifelike but completely lifeless. Bella recognized the subject:
Ellen Kershaw.
This was the ‘Kershaw’ who had been an Aleutian-watcher at first contact, the person Aditya had known. She’d been dead for many years.

It wasn’t that Aditya didn’t understand this. He knew about human mortality. But it meant nothing to him, so he ignored it: Kershaw was Kershaw. In one of the halls below there was wall-sized matte display of a big half wild garden, mysterious in twilight, with a river running through it. Bella had admired the lovely scene for quite a while before he understood that this was Uji: Uji as it had been when Aditya was last on earth; as no human alive had ever known it. Across so much that was the same, he glimpsed the impossible disjoint, the abyss between Aleutia and humanity that could not be crossed. It was time.

In the room they’d made their main hall, Aditya was curled on a huge bed-with-legs, eating perfumed crackly sweets from a glass bowl and comparing maps of Europe in the
Braemar and Johnny Guidebook
with the modern versions.

Their itinerary had changed. Aditya had decided that Paris was too dangerous, and was looking at Eastern Europe. He wanted to track down a particularly obscure site, a tourist coup on the
Braemar and Johnny
trail. It was a sarcophagus—a nuclear accident monument—which had a little-known connection with the saboteurs. Bella had wondered if Aditya’s enthusiasm for Braemar and Johnny was assumed for his benefit, more librarian-stroking; but now he thought not. All other signs said that Aditya’s fancy for an obscure invalid had reached its peak with the invitation to come on this trip, and was rapidly waning.

Aditya’s curiosity was perfunctory. He tossed the maps aside. He choked, and spat out a mouthful of the snack.

Celeste swooped to deal with the mess. Their rooms were meant to be clear of deadworld eyes, but the Silent took it for granted that this was a good-mannered lie.

Aditya shot Bella an irritated glance.

It was possible to eat while wearing quarantine, but it wasn’t convenient or pleasant. Pureed and cooled food was sent up to them in their suite. It was uniformly vile, nothing like the Keralan dishes Bella remembered. “I’m not very hungry.” He said this aloud, in English, meekly accepting the Beauty’s inconsistency.

This household had no evening prayers. The only screens that were considered important were the banks of security monitors in the guardroom, and watching them was usually left to the machines. Instead of gathering in front of the movies or the “tv news” the Kershaw clan gathered in a secure underground hall for a prolonged evening meal. The Aleutians joined the assembly after the tables-with-legs had been cleared of food.

Kris Kershaw, their host, had discovered that Bella spoke fluent English. He talked to her about the outing planned for tomorrow night, to a sensei club at Castlefield down in the city. Old Earth’s sensei nightclubs were famous, and Aditya had insisted on visiting one, despite the risks. Kershaw was in good control of his informal speech: unusually so. But he was nervous. He confessed he found the Beauty’s attitude to danger alarming.

On his cheekbone, beside the opening of his left ear, clung a small black object like a cosmetic patch: his connection with the guardrooms. Sometimes in conversation, he would stop talking and listen, and murmur briefly for the pickup on his throat. The big hall was illuminated by fiery balls of light that hung in the air: dead things alive and moving. Death-in-life was all around them. Bella thought how far he’d traveled, since he last saw his home