North Wind (25 page)

He left the company early as usual, just as the guests had embarked on an exhibition of Aleutian evening dances. Gilberte and Albertine were performing “Everything Says I” as a duet, to the mouth-music of Aditya’s Silent ensemble. One of the human domestics had given him a light for the dark passages. It had been instructed to follow him at shoulder height. As they reached the stairway to the aliens’ suite it darted away. Bella found it under the stairs, perched on a fat stack of glistening, brown-skinned mudpats. They were Aleutian discrete-energies: disks.

Kris Kershaw must have good connections. It was supposed to be impossible to get hold of Aleutian products this far north. The fireball sipped like a feeding insect. Bella watched it: thinking of the awkwardness of official tourism, after the freedom of his life in Trivandrum; remembering Mykini and the Travelers’ convoy.

Tonight he did not feel like a secret agent, he didn’t want to think about what these disks might mean. The apparition in the garden had upset him. It must have been a hallucination, or a new kind of letterbomb. Sid mustn’t be here!

The light rose again to his shoulder. They climbed slowly—Bella was very tired—past false windows (there were no real windows in the outer walls, this was a house built for wartime) that showed monitoring of the Kershaw estate. Lights upon lights glittered in the dusk, outlining squat towers and sparse gardens; the concrete ramps and walkways that linked long bunker-like living halls. At the antibiotic screen, the fireball drifted away.

Bella pushed through a curtain of clinging gel and went to his own room, away from the others at the end of the corridor. A light by the bed began to glow softly as he entered, the door closed behind him. The bed was local style, with legs and a separate quilt. Sidney Carton was sitting on it. Bella walked past the breathing ghost, sat at the head of the bed and reached for his medical pouch. A hand closed over his wrist. Sid spoke, in the Common Tongue.

Bella stared at the hand. Sid felt the shudder that went through her: but she was not surprised, nor frightened.

He released his grip. He nodded to the view of dark and glittering towers through the room’s false window.

She was very still, her gaze unwavering.

She shrugged a little.

Sid laughed, a silent grimace.

Bella barely reacted.

He smiled.

Her quarantine had begun to disintegrate in the Aleutian air of the closed suite. She rubbed shards of it from her face: watching him carefully all the while.

The letterbombs had never mentioned the instantaneous travel device by name. But there had been an acceptance, from the beginning, that Bella knew the truth. Knew that she had been kidnapped, knew Sid was a secret agent, knew that she was supposed to possess information about that mythical marvel. There had been an assumption, even, that Bella had become interested in the fate of the device on her own account. Sid saw, something he hadn’t known for sure until this moment, that the messages had all been read. They were like colleagues, exchanging notes about the game in which they were rival players. It was a version of reality that felt strangely comfortable to him.

His illusion was shattered by the sudden hurt in her eyes.

she snapped.

Briefly, her whole body drew itself together, twisting into the animal configuration. He saw the effort that it took her to relax that betraying pose, the tensed limbs of a small beast poised to flee. She managed it, but she looked so unhappy, so cornered, it was all Sid could do not to burst into tears.

Formally erect, she accused him. she quoted, with bitter irony. really
need, you and your boss? Don’t tell me you still believe I can lead you to the treasure, because I know that’s not true. I can’t read, but I can read
you
you know! I don’t understand. Why won’t you leave me alone?>

And he couldn’t answer. He hung his head, like a bad child.

Dry curls of quarantine floated to the floor, twisting like dead leaves in the faint warmth from her bedside lamp.

she said.

He didn’t move. It was so strange to be talking to her, in the intimacy of silence. The only time they’d done this before was in the travelers’ camp, lying down.

He made this confession staring at her bedspread. It was pink and blue; it had a vaguely nasty pattern. He looked up, unsure of how far, in the Common Tongue, he’d already abandoned his pride.

She sighed. She nodded—

They glanced at each other, sidelong.

Kershaw had agreed that this interview would be private, but Sid assumed the machines would be watching. They’d learn nothing. Even the nuances of body language by which Sid “called Bella she”—exasperating to the librarian—would be invisible to an old earth monitor system.

The cameras, if they were running, recorded that the alien and Sidney Carton sat silent and almost unmoving for several minutes. Finally they turned to each other and embraced: at first sadly, like parting lovers—and then, as the universal balm wiped away all complications, all reserves, with perfect confidence.

The Castlefield site was domed to keep out air-raids. This was an area of the city notorious for terrorist action. There were several clubs under the dome: gaming hells, history worlds; adventure playgrounds of all kinds. The Aleutians arrived at dusk, in quarantine film and shrouded in chadors. It was a small party. To Kershaw’s evident relief the Silent had elected to stay behind.

Aditya was in a bad temper. Last night he’d commissioned the Kershaw women to buy nightclub masks for the little clan. Today, specious apologies had been delivered. The Beauty knew that Kershaw had interfered, afraid of the scandal of an alien tourist party openly dabbling in the deadworld. Kershaw had always been a narrow, puritanical fool. But he should at least remember that Aditya the Beauty
never
cared about scandal, and was accustomed to do exactly as he pleased.

At the gates they met a male group of African, Russian and Chinese journalists who were in Europe covering the War. They were in on the secret. Thereupon a respectable party of foreign visitors and their veiled wives entered the dome: the disguise should be adequate for most circumstances. Kris Kershaw led them into a darkness shot with sound and light (it reminded Bella of the spectators’ gallery at the mall in Trivandrum). They passed through a transparent marquee of scintillating purple stars. Inside it there was music, a dance floor and leggy groups of tables and chairs; the floor was empty. They settled around a table. One of the journalists, Roy Ifekaozor, rounded up extra chairs.

“What is a sensei club?” asked Bella. “I thought a sensei was a deadworld entity running a game?”

Roy started. “You’re a talker? A Signifier, excuse me.”

Mr. Kershaw leaned across the table. “Bella speaks excellent English. Be careful of your ‘formal statements’!”

The cleric smiled. “A sensei is a ‘deadworld entity,’ yes. But the nightclub ones are no more than smart sound-and-light systems. There’s no need to be afraid.”

To the Aleutians, all journalists were priests, who recorded aspects of WorldSelf’s myriad variety for religious purposes: this made them daunting company. The journalists, meanwhile, were virgin “Aleutian-watchers”: not sure what they could properly say in Spoken Words, and afraid of giving away secrets in the Common Tongue. Plus, Aditya was sulking.

Conversation was strained at first. Happily these clerics, off-duty, proved to be far from solemn. The Russians and the Chinese ordered beer, the Africans ordered vodka. Mr. Kershaw ordered Mekong, Thai whisky, in honor of the Aleutians’ Thailand connection. It came with a colorless fizzing liquid called “mineral water” that Roy pronounced to be laced with the house hallucinogen. It was routine, he said. The drug was cheap, and covered the deficiencies of the sensei’s décor-system. Their dumb waiter refused to incriminate itself, but Roy’s pocket analyzer confirmed his guess.

“Knock it back! We’re here to have fun!”

They had the marquee, rather dismally, all to themselves. Bella suspected that Kershaw had picked an unpopular night-spot to cut down on Aditya’s opportunities for mayhem. The void-force entity sensed that there were paying customers looking at an empty floor. It began to fill the space with fx: giant insects, fantastic beasts and birds, the famous dead.

Jungtao the Chinese explained to Albertine that modern telecoms were nothing like as efficient as the aliens supposed.

“Global satellite communication has become a magical operation! The armies shoot ephemerals into orbit with their railguns: where they live briefly and then decay. The USSA does the same, biodegradable satellites is all we have. As a non-com, all you can do is fire up and hope. If you’re in the right place; right time, right incantations something happens. It’s barely different from chance; it’s like filing stories by parapsychology. Cable’s the thing in civilized countries, has been for a hundred years. But in the War zones either you’re out of the net, or some devils have cut the cable. Bastards; destroyers of worlds. It’s a receiverless global or nothing.” His vivid face grew bleak. “Or you can work for the War governments, one side or the other, and then you have no problem. There are journos who do that. We don’t call their kind of reportage the news.”

Andre Chidi Amuta, a Russian of African descent, was explaining to Viloma: “You’ll have noticed that we were frisked. Useless!
Oxfame, Shelter, Species Endangerées, Cancercare:
all the splinter groups active in England get their tech from
Ochiba.
And
Ochiba,
because of the ex-Japanese background, is the Reformers’ high-tech supplier. They can get
anything
into
anywhere.
Last month there was a massacre in a sex-shop hell right here in Castlefield—er, a game about lying down, you’d say. The machines cleared up the debris. No one knew a thing, until days later when a soft-rubbish cycler threw out a truckload of skulls!”

Bella listened, wondering if in other parts of the giant planet European journalists gathered, to talk about the War as if it was something that happened to other people. He supposed so. It was inevitable; it would have been the same at home. He’d managed to slip out of the conversational matrix as social relations eased. He sipped a glass of mineral water, and casually, carefully, watched the company. Viloma had no talent for foreign languages. He sat stonily erect, saying “How interesting,” at random intervals. Bella felt sorry for the medium. He didn’t seem to be enjoying the Grand Tour…. Aditya laughed and chattered expansively. Kris Kershaw was pretending to be at ease: and inwardly desperately wary. It made Bella feel a little odd to think that, if Sid had been telling the truth, Kershaw now believed that Bella was a double-agent: plotting with anti-Aleutians, against the Expedition.

Just like Aditya.

He suppressed that thought, the Beauty was too close for comfort, and turned his attention to the dance floor. There were real people among the fx now. He could see them through the rich complexity of their masks: masculine and feminine, male and female, combining as variously and casually as if they were Aleutians; in patterns like the patterns of home.

The disks didn’t matter. Secret trade with more or less hostile locals was part of the life of Aleutia on Earth. It was mischief that didn’t shock anyone, the humans had a word for it,
the grey economy.
But the treasure-hunt, though Bella still could hardly believe that Device existed, was something else again.
What is it you want from me?
Sid would not, could not tell. Yet it was as if he was willing Bella to guess the answer…maybe against his boss’s wishes. Sid was not pleading for a superbeing’s love, the way the letterbombs pretended. Bella felt, painfully, that they were equals on that particular score. Both of them hurting, both with hopeless unspoken reservations. No, there was something else: something important.
Don’t abandon us, be on our side, be one of us.
Bella thought he had found the answer, at last. Through Sid’s defensive pride, through bluff and double-bluff, he discerned an appeal to the conscience of Aleutia.