North Wind (27 page)
Authors: Gwyneth Jones
Tags: #Human-Alien Encounters—Fiction, #Reincarnation—Fiction, #Feminist Science Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Gender War--Fiction, #scifi, #sf
At last he was called to a booth. Wherever the Fat Man was, right now (Sid didn’t know), he’d decided to answer the cable very straight. No quirky décor. He sat at a desk with a red antique telephone on it and nothing else: a bland bulk in a white suit.
“Ah, Sid. How are things in the St Petersburg of the West?”
Sid reported on the substance of the two interviews he’d had with Bella.
“I don’t understand why she won’t talk. She must want to know what’s going on: I mean
know,
not haze it, for God’s sake.”
His boss leaned back, gazing up at an antique virtual fan that hung, ticking gently around, from his virtual ceiling. “Aleutians have a high tolerance of naked uncertainty.” He spread his Mickey Mouse palms. “Truth is hard to pin down, not least in interpersonal relations. Humans know this, Aleutians live it. Our librarian prefers to keep the lie direct to a minimum, that’s all. Hmm. Eastern Europe, a sarcophagus. He told you nothing that could not easily have been found out by other means. But it’s a good sign, he’s beginning to confide in you.”
Sid tried not to wince. “A sarcophagus on the Braemar trail sounds like Peenemünde’s place of work. It’s a plausible cover. I think they have a rendezvous with a spaceplane. They could get away with a secret launch, out there in the battlezone.” He affected a professional tone; his spine prickled with dread. They would take her out to orbit; he would never see Bella again.
The Fat Man pondered. “A spaceplane, hm, it’s possible. But remember, Sid: serial immortality is not the stuff of human fairytales. The phenomenon we have experienced on Earth—a group of intimates, centered on the ‘Three Captains,’ born in approximate synchrony in consecutive generations—is known to the aliens. These clusters arise spontaneously and break up in the same way. I believe the Three Captains are all on Earth now. Each of them is aware that he may next ‘wake’ many, many generations away: ‘lost in space,’ with Dark Ocean triumphant and Earth and its secret treasure out of reach, vanished indefinitely into in the random void. I suspect that time does not seem cheap to them! Not at present. None of the three, nor their intimates, will want to leave the giant planet at this juncture.”
He frowned. “Further than that, I have no idea what Aditya is up to. Consciousness is work, Sid. Every kind of mind keeps it to an economic minimum: Aleutians are highly advanced in this respect. In some cases, and some would say that fellow the Beauty is a prime example, one might say conscious reasoning is practically dispensed with: which makes reasoned prediction—”
He sat up sharply. “A sarcophagus on the Braemar Wilson trail! And Aditya has that damned medium with him!” He reached for the red phone. “Sid, I think we’re in trouble.”
8
Terrible As An Army
i
A car that “knew the way to go” had proved elusive. Nightclub masks run by stunning amounts of processing power were available on a wrist strap, but many kinds of machine intelligence that had been commonplace on Aditya’s previous trip had vanished from the market. When they left their private cruiser at the last airport they were forced to fall back on a series of local drivers: who came in pairs, and handed the Aleutians on to others of their kind at intervals, in a dour absence of local-alien interaction.
Aditya retreated behind an eye-wrap, and spent hours curled up watching Graham Greene records, (Luxembourg M&S had had a glut of them): occasionally emerging to protest that he wished he had an immortal soul, so he could fear damnation.
Following the advice of Mr. Kershaw, they lived in the massive cars, driving into open country before they halted for the night. Once they stopped in a deserted town and investigated a large building that turned out to be a hospital. There was a floor devoted to newborn babies. The rooms marked blue for boys were empty. The rooms marked pink for girls were full, but the babies were dead. The other wards were entirely stripped and burned.
Kershaw had offered them an escort. Aditya had declined, but accepted a store of dead weaponry. He drilled the Signifiers in firing technique, and posted guards. It was a great game. He stalked away from the cars at dusk and stood, arms stretched across the immemorial battlefield, declaiming:
Ah love, let us be true
To one another. For the world which seems,
To lie before us like a land of dreams
So various, so beautiful so new
Hath really neither joy nor love nor light
Nor certitude nor peace nor help from pain
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night
They met neither of the ignorant armies, nor any further random traces of their passage. They forged on, eastward.
The sarcophagi were the tombs of giant power generators. Some had suffered industrial accidents; some had been bombed or blown up. Many had simply been abandoned as the war made their upkeep impossible: the finicky mechanical suns needed constant attention. In decay they were considered hideously dangerous. The locals would bury the whole thing in instant stone, which they might sculpt into grotesque shapes as a warning to the unwary. Before the war the Expedition had done good business in “decontamination,” and Aleutian tourists had become fascinated by the tombs themselves. But the spectacular ones were further south. Here, shapeless lumps loomed occasionally on the horizon. Aditya ignored them: only one sarcophagus would do.
After several days of driving they reached the town near their destination. The usual ritual was performed. Pairs of drivers got down, pairs of drivers replaced them. Aditya made his wishes clear, and the cavalcade of three long cars set off. Then disaster struck. The local drivers stopped the three cars by the side of the road, climbed out, went into a huddle: and announced they wouldn’t come any further. Aditya argued to no avail. He came scowling to join Bella and the little clan.
Aditya was too much annoyed to resent the information.
The Aleutians grinned at each other. The joke was that Aleutian “decontamination” had consisted of making a big fuss and doing little. There were mechanical sun generators lying about everywhere: at the bottom of the oceans; all over. Expedition artisans had established that the things were doing no harm beyond causing a rise in the death rate. This didn’t make much sense as a reason for concern, when there was a major war going on anyway. The Aleutians did almost nothing to the ones they “treated,” and
nobody noticed.
As Rajath the trickster put it:
The local drivers stared at the giggling aliens. They turned and began to walk towards town.
Aditya’s cook tasted the liquid fuel, and assured everybody that people could eat that too. So they took the fuel cans, as the most economical use of space, and left two cars and the rest of the provisions behind. Nobody stayed on guard. Bella thought this was unwise, but didn’t comment. They went on, squeezed into a single car. It was a rocky and alarming ride with Aditya at the controls. It ended abruptly when the car shied at a boulder and smashed itself into a tree. They climbed out into a little wood, where the midsummer leaves, that should be green, hung yellowing and grey. They had reached the Exclusion Zone. The dead-metal fence that traditionally surrounded a sarcophagus was ahead.
The sarcophagus entry was in an appendix of the
Braemar and Johnny Guidebook:
an obscure item that the book’s human designers hadn’t troubled to translate into moving images. Aditya could read, but not fluently. Albertine read out the passage of English text, for the benefit of the Signifiers.
None of the little clan had heard of Peenemünde Buonarotti, and less did they care.
The Beauty was getting organized.
They found a broken place in the fence and stepped through. In the distance Bella saw some massive and beautiful Old Earth science equipment. It was summer, which was supposed to be the warmer time in the north. But the day seemed cold.
Bella had been an invalid again at Uji. The bracing empty air of Old Earth had restored some of the health he’d found on his adventure. He tackled the walk to the sarcophagus with a confidence that would have been impossible at home. But he was feeling very uncomfortable. Aditya had been becoming more and more irritable with him: the Beauty seemed to know that he was under suspicion. But Bella didn’t know anything more than when they had left Uji. He wished he had not mentioned Peenemünde Buonarotti…. A trip to see a sarcophagus had meant nothing to him. Now it had turned out to be Peenemünde’s workplace, and that must mean
something.
But what? What was Aditya doing here, in this place where the Seeker-after-truth believed instantaneous travel had been invented? What did he know?
Quarantine isolates everyone, but Bella was doubly alone. None of this company, except Aditya barely, had featured in his sparsely populated recorded lives. They were blanks with borrowed names: and they served Aditya. They had let him feel, in many tiny ways, that they were aware of the slackening of their patron’s favor. When at last he stumbled, Celeste picked him up without a smile, and carried him as if he were a bundle of empty clothes. His joints crept. He felt that some crisis was imminent, and whatever it was, it frightened him.
The sarcophagus loomed in the center of a waste of ripped-up earth. Everything seemed to have been left as it had been the day they finished building the tomb: which was undecorated—a chalky brown mound, rising at either end into stiff unequal towers. It looked like a huge, half-collapsed pudding. As they got close, the homogenous effect vanished. The froth of instant stone was folded into globs and slabs. Shards of it were coming away from the structures underneath. The entrance porch of the smaller building had been deliberately opened a long time ago, and the material had not regenerated.
The cook set up his stove. There was plenty of convertible rubbish about, so he saved the can of car-feed. The Signifiers ate with their rifles slung romantically on their backs. They made a joke of the inconvenience of the film, through which they sucked their food. When they were finished the camping stove resorbed everything leftover. The cook folded it away. And now no quarantine could contain the atmosphere of intense excitement.
Bella felt the circle that had closed around him, holding him in place.
Viloma was carefully stripping the quarantine from his hands, his eyes fixed on the isolate.
Bella seemed to have no choice.
An Aleutian medium was supposed to be able to grow a live culture from some decaying trace of the deceased. The thing could be fed, ideally with the blood of the necromancer and others, persuaded to take the shape of some kind of grotesque little person, and then questioned. Believers claimed that if this was achieved the creature would tell secrets that the dead person had never confessed: repeat signals that had never entered the living traffic of wanderers. But it was terribly dangerous, and rarely attempted. Things could go horribly wrong.
Bella recalled the séances at Uji, which he had successfully avoided. He was sure nothing much had happened at those. Materialism was a silly and rather nasty parlor-game; the rest was baseless fantasy. He would have to take part, he couldn’t escape, but there was no reason to be afraid.
They entered the building. It was gloomy inside. Albertine put the guidebook away, and they took out handlamps. Viloma led them now. The medium seemed to grow physically, as he followed a faint trail of long-past Aleutian presence through the drab and dead corridors, up narrow angular stairs.
The room was not large. It held a few pieces of furniture. There was a window. The dusty glass, unharmed, was blocked by the mass of the sarcophagus.
Aditya’s people prepared themselves. They stripped off their quarantine, their clothes and underwear. From pockets and pouches they produced their occult equipment: phials, mirrors, bowls; a thin knife with a dead metal blade, like an executioner’s. Bella stood uneasily watching. The neat heap of clothing somehow especially turned his stomach.
Viloma was kneeling in the center of the room with a bowl at his lips. He glanced up briefly.
Two of Aditya’s domestics came and helped Bella.
They had suckered their handlamps to the walls, tuned to a red light, and angled so light fell in a ruby ellipse on the dust. Bella remembered the mandorla of dim gold at the head of the cistern stair: the shape like two folded hands that Sid had said was a symbol of birth.
Aditya’s people, Signifiers and Silent, were kneeling around the ruby ellipse: except for Gilberte and Albertine who stood in front of the door. Everybody looked at Bella.
