North Wind (30 page)

Her flesh filled out, her arms and legs were swollen and heavy. But her skin did not become smooth, her hair didn’t become fine. Her claw did not wither away; the moist cleft in her belly did not shift towards the cloaca. The scale around it didn’t turn to hair. Her torso, with its two small marks like the ghosts of human nipples, remained hard and flat. The grooves that slanted along muscle from her collarbones to her place, and down either side of her spine, did not close. They longed as much as ever for the touch of a lover’s mouth and hands.

She made herself ill, and couldn’t do anything but lie in her pallet bed: running her hands over her body, hunting for changes and finding none. Her “petit trou” was a bare slip of space. Its furniture was the food she bought (she never thought of cooking) and the meager grey envelope of un-living pallet rolled out on the floor. She never thought of buying a mirror.

Being ill was good for her. It was a pattern, like walking into the gaming mall but far more potently familiar. She rediscovered the librarian, the invalid: and the ghostly paths of common experience knitted together, making a bridge between the present and the past. She had been the librarian, she could not go home anymore, she was Bella now, but she remembered. She remembered Sid: the feel of his body in her arms, the awkward shape, the warm damp weight. She remembered him in the “beautiful woman” mask, and the way the mask had failed utterly to hide the person—the irremediably contrary, not this-not that,
I won’t-
ness, which was Sidney Carton. She would never see him again. In this world, her loss was too ordinary to be tragic.

When illness had made this bridge, she was able to think about Aleutia again. She dreamed of a library. In the dream it had become a human library of long ago, made of images gleaned from her beloved “local records.” She saw shelves of printed books, some of them shabby old hand-written jotters. It was someone’s personal collection, personal history. Outside there was an empty land of baked, cracked clay going on and on. She was thrown out of the library. The people who threw her out were sorry, but their first loyalty was elsewhere. She pleaded with them but she did not feel they were wrong. Her time in the library had been borrowed time. She was not the person who belonged there, that was someone else.

No longer pleading because there was no point, she woke up crying:
Ochiba,
the discounted, the rejected wife. She had been naming herself a woman, Johnny’s daughter, since the morning when she had crawled out from under the sarcophagus, her place in the world lost forever. Now at last she understood the human word: and it was true. She was a woman. In gestalt, she always had been.

In the gaming hells of the war years, play was an ingenious compromise between the physical and the virtual. You wore a visor, and an eye-wrap, to deliver the environment of the game to your visual cortex. But you remained normally conscious, and moved about in an arena: which you perceived as the whole length and breadth of fairyland. The software entity, the sensei that controlled the game, presented your actions and persona in the fantasy as perceptible experience for everyone who shared the
envie,
the visor-mediated environment.

According to legend—halfcaste legend—it was an Aleutian who had discovered that a game visor would accept eccentric direct-cortical commands: that there were trapdoors and loopholes in the processing architecture which could be exploited for fun or profit. This was clearly untrue. Players had started to subvert game-software long, long ago. What the “trap-door spiders” did was the continuance of an ancient human tradition—of truly obsessed players finding tricks and random shortcuts unplanned by the manufacturers, and spreading the word.

In effect, two virtual worlds occupied a game
envie.
In one, the punters played, and behaved as if the physical laws of the game were immutable as those of reality. In the other the lucid-dreamers, the spiders, knew that fairyland is a place where magic works.

Bella picked up something of this history, of the gamer controversies; a little about game technology, as she settled into her new life. There were spiders who loved to talk. The most useful things she learned by imitation, and then gradually discovered why she did what she did. She learned how to handle the complex and sophisticated Old Earth sensei: how to choose a role from the book when she first put the eyewrap on, how to avoid the “characterization” that was strictly, like game drugs, for fools and punters. She learned how to make money in the money games, and in spot-bets on fantasy battles. But she had been a player before she knew anything, in that crude and basic gaming mall in Trinvandrum: when she had found something she could do and insensately started doing it. She remained, like a true Aleutian, incurious about theory. Maybe that was why she was so good, the envy of other spiders.

The Vanaras had surrounded Lanka like a tumultuous sea. Shouting Victory to the Vanara king! Victory to Rama and Lakshmana! Perish Raakshasas! the Vanara army rushed on the doomed city. Some hurled big boulders against the fortress wall and on the city gates. Others, armed with huge trees torn up by the roots, rushed on the Raakshasas. Ravana sent forth a big army of demons. They beat their drums and blew their trumpets until the sky resounded. They fell upon the Vanaras. The valiant monkey people used boulders and trees and their own nails and fists to oppose the Raakshasas. Thousands fell dead on either side. The field before Lanka’s gate was covered with blood and mangled bodies.

In the midst of this gruesome engagement there were many duels between individual warriors, and many momentary quiet corners, where one or two combatants briefly dropped their weapons and flung themselves on the ground to rest. If the warriors were the kind called spiders, they did not converse in character.

“D’you know something,” said Angada, tossing aside a severed demon limb. “I’ve played this book in virtuality malls all over, the worst to the best. And it is always the monkey battle at the demons’ palace. I’ve never found out how the story begins, or whether they rescue wossername, or what happens at the end.” He’d lost an arm. The dripping stump seemed to bother him, he kept feeling it tenderly.

“Give the people what they want,” Indrajiit picked monkey flesh from between his fangs.

“In my first game,” said Sugreeva, “I thought the trapdoors were it. I thought you were supposed to find every one of them, or you hadn’t got it right.”

“Like bunkers on a golf course,” murmured Indrajiit. “I thought that about bunkers, first time I tried golf “

The two monkeys scratched their heads. “What’s a golf course?”

Indrajiit was a demon: a splendid creature. His face was like a great fanged flower, his ornaments blazed with magic jewels. He was a demon, and yet there was something godlike about him: a great nobility. When he fell in battle, angels would weep. This was true to the book, reflecting the fine even-handedness of Hindu mythology. However, it gave an edge to the friendly chat. You got more legitimate game-powers as a demon: to a pure spider, that was a reason to be a monkey. Legitimate power was not spiderlike.

He didn’t answer the monkeys’ question. Instead, laughing hugely, he said. “Sagreeva, how about a duel?”

A fist burst from the ground beside them, and proffered a velvet lined casket in which lay two pearl-inlaid eighteenth-century pistols. Demons can do that sort of thing. It’s in the rules.

“Accepted,” laughed Sagreeva. He took a pistol. It turned into a banana, which he stripped and ate. Monkeys can’t do that.

A huge severed head flew across the air above them. Blood rained from the sky, deluging the remains of the coconut grove in which they were sheltering. Sugreeva, who knew a spell against flaming blood, shook the drops harmlessly from his fur. “That was Kumbhakarna! Damn! I wanted that kill. You distracted me, Indrajiit. This means war!”

Towards midnight, the monkeys entered the city with torches. The battle had been long and varied. Surgreeva was surprised that Angada was still beside him. His arm had regrown, but now he’d lost a leg and it appeared not to be regenerating. He also had a grisly head wound. He hopped gamely on a whole-tree crutch. This monkey was a spider, of sorts. But he wasn’t very good, and the clumsier rule-benders usually avoided the experts. Angada wasn’t going to make any extra kills around Sugreeva: Sugreeva’s body-count in this tranche was more than respectable. Angada was barely scoring.

Indrajiit still lived. He and Sugreeva seemed well matched.

The city, oh the terrible sights of that city. Monkeys and demons stumbled through its fire and blood dabbled streets: limbs shattered, eyes blinded, choking in poison fumes. A huge building suddenly melted into a sheet of liquid stone, and poured down upon a mass of combatants. A demon crouched over a fallen monkey, lapping blood: a monkey held a demon child by its two heels and impaled it screaming on another’s spiked iron mace.

“Whatever turns you on,” muttered Angada, in a grumbling tone. “I suppose it’s therapy. Maybe they’ve got a right; it’s not as if real life out in the War was much different. But you notice, it’s always animals dressed up, monsters, or something classical. Anything to sidestep the issue. D’you think they enjoy—”

“I don’t care.” True spiders had absolute-zero interest in what the punters did, or why.

“That Indrajiit fancies himself. Do you think he’s someone rich and famous, in the real?”

“I’m not interested.”

“I just noticed! You lost your tail. How d’you do that?”

It was not an injury. The tails were a fearful liability.

Sugreeva shrugged his massive furry shoulders.

“Sorry, can’t help you. If you have to ask—”

Indrajiit, dreadfully wounded, saw them coming and shot serpent darts from his chariot. Arrows in the form of poisonous snakes whipped around the monkeys’ bodies, pinning their arms to their sides and searing flesh to the bone. Sugreeva knew a spell against serpent darts. He grew to cosmic size. The fiery snakes burst from his sky-filling limbs, he reached a great clawed hand and dragged Indrajiit’s magic chariot from the clouds.

Indrajiit immediately became invisible and threw himself on his enemy. Cosmic size doesn’t last. Sugreeva, back to his usual dimensions, struggled with the unseen foe. Angada, who was still trying to remember the spell against serpent darts, rolled over in his bonds to the spot and attempted to set his teeth in a demon ankle. A demon or a monkey heel spurned him. Sugreeva drew back his mace for a mighty blow: and the demon reappeared in death, his head almost split in two.

It was a game kill. In the book Indrajiit was to be killed by Rama with a sacred arrow, which would still happen when that tranche came round. But book-kills were in the decor. They required no great skill and had no negotiable value.

Sugreeva finished the work and stepped back from his foe, grimly satisfied. Down and out! Then, Indrajiit’s cloven head reformed, his limbs gathered. He rose fluidly to his feet. It’s hard to tell with demons, but he could have been grinning. He vanished. Angada looked up from the puddle of blood in which he was lying, trussed in snakes.

“Hey, Sugreeva. I hate to say it, but you’ve grown a tail.”

Bella went home to her
petit trou
and counted bruises. A virtual clinch was a stage-fight, bodies did not connect. The mall games were psychically very dangerous indeed, but physically—aside from terrorist attack—hardly at all. However, because of the demon’s insolent behavior, Bella had a lower score and had lost some of the spot-bet stakes she’d been counting on. That wasn’t important. What
was
important was that Bella had never met a spider better than herself before. She hadn’t given much thought to this. Now she wondered, about Indrajiit.

She could not resist returning to the Lanka game to seek out one special opponent; and returning again. She did not win. She thought about the situation, and decided it was time to move on. Another city, another mall, another
petit trou.
She could travel around the War like this for the rest of her life, buried deep.

It was a bad thing, a stupid thing, to get sucked into a duel. It was all right once in a way, but for a spider to duel with a spider consistently just made you both poor. She had heard of it happening to people. You started playing to beat another gamer, instead of playing to win. You fell into a fatal spiral. Start taking risks, start losing. Start losing, never stop.

That had been Lotte’s wisdom. Lotte, however, had lost heavily sometimes. She had been destitute, despite her sideline in prostitution, the day that she met Bella. Bella felt she had a long way to go before she need worry about a “fatal spiral.” When she realized that she was sliding into a duel again, she did not try to fight it. She made no attempt to discover if it was really the same person, following her around. If it was some rich human, they might be wearing the visor in a private arena on the other side of the world. She moved on.