North Wind (31 page)

ii

It was four am in Akashi, wherever Akashi might be. Philip Rao, of the Office of Aleutian Affairs, read the hour on a small digital clock, a black lozenge with minimal red numerals. It stood on the floor beside the Aleutian’s couch, in the room from which the alien was speaking. Philip believed that room was somewhere in Old Earth, but nobody had tracked down the location. Or no one had told Philip. He was a contact worker. There was a great deal he didn’t know, and therefore couldn’t reveal. The aliens weren’t true telepaths, but it was safer to behave as if they were.

“This was months ago,” the alien pointed out. “Why didn’t you come to us at the time?”

Philip was wearing his uniform, a dun tabard with a codpiece bulge in the groin. A woman’s tabard had a breast bulge in the front and a buttocks bulge in the back. It sounded ludicrous and humiliating, but Philip genuinely felt neither ridiculous nor shamed. He knew that to the person who was looking at him, physical lumps and bumps had no
mana.
They simply wanted to know which brood they were talking to. It would have been different, perhaps, if he’d been another Aleutian with a poor supply of wanderers.

The Convention, which had been adopted since the first Gender War, was that you wore a female tabard if you knew you were what the Aleutians regarded as feminine; a male if you felt you were “masculine,” in Aleutian terms. Confusing, but there would have been problems if the aliens had to cope with the idea of talking to “brood traitors” during a war. Problems too, if a human was liable to appear, in Aleutian eyes, in the wrong suit. It didn’t happen. Anyone in contact-work had to be clear about that aspect of their identity: and ready to be open about it.

In these conversations there must be no covert fear, and no lying. Not because the Aleutians were so terrifying, but because if you gave them crossed signals, in the two modes of Spoken Word and Common Tongue, it snarled things up impossibly…. But he was alarmed by the audience he’d been granted, and frankly expressed it. Since the Protest, there’d been no communication except via recorded messages flown down by freight from Uji. Suddenly, he had an interactive screen interview with one of the Three Captains. In the circumstances, this was not reassuring.

“We didn’t think much about it at the time. But gradually we started to worry.”

“Trespass in a battlefield area,” pondered the alien, reclining on his couch in a dark robe: a lazy, graceful baboon in imperial purple. “That sounds more dangerous to the trespassers than anyone else, as long as they weren’t carrying weapons…no weapons to speak of, anyhow.”

A story had reached the Government of the World, eventually, concerning an incident “involving partial Aleutian weaponry,” in Prussia several months ago. It was known that the Aleutians had a science, which they themselves regarded with dread, of breeding weapons of mass destruction; a process that somehow involved the “inert tissue” of the enemy. The Aleutians of the shipworld were a single brood. If they were building weapons, it could only be against humanity.

The Aleutian Affairs Office was reasonably sure that the aliens were
not
building weapons. But though details were meager and investigation on the spot impractical, it seemed that
something
had happened in Prussia, and they could not let it go by. Aleutians don’t respect people who don’t seem to know what’s going on around them.

The question,
Are you preparing to destroy us?
hung in the air: unspoken, and dismissed.
Not this time.

“No one’s concerned about weapons carried for reasonable self-defense,” Since the Protest, that had had to be agreed. “But we have to remind you, we can’t ensure your safety out there.”

“We appreciate the reminder.” The alien swung himself upright into a human pose, leaning forward from the couch. “And now I think we should forget the whole thing. Least said, soonest mended, as you people say.”

“Agreed,” said Philip Rao. “Thank you for seeing me, sir.”

The old man in his absurd tabard dissolved, the virtual screen out of which he’d been peering vanished into thin air. Clavel sat gazing at the place where it had been. Was it bright day in Krung Thep? Did the hot wet air still smell of jasmine, and exhaust fumes and rot? Did the river pulse, glaucous and flotsam-strewn, under the strange spire of the Temple Of The Dawn? But the Thais had moved their capital to the north, away from the drowned and befouled Gulf of Siam. There was nothing left of the past.

Yudisthara had begged him to handle the interview with the Office of Aleutian Affairs. Poor Yudi was so abjectly dumb about the locals, he didn’t know he had
terrified
them by treating this “incident” so seriously as to involve the great Clavel. But Clavel thought he’d convinced the old alien-watcher that there was nothing to worry about, and the Aleutian Affairs Office could be trusted to do everything possible to keep it out of the records.

He spoke to Yudisthara, in the Aleutia-in-his-mind.

He leaned back on the couch. His robe, deep indigo blue with purple shadows, fell away from his throat and arms as he lifted his hands in front of his face: well-kept, middle-aged hands, the claws trimmed, pads heavy and grainy. A second life here, he thought. Decades more of it, maybe. Will there be another, or is this the end? Bhairava, his master-at-arms—the security officer who had been Maitri’s mate in his previous life—came into the room.

He stepped through long glass doors, onto a stone terrace and down into his garden, the midnight robe floating behind him over the damp caress of the grass. It was September, more than a year on Earth since the séance. The night was cool and heavy with thunder.

He let his fingers run through dark spires of flowering plants that surrounded the sloping lawn. Momentarily, they turned blue and turquoise. The glow of the opaque sky became visible. Was that glittering shower a spray of meteors? It could be tracer fire. Reformer “terrorism” in the Thames valley had reached guerrilla warfare levels. There were rumors of an imminent Ochiba invasion.

He had called his house Akashi, because it was a name like “Uji”: with connotations of sadness in the Japanese culture of his old friend Kaoru. The old Japanese had called that riverside manor far from his home “Uji” after a place that was gone forever beneath the sea: Akashi was the retreat where Clavel mourned a loss equally irretrievable. He went to his sea-shore—a part of the garden laid with sand and shingle, and planted with marram grass and stunted pines. The scent and sound of the waves came to meet him. In daylight the ocean would stretch to a false horizon all around; and lap the sand.

Clavel’s security, like the insectoid flier he used, was a hybrid system, shamelessly taking the best from living and from “dead” technology. It was both his quarantine and his defense. It rarely had to deal with intruders. But something had come up against it tonight. The barrier had been adjusted to let the flier through, but give its pilot a bumpy ride. Clavel listened to someone blundering about among the virtual breakers. He picked up a handful of real gravel and shied little pebbles into the briny dark. In reality, his ocean of exile and sadness was a part of the grounds that he had not reclaimed: a rank patch of stinging weeds and rubble. A yelp rewarded him. A muddy and bedraggled figure came loping up the beach.

demanded young Rajath, excitedly.

The trickster flopped down beside him.

Rajath had been so terrified by what happened in Prussia that he’d abandoned disguise and fled to Uji. He’d been having an uncomfortable time there. The attempted treachery remained a decently veiled rumor: but Yudisthara was prostrate with grief. He had lost Aditya: and when they next met the Beauty surely wouldn’t even look at him. Everybody blamed Rajath, his life was a stinging soup of reproaches. And he was threatened with a passage home, which would be highly inconvenient.

come, if you’re tired of Uji, and I’ll put up with you here for a while.>

Rajath and Clavel had not met since that midsummer night in a wood near Athens. Nor had they been in communication by local means. The conversation they spoke of had taken place in the Aleutia-of-the-mind. Rajath picked at his muddy sleeves, scowling. It had been very clear to him, in
his
inner model of the situation, that Clavel wanted him at Akashi, and that this was because the librarian had survived.

Clavel patted his arm.

As they reached the terrace the rain began, streaming through the selective-deflector dome, a resilient barrier against larger collisions or unfriendly chemical attack. Rajath followed the poet to a small room, furnished as something between a study and a chapel. A character record of Old Earth was playing. Bhairava rose as they entered.

said Rajath.

The master at arms responded conventionally: He didn’t mention Rajath’s own bereavement. It would have been tactless.

Rajath brightened.

Clavel forestalled him.

The screen hovered in the air above local-make low table, with no visible support. The moving images were in shades of grey. Rajath peered at the picture.

Rajath’s nasal pouted uncertainly.

said Clavel dryly.

For a while they watched the story of this thin, bright-eyed elegant person, and his distorted processing of human confessions. His congregations foamed in battered-looking local streets, swarming in and out of big grim character shrines. It was very familiar, to aficionados of Old Earth. Except that nowadays there’d be no character shrines like that, only gaming hells.

Rajath murmured softly, in horrified admiration. He glanced at Clavel, uncomfortably.

Clavel laughed.

Rajath visibly relaxed. genocide!
It’s incredible how little the idea upsets them.>

The record ended. The virtual screen vanished with a tiny, decorative sparkle, making Rajath start. Clavel was silent. Rajath contemplated the ruins of a dream.

he added gloomily.

Clavel watched the trickster, with a bleak and lazy enjoyment of his sufferings. He smiled, with a glint of tooth.

Rajath drew his shoulders together.

remarked the poet sardonically.

protested Rajath.

anyone—
Viloma’s mad, but the rest of you—consider the risk? Even if there’d been nothing unusual in the librarian’s make-up, you were growing commensals from someone close to mental collapse, having driven him into a state of terror. Do you know how near necromancy is to weapon-building?>