North Wind (33 page)

Bella kept irregular hours. When she came out of the hell she was never sure whether she would find daylight or darkness outside. Sometimes there was a plane raid, and she would run and fling herself in a shelter along with everybody else. Sometimes the shattering percussion of a ground level explosion would throw her flat. Once she was shopping in the covered market when there was an outbreak of fireworms: singed flesh, crackling threads of light, bodies milling and trampling. The halfcaste store in this city ran short of everything. The other spiders in her block were washing out toilet pads in cold water. Bella was very glad she’d house-trained herself.

But in the virtual casino, the electric lights were blazing. Supplies of caviar and champagne were unlimited. Bella imagined more and more hells springing up, and the locals crowding into their shelter: rich and poor, halfcastes and purebreds, men and women together.

She didn’t move on. The duel continued.

A session came when things were bad before she arrived, play began badly; and continued worse. Bella had spent an hour at the roulette table. The heap of colored counters at her elbow shrank to nothing. She left the table smiling, and went to a cash desk. The hells, no matter how opulent their decor, were accustomed to cater for clients who didn’t have a credit line.

Inside the cubicle she pushed up her visor and fumbled for paper money in her waistbag. The pouch was empty. She searched it, turned it inside out. She ran her hands over her tomboy. She
must
have more paper. Must have left the last of her wad in the petit trou. But she never left money in her room.

The cash desk was a hollow, opaque cylinder with an automat in one curved side, for receiving cash and recharging your House account. Bella slid into a crouch, in a state of shock. She could not believe she had let this happen. It was the duel, it had become an obsession. She did not take game drugs, and avoided the company of the hopelessly characterized. But spiders didn’t spurn ‘game drugs’ for the sake of mental hygiene. It was because they wanted nothing to pollute the purity of their fix. They were as much at risk as anyone.
It will become real,
people warned you.
One of them will become real, and suck you in…and you’ll be gone.

Through the wall of the cylinder she could dimly see the casino hall, looking strange and bare. The masked gamblers were still masked but they stood and sat around on battered plain furniture in a big, poorly-lit room. Their hands and eyes moved intently over empty space. If she stayed in here any longer the cylinder would retract, and the deinonychi would come and take her away. She left the foyer and went looking for the Angel. He was with the owl-headed woman, playing cards.

“Excuse me—” She didn’t know what to call him.

The owl woman started. Tonight she was dressed in a wide hooped skirt and bodice that left her breasts and furred lower belly bare. The Angel wore his basic black. Bella steeled herself. The Angel and she were friends. It was a reasonable request.

“Excuse me, sir. I’ve come out without my purse. Could you lend me twenty thousand?” The owl-woman laughed unkindly.

The Angel shrugged. “Of course.”

She returned to her place at the roulette table before she consulted the pillbox on her wrist. Forty thousand ecu. That was nice of him. She rejoined the play. She would win. She played on noir. The jetons were swept up by the croupier, Bella’s winnings were pushed towards her. The kind tabby cat patted her hand with his soft furry paw.

The punters placed their bets and won and lost, in a vanished world where everyone was rich—or at least the poor were far away. Where the war had been over for millennia, where women accepted their defeat and used it wisely: and men were secure enough to be magnanimous in victory.

“Rien ne va plus!”

Bella sat, elbows on the green baize, intent on the illusory wheel. The Angel had asked her, in one of their little chats, what it was she did to control the fall. Truly, she didn’t know. The wheel was made, essentially, of images: ordered and indexed. When some task is part of your obligation, you don’t word it, you do it. “I used to be a librarian,” she had told him. “Checking through packets of information is my métier I suppose. It isn’t hard. There are many things you can’t do. If there’s one you can, I get there.” But tonight she kept thinking of the mall in Trivandrum, that primitive scrabble between the monkeys and the demons. She was back there and this time the demon warriors were too much for her. As fast as she re-ordered the library stacks, the demons slyly jumbled them. If her adversary had needed to win, as she did, she would not have been in trouble. But he only needed to make Bella lose. The wheel slowed, the ball rattled into rest.

“C’est fini.” “Rien ne va plus….” “Faites vos jeux.”

She was concentrating fiercely and intently. She pushed a stake onto the rouge. The ball rattled and fell. Lost. Well, it wouldn’t happen again. She was in control. She woke, with a start, to find the masked faces turned towards her. A voice murmured in her ear. “Mademoiselle’s stake is not covered. How will you settle?” She was grateful to find that she could.

She walked out onto the balcony to say goodbye to the view. It was misty dawn. The ocean was viscous pink and grey, moving sluggishly in the brimming bowl of beach and rockspit and horizon. She realized that she would miss the illusions, very much. She had come to depend on them, the way the punters depended on them. Reality is such a drab and a cruel place.

In the dingy foyer, players leaving and arriving brushed past her. The Angel, still masked—it was just a mask now, not part of the
envie—
was leaning against the wall by the checkout gate, one ankle tucked over the other. She owed him forty thousand ecu, and she didn’t have a sou in the world. His great wings curved high over his head. They had an air of offering luxurious shelter. He was smoking a cigarette.

“You look worried, Bella. What is it?”

“Money.”

“I was afraid it might be.”

“I can’t repay you.”

He studied the tip of his cigarette: and threw it suddenly aside. It vanished in midair. “I have a home nearby. If you wish, you might make it yours for a while?”

So it was her turn to fall. She had lost everything. The game had become real. She wondered where Lotte was now. And others, friends she’d made in the
petits troux,
friends who’d dropped out of sight. Halfcaste whores in the War cities didn’t last long.

“You will come home with me? Come, and repay all debts.” The Angel reached out to her, desperate and assured:
“Compagnero—”

Bella put her hand in his, and felt the warm and living grip.

“It’s agreed?”

Bella said nothing. She stood, trembling.

“Do you want to pick up any luggage?”

“No.”

They went out into the street. “I don’t run a car,” he said, easily. “It’s no distance.”

He stepped into a dark doorway. She glimpsed touches of color on walls and floor, where the daylight found traces of decoration in the grime of years. The Angel’s wings shone, white and rainbow-burnished, as he descended into a black pit of a stairwell. Bella followed.

10 
Victimam Sacrifici

i

The Angel had said his home was nearby, but by the end of the journey through the tunnels he was carrying Bella in his arms. She was set gently on her feet in a darkened hall. Daylight entered from behind her, stained by the colored glass that it passed through. There were signs of decay. Paint and plaster had fallen in chunks from the walls. Yet she knew that the hall was alive, as infested with Aleutian commensals as the fabric of Uji manor. The Angel still wore his mask, the wings sweeping into shadow, above the evening dress that glowed in black and white.

He watched her, deeply expectant. he asked.

“I am Bella Guglioli.”

“No,” said the other, aloud. “You’re not Bella. She died not long after Johnny, while she was still a child. I would have done a great deal for her. But I didn’t understand quite who she was, until too late.”

“Clavel?” The Angel, named, shattered into a thousand liquid fragments. Bella collapsed onto the floor.

She woke in Aleutia, in a clean, comfortable Aleutian bed. The casino world no longer held her in its grip. She was out of the game. She remembered how Clavel’s domestics had gathered her up and carried her off, exclaiming at her pitiful weariness and scolding their lord. She’d sipped a bowl of gruel while they hovered: and tried to climb into this pallet as if it was a local bedroll. It had resisted with the dumb indignation of a mistreated commensal until she gave in and let it enfold her.

They had said she was ill: poor thing, poor cripple, the usual things. She was not ill. She hadn’t been eating well or sleeping much; that was all. She lay cuddled in the living warmth and looked around. It was a pleasant room, crowded and cozy and softly lit. Images from Aleutian and local records played, in the exquisite clarity of local-made screens. The furniture was adapted for an isolate; not “half-killed” like products for the local market, but only mildly alive. On a pretty couch someone had laid out fresh clothes, including a light blue robe. She realized that the room seemed familiar because it was familiar. Someone had reproduced her study-bedroom, down to the last robe Maitri had given to her, which had been destroyed at Mykini.

Maitri! How glad he will be, she thought, when he comes back and finds out how the story ended. He’d told his invalid child so often, silently,
everything’s going to be all right:
without ever explaining what was wrong. She understood that he’d been forbidden to tell his ward the truth. Clavel had decreed that nobody must know, not even the librarian with the secret destiny, until the day when everything was revealed.

Beside the couch where the blue robe lay, a closet stood open. There were other clothes inside, folded and hanging: human clothes. The folds had an air of permanence, as if this stranger’s wardrobe had been waiting there for a long time. Bella, half dreaming, wondering were those things meant for her too. If not, then for whom? A door opened. The owners of some of the air’s life came crowding in, and clustered round her bed.

She struggled to sit up. she reminded them.

One of the Silent took her hand. he said sweetly. His eyes were brimming.

At dawn, Bella had truly felt that she was destitute and forced to submit to shameful employment or else starve. That had been the game’s version of events, it no longer existed. But somewhere in her, Maitri’s librarian recoiled from this welcome.

It was all very well for Aditya, whose self-respect was impervious. Maitri’s librarian couldn’t endure to be a bride: contracted to be the bed-partner of a more powerful and more important person. But there wasn’t a shadow of contempt in the domestics’ attention. There was nothing but the usual possessive kindness of their obligation: and a trouble that they were eager to share. She managed to contain her involuntary reaction. Of course she was not a bride! She was the great Clavel’s other self: such a momentous promotion, it was hard to take it in.

pleaded someone.

offered another, ingenuously.

They fussed over her, grooming and petting. Some teased the bed into softer warmth, while others helped her to change her underwear. She asked for her medication. This request produced nervous giggles. They were uncomfortable at having to refuse her anything, but: explained one of them. They left Bella alone with another bowl of pleasant gruel. The Pure One had ordered them not to stay, in case they tired her.

She ate the food, set the bowl aside and stretched herself out: purely luxuriating in cleanliness and proper underwear. If her neighbors in the
petit troux
could see her now! Asking for the medication had been a reflex. She didn’t want it. She knew that the isolate’s drugs had been making her ill all her life. She tasted the information-laden air. Soon, she thought, her “reverse-therapy” would begin—the opposite to the kind she’d risked in Trivandrum. She would be an Aleutian, but not an isolate. She thought of Sid. He’d known who Bella was, all along: and accepted their fate, she saw that now. It was too bad. Some beautiful things are wasted, it’s just life. There was no question of where her duty lay. And when the moment of recognition came, it would be duty no longer. It would be the end of a long and vivid dream and the beginning of real life: no regrets, all debts paid.

She dressed, noting sadly that the modest light blue of Maitri’s present was no longer at all to her taste. Nobody came, so she ventured out into the house. Poetry in still and moving images hung on the walls. Bella moved from one to another slowly: thinking of Clavel’s own poems about First Contact and the giant planet. Maitri’s librarian had passionately admired those melancholy strains of color and form. There was nothing by Clavel himself on these walls, but everything was sad. She saw how the work of the commensals was controlled. They’d been trained to hold the damage done by time, warfare and neglect in a poignant stasis. It was a lovely effect, and inexpressibly mournful. Might such unrelieved grief become a little tedious? The thought felt heretical. She reminded herself she was here to bring the grief of Clavel to an end.

She found her way downstairs to the wide hallway that she had seen when they arrived. Several rooms opened from it. The first she went into was large, and furnished with a collection of local antiques. It felt like a museum. A young local, a man, in old-fashioned clothes, sat on a bow-shaped couch in earnest communion with a screen showing War news. He glanced up. Bella saw a childlike, open face: alert black eyes. The person was familiar, but for a moment unplaceable.

“Oh, Excuse me.”

She backed out, unwilling to interrupt the young man’s prayers, suddenly conscious that she wasn’t in quarantine.

Bella shook herself. Quarantine? That was a thought from the past. She had passed through so many worlds, since “Goodlooking” the innocent tourist had arrived on earth.

One of the Silent had appeared. He acknowledged Bella’s presence with a friendly smile and went into the room she’d vacated, carrying a large vase of dead flowers. Bella saw him place the flowers, taking a path directly between the young man and the screen. He opened tall glassed doors through which she glimpsed a garden, closed down the news and moved the local screen (with the practiced distaste of the Silent who have to handle deadworld ware) into a closet. The young man with black eyes did not protest. The domestic offered to Bella a room that was, to him, clearly empty.

As soon as Bella was alone with him the young man stood up. He was unmistakable now but subtly wrong: too old? Too muscular, too tall, too serious? He crossed the room and vanished, around the moment when he would have reached the glass doors.

“I hope you are rested.”

The Angel had become a tall, loose-limbed Aleutian, no longer young. His modest air reminded her of Maitri. But Maitri was truly unassuming, by obligation. Clavel was awkward like a perpetual adolescent, hopelessly unable to wear his power with grace. It was a discomfort that people loved in him. He folded himself on the bow-shaped couch: watching and waiting, as the Angel had watched and waited. “Did you know it was me, when you met Indrajiit outside the walls of Lanka?”

She welcomed the cloak of formal conversation. “It seems to me now that I knew who you were. But I couldn’t be sure, because you didn’t say and we only met inside the games.”

She couldn’t take her eyes from the spot where the figure of Johnny Guglioli had disappeared. Clavel acknowledged her curiosity. He lifted his wrist, to show the pillbox he wore.

“Among some of the locals,” he said, in his perfect “Japanese” English. “There’s rumored to be a rule that if you save someone’s life you are responsible for that person forever, as far as their ‘forevers’ go. I have learned that there is the same bond if you have caused someone’s permanent death. It was because of what I did to Johnny that he became a saboteur and was executed. When I raped him I murdered him. Long ago, I realized that I would always be haunted. That for all the lives to come his figure, profoundly unreal, would come and sit by my side. He would be with me, quiet as an old friend, every time I raised my eyes. The deadware ghost I can invoke, and banish at a touch, makes it easier to endure the other’s company.”

Bella felt how incongruous it was that she should be uneasy in
this
person’s company. But she was like Maitri’s librarian thrust into intimate conversation with his idol: longing to escape and get back to his nest of records, actually much happier with Clavel on a screen.

Clavel laughed, aloud like a human. It sounded strange.

It was a relief to have something that must be said; that was unaffected by this strange and delicate situation. But it was difficult to speak. The crowded air was trying to close her throat.

“I couldn’t take the risk that it wasn’t you. After the séance, I had to hide. I was confused, I admit: and then the games sucked me in. But I never forgot that I was hiding. You see, I know something. Not what people think—” She stumbled on. “Thought, that I should know. But something that might be vital.”

Clavel was staring at the silk rug that covered the floor by his couch. It seemed in the lamplight to be woven out of topaz and rubies. He looked up.

Don’t tell me. I don’t want you to tell me anything.> His tone was mild, encompassing and absolute.

It was dusk outside the glass doors. Domestics came in: one to rouse and arrange the lamps, others to lay a polished deadwood table for a local-style meal. Clavel stood. “Shall we eat? I hope you like hard food.” He gave her a crooked smile. “You’re using the ‘she’ expression for yourself, I notice. Is this permanent?”

“I…it’s a habit I got into. I suppose it will wear off.”

It was a very Aleutian approximation of human cuisine. The main course was a stew of vegetables. Rigid chunks of cabbage, carrots and garlic floated in a tepid watery stock. Bella ate with polite enthusiasm while the domestics watched, proud of their achievement and of Clavel’s sophisticated taste.

Clavel poured wine for her. “I’m afraid you’re missing your nightly fix. I know what gaming fever is. But I shan’t deprive you. We can go to the Baltic.” He looked at Bella, quizzical. “How did you end up a spider, child? Was it pure addiction?”

“There aren’t many places where halfcastes gather, in Old Earth. I—well, you know how people talk. I had the idea that if I stayed with them, you’d find me eventually.”

Clavel stared: and then laughed in genuine amusement. “I live so much like a human in seclusion, I forget that Aleutia goes on watching me. Of course, the poet’s antics are still entertaining the masses. I can withdraw myself from the traffic of the air, but I can’t escape from Aleutia-of-the-mind.”

He propped his elbows on the table, lips drawn back. “Speed of reaction,” he said. “That’s what we have. You, Bella, you see the smooth curve, where the locals see a jerky sequence of snapshots. You are at the source, they are snatching at inferences. It’s not what we can do and they can’t, that does the damage. Trade depends on the uneven distribution of skills. It’s what they can do, that we can do better. Oh, a
little
better: an edge. It’s enough. Not all the games we can play with their systems are as innocent as virtuality Ramayana. You ask Rajath.”

Bella preferred not to think about the trickster captain.

“It’s because they’re not used to direct assimilation,” she said. “Their processing machinery wasn’t like ours, until they invented ‘virtuality.’ You had to struggle through layers of mapping; the machines were built in formal language. I’ve met local spiders nearly as good as me. They’ll catch up, now they’re able to manipulate the data the same way the mind/brain processes perception—”