North Wind (35 page)

She wasn’t even listening.

“What’s the use.” He collapsed onto a rosewood dining-chair. To his shame and fury, tears were stinging at the backs of his eyes. If he didn’t give this up, he’d be sobbing outright.

Suddenly he realized that she wasn’t listening, because her attention was fixed on something going on behind him. Her eyes had snapped like a cat’s into full dilation, so that a distinction you didn’t know you could see in the black-on-black vanished: leaving nothing but a light-eating hole.

she said, meaning the opposite.

Sid instantly swiveled around on his chair. The Aleutian who had come softly into the room was four-footed, looming larger than any natural animal because of the mad, sentient glitter in its eyes. Hair rose on the nape of Sid’s neck.

Clavel stood: a terrifying transformation, rabid animal to fairytale monster. He moved into the lamplight, eyeing the intruder with tolerant amusement.

Sid scrabbled together his control of the Common Tongue, managing to achieve the rigid stare of a rabbit transfixed in headlights. Clavel strolled to a elegant sideboard. Sid flashed a bemused question at Bella:

she told him, barely: nothing more.

The poet poured himself a shot of whisky and returned to lean on the back of the couch. “You’re right, Sid. Bella is not Johnny Guglioli.” He spoke carefully, deliberately, like a drunk. But Sid didn’t think he was drunk. “When I came back and found I was as trapped in misery as I had been before, I fought with myself for a while. Yet the heart has its reasons. I knew the weapons people had taken tissue from Johnny’s body. I secured some, and had my people build me a hybrid embryo, and I had Maitri raise you as his own, Bella. Your unwitting host, if that’s the right term, needed to have special, rare physical characteristics. Luckily there was someone who fitted the profile in Maitri’s own household, which was a stroke of luck.”

agreed the librarian quietly.

The poet bowed his head. He continued. “Maitri’s librarian fit our profile, which made it natural for Maitri to keep you close as you grew up. I waited. But the moment never came. I gather Rajath tried to have your base-identity read, here on Earth. If he’d succeeded maybe we’d know how much of the human material remained recognizable. It doesn’t matter.”

Clavel came to the front of the couch, looking down at Bella. “You are not Johnny. Maybe the best way to describe you is to say you are Maitri’s librarian, wearing a rather strange prosthetic body in which you are no longer disabled. That’s who you are, that’s what we achieved.” Bella looked up. Sid didn’t catch what passed between them: something, perhaps, of how it had felt to be the subject of this benign experiment. For a moment Sid glimpsed the poet-princess of first contact, bitterly ashamed and painfully young. The older Clavel smoothly recovered.

“I admit, we didn’t know exactly what would happen to ‘Maitri’s librarian.’ What we also didn’t realize was that the librarian and I would not get on.” Clavel smiled. “When you arrived, Sid, Bella was about to tell me that she can’t help it and she’s sorry she’s not what I wanted. She was going to volunteer to stay, and do her best to make me happy, for the sake of the Expedition. Is that right, librarian?”

Bella lowered her eyes.

“You never thought you were Johnny.” Clavel frowned over a remaining puzzle. “That’s bothered me. You never for a moment considered the possibility that you were Johnny, though you are such a clear thinker. How did you manage to miss that solution? You had enough clues.”

“I knew that Maitri had been going to tell me I was your truechild. He wouldn’t lie to me. And Johnny Guglioli—”

“Was never that.” Clavel stood. “Maitri didn’t lie; he told you what I believed. I’m going to turn down your noble offer. You’re a critic, I’m an artist. It wouldn’t work.” He went over to an ancient, exquisite writing desk. “Well, Bella—if you like the name, keep it—I’m sorry my fantasy has caused you so much grief. It’s over now. The rumor of the ‘instantaneous travel device’ will die a natural death. But you two
young people
will need protection for a while.”

(Bella shrugged faintly. There was a forgivable slur in this description. In Aleutia decent pairing crosses a generation. It was a nasty perversion for two young people to be together.)

He handed Bella a sliver of plastic. “Later I’ll make a more settled arrangement.” He walked to the glass doors. “This is the deal. Sid, you give up your secret-agenting. Leave here, keep going, don’t contact your boss ever again. Bella, do not try to contact Aleutia. Stay away from the aliens, both of you. Lose yourselves. I won’t lose you. As long as you keep to my conditions, I will look after you.”

Sid was paralyzed, hypnotized. Suddenly the Pure One laughed, a choked, human splutter. “What a fool you are, Sidney Carton. Don’t you see? The princess is yours.
Go,
can’t you?”

Bella took Sid’s hand. He stumbled with her into the garden, under a sky of deep plum and charcoal in crusted layers of cloud, like Japanese applique work. The trees were looming giants, shrubs were crouching animals, there was the false sigh of the waves. Sid pulled up, too confused to take a step further.

“What
happened?
I didn’t get half of that. Did I ruin things for you? Did I let slip something about us having sex? It can’t be serious. He’ll forgive you. You go back and tell him—”

Bella hauled on his arm. “Come
on!
We have to get away.”

The sound of her voice was like a thunderclap. “Huh?”

“Before you came in,” she gasped, still tugging him, “I had woken from a virtual experience of the rape. I was the rapist; it was the rape that he has repeated here, who knows how many times. I didn’t volunteer! He put the wrap on me while I was asleep. He was trying to characterize me without my consent, to make me into another self, into what he needed.”

“What?
Clavel did that!
Clavel!”

“Don’t put your trust in heroes. Don’t be too disgusted either. People do bad things when they’re miserable: it has to be forgiven. But when I went downstairs to find him he was
very
strange. We should get out of this garden, quickly, because Clavel is not at all stable tonight.”

The sound of her voice. Her hands gripping his. Sid could hear his own breathing, and the pounding of his heart, above the wind and the rain that were pummeling the Thames valley. A ton of
déjà vu
fell on him. He could barely see her face. The wave had collapsed. They had stepped out of the game, and into the real.

They ran hand in hand out of the poet’s garden, into the streets.

Standing at the glass doors, the tumbler still in his hand, Clavel watched the two mortals hurry into obscurity.
“Since there’s no help,”
he whispered.
“Come, let us kiss and part.”
He waited for the changeling to come running back out of the rain, crying: “Daddy! Baby! It’s suddenly come right! I do know you!” But the soul of Johnny Guglioli would never look out of those precisely judging eyes: never know him, never remember.

I have guessed as best I could what you would want, Johnny. I have kept the faith. I have tried to be good. I am trying still.

He dropped the glass and covered his face. He prayed, as if he naively believed, like a human, in WorldSelf as something separate from his own being. A Big Kind Person, out there.

“Oh
God,
if you ever loved me, get me out of this.”

They had to wait for hours, until the automat monorail started up, before they could travel back to the city center. At the last station, Bella fed the gate with Clavel’s plastic.

“Fairy gold,” she said. “Is dangerous. It leaves marks.” She dropped Clavel’s gift on the barrier. Sid gave a faint cry of protest: but she’d walked on. He left it lying there. The great city was silent in the dawn. The rain had stopped and the sky was clear. A hawk flew out and plummeted from a tower block, pigeons scattered with a clatter of wings.

he asked.

She walked beside him in absorbed quiet. She didn’t seem to notice the cold on her bare limbs. In the wilderness that had encroached on central London the leaves were turning. Goldenrod lay in tarnished sheaves in vacant lots, battered by the rain. Seeding willowherb made ghostly grey tangles, berries glistened, small animals rustled unseen. Once she asked. “Are there elephants?”; and he realized what was happening in her silence.

“Sorry. No elephants. No rhinos, no giraffes, no hippopotami. No tigers. All gone. We have more and more people instead.” He touched her arm and pointed to where a trotting, tawny shadow was crossing the Strand ahead of them. “Lioness. We have them. And leopards. Escapes from the old ‘Safari Parks,’ naturalized. They’re like foxes. They eat anything, get everywhere, and most people admire them sneakingly: but don’t forget they’ll happily eat you.”

she murmured.

The city began to wake as they walked. It was strangely peaceful, as the cities of the War could be at this time of day. They walked through a street-projection advertising a game that Bella had played: but where? Somewhere along the Baltic coast? She had no idea.

“I didn’t know I was in London.”

Sid’s hotel was not far from St Martin’s in the Fields, where the Aleutian tourists had stayed, but it was a characterless modern establishment on one floor, the rooms opening off a series of drab courtyards. Bella touched the building material curiously.

“Is this an Aleutian product? It sort of feels alive.”

Sid laughed. “Funny you should say that. It’s recycled waste: to be candid it’s mostly human shit. You have to use what you have plenty of, right? It’s supposed to be sterilized, but you know what European manufacturing is like.”

He bought a liter of coffee and a bag of sugar fritters in the canteen and led her into the warren. He thumbed the lock (his own) on his flimsy pressed-shit door and went to lift down the anti-airborne shutters from the window: yelped as a blast of pure sunlight hit his lenses, tipped them out into his palm and dumped them on the window ledge.

The walls of the room had been sprayed in a pattern of blue sky and clouds that vaguely attempted an effect of depth and movement. There were two narrow beds on legs: a chemical toilet and a washstand behind a screen. A piece of green matting between the beds, trying to look like grass. Bella stood by the door.

“How is Lydia? And Roger, and the others?”

“The kids are fine. The others are no worse than usual. I’ve been back to see them: kind of sick leave, some of the time that you were in the hells. They send me tapes. There’s a screen with a decoder that takes Tourviddy format, down in the cantina.”

She came over to the window, and touched his fingers.

“I’m sorry about your hand.”

He’d forgotten, momentarily, how he’d lost the original.

“It’s as good as new. Except for this,” He showed her the kitemark and the logo of the copyright company. “Keeps regenerating, no matter how I try to file it off. Don’t you hate that? If they want me to advertise for them, they ought to pay me—”

His chatter foundered. He drew a breath like a sob, and pulled her into his arms. She returned the embrace, but there was something wrong. He had known it as they were walking here: something badly wrong. Her silence was unreadable.

He drew back, keeping hold of her.

“About being a woman. I’m kind of attached to lying-down kit I was born with, but if it’s what you want, I’m fine, I’ll get myself fixed.”

Bella thought of Aditya: the lovely face alight in death. For Aditya the
she
of Earth was a reckless abdication of autonomy, a gloriously dangerous game: more alluring than any risk Aleutia could provide. So many ways of “being she,” but it was a bad habit, even for humans. Not something you’d wish on a friend.

“Don’t. I like you the way you are.”

“We could go to the USSA: like Clavel said, start a new life. Their immigration’s tough, but we could try?” No response. He thought of the forbidden territory that had determined not to be changed by alien invasion: a society maybe stranger than Aleutia by now. “Okay, not the US. To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’d fit in. Bella, what is it? I can’t give back to you what you’ve lost, I wish I could.”

She freed herself, and went to sit on one of the beds.” I haven’t lost so much. I was always isolate: now I’ll die and I won’t come back. One day a door will open and I will go out of it. It’s happened before. It won’t feel any different.”

For Sid, the air of the room was full of her grief.

“Did you know?” he asked. “I mean, about Clavel?”