North Wind (6 page)

Side by side, they crouched in the renewed blackness: listening with taut-strung attention.

There was a long silence. Goodlooking stirred at last. “Have you ever been raped, Sid?”

“Not since I was a kid.”

“What was that drink? Were you trying to poison me? Thanks. But you should have told me”

Sid winced. “I’m sorry about that.” He started, realizing what she’d said. “No! I wasn’t trying to poison you. It was oneiricene: a local entertainment drug, mixed with brandy. It was the best I could do. I thought I’d get you drunk and it would make things easier. It was stupid, I’m sorry.”

“Have you any more?”

Sid laughed, a choked breath. “You learn fast.” He felt the librarian moving closer. She lifted the pistol from his belt-loop. He let her take it. It was her weapon as much as his. Maybe she knew how to use an antique firearm. It would be good if one of them did.

“Is this loaded?”

“Yeah, I made sure. Much good it’ll do us against an army.”

He was thinking of the safe room in Trivandrum. What did the horror of this night mean for his children? When humans have lost all rational fear of the aliens, what happens to Aleutian-lovers? His inner eye watched a terrible vision. He saw a child’s little body, dark and sleek. A naked child, running and crying through the ransacked poverty of tenement rooms, in a city a quarter of the world away…. He heard a click: and suddenly understood where the conversation had been heading. He yelled, flung himself on her, and frantically wrestled the muzzle of the ancient revolver out of her mouth. The struggle was over instantly. Her arms were like flower stems. He was afraid he’d snapped her wrists.

Shaking, he stuffed the pistol inside his overalls.

“Why d’you do that?” she wailed. “What’s
wrong
with you?”

For an Aleutian, death is an excursion trip. Sid mustered his disintegrating forces. “Because I’m going to get you out of this. Somehow. You’re going to stay alive.”

There was no answer, but the silence felt defeated. He hoped she’d given up. The way he felt about all Aleutians, just now, he couldn’t cope with stopping one from killing herself.

“The rose was dead,” said Goodlooking, very softly.

Sid wiped the tears from his face. That small, decent voice out of the darkness didn’t deserve his hatred. “I don’t think they’re coming after us,” he said. “Try to sleep, or something.

We’ll make a plan in the morning.”

‘Goodlooking’ lay down on the stones.

It was strange to think he had been so near to this place, a few hours ago and in another aeon. Maitri had told him about the people who used to live here: Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. It was one of those bad relationships, Maitri said, that closes on people like a trap. They’d lost their great household, lost everything, and the Gender War had swept them apart. But whenever they met in the same life, they’d probably fall together into the same cruel spiral as before, poor devils.

Dear Maitri, thought Goodlooking. So many stories. A giant planet full of stories, for us to collect. How could you resist, and how could I? When he was seven and getting too old for birthdays, a religious health visitor had come to do a development check. It happened in the character shrine at Maitri’s house. Sacred moments were playing on the display screens. Someone was making a confession in the chaplain’s room. Goodlooking, distracted by the hum of holy communion in there, knew that he had not done well. He didn’t recognize the things they showed him. He didn’t feel himself to be the person in the librarian’s records. The health visitor took Maitri aside and Goodlooking was left unhappy and frightened. He was afraid they’d say he needed another bone-marrow infestation. Through the open doors of the shrine, something came flying: a little violet sail, rimmed in deep purple. It had eyes like tiny flames.

he exclaimed, excited.

It was the moment of recognition. He had become himself.

said Maitri, beaming.

Then Lord Maitri dropped to his haunches without a thought of dignity, and hugged Goodlooking hard. His eyes were brimming with tears. He must have been worried, recognition had taken so long.

he said.

In the cave, Goodlooking closed his eyes. Little violet sail so pretty, memory, so sweet. Goodbye Maitri, for a while.

3 
Travelers

i

The hotel had been burned to the ground. The soldiers had used some accelerant so violent that the fires were already out. Plates of fused glass rose like giant tattered petals around a smoldering ruin. Sid kicked through the mess where his room had been, and caught a rainbow glimmer in the charred litter. It might have been the remains of his global, it was hard to tell. The army had vanished. The plain and hills, scorched turf and ranked conifers, stretched quiet and silent under a calm blue sky.

From the traces that remained, it looked as if they’d piled the Aleutian dead in the main hall, which had been the heart of their firestorm. He skirted that area, trying to avoid the scraps of blackened tissue that floated in the air. The droms’ stable was intact. The droms were dead inside it. What harm had they done? They were grown by humans. Standing over their tumbled bodies he suddenly wept: for his good master, for the whole gentle, fearless crew. It wasn’t their fault they couldn’t understand. The faces of the noseless monsters were human in his memory. He looked up, wiping his filthy hands across his filthy face. He saw a large shape lurking in the back of the stable, and caught his breath…

He went back to the underground cistern, where Goodlooking was crouched in the dimmest of lamplight. “They’ve gone,” he said. He dumped the bundle he was carrying and dropped down beside her on the stones. “No sign of any survivors.”

No need to tell her that. Their eyes met, lingering: as if they were friends trying to recognize each other in a dark crowd. Last night they had been Maitri’s librarian and the Trading Post mascot. Who were they now?

“Thank you for keeping me from killing myself,” she said aloud. “The last thing I want out of this is a criminal record.”

Suicide was a crime the aliens took seriously. It had to be. Or who would stick around to pick up the pieces after a cock-up like this one?

“I couldn’t find your medicine. Not a chance.”

Her shoulders lifted.

From her expression, she’d be glad when they were over.

“You’d better take me to the Government of the World.”

Sid shook his head. “I don’t think so, kid. They were always your sponsors. If aliens can be massacred, the Government of the World is looking to save its own multiple neck. I don’t think they’ll protect you.”

“Then take me to the ICI.”

“Who?”

“The ICI. Clavel joined that Household, in a great corporation, after Johnny died, so he could serve the human religious vision of WorldSelf as Trade. They’re surely not involved in the Gender War. They won’t have forgotten Clavel. They’ll shelter me.”

Sid laughed. He didn’t mean to, but her idea of life on Earth was too much for his shattered nerves. “Sorry,” he told her. “I’m sorry, but the days of corporate power and neutrality are long gone. It’s no good. We’re on our own.”

He pushed the bundle between them, but didn’t open it yet.

“I’d better explain some things. The soldiers we saw last night came from both sides of the war. The stocky bloke with the turban was an officer of some Allied force, I’m not sure which.
The Allies,
that’s a blanket term for the Traditionalist side in Europe. You’d better get to know some of these names, because everyone knows them. The woman was from
Ochiba,
which is a Reformer army, Swiss based. It means
fallen leaf,
in the, er, the Japanese dialect. They were founded by Reformist Japanese who settled in Switzerland after the Japan Sea cataclysm. You know about that, don’t you? You know Japan disappeared in an earthquake, not long before you people arrived?”

She nodded—a tiny duck of the chin that was their nearest gesture to a human
yes,
though it meant something more neutral:
I see.
You had to watch out, because it could easily be
I see what you mean, but I disagree.

“Ochiba
is the “army of the rejected wife.” I don’t know why a fallen leaf means a rejected wife. But to Ochiba “the rejected wife” means Mother Earth. They’re Mother Earth’s most ferocious defenders, they’re complete fanatics. If they’re with the Allies, we’re up against a Gender War truce. It won’t last but they’ve banded together, these whole armies of crazies, to drive you people out. It’s what I was most afraid of. I warned Maitri—”

And Maitri told me a shuttle was coming, he thought. So much for their damned mental-model telepathy. But he understood that Maitri had known the truth. When he declared
Yudi will not let me down
Lord Maitri was lying, and it was such a human lie. They were unarmed. Their own people could not or would not save them. What could they do but put a good face on things and pretend their disaster was all in a day’s work? He wondered if they’d known exactly what would happen to them. Maybe so. They’d tried everything. He wondered what it was like to be locked in the madhouse with no hope of escape: not heaven nor hell nor oblivion.

He hated himself. He had been betrayed, not by the aliens but by his own residual, idiot faith in the fairytale. He’d believed nothing terrible could happen to the superbeings. Now he was lost in space: no global, no cable, no hope of rescue. But
somehow
he had to smuggle an invalid alien through a country he didn’t know, that was crawling with heavily armed maniacs who were slavering to tear her to pieces.

“This is my plan. We’re going to disguise ourselves, especially you, and head for Athens. It’s our nearest city.”

Cities had become relatively safe places, because urban populations were still mixed. You got terrorism and assassination squads, but no old-style population destruction. Modern warfare was guerrilla warfare on a continental scale: no massive air-raids, no strategic nuclear strikes. Just the slow, almost accidental murder of a civilization.

His plan should make sense to her. An Aleutian ‘city’ was an enclave of life, life on every scale sharing the same myriad-aspected identity: life creating and tailoring a microclimate and a whole biosphere to the will of the sentient inhabitants. Their shipworld was a city like that: a city in space, built around the trap that held the bluesun: their homeworld was netted with “cities,” joined by tendril-corridors of life, while outside in the wilderness balls of blue lightning prowled, the wild blue-sun reactors that could be trapped and harnessed like great dangerous draft-animals…

He pulled himself up, out of a vision of the reality of that alien place. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My mind’s wandering.” How could he give her confidence? “It’ll be like a game. No, wait: you don’t have games. It’ll be like
Johnny and Braemar.
The saboteurs. We’ll be like Johnny and Braemar on board the shipworld, when they were sneaking to the reactor chamber, trying to pass for aliens.”

She hunched there in her battered underwear, a dun quilted bodysuit with a pocket in the crotch for their sanitary arrangement. She looked so pathetic, his poor librarian. If he was lost in space, where was she?

“You’ll need another name. Goodlooking doesn’t sound right. How about ‘Bella’? It means the same, in a better dialect.”

He watched, curious to see how she’d take it. She hesitated: her shoulders rose a little.

Sid grinned, his spirits enormously lightened by that alien smile.

“That’s my girl.”

He shook his head, with rueful pity. She was going to have to take in so much, and he knew how little things rankled with her.

“No. You’ll be traveling as a human. If I had any pads we’d have to leave them behind. You’ll have to do like the natives do.”

He bent over his bundle, giving her privacy while she handled the bad news. “This is called a chador.” He spread the dark folds. “An honor cloak. It’ll cover you from head to foot. It’s female costume, worn by both sides. By males too, sometimes. A chador’s a useful thing, when you don’t feel like facing the world. There are clothes to go under it. I had some of my wardrobe stored in the stable, you see, that’s how this stuff survived. Fact is, I was expecting that shuttle, but I didn’t know if there was a place on it for me. Sadly, I hadn’t got round to moving my ration box.”

He passed over these revelations quickly. “We’d better change.”

Aleutians didn’t like to be naked, but she made no fuss. She stood and peeled down her underwear, toilet pad and all. She scrumpled the outfit up, mugging distaste.

Sid had not meant to look but he couldn’t stop himself, the pull of the grotesque drew his eyes. Aleutian skin had no red or blue tones. The whole human range from indigo-black to milk-and-roses was missing. Some of them were darkly olive, like the smoke from a fire of green wood; some a startling acid yellow; some very pale. Goodlooking was white as a swan in twilight. She stood in the dull chemical light, frail limbs glimmering. He could see the line of the vertical cleft in her lower belly. On her breastless torso there were two small dark marks. Sid drew in his breath, responding in spite of himself to a girl’s slight body, naked in shadow. He had stolen the swan princess’s plumage. She was his captive. She turned, and caught his eye.

His fairy princess had the face of a child that has starved to death: black eye sockets, black nostril slits, lips shrunk so tight the outline of the teeth showed through.

she asked calmly.

“It doesn’t matter. They’re both the same.”

Bella showed no interest whatsoever in Sid’s manly physique.

In human clothes again, and slightly shaken by the undressing incident, Sid took out a compact. He smeared his fingers with gel and rubbed them through his hair; he smudged in brows and lashes with his fingertips, peering into the tiny mirror. He never used cosmetic drugs. They were too chancy. With gels
you
decided when it was going to wear off. Dark hair, sun-damaged skin. He was nondescript, if no one noticed his eyes.

She was looking at the compact. Aleutians didn’t use mirrors. To them a reflection was a kind of natural deadworld phenomenon: it was creepy. He put the case away unhurriedly.

“I don’t think we should go anywhere,” she announced, with trembling firmness. “We should stay here and wait.”

“Oh? For whom?” Caught off balance, he snapped at her. “The rescue shuttle? I don’t think so. I think Uji has evacuated anyone who was going, and everyone else is dead. And I know as well as you do, the shipworld won’t send help. They won’t back up the Expedition, unless something much worse than this happens.”

(His inner eye forced on him the scene in the main hall last night: what could be worse?)

He saw from her face that he was right, or at least she believed the same. They were all dead, all of them. Grief, panic and chaos surged beneath the thin skin of his determination. It made him cruel. “But excuse me, what do I know? Maybe there are more Aleutians on earth, unbeknownst to the Expedition or the Government of the World. The brood’s an organic computer. I suppose you can write yourself in or out of the system if you know how, change your chemical handle so your own parent wouldn’t know you. I’ve heard about these Aleutian masters of disguise. Is it true? I’d dearly love to know.”

“Oh, please, have no secrets from your native guide. I suppose they’re hunting for the instantaneous-travel device, the one Johnny and Braemar used to reach the shipworld? The occult secret of human science the Aleutians have been hunting for ever since?” He curled his lip. “Don’t tell me you believe in that.”

Her puzzlement jolted him. She didn’t know what he was talking about, and he was going crazy. Get a grip, Sid!

“Ridiculous, yes. I’m sorry I raised the subject. And we are leaving at sunset.”

They went up the steps until they could see light, and waited for it to fade. Sid didn’t feel hungry, but his mouth was horribly parched. In the pipeline there was plenty of water. But you couldn’t get at it: it was locked in the slurry of the bacterial flow. He kept his anxiety to himself. Bella complained of neither hunger nor thirst.

“Let’s go,” he said at last.

She climbed slowly, a few steps at a time. The pale mandorla overhead, shaped like a woman’s sex or two hands folded in prayer, was filled with gold. Sid was carrying Bella’s shoes and the chador. It was good woolen cloth, and he guessed—not yet realizing the awful significance of this—that the invalid would find its weight a burden. He waited until she was beside him. Sid was not a tall man, but her head barely reached his collarbone. She glanced up, questioning: why had he stopped? He touched the scarf he’d wrapped around her starved-child face.

“You’re going into a different world,” he said. “You have to trust me out there, Bella. I’m on your side.
Truly.
Remember that.”

They stepped out of the womb of stone.