North Wind (9 page)

At close of trading the fugitives had a cooking pan, two beakers, one with a cover; a metal spoon, a firelighter, a packet of Breakfast Special Indian Tea powder, three potatoes and a bundle of fuel and water chitties. The Travelers had the canteen, Sid’s compact, Sid’s shoes and the revolver. Plus, Sid’s handprints to be copied for credit-matching. They thought they’d done well, Sid was equally satisfied. He’d have liked to hold on to the old revolver, since its value was obviously depressed at the moment, with the armies around. However it was better to trade while they were in the mood for trading. They would certainly return in a different frame of mind, for anything valuable they hadn’t been able to secure.

Someone came along with a present from the old man—two cartons of naturlait—; and with permission, as they seemed tired, to ride in a freight van. They were taken to it and clambered aboard. Sid downed half a liter of milkoid liquid, watched her do the same and fell into deathlike sleep, one arm flung over his precious burden.

The convoy was heading north to a famous winter fair on the Black Sea. They reported that the truce had indeed barely survived what was now called
The Protest.
The anti-Aleutian raiders were supposed to have returned to their normal business of killing other humans, but stray fragments of Ochiba and Allied units remained in the area, scrapping with each other and dealing savagely with anything remotely like Aleutian-sympathy

The Travelers were Traditionalists by custom, but they weren’t partisan. On Sid and Bella’s second day they fell in with an Ochiba mobile field hospital. They regarded this as a windfall. Everyone who was ill in the camp trooped over there. They insisted that Sid must get something for his inflamed eyes, until it became impossible to refuse, and he was afraid to leave Bella alone. So they went together to the field hospital compound, and stood in line with the rest. By the time their turn came with the terrorist doctor, Sid was so frightened he was perfectly calm. She was working alone with her instrumentation.

“Speak English?” she said automatically, as she put him in the diagnostic couch. “Don’t be afraid. We treat anyone. We treat Allied soldiers if they come to us.”

She gave Bella in the chador a nod of respect, and flushed his eyes out with a cool, soothing spray.

“What d’you do when you’re not treating casualties?” asked Sid, in the chair, making nervous conversation.

“Excuse me?”

The doctor’s eyes moved over the couch’s readings: her face and body told her story in the Common Tongue.Ochiba
now. I will join my family when the war’s over.>

She looked into Sid’s face: not aware of having spoken.

“Do? I was a civilian doctor. I have joined Ochiba now. You’re shocked. Don’t you agree that the Traditionalists must be stopped? There are biological males in my group, Alecto.
They
agree.”

“I don’t think killing is the answer,” croaked Sid.

“It’s the only answer left. There’s no serious damage. Avoid bright light. Rest as much as possible. You’ll be fine.”

They’d been the last in line. They walked slowly, agonizingly slowly, back to the camp. They’d established squatters’ rights to a pitch beside their freight van’s back wheels. They had no near neighbors; the “halfcaste” stigma gave them space. It was deep dusk. Bella took off the chador. They looked at each other in wide-eyed surmise, and shuddered in unison. They had no doubt that the woman had told Sid the simple truth. She was a doctor: and in her spare time she killed men.

“Why do you care?” asked Sid, bitterly—meaning, not only Alecto’s work but the whole madness of the war. “You don’t think killing people does them much harm.”

you?
You think people can only be killed once.>

He was silent, admitting her point. He didn’t know which was more terrible, the warzone itself or its evil penumbra of urban terrorism: psychopaths in the home. The traveler women were tending their fires, cooking food, mending clothes, minding children: and hiding themselves assiduously under the black veils, from the enemies who shared their lives. Who raped them and beat them regularly. Not
all
of the women or too often, but enough to keep them scared. Enough to keep their dreaded female power from breaking free. He thought of the Women’s Agenda, and the Men’s, and how muddled it had all become since the shooting started. But the Aleutians were right. The real war, the war behind the war, was the one between men and women.

“You know what,” he said. “Johnny and Braemar couldn’t have been lovers, if they’d met now. It would’ve been impossible.”

“It wasn’t the same. You people changed everything.” He shook his head. “No, I’m wrong. There are millions of people in Old Earth cities right now for whom nothing’s changed. The men are like spoiled kids and the women like mothers frightened of their own children. But they’re not aware that it has anything to do with this cosmic battle, which is being fought for the soul of the world. They’re still thinking:
it’s not my business, it won’t happen here.”

He’d fetched water and put the fire together before they went to the doctor’s. He lit the chunks of compact, put a pan of water to boil and stared at it miserably.

“I’m afraid they’re dead.”

Maid-monster Lydia. She’d been a mean, willful, beloved little
monster,
since the moment she could breathe unaided. And sweet. Rog: the gentlest, most forgiving baby in the world. Sid had always wanted children. In his wary forays into the sexual arena he’d deliberately chosen partners who’d get a kick out of being pregnant, but would be bored by the babies. And he’d been wise enough not to act too keen. Neither of the mothers suspected she was doing what Sid wanted, when she dumped his offspring on him.

He sniffed. She was right, but…. “I don’t think they’d dead? Yeah, well. I have my supposed ‘halfcaste’ Aleutian sense of how the plot went, which tells me nothing terrible happened. But my human reason tells me it’s just when you think you know something, that probably you’re definitely wrong. And there’s the others.” He mentally reviewed his scatty housemates. “They’re like kids themselves, they’re hopeless.”

Bella started to move into the dog-jointed Aleutian crouch: thought better of it and drew up her knees, wrapping her arms around them.

“Because someone has to pay the rent.” How could he explain the situation in his adopted country to an Aleutian? “You see in the country where I live, Kerala, is a Community State. There’s only one household,” (he translated) “It’s run by Reformers, what you call the Women. You can be a member of the company, drawing your share, a citizen as we call it, if you’re a Man or a biological male. But not if you’re a halfcaste. We’re just given house room and nothing more. So who’s going to feed me and mine? I have to take work wherever I can.”

“It certainly is. The purebreds love a repentant looty-lover.” He gritted his teeth. “But I’m
not
one of them.”

He saw the sneaky movement of her shoulders: Sid is being unreasonable. He knew that particular little smile of old. It was different now they were no longer playing Gunga Din and the colonel’s daughter. The pan began to bubble. Stirring it, he dropped pinches of Breakfast Special powder; then added naturlait until he had the ideal, creamy, caramel brew. Sid was proud of his tea. If they could get nothing but tea, naturlait and potato gruel, it wouldn’t be a bad diet. He poured, watching her covertly. She had recovered quickly from her exhaustion. She hadn’t noticed, he guessed she was still in some kind of shock, but after days without her medicine, starving in the wilderness, she was stronger and healthier than he had ever seen her…. He wouldn’t comment on this. He wasn’t supposed to say anything that would start her wondering. They waited for the tea to cool, in the dark midst of the vast, muted stir of the campground.

“Look,” he said. “There’s the moon.” It was a young moon, sailing in the turquoise afterwash of sunset.

“You have two, at Home, don’t you? A genuine Earth type satellite, quite big, and a kind of lump like an old boot.”

Bella gave him a curious look.

He handed her a beaker. She looked up into his face, and touched his cheek.

“Oh.” He rubbed his jaw. “It’s beard. I don’t like gene-therapy. I use a depilatory. If I can’t get it, then after a few weeks,” he shrugged apologetically. “I grow bristles.”

Sid chuckled. “We aim to please.”

Aleutians touched each other all the time, but the butterfly caress of her fingertips had a different meaning and Sid knew it. He was kneeling, smiling at her, and they were closer than they had been in any necessary intimacy of the trek. A certain attraction had existed in the Trading Post, between Gunga Din and the colonel’s daughter. They had both, Sid thought, dismissed the pull as something that would never happen. But that was in another lifetime.

He said

They’d spoken together. Sid beat a retreat. He sat back. He clasped his hands between his knees, to stop them shaking.

he said.

He had been brought up a halfcaste, and she had no preconceptions about aliens. A human was a person to her.

explained the librarian, sensibly.

Sid turned and casually—it took enormous determination—put his hand on her arm. He discovered that the last few seconds had changed this into an astonishingly arousing act. She looked at him doubtfully: and they kissed.

He found that there were symmetrical runnels from the base of her throat, skirting the flat muscle where her breasts would have been. Fingers run in there made her shiver. Her hands slid under his shirt, searched his body: pulled at his nipples. He thought of the thing that they kept in the fold in the belly, called the
claw.
But he’d gone too far to turn back. He pushed the loose shirt down over her shoulders, and hunted his mouth and tongue along the grooves in her eager flesh.

he asked.

They climbed into the freight van in that shamefaced way of lovers retiring, though no one was watching and nobody cared. The Travelers did it in the open. Sid had seen and heard the furtive rhythmic movement in the primitive privacy of darkness: the couplers sure as animals that no one would have the indecency to disturb them. But Sid and Bella were indoor people. Inside the van they took off their clothes in darkness, and hurried together for fear of losing their nerve. Sid forgot entirely that she was not a human woman. His prick slid inside a moist cleft that did nothing to dispel the illusion…and was met there, by something that clasped it with a wild grip, so terrifying and so delightful he almost died. Desperate tremors ran through him: and burst into convulsive spasms, while her body flowed liquid against him, melting and radiating in a hunger, an oblivion of connection—

Until they both lay still. He rolled away. Lay on his back on the dusty wagon floor, sweaty and ecstatic. “Johnny Guglioli didn’t
like
that! What a weirdo! Bella, can you cook? If you can cook, I think we should get married immediately!”

She stirred, he felt her sit up and peer at him in the dark.

“It was a joke, Bel. Hey, was it okay for you?”

This was a joke too. He knew it had been glorious for her. He didn’t take the credit. How could it fail, after abstinence and such days of terror; and since they were friends? She bent over him very quietly. Her soft breath touched him.

In the morning they were still lovers, though Bella had not said a word aloud.

She couldn’t act the woman. Getting an Aleutian Signifier to cook and clean would’ve been
seriously
like trying to teach a fish to ride a bicycle. So Sid did odd jobs for barter and became adept at the domestic tasks of the camp; a regular in the social mill around the water tanker. The Traveler women looked on him with scandalized pity, regarding his “wife” with the resentment they’d reserve for a major courtesan. How right they were!

They crossed the great canal, and the megapolis drew near. The travelers had a van full of sophisticated listening gear. They could avoid any firefight on the ground. They feared most the Allied robot fighters, the mad-dog planes that roamed the sky above their human masters’ path, launching into random attacks on anything that moved. One afternoon there was a squealing siren from the listening van that sent everybody running. People swiftly hauled out inflatable shelters of the most advanced battlefield model. The camp became a field of giant missile-resistant mushrooms. The outer ranks, the young men, scattered into the landscape. Sid and Bella dived into their freight van. The raiders passed, without doing any harm this time. Sid lit their firelighter, which doubled as a tiny lamp. Bella sat up in a pile of sacking bales.