North Wind (11 page)

remarked Clavel.

Rajath laughed. For a moment they were in sympathy, over a taste for local pleasures that would have appalled Yudi.

said Rajath.

Clavel showed teeth.

The trickster considered this novel idea. he decided, and moved restively.

Clavel looked at the small building under the trees. he said at last.

Rajath looked pained.

Clavel showed teeth.

Above them, a few stars competed with the half moon in a hazy sky. said Rajath.

The other stretched his rangy limbs.

temporized the trickster, uneasily.

Shortly, the bird and the insect crafts took wing, and escorted each other away.

Sid woke with a start. He rolled over, his heart racing, and struck a light. Bella was beside him. He checked outside> Nothing was stirring. He knelt by her, shading the flame in his palm. He had remembered that Persephone was the daughter of a goddess, kidnapped and carried away to the land of the dead. Another lost immortal girl, like the one who left Shangri-La. Had he really heard her whisper
I’m married?
No, but in the Common Tongue she had told him, though she could hardly bear to explain it, that she was committed to someone else.

“You poor sod,” he muttered. “You poor little sod.”

He put out the light and lay down, filled with guilt and pity; and determined not to give way to either.

4 
On The Face Of The Waters

i

Maitri’s librarian, who had been called Goodlooking and was now called Bella, lay waking in the safe room in Sid’s house in Trivandrum. As he rose into consciousness other rooms fell from him. His study-bedroom in Maitri’s library; a neat row of pallets in a ward for sick children. A soft toy snuggled against him: dear friend loved and lost ages ago.

He saw the soldiers pouring through the shattered dome. Maitri trying to reason with them. Trying useless bombast: “I must protest! This is an outrage!”—that sounded ridiculous from wise, gentle Maitri. Light suckers were falling, writhing in the flames. Bokr stared at his own severed hand, a moving clot of wanderers seethed over the gap, dying. .

Bella’s Aleutian memory made no distinction between what he had seen, and what he knew intensely of how events must have been. He lay with closed eyes, enduring the images. They would fade. In another life, good things would blot out the bad. In another life, those soldiers would make amends. Everything must happen, thought Bella, knowing that horror and grief would pass, and he would recover his trust in the even-handedness of Time.

He remembered his journey with Sidney Carton, from Athens to this place. There had been a metro train to the airport, and then a succession of air-cruisers. They blurred into one. The cruisers were like metro trains, and the metro trains were not so different from city transport at home. He remembered no perception of flight, or of the vast distances. He and Sid had been carried through blank hours in a series of dead buses, full of people who were equally, eerily void of life in the Aleutian sense….

At the last airport it had been night. Sid had spoken to the driver of a tiny dead vehicle. The driver laughed, and said (Bella had caught the meaning, though the words of a strange regional dialect were indistinct), “The halfcaste street? Don’t be afraid to say so. The killing is over, thank God. You people can relax.
Neti-neti,”
he said: not this, not that. Bella gathered this was another local term for Aleutian-lovers.

He remembered being hurried past an open doorway where local faces stared out of a half-lit gloom. Up narrow dark stairs, to a door that was firmly shut. Sid had lit their firelighter, his hands shaking. He tapped, then knocked, then banged and yelled. Finally it opened. A thin, dark-skinned halfcaste without a nose saw Sid, burst into tears and fell into his arms. That one was Jimi. In the room above they met Mother Teresa, Bob Marley, Superman and Father Roger Casement. Noor Jaan was not at home: and Cactus had been poorly and was asleep.

The children were there, Lydia and baby Roger. When he saw them a long, desperate tension, that had been within Sid since the massacre, suddenly melted. He dropped to his knees, holding out his arms. vowed the librarian, rising from sleep.

When the children had been greeted, Sid had told his housemates that Bella was an Aleutian, and would be staying with them. They were thrown into panic: exclaiming, fussing, groveling. Sid had taken Bella away, to this place that was the safe room, and left him alone.

It would be a relief to escape from the “she” expression. But he’d decided to keep the name “Bella,” as a souvenir of this adventure. If he ever got home again. He felt the chafing of a coarse, oversized toilet pad. He needed to change himself. He opened his eyes, thinking of what Sid had called the “native way” of dealing with the problem. If this was the alternative, he could come to regret that peculiar freedom. He got up and changed, stuffing the dirty pad in the bin. The toilet stand held a roll of “cleeno,” a trade-goods cloth made of living material “half killed” for the local market. Sid had told him he could use it to clean himself. He tore a piece off and wiped doubtfully at his lifeless skin. It felt disgusting. He didn’t want to be rude, but—he stuffed it in the bin. The clothes that Sid had put out for him were Aleutian in style but made of local fabric. He didn’t mind material that was decently dead. He dressed, returned to the pallet: and settled there informally, knees and hips reversed.

The room had no windows and no visible door. It was stacked with emergency supplies: liquid, food, First Aid. Dim light came from trade-goods light suckers on the walls. In one alcove stood the toilet stand, a wastebin and a huge carton of the clumsy pads. In another there was a minimal character shrine: a screen and a shelf of records. This was the place where the halfcastes would barricade themselves in, if their enemies attacked the house.

He had to escape from here. But how? And to where?

Bella wasn’t sure exactly when he’d realized he was being kidnapped. On the night of the massacre Sidney Carton had come to his room and blurted out
I am going to destroy you.
But the weird terror Bella had felt then would have meant nothing. People can’t be held responsible for what they do or say, in the Common Tongue, in desperate situations. No, it wasn’t then. His suspicions could have begun the next morning, when Sid went out to see what was happening and left the librarian alone; and he had started thinking. He’d been wary enough to conceal his surprise at the halfcaste’s slips, at his familiarity with things her friend “Sidney Carton” couldn’t possibly know: at Sid’s increasingly thin story, all round. But it was the “suit” incident that finally convinced the librarian he wasn’t imagining things.

Sidney Carton was a secret agent. His pose as a superior kind of halfcaste—too self-respecting to mutilate himself or to slavishly accept Aleutian culture—was a bold, cool bluff. He was an anti-Aleutian fanatic, who had installed himself in Maitri’s service as part of a carefully prepared plan. He had been taken unawares by the protest and by the massacre…. As Sid’s friend, which he remained, Bella was glad to feel sure of that. But he had managed to escape with the prize anyway: Maitri’s librarian!

It sounded bizarre, but nothing else fit the facts. For some reason the anti-Aleutian fanatics, and also the mysterious “Campfire Girls” from the forbidden territory of the USSA, were very keen to get hold of Bella. It was as if they’d heard of the “disguised prince” rumor, and were convinced that Maitri’s librarian would make a valuable hostage.

Bella glowed with embarrassment. In the wilderness, and notably on that night in Athens, he had let his imagination run away with him and half-believed the rumor himself. He cringed inwardly at the memory, crouching close on the strange pallet, feeling that his most secret fantasies had been laid bare. But everyone has silly fantasies. He was glad to say that the idiocy had passed: leaving only a residual conviction that it would actually be rather unpleasant to find out that you were someone else.

Possibly the anti-Aleutians believed that the librarian possessed some information, some secret hidden in Maitri’s records, that could be used against the Expedition. Perhaps Sid had been supposed to kidnap Maitri himself, until the invalid librarian appeared and presented a softer target? Bella couldn’t think of any such secret, but maybe it was something he knew without understanding its significance…. He abandoned the puzzle. Whatever he knew or didn’t know, whether or not he’d been kidnapped by mistake, he couldn’t let the Expedition’s enemies—Maitri’s enemies—keep hold of an Aleutian hostage.

Sid had left him in Athens, to get instructions from the boss of the gang—via the deadworld, Bella surmised, disliking the idea. Sid seemed so normal; it was nasty to think of him talking to ghosts. He’d returned with air tickets to Trivandrum. The inference was obvious. Sid’s evil boss, the ominous figure who dominated Sid’s unconscious silent confessions, was in this city.

I am going to destroy you.
He remembered the horror that had filled him, when Sid came into his room. It was so strange: in the midst of a massacre, it was gentle Sid who had terrified him, because Sid looked on the killing as an Aleutian might have done. He was frantic; he was flooded with the usual emotions.
But he knew it didn’t matter.
The destruction that he promised to Bella was something different, something
effective.
In Sid’s boss, the Expedition was up against a genuine enemy: a well-informed, upright, ruthless fanatic, in the same mold as Braemar Wilson.

He bore Sid no ill will. No one chooses their loyalties. He wanted to remember forever Sid’s patience and tenderness in the wilderness, in those dreadful days when there’d been neither kidnapper nor victim, only two lost souls together. He wanted to treasure the memory of the lying down they’d shared:
that
had been lovely. If he got home alive he was determined to brave the embarrassment and make a full confession, so it all went on his record.

Meantime, how was he to get out of here?

He was amazed at himself. He didn’t know where all this courage and energy was coming from. He was sure it would evaporate the moment he tried to do something. But he felt, strangely enough, unusually well and strong after his ordeal: as well, at least, as on his very best of days in normal life. It must be the air of earth, he thought. The emptiness that others found so harsh and enervating was a blessed relief to the isolate…. Suddenly he collapsed, stretched out on the pallet, hiding his face. The air was empty, he was alone. The loss of Aleutia was as real to him as to a healthy person physically bound into the meshes of life. He was dead to them, he was utterly deserted. It was awful.

In the room she liked to call their main hall, Mother Teresa kept a row of pallets for the dying poor of Trivandrum. She’d never had many customers. The halfcaste way of death was too quick and casual for her; and the destitute of the Community State didn’t like
neti-neti.
She’d carry them in, half-dead, and somehow they’d manage to crawl out again. When Sid went in there, the morning after he brought Bella home, he found the ward abandoned for the duration of the Protest, the pallets almost buried under a tide of shambolic untidiness. After long days in which the household had hardly dared to open the window-shutters, the atmosphere in the long room was dank and foul.

He’d caught Mother Teresa emptying the freeze-dry toilet. She turned her back on him. She hated to admit that her family used a thunderbox. But Clark, her eldest, had an appetite for lip-smacking purebred food: masala dosa, idli, hamburgers, gulab jamum. The waste products of his gorging couldn’t be contained in an Aleutian-style sanitary pad.

Sid lifted heaps of dirty clothes, and poked at jumbled utensils. Clark was lying on a string bed, poring over the flickering pictures of a comic. Mother Teresa, a feminine halfcaste, had never had the chance to make dramatic changes to the woman’s body that had borne her three “wards.” But she’d tried hard to make her children into genuine freaks. Clark was an object lesson in the perils of cheap, pre-natal gene-therapy. He raised a face divided by a severe cleft palate, shifted his sexless bulk above the flipper-legs that could barely carry him.

It was heartbreaking to know that his mother had paid a small fortune, real money, to have some quack turn her child into a sort of human walrus. “My sunglasses. Have you seen them?”

Clark settled again, groping a greasy package of sweets.

“Superman is a
fictional
character for God’s sake.”

responded the hero, unmoved.

“You don’t know that.” Sid grinned. The beast was harmless. “You weren’t there.” The second of the brood was twisted up on a battered cane armchair in a yoga pose, staring at the ceiling.

“Bob? Bobby!”

As a fetus Bobby had been declared, by a less than usually rapacious quack, unsuitable for prenatal meddling. He’d started having his features rearranged surgically, of his own accord, as soon as he was old enough—a cheaper option as far as the nose went, but he had grisly ambitions for his hip joints. He was a devout telepath.

“BOBBY! HAVE YOU HAD MY SUNGLASSES!”

snapped Mother T.

The halfcastes were stuck with the twentieth century as a source of past selves. Further back, there weren’t any authentic moving-images. Further forward, you were getting into modern ‘deadworld’ tech, which the Aleutians had specifically spurned. The time trap meant that the gender-heretics were stuck with the sex-roles of the past. They didn’t care. They weren’t Reformers. For most of them, there was no agenda:
be like the Aleutians,
that was the whole thing.

Some of the most favored icons were unconcerned by their numbers. They got together socially. Spiritual ownership of other identities (physical resemblance was not a big issue )was fiercely contested around the Enclave band. Long distance disputes were conducted by freight mail, since conventional human telecommunication was out of the question. If you were
really
devout, you could squabble via telepathy. There were halfcaste lawyers who would brazenly bill the fools for legal work in this mode.

“Oh, excuse me, Mr. Marley, sir. I didn’t realize you were in Astral Multiphon-conference. Let me step over these heaps of invisible optic cable here. Where’s Noor?”