North Wind (23 page)

Bella saw that Viloma was watching him silently, playing with a small mirror that he wore on a metal chain. The medium’s stare made him feel it would be awkward to persist. His medication often muddled things, plunging him into embarrassing lapses. Celeste was at his elbow, holding a basin and a roll of “cleeno.” He backed off: he’d met the nasty stuff in Trivandrum.

that
for?>

explained Aditya,

Celeste took hold of Bella with the calm, bullying air of any domestic to a Signifier he doesn’t know well. Aditya was rubbing his hands vigorously over his own basin. Bella was forced to surrender. he pleaded, wincing under domestic’s ministrations.

The little clan burst into rather theatrical giggles

Bella!
You know Yudi always takes my advice on local affairs.> Aditya tossed his fragment of cleeno to Albertine, and slipped a small local-made box out of an overall pocket.

“Cigarette, anybody?”

“I’d love one,” cried Gilberte and Albertine together.

“Why don’t you try, Bella? It’s a local drug called oneiricene, you suck this little lollipop. The drug doesn’t work for us, wrong amino acids or some such thing, but the lollipops are charming, don’t you think?”

“The drug doesn’t work?”

“None of them do, except alcohol, which must be a cosmic constant.” Aditya tucked small white sticks into his hair, and twirled for the company. “Tell me somebody? Yes? No?”

By the time they had decided whether cigarettes in the hair were fun or not, a driver from the jeep pool was at the cottage door. coaxed Aditya. . He grew dignified. entirely
frivolous. It’s about time we showed our faces to our neighbors, in an informal way. But nobody will make a move, unless I do it first.>

Francoise was handing out boluses of barrier jelly. Aditya, Viloma, Albertine and Gilberte were soon blooming from head to foot in the sheen of quarantine film: and Bella too.

Their jeep passed slickly through the membrane where it came to ground level, and clambered on, into the trackless thickets that closed the southern end of the valley. There’d been a road here once, until Mr. Kaoru had advised the Aleutians to have it blocked. That was long ago. Uji had been becoming more separate from the human world ever since. The Three Captains had humored the locals, participating in their needless rituals of deadworld communication. The last trace of those arrangements had vanished with the Protest, and would not be allowed back.

At length the jeep’s driver stumbled on a local road. Buildings appeared, and thickened. The jeep deployed its wheels. This was Karen City, a name resonant in Expedition history. The Aleutian party sat up and began to pay attention.

muttered the librarian cravenly.

grinned Aditya.

He was to be disappointed. There was no hostile reaction to the superbeings. Perhaps the “bugs” of Aditya’s bogey tales were a reality, and the locals had been forewarned and had time to compose themselves. Some traffic halted, some people stopped to stare. But the jeep went on its way unmolested.

sighed Gilberte, the aloof and sensitive one of Aditya’s rival best-friends.

Albertine was a natural optimist.

No one was sure what to do next. Aditya, apparently satisfied to have broken out of Uji, curled into a corner of the back seat and relinquished command. Viloma had withdrawn into a forbidding gloom. Albertine and Gilberte made halfhearted suggestions.

And, rather forlornly,

Then Aditya suddenly woke up and lunged at the jeep’s window, impelled almost through the membrane in his eagerness. “Look! There’s a karyotype booth. I want to have my fortune told!” all
have our fortunes told! Stop, driver! Stop right here>.

Bella didn’t know what a “karyotype booth” was. He would not have considered having his fortune told at home, he wasn’t that sort of person. He got out, obediently. In the jeep they’d been in the microclimate of Uji. The heat and weight of the air outside engulfed him. The smell and taste of it, through his quarantine, filled him with a shock of nostalgia: for the trek, for Sid, for Trivandrum. His reaction frightened him, he wanted to get back in the car. At the curbside a local, a young man, his eyes covered by a green sun-visor, slid from the back of a spindly sort of teksi.

It was Viloma.

He took Bella’s arm. He didn’t think the materialist had touched him or spoken to him directly before. The contact was not pleasant, but he was grateful for it.

They followed the others up several flights of damp, dead cement stairs. The fortune teller’s booth had a medical air. It was very clean. A woman sat behind a counter. Non-living machinery clustered, beyond a screen so frigidly clear it must be pure glass. Bella could not see a recording desk.

Albertine and Gilberte stared at the fortune teller.

Aditya laughed. that
kind of fortune telling. This is “karyotype” reading. One provides a sample of tissue; it goes into those non-living machines. They make a print of your basic identity, what they call your “genotype” here on Earth. Then the fortune teller gives you a personality reading, from “her” charts.>

Bella felt that he was missing something important. He recalled Aditya’s cheery lecture on proliferating weapons. He must have misunderstood.

The others giggled.

soothed Aditya. inert
tissue. I’m not asking you to hand over a free gift of weapon-starter! A wanderer will do: there’s no harm in that.>

Bella attempted a laugh. .

fortunately,
we’ve brought along some freshly used towels. We’ll take wanderers from them. It doesn’t matter that yours aren’t real. They were made to match you.>

Grinning, Albertine produced the soiled cleeno.

The Karen woman behind her screen watched the silent byplay between the aliens, and never stirred; but Bella saw that she was not impassive. In her reserved dialect of the Common Tongue she was saying that it made no difference. She wouldn’t have to touch anything. The machinery was sterilized between clients. Since the Protest had failed and the aliens were here to stay, it was better to make a profit out of them somehow.

“I don’t think we should do this,” declared Bella, trembling but goaded into formal protest. He didn’t know what was going on, but
something
was. “The ritual is for locals. It’s meaningless for us. We know who we are, what can she tell us?” He looked from face to face: “Engineer, surely you agree?”

Viloma folded his arms.

The boy in the green sun-visor came into the booth. His cropped head and the strangely-knitted muscles of his bare legs gleamed with moisture. It must have started to rain. He spoke aloud, in the same dialect as the Karen woman. “Is Bella here?”

Without waiting for a reply, he came up to Bella and bowed. “Message for you, Miss, I’m a polite boy.” He scooted out of the door. Forgetting that he was isolate and could not run, Bella leapt after, running two-footed, hands cumbered by the package. There were people on the stairs, gabbling: they’d come to see the aliens. Bella broke through them, and out into a warren of streets. Finally into a square walled with display windows, an enclosed space pumped full of air as dry and cold as a mortuary. The Karen boy had vanished.

Bella dropped into a crouch, his head pounding, heart beating like thunder. There was no one about. He could see the tab this time: he pulled it. Sid leapt into existence. Inside the bubble, it was a sunny afternoon on the North West Frontier, and Maitri was still alive. Sid was in his Aleutian overalls, holding a rose.

Si je t’aime prends garde de toi.

“I won’t go away, Bel. I’m never going to leave you alone.”

Aditya had caught up.

It was a short message this time. Sid vanished without another word. The rose stayed. Aditya dropped into a crouch beside Bella. Boldly, he passed his hand through the illusion.

In the middle of the square there was a stone bench, beside a plot of local greenery. Bella went over to the bench and huddled, knees reversed and head bowed. Aditya walked around the rose, studying it from every angle.

“I thought I’d put a stop to this.”

The Beauty sat beside him, and touched him gently.

Everyone seemed to know that Maitri’s librarian had done lying down things with his halfcaste guide. Bella didn’t mind them knowing, or at least he didn’t care. It was easier to talk about it, since he and Aditya were in quarantine: both isolate.

he said, bitterly.

Aditya sighed.

In the beginning, there’d been a few local visitors to the shipworld. It hadn’t worked. They were out of place and couldn’t make themselves understood. The experiment had been abandoned. The two Aleutians sat in silence, mourning Bella’s loss.

“I think the ‘Eiffel Tower’ isn’t there anymore.”

Bella watched the rose, slowly fading into nothingness.

said Aditya.

It was Aditya’s obligation to give pleasure. The right strokes flowed from him naturally, like the abundance of wanderers that told you how wonderful it would be to lie with him. There didn’t have to be any plot behind his sudden, surprising enthusiasm for Proust, his sudden respect for Clavel the Pure. His whims were famous. He’d taken a fancy to the obscure isolate; his natural skill explained the rest. There need be nothing behind it.

Who is it who wants to be sure of who I am?

Bella thought of that question, which he was not going to ask. Somewhere in the days since Aditya had adopted him, he had stopped being frightened. He’d been given a clue to follow, in Trivandrum. The strangeness that had gathered around him since he arrived on Earth was no longer so bewildering.

Aditya poked him in the flank with a shrewd, silvered finger.

Truth is prolix and inexhaustible as the Self. Nobody need ever lie; there is always some truth you can tell. The Beauty’s liking could be genuine, why not? Bella’s sadness over giving up Sid was real pain: it was also good camouflage.

Good heavens,
he thought.
I’m becoming a secret agent!

Aditya giggled, as if Bella had paid her a charming compliment.

Bella laughed.

They left the square arm in arm.

iii

In the cottage, about an hour before dawn, Aditya knelt in front of a mirror. He was alone. Everyone else was asleep in the main room. Outdoors a blue glimmer dimly suffused the valley, in Beauty’s boudoir a single silver lamp burned: the flame alive and dead, visible and bodiless. A screen of imitation bamboo shifted, a figure slipped inside. Aditya continued to gaze into the mirror, with the severe, absorbed attention that beauty gives to beauty: but with a different and strange glamour added to his charm.