North Wind (36 page)

“I knew the same as you, Sid. Clavel, who is the Expedition’s conscience if you like, was distraught with grief: and only his truechild could bring him back to himself; to us.”

“I thought I was done for. I knew you didn’t love him. You love me. But you would never give up your duty.”

“Clavel’s wrong,” she said. She didn’t appear to be speaking to Sid. She was looking away, preoccupied. She lifted her hands and let them fall, with sad finality. Sid was terrified.

“So it’s all over,” he said cheerily, to hide his panic. “The mystery of how Johnny and Braemar reached the shipworld will return to its rightful place in the scheme of the Strange But True, along with the Marie Celeste, the origin of QV petro virus, and whether you can sharpen razorblades by putting them under cardboard models of the pyramid of Cheops—”

She wasn’t smiling.

“I’m still an Aleutian, you see.”

“In your soul, you mean? I never doubted it. “

“I owe you so much. You saved my life when I didn’t know it needed to be saved. I was, I am, eternally grateful to you. But you serve your cause, and I have to serve mine.”

“Eternally grateful? That sounds nasty.”

“You’ve told me yourself, often and often. Race is bullshit, culture is everything. No matter how I was made, I’m an Aleutian. I have to go and look for someone, who I think will be looking for me so it shouldn’t be hard to find him, but you can’t help. I’d never ask you to change sides. Neither can I—”

To Bella’s bewilderment, Sid grew mysteriously less alarmed as this terrible, final speech progressed. “So this is goodbye,” he broke in, solemnly. “You’re off to find your lawful master, wherever in the wide world he may be.” He frowned. “But didn’t we just promise the great Clavel we’d stay away from aliens?”

Sid looked grave, but his eyes glinted blue.

“I think it’s time I took you to meet my boss.”

Outside the lodging house Sid hailed a leclec, the three-wheeled London self-service teksi. They shot away in jaunty style, through Westminster and the Monuments, towards the Royal Parks.

Bella had a strange feeling that everything was as before. He was Maitri’s librarian on the holiday of a lifetime, riding with the halfcaste Sidney Carton through an ancient city: storing up memories for the long, eventless lives to come. He didn’t ask where they were going, and Sid was giving nothing away. In Hyde Park, under the tarnished foliage of the remaining trees, the squatters’ camps stirred with morning life. Beside a mobile army barracks Allied soldiers were cleaning a herd of big brick-and-grey colored vehicles. The leclec bumped over pathways that had been old when the Aleutians came to earth, and stopped outside a curious, angular building, that stood alone not far from the dry basin called the Serpentine.

The inside of it was large and bare. The air was full of dust; it smelled of the past, of forgotten things. The Fat Man was lying on his bed in the middle of a clutter of baggage: one leg crossed over the other, white gloved hands folded behind his massive head. He sat up as they entered, with the unflappable dignity of an enormous child. Bella didn’t wait to be introduced.

“Seeker-after-truth!” she cried. “Seeker-after-truth!” She ran and buried her face in the engineer-scholar’s ample lap.

11 
The Light Of Other Days

i

Sid hung back, grinning oafishly. Bella and the Fat Man were all over each other, hugging, stroking, nuzzling, as unselfconsciously physical in their greeting as if they were say, a big dog and a little cat, that happened to be great friends. Bella was babbling:

Sid looked up into the spidery rooftree, around into the corners piled with ancient rubbish and desiccated human turds, swallowing hard. He’d brought her home. She wasn’t talking about the derelict Serpentine Gallery. Aleutia was the lovely place. Their place, their main hall: the teeming hollow, you could say if you wanted to get metaphorical, where they all lived, inside each Aleutian body. He saw the physical grappling (always disturbingly animal-like to human eyes). But what he felt was the force-field, mind-field of the Aleutian commonalty.

He knew that Bella had recognized the Third Captain, Kumbva the engineer, the moment she met the Fat Man disguised as a Hindu widow, in Trivandrum—and had kept quiet about it in her inimitable way (the things she could keep quiet about: it was awesome). He realized now that, on some level, Bella was not surprised to find that the Third Captain was Sid’s boss. And that from this moment what had been done to her, to Maitri’s librarian, had been done
with her consent,
and the consent of her peers. They had strange ideas about time and consequence. It’s no use quoting Magna Carta to an Aleutian, he thought ruefully. They don’t understand a charter of liberties. Their society genuinely does not work that way. At last the two left off hugging and turned, arm in arm: little cat-faced Bella in her black tomboy, and the big fat bear of an engineer in white linen. What a ridiculous pair! Bella’s eyes were brimming.

Kumbva laughed. “Well, Sid, you rogue. You bold deceiver. What have you to say for yourself?”

He was appalled at the Fat Man’s perfidy. “I
couldn’t
tell you!” he protested, to Bel. “I wanted to! But what could I do? What do I know about Aleutian psychology? I had to trust him.”

Kumbva shrugged modestly. Sid thought of everything that they’d done, since Maitri’s librarian came to Earth. Sid had been sure that Bella could not inherit latent memories from her human “parent,” about instantaneous travel devices or anything else; that was a loony alien idea. He’d found Kumbva’s pursuit of the librarian callous and incomprehensible. But Aleutians see things differently. To Kumbva the thriller plot, the vital pawn exchanged and recovered, was an old, told tale. Kumbva, in his way, had been looking after Bella. Had been paying, if you like, Aleutia’s debt to this brave soldier.

Sidney felt humbled: a sensation he detested. “And I did trust him,” he admitted. “I sometimes hated him. But I kept on trusting him, just hoping I was right.”

Bella pulled Sid down beside her, so that she was flanked by him and Kumbva. she told the engineer. belonged
but to Earth, not to Aleutia. You forged a bond between us, a tried and tempered bond, a commonalty of two. You were right to trust him Sid. The plan worked. I am Bella, I’m whole. I don’t want to be anyone else, or anywhere else but here with you.>

She tugged his hand to her cat-face, nuzzling it Aleutian style.

Kumbva beamed at the lovers, shoulders tucked to his ears.

“But the séance—!” Bella shuddered, looking to the engineer. “How did you know? How did you know anyone could do that?”

Kumbva’s face fell. “I didn’t. That ceremony was
not
a part of my rough midwifery, dear librarian. When I finally grasped what Aditya was babbling about, I was very scared. You realized, librarian, that the way you were made had to be close to weapons-building?”

She remembered her terror, when Aditya had told her what she was: and then started trying to bring severed fragments of that engineered, inert flesh to life. “I did!”

“And then, there was Viloma. I do not believe in magic, but there are strange stories about that person. Whatever it is he does, I’m afraid he is not entirely a charlatan.” Kumbva shook his head, and slapped his knees (he was sitting cross-legged, human style, a trick he’d worked hard to perfect). “No more of that! It was in another lifetime. To business! I can take it, Bella, that you have accepted the job I offered to you a while ago?”

“Well, yes, but…”

His large nasal crinkled in amusement. “You want to discuss pay, conditions of service, out of pocket expenses?”

She turned to him.

“I was sure you were an anti-Aleutian fanatic. That’s why I was miserable until this morning. I’m
still
sure. I don’t see how I could be making such a mistake, because I know you. So why are you working for us? Maybe I understand,” she added. “But tell me.”

murmured Kumbva.

“Why am I—?” Sid was taken aback. “But I’m not! I’m not working for you people. Not a chance! I know it may
look
that way—”

They burst out laughing. Always the same Sidney Carton!

He scowled. “All right, laugh. It’s the truth. I am not in this for your benefit. Present company excepted, I want the aliens off my planet. But I’m realistic about the options.” Deeper color tinged his ruddy cheekbones. He wrapped his arms around his knees, defensively, and stared at the dirty floor. “When I was a kid, I lived on the myth of the stardate diaries. Then I met the Fat Man, and he had his Aleutian version of the mythology. The longer we’ve worked together, the less proof we’ve found. I still consider it beyond doubt that the great scientist Peenemünde Buonarotti had a secret that died with her. I want to know what that secret was. If there is ever an end to this treasure hunt I want to be there for the human race, as a witness. If Peenemünde’s secret is the secret of instantaneous interstellar travel, which I find less and less credible, then nothing would please me more than for the aliens to take it, use it and GO HOME. Does that answer you?”

She nodded, meeting his eyes: an encompassing that embraced the dogged hope that pride denied, and his secret knowledge that the search had become necessary in itself. If you have a quest, however crazy, you have a reason for living.

Bella ventured.

Kumbva stirred.

“Will someone explain?” demanded Sid. “You people overestimate my powers. I managed to stumble onto what Kumbva was playing at, in the end. I can’t follow Clavel’s line in this.”

The Aleutians glanced at each other.

said Kumbva.

returned Bella, quickly.

“But
why?”
protested Sid. “Why would he kill you? Because you’re not Johnny?”

The Aleutians looked at him pityingly. Sid is stuck in the middle of last week, again.

“To protect the secret,” Bella explained. “I had to wake as Johnny, and recognize him. Nothing else was good enough; it had to come from me. That’s why he delayed our meeting, when I came to Earth. I was far too old, it was too late, but he was still hoping. Meanwhile Dark Ocean, the people in orbit who want us to leave Earth and go off again in search of Home, had hired Rajath to get hold of me, for the sake of Johnny’s memories. So Clavel was horribly torn.
That’s
why he did nothing, for so long. He was waiting for me to come to him, to know him again. Yet he was afraid that if I
was
Johnny he’d have to kill me, to protect the secret of instantaneous travel. He’s not always so crazy, but he genuinely does believe the device, if it exists, belongs to the people of Earth, and we shouldn’t have it. That’s why he made us promise, Sid.
Tried
to make us promise,” she corrected herself. “To stay off the treasure trail.”

“Hmmph,” snorted Kumbva. “We’re flattered by the poet’s confidence, I’m sure! I fear the secret is safe for a few lives longer. Never mind. Sid’s honor is cleared, and Clavel we will leave to his grief. You children forgot to eat breakfast. Let’s picnic.”

He delved in the baggage that surrounded his pallet and produced a local camping stove, a folding kettle, a carton of naturlait, and several paper parcels. Sid made the tea. One parcel held currant buns, one held bagels. Another, when opened, released a powerful hideous stink.

“Lock Fyne kippers. I get them from Fortnums. Won’t you try some?” Sid and Bella retired to the far end of the bed and breakfasted on buns and tea, while Kumbva devoured his awful delicacy. Finally he folded up the kipper wrapping.

“The sad thing is,” he remarked, “if the poet really wants to save Earth for the earthlings, he ought to be helping us.”

Sid nodded, gloomily.

“If we can’t positively go Home,” agreed Bella, “We’ll stay forever. Dark Ocean’s lost the battle. They’re desperate, why else would they be ready to employ Rajath? They were clutching at stars, as you people say. Aleutia won’t go back to wandering at random in the void. Eventually, no matter what people say now, we will start to build permanent settlements.”

And soon, in a few lives, all of Earth will be like the Uji valley.

There was a grim silence: grim on Sid’s part anyway. It was one of those moments when he lost his hold on the Common Tongue. He knew from the way they looked everywhere but at him that he wasn’t keeping his feelings to himself.

Kumbva slapped his knees again. “No moping! One trail ends, another begins, and now we are three!”

“But I don’t know that this trail has ended,” said Bella, slowly.

There. She’d put it in Spoken Words. The bare room became preternaturally quiet.

On that night in Mykini, the terrible night of the massacre, Sid had cried
I am going to destroy you.
Bella remembered that now. No one else, not even Kumbva, had seen the affair of Johnny Gugioli’s “latent memories” in quite the same light. Maitri’s librarian had been destroyed indeed. And for nothing, for a stupid mistake? She saw again how Clavel had paced, in the dark house full of sad beautiful things. Clavel had been prepared to kill Bella, because of knowledge that owed nothing (except circumstance) to the failed experiment…

She heard idle shouts from the soldiers in the barracks; traffic muttering faintly further off. The others waited. “I saw something, under the sarcophagus.”

something?>
repeated the engineer, intently.

“What did you see?”

Bella’s nasal compressed. Her limbs drew together, trying to twist around for flight. She was so afraid to be wrong. “Lettering: words. I think I could draw it.”

Sid and the Fat Man stared at each other, in wild surmise.

protested Sid.

The Fat Man reached out, grabbed a battered flat notebook from by his pillow; opened it to a blank page.

“Use the stylus. Take your time.”

She formed the letters awkwardly, barely managing to fit them on the screen:

DEUS PROVIDEBIT.

“Where!”

Bella quailed: . “Inside the sarcophagus.”

Sid laughed at the anticlimax. “Well, obviously. It’s Buonarotti’s secret password, you were where she used to work. It’s not surprising you saw her mark. It’s no use. There’s nothing left at the university. Any data stored there was certainly destroyed, rendered useless by the accident.”

Kubmva bent hungrily over the scrawled letters.

“Sid, remind me. What do we
know
about that accident?”

“Enough. Du Pont-Farben was running a mini-reactor; one fine day it went down with a touch of non-linear positive feedback. Boom. Everybody relocates for five thousand years. It wasn’t a famous disaster. These things happen—happened—in the mid-twenty-first: maintenance running down, no money, civil disruption, communal violence. Things were coming apart.”

“And Buonarotti?”

“Was working on her quantum simulation—officially, that is, for her corporate sponsors. You know. You get some fantastic Craysworths of computing power, and calculate every bloody quantum mechanical feature of a bunch of non-existent atoms, real bottom-up, absolute ‘virtuality.’ Same work that got her the second Nobel. She was modeling the behavior of hybrid materials that didn’t exist but might be wildly useful if they did. In her spare time, according to some, she was going for jaunts around the galaxy in a prototype starship. Which has never been found.”