North Wind (12 page)

There was a conscious silence between the brothers. Bobby grinned in his networking trance, without opening his eyes. Clark sniggered. Sid judged from this that the bold girl had gone down the mall to play virtuality games: a pastime totally forbidden to halfcaste youngsters.

He turned, with shrug of complicity (they weren’t bad kids): and saw that Mother Teresa had brought out her Aleutian cooking-stove. She was feeding it with pieces of shriveled turd.

Mother T had scrounged her proudest possession from the Aleutian hotel. The halfcastes who lingered around that compound sometimes used to come away with alien cast-offs, sterilized to conform with quarantine rules. The “stove” was a room-cooler. It had not been grown to run on turd, nor to heat to cooking temperatures: but you could make the cruder commensals do anything, really. It helplessly gulped the waste and began to glow.

Sid turned away, hating to see a living machine mistreated—and suddenly, horrified, remembered Bella.

“Are you crazy! Get that thing out of sight!”

He sprang across the cluttered floor. Mother T squawked and threw herself in the way. They ended on the floor together, in a scatter of dried human dung. The room-cooler wriggled off under the furniture. Clark and Bobby raised an ironic cheer.

Sid squatted on his heels, head in his hands, furious with the whole squalid muddle of the halfcaste world. “Are you crazy!” he demanded again. “Suppose the landlady walked in and saw that thing. You know the way she walks in here. Remember who we’ve got upstairs!”

Mother Teresa snorted, scar tissue round her clumsily bared nose-hole flaring. you,
when they were burning halfcastes in our streets?>

She was shaking. She’d give her life for Bella, without question. The poor, brave, pitiful old bat. He saw, lost in those evasive button-hard little eyes, the longing to be
good,
that had made her choose her saintly name; that bound her to this tattered, idiotic cult of the superbeings. He picked up his sunglasses, which had been hidden under the bag of dung.

“She won’t be here long. If I forgot to say it last night: thank you, for keeping my children safe.”

Father Roger was reading his Office, sitting tranquilly on the narrow cot in his cell of a room. As Sid came in his eyes continued to flicker over the moving glyphs on the flat reader in his hand. His godson was sweetly asleep beside him.

Sid fidgeted, peering at mementos. Here was a papal blessing, all the way from Lima. Roger had been a priest before he became a gender-heretic. Reformist by conviction, he’d recognized himself in the person of a minor hero, a forerunner claimed by the Reformers from the early twentieth century. It was his bad luck that the RC Church had also, subsequently, decided to canonize Roger Casement, crusading anti-racist and homosexual martyr, in a saint-making batch designed to gain credit with the Reformer party. The Reunited Catholic Church was unhappy about reincarnation. It felt a lot worse about a priest who claimed to be a reincarnated saint. Rog had been cruelly demoralized when Sid met him; a priest relieved of his duties, struggling to find his way. Poor Rog! The Protest wasn’t going to have helped his case. But he was patient. Wasn’t it the Aleutians who said, time’s cheap?

“Roger? I don’t want to interrupt, but—”

“Mmm?”

“Suppose—?” Sid broke off: tried again. “Suppose you knew something important about someone, something crucial. But you couldn’t tell them, without betraying a vital secret—?”

Father Casement looked curiously at the restless young man. “A moral dilemma, Sid? That’s new for you.” He shook his head. “You’d have to tell me more.”

Sid straightened a framed flat reproduction: a pencil sketch of a gaunt, kindly looking masculine Caucasian. He glanced from it to the plump Tamil priest with a discreet nose-chop. Asking a saint for advice on a business decision. Little Sid was losing his grip?

He sighed. “Yeah, well that’s the problem. I can’t. Thanks anyway, Roger.”

On the floor above, the kids and Sid had the smaller back room, Jimi and Cactus shared the other. Sid found Cactus at home alone, in the character shrine alcove, lying gazing at the screen. Cactus was often ill. He’d had gene-therapy meant to give him an Aleutian gut, which had left him with a digestive system that could not digest much.

Cactus was an unusual alien-lover. He didn’t know who he was, but he was sure he was someone ordinary. He spent his time tracking carefully through news coverage, forgotten game shows, prehistoric mall-monitoring; anything that Jimi could find in the secondhand bazaar, waiting for the moment of recognition.

“Hiya, Cactus.”

He was called Cactus because he had hardly any hair. What there was of it grew in spikes, each a single horny growth; bare puckered scalp between. They watched the screen in friendly silence. It was a fossiled infotainment feature about sewage treatment, with a large cast. At a break for some surreal animation, Cactus stopped concentrating and made a shy speech.

“I’m glad you’re back, Sid. We missed you.”

“I missed you too. I’d have been here if I could.”

“It wasn’t so bad. We stayed indoors. But what’re we going to do now, without the aliens?”

That was what they all wanted to know, though it was only Cactus so far who had asked out loud. How are we going to live,
Sid?
It had to be Sid. No one else was going to think of an answer

The feudal Aleutians didn’t strictly-speaking pay their servants. Lord Maitri had given Sid practical and generous presents when he took the halfcaste interpreter into his service: a bale of organic batteries, bolts of cleeno; water tablets. The household had been living on the sale of these goods for the past year. Their small remaining stock was useless now.

“They’ll be back.”

“I don’t want to sound disloyal. But what if you’re wrong?” Cactus’s anxious face crumpled. “We can’t give up being lootie-lovers, because the purebreds threw them out. It’d be a betrayal of our whole lives. But how are we going to survive?”

Sid perched the sunglasses on his nose, and smiled wisely and mysteriously. “Don’t you fret. I’ll think of a number.”

Cactus nodded. “I’m sure you will Sid.”

“In fact, my prickly one, I’m on my way up town, right now, to wheel a deal that should keep us cozy for a while.”

murmured Cactus, gazing fondly at his friend.

“Couldn’t have put it better myself. Wish me luck.”

Before he’d become Maitri’s child, the librarian had usually spent his infancy in a children’s ward. Most people who bore an isolate quickly decided that the baby would be better off in specialized care. The shipworld or at home, it had been the same. For more lives than he cared to remember he’d passed straight from some hospital or other—if he survived—to his study bedroom beside Maitri’s library, and scarcely left his lord’s house again. He had almost no experience of his own: world: only the records, and the thin replenishment of his prosthetic wanderers.
There’s one consolation,
he thought.
I will be no more helpless in the streets of this city, than if I was at home.

Sid had never explained how he had acquired his adult dependents. He was like Maitri, the librarian decided: who drew people to him by gentleness alone, and anyone who once joined his household stayed forever. They were certainly loyal, which was awkward, because Bella needed help. But loyalty can be deceived.

He was sorry he wouldn’t see Sid again. It was a shame to have parted so awkwardly, both of them feeling guilty and preoccupied. He resolutely put the sadness aside. It couldn’t be helped.

Someone had brought a bowl of soup. He’d found it by his bed, when he woke from a brief doze. He had judged that it would not be poisoned, so he’d eaten it, and found it good. He picked up the bowl, let himself out of the safe room and made his way to the roof, where he knew he would find the weak link in Sid’s company

ii

The halfcastes lived in a run down area near the temple, on the border of the Reformers’ part of town. As Sid marched confidently up the MG road—called after Mahatma Gandhi, like the main drag in every second town on the Subcontinent—the character of the street display changed. The frequency of block-high shimmering pages of sacred calligraphy increased. They became more literal, less stylized. In the gaudy Hindu projections there were fewer forests of chaos, more conventional gods and demons. Underfoot the vivid, hardwearing and heavily engineered sidewalk turf gave way to plain white instant stone. Few women on the street, and many of them were veiled. More teksis and fewer buses.

Now he was in Man Town. But the change was not violent. Kerala was a Reformist State where Reformers and Traditionalists lived together peaceably; as on a larger scale the Reformist States of the Subcontinent lived in peace with their Traditionalist neighbors. Battery buses threaded the teeming pedestrian traffic, teksis swooped and dived. A heavy monsoon rain began. Sid put up his umbrella, but kept his dark glasses on. They hid his blue eyes, and that wasn’t all. Up at this end, the MG was a strutting-ground. Keeping your eyes covered was a accepted way of avoiding the stares of challenge, and staying out of fights. Sidney Carton swaggered, cocksure: occasionally pausing to brush some imaginary injury from his spruce white cotton suit. He felt safer in Woman Town. Everybody felt safer in Woman Town. But he enjoyed coming up here: it was a thrill. It stirred his blood with ancient pride. Safety isn’t everything.

He stood, deliberately, to take a good long look at one of the burned out buildings. He’d never noticed that so many Community Retailers carried Aleutian goods. But the Subcontinent had been the Aleutians’ favored trading area for a long time. There was an affinity between alien and Indian culture. Hindus believed in reincarnation, and were as indifferent to change as the aliens. Muslims had their Aleutian submission to fate, and the same rigid recklessness. Where else on Earth would you find such an insidiously, immovably feudal society; or such a blurring of the distinction between repetition and diversity: a hundred thousand MG roads, why not? But favor and affinity hadn’t saved them from the Himalaya Project. That was the aliens for you, decided Sid gloomily. You thought you understood them. You started thinking this understanding proved that
the whole cosmos
made sense. Then
pow.
Complete breakdown.

He wished he hadn’t told the others that Bella was a real alien. They wouldn’t give her away on purpose, but they were such fools, and she was so helpless. But he wasn’t used to deceiving his folks. Maybe he’d have to move her, think of somewhere else.

A group of youths were pouring solvent on a clump of strange greenery: Aleutian weeds, escaped from the hotel compound. Sid thought of all the wild breaches of quarantine that the Protest had caused: so damned stupid. A young face with blacked-out eyes turned and glared.

Sid hurried on, and entered the foyer of an old-fashioned high rise hotel. It was the place foreign alien-watchers had favored before the Protest. The lobby was deathly quiet. Two Arab-States men in flowing white robes were taking coffee. They watched Sid over their newsreaders.

“Mr. Thursday,” he told the receptionist. “To see Mr. Sunday.”

He was expected. He was permitted to go up to Mr. Sunday’s room.

He knocked on a sheeny grey door that was redolent of another age: of minibars and faxed news updates and closed circuit tv.

“Come in, Sid.”

He entered and was confronted by a towering Samurai warrior: scaled armor, venomous eyes, sword raised high. He dodged, he feinted. The sword swept through his body, cleaving him from shoulder to groin. Sid groaned in exasperation.

“Sit down,”

The Fat Man was ensconced with his back to the light, behind a secretary-desk. His white gloved hand offered an antique chair, made of padded hessian and metal tubing. Sid approached warily. There was a spider on the seat. Sid disliked spiders. He laughed and poked at the thing fearlessly. His whole hand went through the chair. He lost his balance: reached out to his left. The chair vanished and reappeared on his right.

“Why do you
always
get me?” he demanded.

“It’s my timing,” explained the Fat Man. “Which is superb. And the fact that your raw perception is fooled.
You
know the difference between trickery and reality by context, if nothing more: the spider on your chair has to be a joke. But your senses have to be
told.
It makes a little delay.”

“Is the chair real now?” asked Sid patiently. He knew it was. His senses could tell when the game was over. He sat down.

“Well.” The Fat Man steepled his gloved hands and peered largely over them. “Is there a way through the doors of death?”

Sid grinned. “Some kind of looty fantasy, isn’t it, that expression? Something about humans secretly being able to walk into a tv screen and come out on the other side of the galaxy? It sounds like a dumb, tourist’s misunderstanding to me. Seems to me if you tried that, all you’d get would be a bumped nose. Suppose you had one.”