North Wind (13 page)

They laughed.

The Fat Man was a veteran, a legendary Aleutian-watcher. His grasp of the alien question, in all its aspects, was renowned through the Enclaves and Old Earth. His long and close association with the halfcaste Sidney Carton had started one day when Sidney, not yet a teenage single father, just a rebellious halfcaste brat, met a large and fat tourist who was wandering insouciantly in the
neti-neti
area of Ernakulum, the coastal town where Sid’s people were living. Sid had heard the fat tourist asking: “Is there a way through the doors of death?”

Other kids hooted, gaped dumbly or ran. Sidney was intrigued. He had followed the stranger. The Fat Man had pretended not to know he was being followed, until he walked into Bimbis the confectioners, ordered a sumptuous heap of cakes and invited Sid to join him. Then he had begun to talk. About the aliens, and the saboteurs. About the sciences of earth and Aleutia, and about the wildest dream of all.

He said he was looking for the instantaneous travel device. It was not a myth. It existed. The saboteurs had used it to reach the shipworld undetected: and then the secret had been lost. The traces that remained were certain enigmatic phrases, buried in Old Earth’s mass of recorded data, a few microns of gold in a mountain the size of the planet. One of these clues was that cryptic promise:
there is a way through the gates of death.

Sid had known he was hungry for more than food; born hungry. He had never known what he was hungry for, but he recognized it at once. Something impossible.

They’d been partners ever since. The Fat Man had filled Sid’s empty mind, taught him alien-lore and human science. He’d taught Sid to read and write, explained to him the workings of history. Sometimes he would disappear for months, pursuing other business. Sometimes he would arrange for Sid to take service with the aliens, in deepest cover. Afterwards Sid would answer strange questions, and the Fat Man would never explain what he had learned.

For all Sid knew, this sorcerer had a whole college of apprentices scattered over the globe, and “Mr. Sunday” was one of many aliases. But Sid, “Mr. Thursday,” thought not. Maybe he was kidding himself but he believed that no one else shared the great alien-watcher’s lonely, crazy quest. The Fat Man slipped a small package across the desk. Sid pocketed it without a glance. He knew what would be inside: milk tokens, school-meals vouchers, cablesoft-stamps: the paper-money of the Community State’s grey economy. The landlady would know what to do with them.

“Well, Mr. Thursday?”

Usually they managed to stay in touch no matter where Sid was. Sid’s boss had a weakness for gadgets, especially fancy telecoms. Sid was conscious of the gap in the record, the days of his trek with Bella; and in the Travelers’ camp. He put that time firmly out of his mind.

“She’s in my house, unharmed, secure.” He had taken off his glasses when he entered the hotel lobby. His darkened lashes flickered. He could feel that packet in his pocket. “I think we should tell her what’s going on. She’s not merchandise.”

“Oh. You think that.” The Fat Man pondered.

“She should know who she is.”

“Ah. The vexed question of Aleutian identity.” The Fat Man leaned back, gazing thoughtfully at Sid. “The wanderers are very important. Those louse-like red bugs are cell-colonies which are sentient, in that they hold not only the individual’s whole genetic identity, like the cell of a human body; but also his current emotional status. His current skills: his whole life-status, condensed into chemical signals. We believe that a neural model of the entire brood entity, similar in principle to the ‘homunculus’ perception map in the human, exists in each Aleutian mind/brain. When they consume each other’s wanderers, this model is updated. Every update is copied to the reproductive tract, where each Aleutian—as we know—carries the full complement of the Brood’s genetic variants. Thus, the Aleutians are not true ‘telepaths.’ They have no psychic powers. Their knowledge of each other, reinforced of course by the character tapes, is based on physical contact and chemical reaction, however rarefied by distance. Yet they are true immortals. When a new ‘Clavel’ is conceived, that bundle of chemicals really does ‘know’ what happened to Clavel in his last life.”

Sid was looking increasingly depressed. “Chemicals don’t know things. Conscious memory can’t be passed on like that. And if it could—”

A white-gloved hand lifted, mildly. “A debatable point.” The big man’s face grew bleak. “I’m reminded that the physiology of their reproduction explains why to an Aleutian
rape
has the same meaning—if you can call it that—as the human criminal act. When they
lie down together,
as they say, the exchange of wanderers, a polite constant in social interaction, becomes a flood. Wanderers are directly absorbed through mucus membranes, sometimes in enormous numbers. Thus, their love-making, just as in the human gestalt, is essentially an act of chemical communication. Rape, as among humans, is the means of imposing a stronger party’s version of events upon futurity.”

There was a short silence. The word “rape” was no longer a historical tag; it had a personal meaning, just now. Both of them had liked and admired Sid’s alien employer.

“Such futility.” The big man fisted his hands. “Oh, my Sid! Everyone on earth is rejoicing at the success of this Protest. You and I know better. Why have human beings become so stupid? The Gender War has rotted their minds. How did the battle of the sexes become such a disaster?”

“It was the Aleutians,” said the halfcaste—forgetting to protest that the Gender War wasn’t really about gender. “The problem was always there. But everyone felt deep down that nothing could be done. Men and women were complementary halves, two sides of the same coin. Then the Aleutians came, and each of them was a person, nobody’s better or worse half. Women saw the aliens: with no one forcing sex on them, having children and not getting their pay docked for the privilege; and so on. Men saw the same aliens doing what comes naturally with no thought for the consequences, and nobody having unrealistic expectations or nagging them to behave. They both said to themselves: if the Aleutians don’t have to put up with that shit, why do we? The superbeings made it valid for everybody to be a person. But cut it any way you like, that means there’s twice as many fully-formed humans in any given area than there used to be: and still only one planet. Of course there’s a war.

“Mmm. ‘It was the aliens.’ Glib, but I suppose you could be right.”

“Don’t quote me. That’s a personal contemporary and worthless opinion. When it’s over, they’ll say this war was fought for purely economic reasons. Nothing to do with the Aleutians.”

The Fat Man nodded. “Naturally. As the aliens say, trade is the human world’s State Religion, and the religion of your state of being is unavoidable. One must pay one’s respects.”

He relaxed his big fists, and seemed to shake off gloom. “Back to present business. Is everything still going smoothly?”

“She won’t talk to me.” confessed Sid. “I don’t know if I mentioned that, when we last spoke. She did, all the time, but she won’t. Not a single Spoken Word. It gets on my nerves, I admit. My mother never talked to me. When she died, I was six and I’d never heard her voice. My Dad, I thought of him as my Dad, brought me south, and he never said a word to me either, all the time until we split up. It seemed reasonable to them, and I’m grateful they let me alone over the gene-therapy. But you see, it puts me in a bad temper when people won’t talk. I get sick of the Common Tongue. I’m afraid I’m making her dislike me.”

“Oh?” The Fat Man was concerned.

“Not like that, don’t worry. She doesn’t suspect a thing. She thanked me for stopping her from committing suicide.”

“A good point. Though I don’t think an invalid would have had any trouble getting off. The aliens discourage suicide, but they can be broad-minded in defining ‘death from natural causes.’”

“She wouldn’t see it like that. She’s too conscientious. And innocent. She’s a baby.”

The Fat Man regarded his protégé with grandfatherly affection: “A baby! You know Sid, it’s hard to catch an Aleutian measuring anything. But Office of Aleutian Affairs at the Government of the World has established that the shipworld observes a ‘year’ about one and one-sixteenth as long as ours. It’s deduced, and the deduction seems reasonable, that this is the length of the original planetary year.”

“Yes, so?”

“According to my sources, ‘Maitri’s librarian’ has been alive, ‘this time’—as the aliens say—twenty-three and a half shipworld years. The comparison is inadequate, since we haven’t established the average Aleutian lifespan, if there is such a thing. But it would appear that in human terms your ‘baby’ is a year or so older than you, Sid. Aeons older, of course, in theirs.”

Sid grimaced impatiently. “Fine, she’s a grown up—”

“Why did you use the name ‘Bella,’ by the way?”

“She needed a local name. It came to mind.” Sid’s eyes were veiled, his tone slightly defiant. “I want to tell her.”

The Fat Man steepled his white fingers again. “Johnny Guglioli and Braemar Wilson, the saboteurs. They reached the shipworld, they attempted to blow up the bluesun reactor, they were caught and Johnny was killed. The aliens on the shipworld were not aware that there was any mystery about Johnny and Braemar’s means of entry. Not until long after the crisis. Braemar Wilson escaped on her return to Earth, and was never interrogated. It’s extraordinary Nobody ever asked the most obvious question:
how did they get there?”

“I thought we’d established that they did. The humans started an investigation, but then they stopped. Because knowing how it was done or who done it, was politically untenable.”

“Quite. But I know and you know Sid that there was no high-powered conspiracy. No forced entry to the shipworld; nor any spaceplane launched from earth.” He raised his hand to forestall an interruption. “Agreed, my cautious Sid, evidence could have been concealed, evidence could still emerge. So much data has been lost and mislaid, the answer to the mystery may be perfectly simple and may yet never be found. But so far, at the least, we can say that the mystery remains. And we know, for certain sure, that powerful interests on earth and in orbit believe that Maitri’s librarian holds the key. The key, oh most precisely, the key to the kingdoms of heaven.”

He held up his hands again: both of them. “You will not tell
him,”
Sid’s boss gave ironic emphasis to the correct Aleutian pronoun. “For his own safety, he must not know. Don’t believe in the fairytale, Sid. Aliens are not angels. And never underestimate them. When you next have to rescue Bella, you may be up against more serious opposition. You are likely to be dealing with ruthless, corrupt, villains: who can read your body language, my Sid—yes, yours—and the whole situation you are in, so minutely that they might as well be reading your mind with a bright green psychic ray.”

His tone was so grim that Sid laughed. “It sounds hopeless, Fat Man. What am I supposed to do when I’m faced with these hardened criminal superbeings?”

Mr. Sunday’s unwonted gravity dissipated. “Try thinking about high energy physics. Cosmology, Theoretical Chemistry. I guarantee, every Aleutian in the room will fall into a catatonic trance.”

He sat back, reached into a pocket and brought out a slim, pearly screen case, the length of his large palm. “Look at this, Sid. A new toy. There’s a cam that goes with it, a little flying thing. We’ve been talking for long enough. I think we should have a peep into your safe room.”

Something winked from between the gloved hands, a flickering mayfly. It zipped through the air, nipped between the blinds at the window and vanished. There was a pause, in which the rain grew loud and Sid began to frown. A gossamer screen unfolded: glimmered, fizzed and cleared. They watched a slow pan around a dimly lit, low space.

“The cam can’t burrow through solid walls,” explained the Fat Man in a whisper, as if the insect-wing monitor might hear him and flit away. “When it can’t get nearer to the target location, it embeds itself in the last barrier and builds a picture from heat, echoes, residual light.”

“That’s our safe room all right,” Sid confirmed, slightly piqued. Didn’t the Fat Man trust him? But then, jaw dropping, he gave a wail of disbelief. The room was empty.

He ran into the street. There was a teksi stand outside the hotel. He leapt onto a greasy saddle, The meter bleeped officiously.
Tell on me to the town hall, would you?
Sid scrabbled in his pockets for a con-film, slammed the fake palmprint onto the contact; gunned the stick. The machine shot away in a fountain of puddle water.

The Fat Man, watching from his desk, murmured, “Such impetuosity!” He put his pretty new toy back his pocket: rose with ponderous grace, took Sid’s umbrella and went to find some tiffin. He adored Keralan food.

iii

Under an awning made of Aleutian trade-goods waterproof, Lydia had cleared a space in the roof’s clutter. She wiped the grisly-looking cement with a rag of cleeno, and used the same spongy grey rag to wipe her hands. Taking a water tablet from the box, she broke off a fragment and put the rest back. She dipped wheat-flour out of a bin, crumbled the Aleutian powder into it and stirred it around till it was moist.

She kneaded flour and water dough on grimy cement with her grubby small hands, in perfect, hygienic safety: occasionally poking at her charcoal brazier. Cheap Aleutian trade-goods made domestic cleanliness easy for the poorest and least competent of their customers. Anything the cleeno had touched was free of harmful life for hours. The water scavenged from the air by the cryptobiont powder was distilled to exacting purity. As she worked the child hummed a wordless song. Small people, winged and dressed in flower petals, played around her. A miniature turquoise pony jumped over the flour bin.