North Wind (15 page)

Lydia had turned back as soon as she realized Bella wasn’t behind her. She was sitting by the gate in the railing. Her father propped his teksi and came towards her.

“Bella’s gone.”

She nodded, and burst into tears. “I’m sorry Daddy! I’m sorry!”

Sid collected pebbles and started chucking them, idly, into a puddle. He couldn’t take it in. Loss and hurt bewilderment rolled over him, like a tank running over his chest.

How could she do this? She belongs to me!

5 
Deus Providebit

i

“Men have no natural authority!”

The voice was the voice that had spoken to Bella from the mask of an eight-armed monster. The speaker was Katalamma Pillai: a young Woman of vigorous, athletic presence, dressed in a smartly tailored emerald green tunic and trousers. She was sitting cross-legged on top of a low storage cabinet in her mother’s office. Katalamma had brought the fugitive halfcaste home to her mother’s house: a pleasantly old-fashioned establishment in the green heart of Woman Town. B.K. Pillai was a distinguished Reformist lawyer. This was her office. The large room was lined around three walls with cabinets, stacked with generations of different recording media: tapes, disks, cards, charged paper, flat-readers; printed books. The daughter of the house sat cross-legged on top of one of these cabinets, expounding

A few clerks were at their desks, visored, deep in research. They paid no attention. The public office hours were over; this was no longer livespace. Katalamma could do no harm. At her own desk, B.K. was helping Bella to complete her application for reverse gene-therapy.

“Look at the Traditionalist marriage ceremony. In every culture in the world, ‘traditional’ marriage is a ritual of submission, a formal abdication of authority. The aliens are right: we are two nations; we have been at war for aeons. Marriage is the surrender ceremony, repeated and repeated, of the Women’s last defeat. Every social function Men claim to possess was stolen from us as war-booty. When we have won back all that was ours, Men will spend their entire time making themselves beautiful and strong, and we shall choose the best of them to fertilize our seed!”

The lawyer read the text carefully to Bella, as it scrolled by, with a small wry smile for her daughter’s ebullience. “Can biological males have natural authority?” she inquired mildly.

Katalamma shot her a reproachful glance. The status of “biological males” was a vexed question for young Reformist activists. “The aliens,” she continued, on smoother ground, “unmasked themselves when they announced the Himalaya Project. We thought they were our partners, but they have demanded submission. They are crypto-‘Men.’ Men in gestalt, as the anti-Aleutian fanatic Braemar Wilson warned us, long ago!”

“The aliens are not the enemy,” murmured B.K. “It’s true that they have changed people’s lives, in the Enclaves. But who knows? The Age of Information—all those deadworld networks—was maybe coming to a natural end, and biological solutions were fated to follow. Human priorities are always changing. Why be self-doubtful? In Kerala we have a Community State that owes nothing to alien influence. A system which will provide without a qualm the expensive treatment this young woman needs. The Aleutians are simply foreigners—”

Katalamma sprang from the cabinet and strode across the room (in her arrogant step, glimmered the shade of a blood-dripping vengeful goddess), to the far wall, which held a 3D projection of the Earth’s physical geography: a beautiful and engrossing decoration.

“Was it simply foreigners who did
that?”
She stabbed a finger at the Panama Trench, which Expedition artisans had made, cutting the isthmus between the two Americas, at the site of the old canal. It gave the vast reaches of the USSA a helpful natural quarantine barrier in the south, to match the sea-passages in the north.

Bella, to whom Earth was a series of destinations with blanks in between, didn’t know the scale of the wall projection. The trench looked tiny and harmless. She knew the Expedition had acted in good faith, believing that the work had been approved and accepted by their customers. But she trembled. If the two Women started to revile the Himalaya Project, surely anger would sharpen their perceptions. They would know that their “repentant halfcaste” was a real alien.

So far, everything had gone well. The story devised by Lydia had been accepted. The halfcaste community in Goa, another State further up the coast, had been massacred in the Protest. Nobody expected Bella to give a coherent account of her flight from that horror. And she had found it easy to convince them that she truly “wanted to be human.”

It was a translation of her genuine emotions. If you are a permanent invalid you must resign yourself to your fate, otherwise life would be intolerable. But the bitter revolt of the normal person trapped inside never goes away.
I am not normal, but I long to be.
It was easy to keep on saying that, in the Common Tongue. Dangerously easy!

“Please don’t start on the Himalaya business, Katalamma. You know my views. The Aleutians are, as I said, ignorant well-meaning foreigners. They try to help and they make mistakes. They are here to establish markets for their goods; they have no intention of making themselves hated. The situation has clear human parallels. Who should know that better than the people of India? We must not forget that Aleutian trade goods have made an immense difference to the poor: far more difference, far more quickly than we could achieve with political solutions.”

She stopped the scrolling document. “Here we need your signature, Bella.”

Bella looked up, remembering to make the “she” expression. Since she’d taken refuge with the Women, it made sense to present herself as female, and she knew what was expected, from traveling with Sid.

“Signature?”

“A thumbprint is perfectly adequate. Oh—”

The lawyer had started to lift Bella’s hand: a hand lacking the little finger, dead white, and with a crepey texture as if it had been held too long in water. Bella hadn’t yet been examined by a doctor. Though this girl was desperate to be human again, she had clearly been reared as a devout halfcaste, and the work done on her body was extensive. It would be cruel to subject her to investigation by deadworld medical devices, so soon after the horrors of Goa. The poor child was going to suffer enough indignities, once her therapy program began.

B.K. held the strange little hand, uncertainly: the halfcaste girl limply accepting her touch.

Katalamma bounced across the room (Katalamma habitually walked as if she could barely stop herself from leaping into flight). The young woman known to her fans as “Hammerhead” was not burdened by undue sensitivity.

“Looks human enough,” she announced. “You should get a print.”

“Place your thumb on the screen, Bella.”

Katalamma stood to watch, with a proprietary air.

“I need you to apologize to the imam,” said B.K. , in a firm undertone. “For that disgraceful affair at the tank. He’s an old man, he deserves respect. The way you behaved, you are no better than the mobsters of the Protest. Who will be prosecuted with the full rigor of the law for the crimes they committed, if I have my way. And I
will
have my way.”

“My people didn’t have anything to do with the violence. We aren’t Gender Warriors. Kerala is a civilized country. We intended the Protest in to be reasonable, limited, justified—”

“Ha! You knew what would happen.”

“It was the Men,” muttered Katalamma sulkily.

Sid had told Bella that two political parties hated the terms “Women” and “Men.” But here in the Enclaves, where it really was politics, not war, nobody seemed sensitive.

“Always
the Men!
Where would you be without that alibi?”

Katalamma glowered, pushed back her cuff and tapped the pillbox strapped to her wrist. The Kali mask leapt into existence.

“Switch that off. I won’t have it in my office.”

“Why not?” demanded Kali, in Katalamma’s voice. “It’s a lesson for Bella. Attend and learn, new human! For a hundred years the aliens have been destroying our deadworld networks—”

“Ha. The Gender Wars can take most of the credit for that!”

“Don’t listen to her, new human. It was the aliens, just as much. Well, we can’t argue with them; they are superbeings. But I am Kali: I enjoy chopping things up, so now the deadworld is no longer a grid across the globe; it has scattered into a million, million forms. I have all the power of the void forces here on my wrist. I am
Hammerhead!
The hidden virus, the avenger who will one day arise!”

B.K. applied Bella’s thumb one last time. “I will teach you to read, Bella. And maybe to write. It is the best gift I can give you: the gateway to a great world of knowledge that is in danger of being lost forever, although my daughter hasn’t noticed
that.
Empowerment does not lie in gadgets that can be stolen from you or smashed. There, that’s finished.”

She lifted printed sheets as they emerged. “You’re making yourself ridiculous, Katalamma, with that childish ‘gamer’s handle.’ You need to grow up, if you really want to have a career. Your father and I gave you a good Keralan name. Why not use it?”

“You called me after a sea goddess. Hammerhead
is
a sea goddess.”

Katalamma’s real hand grasped Bella’s and held it to the controls of the deadworld toy. Smoke engulfed the desk and Bella: blue smoke; it was water. Deep in an illusory depth of field there moved a huge, sleek limbless body. It rushed forward silently: a commensal with a flattened flanged head, an eye at each end of the extension. It was a tool, obviously, but for what purpose? It turned on its back. Bella gasped. A mouth opened on rows of jagged teeth. “That’s a hammerhead shark.” said Katalamma’s voice, high and thinned as if by a great distance. “A goddess of the sea. Sharks are female-ordered, fearless, powerful. That’s why I chose the name. But don’t look at the teeth; look at the gills. That’s how she breathes, by pushing the water through there as she swims. If a shark doesn’t swim, they say, she dies. Mummyji says the Aleutians are trying to help us. We cannot be
helped.
We must live in our own way, develop in our own way. Or else we die.”

“Hmmph,” said the lawyer. “Very poetic.” But she seemed mollified. Sincerity could always move her, even in her own child.

“Now, Bella: government bureaucrats must have hard copy! We could dispatch your application to the Health Department straight away, through that deadworld my daughter is so fond of. But I’ll tell you a secret: we will avoid a delay of some weeks, if we take it to the post box.”

The post-box was out at the gates of the garden, an immense distance for Maitri’s librarian. But Bella was still enjoying a period of well-being; which was doubtless built on terror and would end in complete collapse. She reached for the battered chador. It was never out of her sight.

Mother and daughter silently exclaimed in pity.

“My dear,” said B.K. kindly. “Let’s try it without the cloak. There is nothing wrong with the chador. Everyone should have the right to wear the chador: but not every day! You have recanted. You are in my charge, and safe from the hooligans.” She paused. “You know, medical deprogramming therapy can take a long time. You may decide, in the end, that you have had enough operations. Do you understand? Being human is something that starts on the inside.”

Bella recollected herself. “I understand.”

“Good. Wait, there’s one thing we must do before we send off this application. We must ask my husband’s permission, he is the head of this household.”

The Pillai house was set back from the street in a wide and rather wild garden. At the front of the building steps led up to a gabled porch, the entrance to the law offices and the family’s rooms. The ground floor was an open, pillared hall: a caravanserai for passing Pillai dependents, for pilgrims; for any poor traveler who asked for a place to stay. It was lunchtime. A rice-tiffin was being served at long tables. B.K. led Bella through the bustle to the back of the hall, and out onto a shady terrace, where there was a fish pool in a square stone basin. Her husband was there with one of the guests: a holy woman, in the white robe of a Hindu widow, whose pilgrimage had been interrupted by the Protest.

“Ravi?”

“My dear?”

Mr. Pillai was in Brahminical dress. The sacred thread traversed a meager fluff of grey on his lean, naked breast. The hair on his head, gleaming black without a trace of grey, was twisted in a bun. Between him and the holy woman lay a flat reader, displaying some abstruse, distant work of God. Ravi Pillai was a devout reformed Hindu, who spent most of his hours in devotions, and contemplation of the divine heavens—unless a kindred spirit turned up among his wife’s open-house guests.

“Ravi, my dear, we are just going to post Bella’s application for reverse-therapy. Is that all right with you?”

The scholar tore his eyes away from a star-filled abyss. “Of course.” He made an effort to engage with the mundane. “I hope it all goes well. I will pray for you, Bella…if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” said Bella shyly.

The lawyer’s elaborate deference to her marriage partner made Bella uneasy, in case a minor Gender War was about to flare up. But Ravi didn’t seem to mind. B.K. glanced at the screen, indulgently taking an interest. “Seeking for God in the stars? You know best, my dear: but I remember my Einstein. If there has to be a ‘center’ to the universe, though why there should be such a thing I don’t know, then it is here in our garden, as much as anywhere.”

“If there is heaven of bliss,” murmured the holy woman. “it is here, it is here, it is here—”