North Wind (16 page)

B.K. spoke English as a matter of Reformist principle; it was the language of post-nationalism, and Malayalam, the language of Kerala, with her Traditionalist friends. But she was a scholar herself, though she pretended otherwise. She beamed in delight at the holy woman’s pure Urdu.

“Ah! Once, guruji, I read those words, on the wall of the Mughal Palace in Delhi. I’ve been a traveler myself, you see. But we must leave you if we’re to catch the post. Bella?”

Bella was staring at the holy woman, who remained bowed over her reader. Nothing of her could be seen except the dome of a shaven skull, rising from an ample heap of drapery.

“Bella? Have you fallen asleep?”

A fold of white cloth moved, in an impatient, amused gesture of dismissal.

“I’m sorry,” said Bella, “I’m coming—”

“This is the husband-worship of a Hindu housewife,” complained B.K., as they walked, “If Ravi wants to support a whole college of shady indigent ascetics for life, his will is law, and I must feed the lot of them…. But the
evidyane,
the seeker-after-truth, is one of the genuine ones. I feel that, don’t you? A truly inquiring mind.”

Bella faintly agreed.

“It’s an honor and a delight to make someone like that welcome.

Bella had settled quickly into this ordered household. She washed with water and coped with human sanitary arrangements (profoundly grateful for Sid’s training). No one asked her to eat hard foods, but she ate dahls and curds, and found them tasty. The strangeness ceased to register. She was an Aleutian; she expected familiarity and found it. If there had been a separate video library in the house she would have been happy to move in there indefinitely. Why not? Since Maitri was gone, there was no reason why she should not find another patron for this life: and B.K. Pillai was kind. She was safe, among the Women. Neither Sidney Carton nor his evil boss could reach her.

She had been given a bedroom of her own, on the clerks’ floor. This too was soothing. She was an isolate; she’d always spent her nights alone. She went to it after walking to the post box; to rest. The chador was folded over her arm. A ceiling fan stirred the warm, moist air. There was someone sitting on her narrow bed-with-legs.

It was Sidney Carton.

He looked up, and smiled with his mouth. His hair, brows and lashes were pale again. “Hiya, Bel.”

She dropped the cloak.

“I’ve a friend,” he said, conversationally, “who thinks this kind of thing has deep existential implications. I’m here, you see, where I am. And I’m also wherever it is you are: somewhere in the future, from my point of view, and somewhere else in space. I’ve jumped the gap, like an electric current: actually as a map of photochemical impulses. Or something like that. Let me experiment. Is bi-location really happening?” He screwed his eyes shut: the thick pale lashes squeezed between ruddy corrugations. He opened them again. “Nope. Nada. You’re there, I’m here. Or the other way round. This isn’t happening. Try to touch my hand, you’ll see.”

She didn’t move. After a moment, the proffered hand dropped. “This is a letterbomb. I have to tell you that. It’s the law, anywhere in the human world. I have to announce ‘This is a letterbomb,’ in case you get the idea that I’m a psychotic episode.” He laughed, then became serious. “This is a recorded message, Bel. It’s not really different from someone on the phone, talking to you out of a screen. But for you, I know, that idea’s scary enough.”

“What can I tell you? We gave Jimi a grand send-off, once we’d got his body back. I think we invited the whole halfcaste population. It’s lucky he couldn’t attend the festivities, really. You know what he’s like at parties: gets all shy, drinks too much, does stupid things. In fact, if I seem a little strained, it’s because I’m still hung over myself…”

And so he went on, gossiping about his housemates and his children, as if this was Goodlooking’s room at the Trading Post. Until suddenly, mid-sentence, he disappeared.

Bella came down at twilight for evening prayers. A Tourviddy bus from the countryside had taken up temporary residence in the Pillais’ garden. The guests in the caravanserai, ignoring the modern entertainment available from an array of cable-consoles, settled every evening for the old-fashioned movies. Bella had “attended evening prayers” dutifully each night, humbled by the casual, relaxed attitude of the locals. For them, obviously, prayer was a natural part of life. No one put on a special face to come to church. Nobody behaved in a special way. She slipped in at the back, knelt and briefly covered her face. She tried to attend to the service.

It was a confession of a killing: the cruelty and shame of the story conveyed by high camera angles and sidelong, voyeuristic traverses. It was clear that the murderer was someone famous. The priests had been both too harsh and too kind in their editing, leaving a sense that malicious killing was very wicked; but that wicked behavior was glamorous if you were important enough. In Aleutia, there were people who’d call this sort of thing unfit for public worship. Bella didn’t know if that was right or wrong. It’s also too lifelike, she thought. Their priests often make that mistake. One would think those were not generated images, but real humans

She couldn’t concentrate.

Sidney Carton!

People chatted out loud and passed snackfood. A baby was crying in one of the front rows. She’d seen it, a big-headed sickly thing. It was forever crying. If it was so ill, why didn’t they gently let it die? In any hospital Bella had ever known, it would have been down for nursing care only.

Bella jumped as if she’d been stung. The
evidyane,
the holy woman, had knelt down beside her and softly touched her arm.

The large bundle of white rose up and moved off into the shadows, to the water-tank; and waited there for Bella.

A hand slipped out of the drapery and showed her what seemed to be a paper cut-out of a fish, like the friendly local commensals that lived in this pool. The hand moved. Almost at once, a silent fountain of little, glittering creatures burst from the dark surface of the water. They multiplied, crisping the air into fractured rainbow patterns.

Bella suspected a practical joke, but picked the one real cut-out from the air, anyway. The rest vanished. She handed it over.

The pilgrim led Bella up a narrow outside stairway and into the back wing of the house; into a small, bare and dimly lit room. B.K. would have put her husband’s pet scholar in a good guest suite, if she’d been allowed. But the pious widow had preferred this austere little closet. As soon as they were in the room with the door shut, the pilgrim folded back the robe which had been pulled over that shaven head. The Hindu widow vanished. Someone kind and wise—at once cheery, formidable and somehow very innocent—studied Bella: and both of them dropped the “she.”

“Yes,” he said, in English as perfect as Lord Maitri’s. “I’m an Aleutian. You know me, and I know you, librarian.”

“Sir—!”

He forestalled Bella’s respectful greeting. “Please, I’m traveling incognito. Call me ‘Seeker-after-truth.’ I like the name.” He settled on his pallet, a local-made bedding roll which was spread on the floor beside a stack of curious baggage: local baskets, boxes of strange design, messy paper-wrapped bundles. His wide and bristling nasal flared in amusement at Bella’s dumbfounded silence.

“How do you like my masquerade? Much can be done by simply lying about one’s appearance. It’s a trick of confidence. But look at this.” He bared his throat and arms. “Did you notice? No wanderers!”

The pilgrim smoothed a hand over his glossy crown. He smiled warmly.

Bella folded to the ground, joints reversed. At the Seeker’s nod of invitation, he spoke formally.

“When Lord Maitri’s company died, I escaped with our halfcaste interpreter. He brought me to Trivandrum. But then I decided I’d be safer on my own.”

He couldn’t bring himself to say more. It suddenly seemed impossible that
Maitri’s librarian
should have been kidnapped!

agreed the other placidly.

Bella’s attention kindled. It had been a blow to Maitri’s librarian, who could not read, when he discovered that the pre-moving-image works of earth’s greatest clerics were forever out of his reach. But just to
touch
them—

Like most Aleutians, Bella respected technicians, but regarded obligate scientists with a mixture of intense indifference and mild unease. They were called “engineers,” but it seemed like a courtesy title. Their technicians and artisans did the engineering. Scientists were dreamers. As they themselves admitted they dealt with exceptions, vagaries, anomalies; imaginary rules for imaginary cases. None of their bizarre pure mathematics, pure physics, pure mechanics was any use in the real, living world.

At the worst, an engineer was a kind of magician, dabbling in the occult. At the best he was a mystic: driven by his obligation to seek knowledge of the Self beyond the realm of life, in the unknowable void. Bella had no doubt in which category Seeker-after-truth belonged. He was no less uncomfortable. Mysticism wasn’t his kind of thing at all.

he remarked feebly.

Seeker-after-truth positively snorted.

Seeker-after-truth snorted again.

he repeated bitterly.

The scientist gave him a calm, penetrating look.

Seeker after truth laughed at Bella’s doubtful face.

Seeker-after-truth stretched out a broad hand, the color of greenish woodsmoke. no different mind.>

He slipped casually into formal speech. “It was this teaching that led to her being known at First Contact as ‘the scientist who doesn’t believe in aliens.’ Apparently Braemar Wilson tried to recruit Peenemünde into her anti-Aleutian resistance movement. The attempt failed, though she may have become a grudging sympathizer. Peenemünde’s teaching is not partisan. She believes that we are one mind, not for sentimental reasons: but as one of the conditions of existence. We are self. And the self: Aleutian, human, yours, mine, WorldSelf Itself, is made not of flesh but of stuff Buonarotti calls
information.”