North Wind (19 page)

Bella remembered another telling detail. The librarian shrugged dismissively. was
the name of “Johnny Guglioli’s” child. That’s not something even a halfcaste would know casually. As you know,
The Grief of Clavel
isn’t well-known on Earth.

He felt he’d made a mistake. The Seeker was not following this.

Seeker-after-truth was frowning. he muttered.

Bella quailed. He didn’t blame Seeker-after-truth for being annoyed. He had explained things poorly. He’d made his story sound feeble, overheated and childish. He crouched low.

Seeker-after-truth gently tugged the librarian’s nape, lifted him and drew him close. he repeated.

He seemed to consider how much to reveal. is
a plot, and the Expedition is in danger. You have become involved in a treasure hunt.> He chuckled softly. he smiled grimly—

He stroked the slick dark head that was resting against his shoulder.

The librarian’s shoulders lifted.

The scholar pondered.

Bella realized, astonished, that he was being offered a job. He was silent for too long. Seeker-after-truth would think him impossibly ungrateful. But couldn’t help it. Suddenly he had thought of the outing to the ruins at Mykini: the yellow sunlight and the scent of the pine grove. That picnic had been an event like no other in his quiet existence…. He remembered the librarian of that day with a desperate nostalgia.

I want to be myself again!

he said, at last.

Bella returned to his small room on the clerks’ floor. The Pillai household was plunged in the death-like silence of night among the locals. He crouched on the narrow bed-with-legs, his limbs drawn into a knot and his face buried in his hands. He thought of the strange events that had gathered around him and remembered how Maitri had drawn him aside after the visit to the ruins, the evening before the massacre. What had Lord Maitri begun to tell him? What was the news he had refused to hear, misunderstanding in his usual isolate way? No. It couldn’t be. He was Maitri’s librarian, no one else.

He trembled, and trembled, and finally—when he had grown calm—Sidney Carton came to him: Sid, in the Aleutian overalls he used to wear, with such a sad and lonely face. She—becoming
she
again to enact Sid’s desire—could not bear to send him away. She put her arms around him. Sid slipped his hands along her shoulders, inside her local shirt. His fingers found the grooves that should have been melting and running with wanderers. He bent his head and used his mouth to hunt the moist lips, too passionate to notice there were no messengers there. His hands traced the lesser grooves beside her spine…. She could not help herself. She pulled herself up and hard against him, so that he could feel through her clothes the plumped, engorged rim of her place, pressing against his belly.

Bella stopped it there.

The ghost of Sidney Carton had reappeared in this room at random intervals, after the first time. Bella had searched and failed to find any kind of occult device. He had told no one, certainly not Seeker-after-truth. This haunting was a problem that he would have to deal with alone. But the letterbombs were not erotic. That was Bella’s own idea. He crouched on the bed, and wiped his brimming eyes “Oh, Sid,” he whispered. “What a shame. What a waste.”

iii

Bella didn’t see Seeker-after-truth again. One morning soon after their long interview she went to the back wing of the house, and found a Pillai domestic sweeping out the pilgrim’s empty room.

“Where did the evidyane go?” she asked.

The domestic only gave a shrug, that cold smile which never touched their eyes.

Bella didn’t use cablepoints. When the Tourviddy van, which had remained parked in the Pillai’s garden, showed recorded news bulletins at “evening prayers,” she perceived them as timeless records of selves in interaction, rather than information about current affairs. But she knew what was happening. The humans talked about nothing else, informally. Negotiations had begun, between the shipworld and the human Government of the World. After half an Earth’s year away, the aliens were coming back. The human world had found it needed Aleutian goods, and decided not to let false pride get in the way of business. And maybe some people had realized that alien presence was a bulwark against the spread of the Gender War. It was understood that the fate of the Himalayas could be discussed later.

When she learned that the Aleutians had returned to Uji, Bella knew he had to reveal his true identity to his hosts at once, to same everybody embarrassment. But the right moment never seemed to come. It was some days later, when he finally went to B.K. Pillai’s office, determined to explain everything. It was nearly noon. The lawyer was alone, the rows of clerks’ desks empty. Tattered scraps of garlands, left over from the Harvest Festival at the end of the rains, trailed from the frame of the wall-sized world picture. Burning sunlit air poured through the open shutters. But this room, close to the heat-ex well that was the house’s cool core, was never too warm.

B.K. was working through the dregs of her in-tray. She was almost down to the level of pathetic requests from shady foreign charities. As she worked, she talked to herself in the Common Tongue. The language of her minute facial gestures was painfully intelligible to the Aleutian who saw her as patron, benefactor, wise friend.

What’s the use of keeping a vicious animal caged in your house?
they say, feeling that their time has come and at last they are free. Stupid arrogance. Young women like Katalamma don’t know anything about how the war is going. I am afraid of the aliens, but without them there is only the War, growing nearer. The war which we Reformers must lose, and every woman too. How can the people who hate war win? We are driven into battle, but it’s hopeless. It was not the aliens’ fault; they only named what was happening. Now it is too late. What is it the aliens say? Once the weapons are out, everybody loses.

glad
the aliens have returned, to damp her anger. She trusts me still. I don’t want her in trouble. There is no alternative, it’s
them
or worse—>

She was crying. The flowing human tears, so wild and excessive, ran down her face as she looked up and saw Bella.

“Ah, Bella,” she said. “Good. It’s time we had a talk.”

Bella wanted to say
There’s something you should know,
but he didn’t manage to speak. He understood B.K.’s grief too well,. How hard it is to become a dependent, again! Afterwards, he hoped that B.K. understood and forgave him. But at that moment Ravi Pillai came into the room, treading the polished wooden floor softly on his bare feet.

“Mummyji?”

They went out together. Ravi stepped back, and said shyly to Bella: “Please, wait here.” Bella sat down at one of the clerks’ desks and waited, trembling.

At last B.K. Pillai returned, dressed in a gold-banded green and purple sari over gold-gauze petticoats. It was the kind of ensemble she wore when Traditionalist Hindu ladies came to curl on the Pillai sofas like large gaudy kittens; to eat sweeties and make pointed comments about Katalamma’s marital status. She stood, smoothing the silk and smiling distantly.

“Please come with me.”

The rescue party that Seeker After Truth had promised, had arrived. They were in the caravanserai hall, in their overalls, and wrapped in quarantine film. They presented gifts of “half-killed” Aleutian goods. They made polite speeches in English, while being extremely rude informally—under the mistaken impression that humans cannot understand the Common Tongue at all. In fact the language barrier was no obstacle to their flagrant amusement and distaste.

Under the transparent film, tiny squirming blood-blisters wriggled over the skin of their “hairless baboon” faces; their crumpled, chicken-skin hands and throats.

Bella had been expecting to be found, some time soon. But his head began to spin. Weakness overwhelmed him; he fell down in a faint at his rescuers’ feet.

The Aleutian hotel had been burned out. Its wonderful gardens, prized by locals and aliens alike, had been reduced to an ash pit. The rescue party had taken over another hotel near by. As soon as Bella-who-had-been-Goodlooking, Maitri’s librarian, was well enough, they held a small reception party for him, in the room they’d made into their main hall. Bella arrived with a nurse at his elbow, still very shaky. The hall was a gloomy place, decorated in a grim industrial shade of red. Ancient electric chandeliers hung from the ceiling; but the light came from ordinary sucker lamps.

He’d been bewildered by the size of the party, until he’d found out that the expedition to claim Maitri’s librarian happened to be the first triumphant sortie from Uji. Naturally it was an event, almost a victory celebration, and there’d been hosts of volunteers. Sarvanga, the highest ranking Expedition officer, presided from a flat topped partition that he had adopted as a dais.

“I’m very grateful—” Bella began, formally.

Sarvanga brushed this aside.

murmured the nurse. .

Sarvanga turned to one of his aides. <“Sidney Carton” isn’t it? What amazing names they have.>

“Lord Maitri’s halfcaste interpreter,” the spruce young Signifier supplied, very formal and correct. “The chap’s here now, sir. He’s hardly left the lobby since he found out we’d recovered Goodlooking. He seems to expect a reward.”

No one noticed that he’d spoken.

complained someone.
rescued the librarian. We went to that weird house, and fetched him right out of there!> Another member of the company lifted his head, which was resting elegantly in the lap of a close friend, and transferred a wanderer from his own naked throat to the friend’s mouth.

judged Sarvanga.