North Wind (26 page)

What would Clavel, who was the conscience of Aleutia on Earth, want to do about the instantaneous travel device? Could Bella, the humble isolate, answer for the Pure One?

The masks intertwined and melded into a single moving field. In this pleasure garden of the void forces, deadworld devices made a truce between the gender warriors, closed the empty spaces between human bodies, brought their flesh to life. The humans had become Aleutians, no different mind. Bella was filled with an immensely clear euphoria.
It belongs to them,
he told Aleutia-in-his-mind.
Peenemünde’s discovery belongs to the people of Earth!

He seemed to hear Seeker-after-truth, telling him sadly that this could not be so. Buonarotti herself had decreed that the treasure was not for his own kind. But that couldn’t be right. Hadn’t the saboteurs been the first to use it?

Among the masked dancers, he glimpsed a woman’s face: instantly recognizable, as if conjured by his thoughts. Surely that was the long-dead saboteuse, Braemar Wilson? Aditya had seen it too.

The Beauty sprang up, outraged. “Kershaw”! Your women told me a “Braemar” mask couldn’t be had! They said there was “no demand”! I want an explanation! I want that mask!>

He threw off the chador. There were people at other tables by this time. They pointed at the tall figure in film-covered dun overalls; there was a scatter of ironic cheering. Mr. Kershaw whispered urgently to Bella. “They think it’s a mask, But we’d better leave. The Protest’s over, but aliens on the loose in here—!”

Braemar Wilson had emerged again: a pale-skinned woman with a crown of dark red hair, in a dress of grey frost-fern lace over silver taffeta. Frost-fern detached sleeves rose almost to her shoulders, leaving them naked. Silver-grey tendrils cupped her breasts, barely veiling the dark nipples, and clung to her small waist. “Oh, I
want
that!” shouted Aditya, in English. “Albertine! Gilberte! Morel! Charlus! After her! Follow that frock!”

Mr. Kershaw moaned. “Stop them!”

The aliens had shed their cloaks, even the sullen materialist obedient to his patron. While the journalists hesitated, not keen to grapple with the superbeings, Aditya was gone: leaping over tables, dropping to four feet; Gilberte and Albertine close behind. Something, a projectile of light, zipped through the marquee. It passed overhead: a nothing in this sea of illusions. Next moment, sirens began to wail. “Air-raid,” yelled Roy Ifekaozor, in relief. This he could deal with. He grabbed Bella, the only Aleutian still in reach. “Quickly, er, sir, this way—”

Bodies milled wildly under the purple stars. Bella slipped free from his cloak and left Roy holding it. He stepped onto the dance floor, into a melee of panic and a stink of cooked flesh. Braemar was there, waiting to take his hand.

Green emergency tracks had sprung into being. Clubbers ran jostling for the exits down the bands of light. A Godlike voice boomed PLEASE KILL YOUR FX. PLEASE KILL YOUR FX. The hand that gripped Bella’s, hard and damp and infinitely characteristic, tugged him sideways into the dark. He sensed a cumbered, patched and makeshift nakedness of mechanical things, the reality behind the blossoming void. They came to a wall, found a heavy mechanical door that stood ajar, and squeezed inside.

Sid hauled the door shut. They were in a large gloomy shed. Strange creatures loomed, their pens outlined in thin red strips of light. Bella went up to one of them. He thrilled to its antiquity—the quality unknown in Aleutia. The monster’s flank was cold to the touch, under a pelt of sticky dust. But it was imbued with the life of the people who brought it into existence.

Sid killed his Braemar mask. He sat on the edge of the display housing, dressed in shabby singlet, cutoff leggings and plastic slippers. It was cool in here. He rubbed gooseflesh on his arms, which were grubbily pale beyond the rust-red tidelines at throat and wrists.

“That’s Stephenson’s Rocket you’re petting.
Now all our pomp of yesteryear is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
I love the old engines. This is my town, you know. I’d’ve liked to bring you here one day, if things had been different.”

“You aliens are so paranoid. No, we’re not. This hall belongs to the Office of Museums and Libraries. They haven’t any money for livespace. It doesn’t matter anyway. Nobody watches that CCTV stuff…. Except Cactus. He monitors the malls for us: a little late, but he’s thorough.”

Bella leaned against the engine’s flank.

“I was taking your advice. I still need to know Aditya’s travel plans. The Braemar mask was my lure. I thought we could meet on the dance floor, me and the alien chief. We’d get talking: a random social encounter, he’d tell me about his trip.”

She was looking at him with an expression of serious disbelief, which confirmed everything Sid had been told about the notorious Aditya the Beauty. She touched a fading scorch mark on the slick film that covered her sleeve.

“The fireworms? It was an air raid, just the Reformers, nothing to do with you people. And I’m not strictly an anti-Aleutian, not like Kris. I belong to, er, a splinter group.” He flicked his pillbox, so the beautiful woman’s aura rose like a flame. “I don’t try to kill aliens,” he quavered, falsetto. “Except by the millions…. What d’you think? D’you like me in a frock?”

She gave him that smile: Sid is being unreasonable.

She came over, leaving the engine as if she was sorry to give up its support, and held out in her filmed hand a sheet of crumpled purplish tissue.

Sid could only shake his head.

said Bella, looking mystified. She sat down: folding suddenly, as if her legs had given way, into the aliens’ informal crouch. She propped her head on her hands.

Sid grinned. “Clear as crystal, eh? Someone should have warned you not to drink the well water.”

“Is that so?” She didn’t notice the irony. The clubs were such cheapskates; she’d be down again in no time. The Bella who had taken his hand so sweetly, who had run with him into the dark as if they could run away from the world, was already fading.

She lifted her face, frowning at him very soberly.

Sid twisted the pillbox on his wrist moodily.

“That’s what we think. Dangerous and crazy. So why are you traveling in his company, dear mild-mannered librarian?”

The nostril slits in her starved-child face were drawn together in concentration. She gave a rueful shrug that acknowledged her meager resources.

Sid glanced at her sharply: a flash of blue, quickly hidden again.

“You don’t owe Maitri anything,” he muttered.

She blinked.

“No free man shall be taken,” declared Sid. “Arrested or imprisoned or disseised—whatever that means—or outlawed or exiled or otherwise destroyed, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and the law of the land…. It’s called the Magna Carta, a bit of it, near enough. It’s kind of a code of conduct, we’ve had something like it embedded in the architecture for thirteen hundred years or so, a fleabite, I know, by your reckoning. I’m not saying the law works but
at least it’s there.
Are you a free man, Bella? Or a free woman, if you’ll pardon the expression?”

She frowned, her nasal pinched: giving the impression that she was earnestly considering her answer. she said.

Sid laughed. “Oh, forget it. Sorry I spoke.”

Bella had relapsed into inner space, lost in Aleutia as he thought of it. She was so preoccupied tonight, she hadn’t even noticed he was committing the crime of “calling her she.” He saw the stolen girl he had glimpsed in the shadows of the cistern cave at Mykini. She’d been taking that medicine. She had the wilting-flower-stem look again, which it hurt him to see. But he knew how deceptive that fragility was. He had thought her meek: she was far from meek. He felt the core of obdurate self-respect beside him, hard and fine-cut as a jewel, a diamond in lamb’s clothing, and despaired of protecting her.

she said, suddenly.

The door of the museum hall screeched open. One of the site’s loveable old Robbie-the-robots peered in. “Whoever’s in here” it croaked, “the All-Clear’s sounded.”

Bella started, and stared in disgust.

“Not really.”

The robot shambled off. She got to her feet, the origami folds of hips and knees returning to a more human geometry. she said.

He stood. His throat was tight. “I suppose not.”

“You too. You take care.” He pulled a lumpy paper bag from the daypack on his shoulder. “Look, here’s more of my Aditya bait. You can have them. You’re in Avalon. You ought to have apples, if you come to the Island of Apples. They’re called Discovery Beauties, by ‘Discovery’ out of ‘Beauty of Bath.’” She took the bag. They faced each other, across the unbridgeable gulf.

The air-raid must have done something to Castlefield’s climate control. It was freezing in the engine hall. Sid huddled his arms around himself and hopped from foot to foot, trying to review what she had told him. When she was there in front of him, the Common Tongue was transparent. As soon as she was gone it melted in his memory into an intolerable blur.

What can you do with someone who spends a year in fairyland, which to her is but a day, and then takes you in her arms so casually: not as if the time between didn’t exist—because she knows that you lied to her, kidnapped her, sold her for rent-money: she believes you are the enemy. Not as if none of that happened, but
as if it doesn’t matter.
He was insulted!

“You’re not even my type,” he shouted aloud, to the empty hall. “I wanted a real girl. Not a cat-faced shoulder-high marsupial alien, who thinks human gender is just a question of who is bigger and can hit harder! And who WON’T EVEN TALK TO ME!”

The great engines stared ahead of them, massively unperturbed.

Suddenly from his fury, he plunged into a memory of her body, like fluid in his arms. Her claw shuddering in his gripping hand, the choked wild sounds in her throat. Indignation deserted him. He sat down on the dirty concrete, head in his hands. Shared pleasure had forged the friendship between Sid and the alien into a bond that could only hurt them both. He was enraged that she dismissed the whole human movie-plot of secrets and betrayals: car-chases, showdowns, meetings with Mister Big: but she was right. There was nothing to discuss, nothing to be done. She was caught in a trap she couldn’t see, and Sid couldn’t save her. He was as helpless as she was herself.

Viloma found a body in the car park. The Aleutians turned it over and discovered a swollen, agonized mask, flopping limbs, belly and thighs masked in blood. said Albertine, newly knowledgeable.

murmured Bella.

Aditya was more interested in Bella’s paper bag.

In the icy light of the parking hangar the gold and red globes were robbed of color, but they fitted nicely in one’s palm. Aditya enjoyed a moment of triumph.

Mr. Kershaw spared the corpse barely a glance. “Get in the car,” he said. “Please. Into the car.” The soldiers shut them in, and got up in their gun-turret caboose behind.

ii

The cablenet conference facility on Piccadilly Gardens was a large shabby building. The skeletons of some ancient trees decorated the foyer. Sid had thought they were the last trees on earth when he was a kid: a romantic notion he’d been quite sorry to lose. The hall was full of wartime bustle. He finally managed to get one of the “personal communications experts” to make his connection, using the Fat Man’s credit. Then he had to wait an hour. The “personal expert,” a facsimile young lady from another age, occasionally asked fatuous questions. Sid answered with docility. He had tried cheeking the aged data-handlers that lurked behind these images. It wasn’t worth it.