North Wind (29 page)

Morel vaulted for the top of the cabinet, jumped from there onto the stairs. The monsters, intent on the numerous warm bodies they sensed beyond the barricade, let him go.

Aditya thought of Clavel, who had started this affair for his own benefit and then given up halfway. Always the same Clavel: always having regrets and pulling back from his own desire. Sorry it’s come to a bad end…he told the poet, in the Aleutia of his mind. But you’ll understand my part. The Pure One should. What could be more pure than loyalty that is totally undeserved?

One of Bella’s terrifying offspring reared over the cabinet: my, they were getting big.

Who would have thought the librarian had so much savagery in him? All those mimsy lives of holding it down: yes sir, no sir, please protect me sir. Then whoosh, what a reversal! He thought of those idiotic walking hat-stands at Uji and laughed. The traders had despised Bella, because he had no commensals! More than ever, I’m sorry we didn’t lie together. He had forgotten or he didn’t care that the librarian was not the librarian. His wanderers spoke, he spoke to Bella in the Aleutia of his mind. Another time—? He had no last thoughts for the Third Captain, the engineer. Aditya knew when he was not appreciated.

He had taken poison, which he habitually carried. To enjoy life to the full—as the Beauty did—it was necessary to have a little door inside, a secretion that could be triggered to provide a swift exit. The toxin in his body should slow the quasi-weapons.

He made a speech.

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love…

Aditya had never hated anyone. He loved those he guarded, the ones still alive behind this barricade, though he’d led them (not for the first time!) to a premature and unpleasant death. Yet the flavor was right: a fine carelessness. That was the way with these locals. There was something about them as familiar as a remembered dream. But like a dream, it vanished.

He covered his face. The creatures swarmed through.

Bella had collapsed on the stairs, a makeshift torch in either hand, the fuel can from the car on his back. A figure leapt into his smoky view. “Morel!” he gasped.

It was not Morel. But it was an Aleutian face—that Bella recognized almost instantly. With one wild glance the figure flew past him and disappeared downwards. Bella struggled to his feet. The creatures were slow to attack him, he’d discovered that. If he was alone in a room with them he guessed he wouldn’t last long, but in the open they hesitated, and he had a chance.

The suits had a floorplan of the campus, which they’d hooked out of Youro library sources. It had turned out to be seriously inaccurate, at least for these buildings. Their ionizing radiation count was alarming, it had gone off the scale of the suits’ dosimetry: it was hotter than hell in here, must be the most contaminated spot in Prussia. They couldn’t work out where the ordinary fires had come from, either—

Sid crouched in a doorway, listening to the Campfire Girls on Radio Suit. He had seen Bella. She was alive. He had known she was still alive, somehow, when he was standing in that bloody chamber. He had to get away from the suits and find her.

The Campfire Girls had undertaken to help the Fat Man, to defuse a touchy situation involving rivalry between aliens. They’d agreed to hand Bella over to the Fat Man’s agent and modestly retire. But the SEF knew about the treasure hunt, and they knew Bella was important though they didn’t know why. Sid didn’t trust them. He tongued Radio Suit to a murmur, to cut the distraction. He’d still hear if anyone started wondering where Sidney Carton was. But he should have a few minutes.

He followed the figure he’d seen, down the stairs. He was near the front entrance of the smaller building. He’d have to brazen it somehow to get past the guards, but once he had Bella everything would be easy. The light from his helmet showed a counter and pigeonholes. An ancient monitor on a keyboard stand gazed at him. The floor was scattered with scraps of litter: how long had it been lying there?

“Bella?”

She was in a corner behind the counter in an animal crouch, her overalls smeared, blackened and torn. He could see a raw red gash on the chicken skin flesh of one forearm. She had never looked less human. He was consumed by pity and fury.

“What did they do to you?” he whispered, his voice shaking, sweat breaking out inside the cool, safe shell. “What happened Bel? It doesn’t matter. Come with me, quickly. I’m kidnapping you again. I’ll get us of this. Trust Sid.”

He realized how terrifying the suit must look. He wrestled, pulled off a gauntlet and held out his bare hand.

(felt the thunderous fall of invisible death on his skin)

The half-human thing erupted from its crouch. It bowled him over. Sid yelled. Something lithe, terrible, wild fell on him, teeth trying to meet in his protected throat. He rolled on the floor, scrabbling for his gauntlet, how did she suddenly come to be naked? What he’d thought was Bella wasn’t even wolf below the waist. It was a red serpent, a python as big as a man’s thigh, made of raw flesh. It had wrapped itself round him. Something was trying to pull him free, but the monster wouldn’t let go.

The sound of his own screaming—

He woke surrounded by suits, feeling blissfully dizzy. His right hand throbbed slightly. He rolled his helmet and saw a slick of burned stuff that looked like melted plastic, smeared thickly across the floor beside him.

He realized they were talking radio, not Aleutian, and said that again aloud. “YEAH. IT WOULD. WHAT D’YOU TAKE YOUR GAUNTLET OFF FOR, YOU STUPID DICK?”

“I can’t remember.”

They carried him to the truck. Sid missed some time. When he became conscious again he told them he felt well. They took him to the colonel’s office. She sat at her broad desk, below the obligatory portrait of Carlotta de Leyva: the one where she had the parrot on her wrist and heaps of braid on her shoulders. The first President of the United Socialist States, a small-boned little woman, putting on flesh in middle age, looked down at him with bold and friendly eyes. She was no more really here than most of what he could see, inside this segment of a personnel-carrier pod. The impressive acreage of unreality was a sign of rank, like a key to the executive toilet. His sense of the cabin’s cramped physical dimensions crept through the matte and the dope, making him feel slightly sick.

“That was not funny, Sid,” said the Colonel, in that calm, mysteriously lilting, forgotten accent. “What happened in there?”

“I don’t know. Ask the Fat Man.”

She heaved a sigh. “Well, as far as we can tell there’s nothing left alive, and we’ve sealed the tomb. We came here to secure the release of a hostage. I think we can safely say that that situation is over. She can’t have survived. Shit. I hope and pray the Gender-Warriors never find out about this affair: they’d love some alien biological weapons. Thank God for hard radiation. But why do I get this vile idea that what they were doing was for fun, some kind of gross ugly alien sex-ritual game that went wrong?”

She pointed a square-tipped brown finger at him. “I caught that. Don’t bother to translate.” She stared ahead of her. “I suppose this is the end of the treasure trail. No one’s going to be getting any information out of the young alien woman whose career we’ve all been following with such interest. You, me, the Fat Man, those other aliens. I’m glad. Nothing good ever comes out of Old Earth, and the aliens are best left strictly alone. In my opinion God says no. The space race is over. We have to learn to make things work right here.”

She attended to a voice he couldn’t hear, and then stood up. They got out of the truck. It was parked in a wood outside the fence. A suit was walking away from a beacon planted in the open space (contaminated farmland) beyond the trees. There was a bullet-shaped German car parked on the road. A local, a Prussian male, stood beside it, smoking a tobacco cigarette.

“I sent for a taxi. Excuse me if we don’t offer you a lift, we’re going straight back to Tracy Island.” Jez grinned. She leaned on the roof of the Prussian car and pushed up her sleeve: studied a silver bracelet that she wore.

“In the middle of the Protest,” she mused, “One of my guys was in Macedonia, or one of those places, on this very same trail. The last records we have, she was in a torched alien Trading Post, sifting the remains. She’d found something that looked like crushed beetle-wings in one of the trashed rooms. She thought it was the remains of a receiverless global: a suggestive discovery, she felt, in a nest of telecoms-allergic telepaths. She never came back. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you Sid?”

He shrugged. His expression moved, minutely, through a subtle sequence of ignorance and reproachful puzzlement.

“In English, Sid. I’m not a funxing alien.”

“Maybe they
were
beetle wings.”

“All that, for ‘maybe they were beetle wings’? What a ridiculous language.” She let him off the hook. “Okay. But you tell the Fat Man, the SEF currently owes his private anti-Aleutian-watcher splinter group nothing. In fact you are in debt, but don’t worry about paying us. We’ll call you, got it?”

“Absolutely, ma’am.”

Sid had just discovered that the right sleeve of his borrowed pullover suit ended in a white stub much smaller than a human hand. He was staring, trying to assimilate this knowledge. The Colonel turned the bracelet on her wrist, so that tiny jewels caught the light, and looked at him without perceptible sympathy. She tucked something into his breast pocket.

“Cash it in where you can, and don’t forget to take your rad tabs. G’bye, Sid.”

The big silver bird came and picked the personnel carrier up, and bore the Campfire Girls off to their secret base. Sid made the Prussian drive around the Exclusion Zone. There was nothing moving. He had promised never to leave Bella alone, but he did not dare to go back inside. He sat in the car, clutching a chit for a new hand, and cried, and cried.

9  
The Decay Of The Angel

i

When everyone had gone, Bella crept from her hiding place in the blighted wood. She didn’t go near the crashed car that lay where Aditya and the others had left it. She’d seen the suits crawling over it, and she was afraid. She sat with her back against a tree bole, shivering in the June morning in her singed and blackened clothes.

She was Bella, Johnny Guglioli’s daughter.

She grasped at this construction of events, not sure where it had come from. She had been kidnapped as a human female child, disguised by gene-therapy, and brought up in Aleutia. Kidnapped? Rescued from this awful place: from the War, from human misery. But she had been stolen from her guardian by the anti-Aleutians, and pursued by Aleutian traitors to the Expedition, and others, for the sake of her father’s memories. It was a misunderstanding. She remembered nothing. Everybody knew that now.

There would be no more silver suits coming half way round the world to track her down, no more letterbombs from the anti-Aleutian fanatics, no more showers of mysterious favor from a reckless society beauty. She was safe. She realized she was kneeling, covering her face. She dropped her hands, mugging self-consciously. Silly me, praying in the middle of a field.

Stop laughing everyone!

Aleutia-in-her-mind was laughing at her. She’d been such a fool about the “disguised prince” rumor. She was Johnny Guglioli’s offspring: prey, treasure, a negotiable object. She wasn’t important as a person, not to anyone. That was proved. Silly librarian, who had walked into the jaws of death, to a fate worse than death as the locals said, certain that that her secret lover, watching from afar, would rescue her in the nick of time if things went wrong. Convinced, just as she had been in Athens.

She looked at her hands. The pallid skin, where you could see it through blood and smuts, was puckered and visibly pored. I’m a human disguised as an Aleutian, she thought. We (the executive ‘we’ of Aleutia still came to her naturally) made me into a halfcaste. I am the first true halfcaste. If I had tape of Johnny Guglioli here I ought to watch it and watch it. He is the nearest thing I have to a past self.

What had been done to her was cruel. If you don’t know who you are, you are cut off from the WorldSelf. You can’t know God, if you don’t know what aspect of God, the WorldSelf, is you. If you don’t know who you are, you are mad. It isn’t romantic. You have to be kept in hospital, because you can’t look after yourself. She began to tremble, remembering the bridge over the Uji river…. Maitri’s librarian stood there with Aditya, frightened by the Beauty’s sudden attention. The librarian protested silently, to everyone:
please stop telling me I’m not who I think I am. Don’t you know you could drive a person crazy?

But was that me on the bridge? Where did
I,
this
I,
begin?

Her identity lay in fragments, shards of used quarantine film. She couldn’t get back inside.

The librarian!

She clutched the sides of her head, as if like the locals she believed
her
self,
her identity, was held in there. The memories! So many memories! So many lives! The years going down one from the other, deeper and deeper into invisibility, and all that was still this
self,
tied to this
person.
The continuity into this immense depth, a lived and living thing going down into the impossibly far away dark….

The borrowed memories fell away. The presence of Aleutia fell away. She was left alone.

A different kind of memory struck her.

Inside the sarcophagus, she had seen Rajath the trickster. Morel had been Rajath in disguise! She didn’t know when the substitution had happened. She was isolate, and she’d never known Aditya’s housekeeper well. She had told Aditya, that day in Karen city “you’re supposed to be harmless so long as Rajath’s not around.” She’d said it to make Aditya feel unsuspected: she’d known that if Aditya was a traitor to the Expedition, Rajath the trickster
must
be somewhere near. She hadn’t known how close. Seeker-after-truth had told her there were traitors with Sanskrit names, who meant to sell the secret of instantaneous travel to the Expedition’s enemies. She had been looking for the traitors, and the traitors had found her.

She thought Rajath had escaped alive. He must be somewhere near, right now. She was not afraid, she was in no state for such a rational emotion, but she felt it would be horrible to meet him, so she got up and began to walk towards town, hardly aware of what she was doing. Something came rumbling behind her out of the empty plain. An Allied jeep pulled up. There were two men in it. The door of the cab opened.

The driver jerked a thumb. “Montes.” She climbed in. “Tu t’as trouvé dans un peu de firefight? Mais comment? On n’batte pas autour d’ici, depuis bien des jours—”

Bella said nothing. Let them make up their own story. The jeep rumbled on. Soon they reached the spot where the tourists had abandoned two hired cars. One of them was still there. Its half-dismantled body was hardly visible under a mass of human scavengers. The other had gone. She realized, as they passed this spot and the vastness of the plains opened, that she could have died before she reached town on foot. The dizzying scale of the giant planet, invisible to a pampered tourist, returned to her. That was good. Room enough to get lost and stay lost.

On the outskirts of town the men stopped and sat for a short while, discussing in pidgin French, their common language, whether to force Bella to lie with them. Boy or girl, they were not fussy. They discounted the risk of disease: they had remedies. But with a face like that, who could tell what went on under the clothes? They decided against it. They drove into the center and gently pushed her out into the street.

Buildings closed around her like tall broken teeth. She learned that food was being dispensed and followed this rumor, aware of someone insisting that she needed to eat. Before she reached the canteen, she came upon the entrance to a gaming mall. It was basically similar to the one in Trivandrum. She went inside, for no other reason than that it was something she had done before. She stood with a group of thrill-hungry children by the pay gate. Someone came in, slotted a cashcard and beckoned. He spoke in a dialect she didn’t know, but it was easy to understand.

“You, the little halfcaste—”

In the blue darkness of the Spectator’s Gallery there was a whispering like an overheard dream. She lost her first patron, maybe she missed his signals. She found an exit from the arena and waited. A player came out of the game, pulling off his visor and breathing hard. “I shouldn’t do this. You don’t want to get addicted, kid. It’ll ruin your life.” He tossed his half-charged kit to her, and walked away quickly.

It was like Trivandrum but better. There was much more of everything, and everything had the rich detail of the body-masks in the Castlefield club. The game did Bella good. It was better than food. She came out of it, when the kit went dead, feeling alive and focused. She went out into the entrance lobby and flopped against the wall, thinking of nothing. Her vision had gone grey, with black at the edges. She had no idea what she’d been playing, no memory of the book at all. She didn’t care. Someone came and sat next to her.

“Hey.” It was a girl, a kind of a girl, dressed like one of the sextoys on Regent Street Market. Bella was afraid her own bloody and filthy clothes had been recognized as alien. Apparently not. Maybe in this town, smoke-stained bloody rags were unremarkable.

“You’re good.” Tiny bead-like things moved over the pale skin of the stranger’s face. They glittered, and fell into the air continually.

Bella was surprised to see a halfcaste so far from the enclaves, and wearing imitation Aleutian cosmetics. She said so, informally. The girl made no coherent response. She had the physical attributes of a halfcaste, but she did not “speak Aleutian.”

“I’m Lotte. You’re new here. What’s your name?”

“Bella.”

“I’m a spider. Are you? You play like one. What were you doing in there? You’re wasted on that stuff.
Sword and Sorcery
is for the clawfaces: dickheads and kids. If we had money we could play the money-games. I could get you in. Have you?”

She searched her pockets. Bella had traveled with Aditya helplessly as an infant. Of course she had no money: she had nothing. But Lotte’s predatory stare demanded to be placated. She found a creased wad of thin tissue and, unthinking, handed it over. The halfcaste girl spread it carefully. It was Sid’s ten head note.

“Aaaah!”

The note vanished in a tightly knotted fist. The girl’s sigh of delight didn’t reach her nasal. Its constructed lips did not plump or quiver. But her cheeks glowed red under the patina of synthetic wanderers. She declared, rapidly, that she did not steal, she was not a thief, she did not know what Bella’s resources were and didn’t dare steal outright from a stranger of her own kind, who might have some spider-means of revenge.

“You need a friend, don’t you,” she said aloud. “I’ll be your friend. Let’s go. I know where we can change this.”

Bella tried to get up. Her legs would not obey her. Lotte laughed, and grubbed around in the pouch that she wore on the front of her tiny skirt. She took hold of Bella’s slack jaw and thrust something into her mouth: something crumbly and hard that softened and burst when it met saliva, with electrifying effect.

“Don’t be scared, it’s only sugar.”

They left the mall, Lotte with her arm around Bella: laughing and holding her up. Bella could not walk straight, but she was awake enough to register that a halfcaste gamer, living deep in Old Earth, had instantly recognized an Aleutian banknote.

She put this fact away, to think about it later.

Lotte took Bella home with her, fed her, cleaned her up and gave her some clothes. She taught Bella how to play the money games, and introduced her as a friend to the tiny halfcaste community. This last was exceptionally generous of her because before Bella arrived, Lotte had been the best, most authentic halfcaste in town. It seemed there was not much change after these services from the Aleutian note: Bella never saw a scrap of the money. She didn’t complain. She considered the exchange fair, even after she understood what a stack of local credit or cash—at the worst rate imaginable—Lotte should have got for a tenhead.

Eventually Lotte decided to move out east, towards Russia. There were bigger and smarter malls in the resort towns along the fashionable Baltic shore. She bequeathed to Bella—informally, she didn’t make any goodbye speeches before vanishing—her room, her “petit trou” as she called it, in a big derelict block near the halfcastes’ favorite mall. The cabal of scavengers who ran the block then discovered substantial arrears of “rent” and descended on Bella. She didn’t mind. She was on a winning streak. She paid Lotte’s debts and considered it fair trade for the halfcaste girl’s last gift of information: one can move on.

She moved to a big city. She dug herself into her own “petit trou” near the mall the halfcastes favored, which was invariably the best—if not the smartest or the most salubrious—gaming venue in any town. She was imitative, she was methodical, she did exactly what Lotte had done and everything fell into place. The pattern of her life was set. She had found a way to disappear.

She learned that in every city of the War there was a community of these strange creatures, Aleutian groupies surviving without any Aleutians. They lived around the virtuality “hells,” grifting a marginal living out of the games: some resorting to prostitution, or preying on each other. They were a different breed from the
neti-neti
of the South. They did not “speak Aleutian,” they did not study character records. Their clumsy transformations were enhanced with makeup. Yet their devotion was real. Sometimes, (they insisted) it was satisfied—mysteriously, secretly. But beyond Lotte’s acceptance of the tenhead note, Bella saw no evidence of actual contact with any Aleutians.

She lived on sugar, naturlait, and diet-supplement patches handed out at the free canteens. One day she bought bread, and a pack of vegetable stock cubes. She broke the bread and the cubes into a naturlait carton and ate the slops. She ate the whole loaf. Her gut struggled painfully and messily, but survived that first assault. The Old Earth halfcastes had the same dietary ideal as the
neti-neti
of Trivandrum. They dosed and starved themselves in a regime that produced no more than a liquid drizzle of excrement, and used “Aleutian” toilet pads, as religiously as they used cosmetics to flatten their hair and pucker their skin. Bella, traveling in the other direction, bought shampoo to make her leathery hair curl (it didn’t) and trained her gut to make turds.

She became obsessed with hard food. She took it home and gorged on the hardest she could find: raw vegetables, nuts, corn, crackers, cocoa beans. It was an ugly process but she persisted doggedly. She was frightened of this unhuman body. She wanted to kill it, if it refused to change. She wanted to be normal, ordinary, acceptable. Nothing more, was that too much? She forced herself to eat until she vomited; and then to eat again.