North Wind (34 page)

“You mean they’re becoming more like us, and you approve. You’re one of those who wants humans to be imitation Aleutians?”

“It’s not like that—” Bella dropped her eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to argue.” There was an awkward pause.

Clavel talked on. He spoke of the sights of Earth, the poetry on his walls, the progress of the climate improvement scheme (on which Yudi was more determined than ever). He was interesting, insightful and well informed. Bella spooned the dire stew, listened and offered anodyne formal comments. It made her feel better to know that Clavel was at least as nervous as she was herself, about what should happen when the meal was over.

The Tinman had followed the Angel and his prey into the deserted Underground station. The default lighting had failed, but he had night-sight lenses. With their help he read the blackboard by the gate. It was covered in white chalked copperplate, the mark of the sole literate community left in this ravaged city. There had been “an incident” on the line. Service was subject to long delays, or suspended. The date was a year old.

But it was dated! You had to admire that.

After months of neglect, the gate had fallen open. He killed his mask and passed unchallenged. He’d trudged the filthy ballast for what felt like hours when he came across the feather. It lay poised on a rail: a white feather twice the size of a swan’s primary, with a heavy burnish of gold, violet, green. He assumed it was virtual. But when—stupid, but irresistible—he stooped to pick it up, it turned out to be real.

He sat down, studying the Angel’s message by glimmering animal vision. There were no giant swans around here, and swans don’t have rainbows in their feathers. This was the Aleutian answer to human magic. You can make illusions. We can make reality. You can do black-box conjuring tricks, we can create. We can make your wildest dreams come true: easily, easily.

The feather had been dropped deliberately. Clavel must have spotted the Tinman at the casino, and knew he’d been followed when he finally took Bella away. It was a mean joke: saying Clavel didn’t care about Sid. He had nothing to fear. Bella couldn’t be rescued, she wasn’t a captive. Her fated lover had taken her home at last.

Every halfcaste on Earth, when Sid was a child, had known about the great Clavel and his vow of perpetual mourning. Nearly every halfcaste kid went through a period of being secretly convinced they were Johnny Guglioli reborn: destined to end Clavel’s grief, forgive him for the rape. Bring Clavel’s benign influence back to the Expedition; heal everything that had gone wrong. Spiritually, it was a noble destiny. On a more material level, you could dream of the day the poet-captain would come and sweep you off to a life of bliss.

Little Sidney had never been through this phase. He was the one who used to point out to the other kids that, if you forgot the legend and remembered the records, you could see that the famous rape didn’t mean anything. The love story had never existed except in the alien’s mind. Johnny Guglioli had barely
liked
Clavel. Why should a reborn Johnny feel any different?

But that was the real person, who would never be reincarnate, who was dead forever. With a Johnny who had been purpose-built, how could Clavel fail?

He tucked the feather in the breast strap of his overalls, and tramped on. The Fat Man had ordered Sid to leave Bella alone, when they found her in the gaming hells. He was to wait until the other player had made his move, and then go after Clavel and fetch Bella from the poet-captain’s lair. The Fat Man’s instructions were never less than whimsical and arbitrary, but this was surely the most senseless errand yet.
It’s over, he thought. There aren’t any “latent memories,” the séance sorted that out. Bella’s no longer our concern. She never was. I was right from the start. I don’t know why I’m doing this.

The other Aleutians were together somewhere in the house: playing games, making music, chatting, slipping off to lie down together. They would spend the night Aleutian style, napping and waking. The poet captain was with them: puzzling and fascinating and delightful as ever to his followers. Bella the isolate did not share their company. She was alone (she’d grown used to it) for the long blank of the locals’ night. She slept, and dreamed.

He, Bella, was profoundly isolate. It was no longer a physical disability. He swallowed the broth of presence, it sank into his pores. But the messages delivered to him were untrue. They were artifacts of the nerve fibers, mechanical tricks. Some vital chemical twist had come unraveled and he had lost his faith in the commonalty of mind. It was gone like a major perceptual interface disabled: as if he could touch the world but feel nothing. As if his eyes could see, but his mind could not process images. He was surrounded by ghosts. The persons of Aleutia:
Maitri, Bokr, Aditya, Rajath, Yudisthara, Bhairava…,
various and individual as the void and distant stars, were like deadworld masks. He was hopelessly, permanently alone. So were they all, but he was doomed to know it.…Bella stirred, half-rising from unconsciousness. Am I always he when I dream? she wondered. She had not noticed this before. The formless nightmare, without events or narrative, seemed to tell her that she would never be part of Aleutia again. In her half sleep it had the cold touch of truth. But Aleutia exists, she thought. The commonalty is real, it won’t disappear because I’m shut out. Comforted, she sank once more into sleep.

…and was
he.
He saw a room, which he knew was a room in this house. There was a wide bed, local-style but without legs. The coverlet was gold, crushed silk. A young masculine halfcaste sat on the edge of it, wearing a pair of denim jeans. He was not gene-therapied, but he’d had his nipples and his nose removed by surgery. He rubbed his hairless unmarked breast and bare shoulders. He was looking round him with frank admiration and hoping that a small deception would not be detected. He knew that the libertine who’d brought him back to this house preferred virgins. A halfcaste who had been whoring for perverse locals was spoiled. The boy knew this, and naively spoke of his deception in the Common Tongue. The person who was Bella, the hunter who prowled the gaming malls, watched and smiled.

They began the little play that the libertine liked to play. They talked, the two of them. The young man relaxed into his role. He was acting himself: innocent, greedy, and certain that the superbeing could grant his every wish. Bella grasped the youth’s hand and drew him into an embrace. The local struggled, as he had been tutored: pretending that he suddenly didn’t like the idea of sex with an alien.
When it comes to it,
whispered someone in Bella’s mind,
they never have to pretend this part…. Not one of the half-changed really wants to lie with us.

This voice whispered knowingly, and was the voice of the person who was Bella. But he managed to project himself into a different situation: in which he truly believed he was being invited to make love with a willing partner. When the young man began to struggle, and his disgust was unmistakable, Bella’s revulsion at what he was doing was overborne by habit. It was the terrible mistake that you can’t stop making, over and over again. He held the protesting body down, his belly open and his claw clutching. The young man’s soft penis had become swollen and rigid while he sobbed in shame: betrayed by the logic of the human response, where one kind of arousal is so close to another, fear or lust… Bella was feeling what happened to the male human body from the inside. He was racked by an incredible flux of sensations, playing both parts inextricably: as if he and the human were true lovers, twin selves…but the rape went on.

so smooth and lifeless, like no Aleutian flesh. Knowing that I am destroying any possibility of a true meeting, but so aroused by horror that I can ever escape. No other lying down could be so agonized, so intense. I bring them here. I make them act Johnny’s part. They comply in greedy fear, hoping I’ll pay them in supernatural favors. I cannot stop myself. I enact the rape because the rape is what is happening. What I did to Johnny is what we are doing to Earth. They say they want us, because they’re too frightened to say no and its too easy to say yes. And we know it’s a lie, we know what we are doing, but we won’t stop, it won’t stop—

Bella lay open eyed: the engrossing, orgiastic nightmare draining out of her. She was in her own room, she was Bella again and Clavel crouched by her bed. He was not looking at Bella. He seemed much younger than he had been at dinner. She lifted her hands to her temples. The fugitive trace of the pressure of a visor there was already fading.

She must have made some exclamation. The poet started.

he said.

He left the room.

Bella sat up. She touched her temples again, and the back of her head, above the nape. Yes, definitely a visor. Clavel! She felt that she was waking for the first time since the Angel brought here. She knew there would be no gene-therapy to remove this half-human disguise. She had never been Clavel’s other self. She got up, stripped off her night clothes, dressed herself deliberately and went to find her unhappy host.

Clavel’s retreat stood among derelict ruins, bedraggled bombsites, and big old houses subdivided into teeming tenements. The streets were littered with midden heaps and chunks of defunct machinery, left to bio-degrade slowly in the foul air. People sat about on corners and in doorways, wrapped in the bored languor of malnutrition. Sid wanted to hide behind the Tinman mask. But kids here would sell their vital organs for an fx generator, so he kept the pillbox pushed well up his sleeve. He found a café and ordered tea and a slice of cornbread and scrape. He could remember how it felt to be a halfcaste in a neighborhood like this. It is
not good
to have to deal with people who envy you, without having any reason to fear you. It’s a bad bargaining position: it ruins your nerves. It didn’t make any difference that halfcastes had no material advantages. They had their faith. For the victims of the Gender War, that was unforgiveable. He sat for hours, intermittently picking with a pocket-knife nail file at a blemish on the heel of his right hand.

He’d decided not to break in until after dark. It would be better that way. She’d have settled in. He’d make his speech, she’d say no thanks, I’m sorted. He’d congratulate the happy couple and leave.

He moved from the café to a pub. About ten in the evening, when the looks he was getting were nearing the verge of violence, he headed for Clavel’s protected grounds. He used the Fat Man’s gadgets to get in, and prowled like a trespassing sightseer: throwing stones at the sound of the waves on the seashore, listening to hooting monkeys and the rustle of tropical rain in the West African Forest. He might as well check it out; he wasn’t going to be here again. No alarms went off. No one appeared to give him the
can I help you?
and escort him to the gates.

It was raining hard when he dared the terrace above the English Country Garden. He picked the dead-and-alive lock with his hybrid skeleton key. His night lenses showed him a big room furnished with a tasty collection of antiques.

I just want to talk to her, please

He stepped inside. The room wasn’t, as he’d first thought, empty. For an instant virulent orange swamped his vision. The lenses adjusted, and there was Bella, sitting on a soft couch that was the most Aleutian object in sight, a dim lamp at her elbow; dressed in the same black slip she’d been wearing at the casino. She had a whisky tumbler in her hand.

she suggested.

He shut the terrace door, and stayed with his back to it. The air made him want to cough, it was a long time since he’d lived with aliens. They’d spawned monsters from her terrified flesh and he’d left her there alone… He realized, startled, that she was as consciously feminine as if he was looking at a human woman in full Gender-warpaint.

If she was surprised to see him it didn’t show: of course not. She sipped the whisky, giving him a somber, level look over the rim of the tumbler.

It was a moment of complicity, the small against the great, so unexpected that he could not respond. He put on the Tinman, and clanked (silently) over to her. He shook a closed metal fist: “You were very generous to the club mascot. Pity a person can’t live on fairy gold.”

He killed the mask and felt naked: cruelly exposed. “I like the outfit. I often wanted to tell you. Is that what they call a ‘Tomboy’? It’s very Old Earth, very natty.”

“Yeah, I know. Du Pont Hygene. If you don’t think Traditionalism is that weird—”

“I don’t care which side a company belongs to. I’m not interested in politics.”

Her stillness had an edge to it that puzzled him. It must be his imagination. He wanted to beg her,
please don’t leave me.

“I’ve been sent here, by my boss,” he said. “You know the whole story now, how you were supposed to be able to ‘remember’ things that happened to Johnny Guglioli. We want you with us, but that’s not why. We want you for yourself, the person you really are. Come with me, don’t vanish into Aleutia. You could be what Johnny should have been, the bridge between two worlds.”