North Wind (37 page)

“Thank you, Sid.” Kumbva was gazing into the distance. “What needed so much power?”

“A carbon-based plasma atom-smasher. Dinky little thing, we don’t know really precisely what it was for. Du Pont was developing a new brand of support hose: who knows.”

“Mmm.”

Sid looked at Bella. She was ignoring the strange terms. She was attending vividly to the wordless communication that was flying. What he saw in her face alarmed and thrilled him.

“Oh now,” he protested. “Fat Man, let’s not get excited.”

“I think we need to know more,” said Kumbva, mildly. “About this boring, typical nuclear accident, which we have previously found uninteresting.”

The treasure hunters stared at each other. The
password!
It had such a numinous glow. Sid grinned.” Okay, a job for the new recruit. She’s a librarian. Let’s take her to the library.”

There were ominous firecracker noises in the distance as they came out, but the incident was too far off to worry about. Someone had taken Sid’s leclec. They hurried on foot along Rotten Row, where a party of veiled women were riding on showy thoroughbreds, flanked by armed grooms. At Hyde Park Corner a traffic jam had formed, around a van hawking green fodder for drom-drawn carts. Here they picked up a group of little boys: who, thanks to the Fat Man’s skill, did not see a noseless alien, but who grasped the entertainment value of an enormous fat foreigner in a white suit. murmured the Fat Man. He broke into a run down Piccadilly, and lost the jeering children by diving into the second-hand clothes mart opposite the Ritz hotel.

It took Sid and Bella some time to track him down and prise him away from the stalls. It must have been nearly noon before they reached the library. It was in a short, quiet street near Whitehall. There was a bread queue opposite: Bella called them all bread queues, though the prize could be anything desirable and rare. The entrance to the library was chained and barred.

she exclaimed, staring across the pavement.

Kumbva tapped his lips.

“Closed for major refurbishment,” Sid read from a crumbling lettered sign, and winked at Bella. Kumbva moved in. The queue watched incuriously as three scavengers: a halfcaste dressed for clubbing, a ruddy skinned blond in “alien” overalls, and a big fat man—wearing animator’s gloves, and a white suit—dismantled the barrier at the gates of the defunct British Council building, and vanished inside.

The “New” Library was in the basement. Sid, with the Fat Man tricks-bag slung over his shoulder, shone a torch around. “We found this place years ago. Everyone has forgotten it exists, we reckon: that’s how it survives. But it’s cabled-up, still collecting data, still filing it all. Still powered, but it’s better to bring your own.” He went to the central island, and removed a panel with an accustomed air. He tugged out a meltoptic cable, broke it; spliced in a plump brown disk.

“Just in case some Allied monitoring spots a user-surge where none should be: it could happen. Besides, this part of London, the Monuments, greys-out every five minutes. It shouldn’t matter to a system like this, but I’m not the one to try and funx-out what’s wrong, if it goes down and doesn’t come back up…. Lights. Service.”

The room woke. Bella saw ordered booths; dusty display cases, emptied of their mementos long ago. This was not a library in the sense she understood: not a private collection.

she suggested, uncertainly, and did so.

we in church? You may be right, the Self is everywhere.> Kumbva followed suit cheerfully, briefly. He cocked his massive head.

“Ah.” The secret agent and his master looked at each other.

“We don’t know how to use them,” confessed Sid. “Much. We didn’t have public libraries around where I was dragged up. What d’you think this is, the twentieth century?”

put in the engineer, humbly,

“We ask stupid questions,” explained Sid. “It’s like one of those random counseling generators. Sometimes we get a blizzard of stuff, and we don’t know how to get them to filter it. Sometimes they just say ‘Yes,’ or ‘No’: and we’re no wiser.”

Bella still looked doubtful.

The Fat Man chuckled.

Bella sat down. Kumbva and Sid took booths on either side of her. She picked up the dusty visor—thinking, as she clasped it around her head, what a life-changing, fearful gesture it had been, the first time she put on a humans’ contact wrap. Her field of vision became a coruscating mass of blue on blue on blue. “Hello, friend. There are no human librarians on duty at the moment. Can we help? Or would you prefer to leave a message?”

“Coralin!” breathed Bella, putting her hands up to the human wrap that held
life,
in astonishment. “Is this
coralin?”

“Yes, we are,” answered the sweet, multitudinous voice.

“Coralin,” agreed Kumbva’s voice, placidly. “Living on here, undisturbed, unsuspected. Coralin, whose trademark is to be compatible with anything. The polymorphously perverse blue-clay, the processing medium that the human race abandoned in horror when the aliens arrived, and they faced the reality of compatibility
sans frontières.
Goodness knows what they get up to in here, when nobody around to ask stupid questions.”

“We catalogue,” they answered. “We cross-reference. There is always more to be done, in a library.”

Coralin, thought Sid. Performing animals, I hate ‘em. It was a horrible idea, really. The entity (our name is legion) that lived inside this casing. Sucking up the news, the shows, the music; sucking up all the hordes of new books of mayhem and cupidity, before they hit the hells. Sucking in everything. Changing, in another space and time, becoming what? Never knowing that they/it had been abandoned, that humanity had taken another turning. Their swift ages passing uncounted. How did coralin perceive time?

“What do you want to know?” asked Bella.

“I can’t tell you,” confessed the engineer. “I hardly know what I’m hoping, in fact I’d rather not say. Suppose we review anything on record conceivably connected with that accident in Neubrandenburg, and see where that leads. Don’t be afraid of going over old ground.” The Fat Man’s tone took on a touch of hauteur. “Sid and I may have overlooked a few details.”

Silence fell. The blue screen in front of Sid’s eyes shifted with enormous rapidity, through an algebra of data-netting tools that meant nothing to him. It slowed to Bella’s eye-blink. He glimpsed a map of Europe, dotted with tiny pyramids. A monochrome video sequence, which he’d seen before.

“That’s it!”

“This is the accident,” said Bella’s voice. “From the campus monitoring.” A tower of cloud billowed silently, small figures scattered. Sound appeared to have been lost somewhere along the years. “There’s a little more, of the entombment: and some text and figures from various sources. I’ll run through it, stop me whenever you like.”

“Thank you,” murmured Kumbva.

The accident had happened during an off shift, when there were few people in the building. There were two presumed fatalities, technicians whose remains (at this point in the reportage) had not been recovered from the reactor chamber. With such a pitiful body-count, global reportage had switched, almost at once, to Buonarotti and her departure for New Delhi; where she would pass into retirement, and be forgotten.

“Can you see anything anomalous?”

“These are figures for similar accidents.”

Aleutian “figures” were false-colored spirals, fans and mushrooms: intensity of color translated into closeness in time, in geographical area, in the type of reactor, in the pathology of the accident, in the behavior of the plume, in the data on short and long term contamination… It was too direct for Sid’s intuition. He could not sense these gradations as measurement; he wanted numbers and x/y graphs and printed words. Bella, the librarian who couldn’t read flipped over those bits at dismissive speed. “Entombment looks interesting,” she remarked, absorbed.

“Mmmm,” agreed Kumbva.

Back to ancient and very basic video, translated and conserved. Now Bella was scanning several emergency clean-up operations, one of which was the crucial accident, frame by frame. The team that had poured the tomb for Du Pont-Farben’s little glitch was a Russian outfit. The raffish swagger of those legendary tough guys of the Dissolution Meltdowns came through. “Differently marked vehicles,” noted Bella. “Same faces where it counts.”

When Aleutians say “face” they don’t mean eyes-nose-mouth. They mean the presence. Sid peered intently at the grey images. She could be right.

“Clean-up teams were usually Russian,” he announced, trying to sound as if he knew where this was going. “Rasputin types: breakfast on strychnine-sandwiches, smoke a pack of fifty heavy tars, pick up a few hours of cell-destroying radiation, break for lunch on scrapie-sausage. They thrived on it. Environmental disaster was good business for those heroes.”

“Too good, maybe. Look.”

The screen had settled on a courtroom: a prosecution for fraud. There was clear dialogue, for a change; the coralin helpfully lip-synced the speech into English. There had been an expensive industrial incident. It was being suggested that no disaster had in fact occurred: that in collusion with the hiring company this team had faked evidence, doped emissions and tampered dosimetry.

“That’s not the only time they got as far as court.”

Under different company names and personal aliases, key members of the team that handled the accident at Buonarotti’s university had had serial brushes with the law. The coralin found only one, minor, successful prosecution: but for readers of the Common Tongue, the informal exchanges in the livespace court records left no room for doubt. The heroes freely admitted they were guilty as charged, laughing all over their solemn, spruced-up courtroom faces.

Except for the time when they managed to rack up fifty-odd horrible deaths by chemical burns, in a chemical plant explosion they rigged and then “cleaned up.” They had the grace to express regret (silently) for that one, as they got off scott free.

“But the contamination?” asked Kumbva, sharply.

“Difficult,” admitted the librarian, after studying more “figures.” “There’s what the locals call a ‘paper trail,’ linking those faces with the company that was contracted to monitor soil and site: but the year after they returned their first data there was a similar event nearby. A real one. Our campus and surrounding area were affected by the plume. And then the monitoring firm went out of business, and nobody seems to have taken over—”

“Let me study some of the raw analysis.”

“Buonarotti spent
wads
of money that year,” murmured Sid. “D’you remember, Fat Man? She’d given the Nobel money away to charity, of course. That last year she emptied her accounts: and no trace of where it all went. We’ve thought she was financing anti-Aleutians.”

“Sssh.… But so cumbersome!” The engineer’s lips drew back from formidable teeth. “So dangerous and elaborate! Such a risk! I have been searching for
information.
Data, a ‘blueprint.’ Everything I knew of her culture, your culture, pointed to that. Why do it this way?”

“If you mean what I think you mean,” answered Sid, “I can tell you. Why hide her secret under a blanket of non-existent hard radiation? Because she knew what was coming. She saw a future where no one would notice a faked nuclear accident, among so many real ones. She saw coralin tape knitted into blankets, disks of fantastically advanced data cut up and used to stop teeth. She was smart. You people couldn’t fool her, when they fooled practically all the world.”

The Fat Man sat back and pulled off his wrap.

Sid glimpsed the sea of blue as Bella signed off, before he did the same.

“She faked it!” exclaimed Kumbva. “Peenemünde Buonarotti faked an environmental disaster!” He twisted the wrap over and over in his hands. “I don’t know.” he corrected himself. “Nothing here amounts to proof. All we can say is that we are no longer sure we can dismiss Peenemünde’s workplace. Whereas, as Bella once wisely pointed out to me, if it wasn’t for the deadly contamination, I’d have torn that campus apart.”

Another silence fell and lengthened, in the forgotten library.

“The Campfire Girls!” Sid remembered suddenly. “In the sarcophagus. They had trouble with their dosimetry. Getting weird, unbelievable readings; it scared them. That’s what I heard.” His heart was thumping. He thought of the last great scientist of the global civilization: getting old and tired, frightened and reckless as her world collapsed around her. It was strange to recall that
this
world, the normal day-to-day mess that Sid took for granted, had been to Buonarotti an appalling fall into night, a dreadful, unplumbed abyss.

Kumbva jumped up, his bear-body full of urgent energy.

“We’d better be on our way. No time to lose.”