North Wind (38 page)

They traveled to Hamburg by air-cruiser and checked into one of the runway hotels. Their room was a drive-in lockup, with space to spread their bedding beside the vehicle slot, a compacting toilet-cum-wastebin, a cablepoint; nothing else. Kumbva at once plunged into a tussle with the cable-service, securing transport and provisions for the trip east.

Sid walked out into the cold, dusty afternoon. The vast expanse of the old airfield was dotted with caravanserai like their own. There were people wandering about. Bella was looking through the perimeter fence. He stood beside her. In the distance a cruiser grew by tiny degrees, a silvery blob grazing the rim of forest that blurred the horizon. The engineer was traveling in his preferred Old Earth disguise, as the mysterious but respected alien-expert known as the Fat Man. Sid wondered what the alien-watcher watching circus was making of Bella, if it had picked up on her. She’d swopped the Tomboy for “Aleutian” clothes. Over her dun suit she wore an open-sleeved robe in fine black and white wool, a local version of alien style. The patterns were too sharp-edged. Sid called them geometric. Bella and the Fat Man called them scientific-looking; meaning an effect of the wildest imagination.

They had not been alone together in the day and night it had taken to set up this journey: and a gulf had opened again. Nothing but obvious social exchanges seemed to pass between them, spoken or unspoken. He wanted to touch her but he couldn’t. The tug of physical attraction, which had become so utterly necessary to him, seemed cut off at the source.

Bella turned, arms folded over that breastless torso. From the dead-child face black on black eyes surveyed him. Was this someone she used to know? She thought not.

She walked off, back to their room.

Right, fine. That put Sid in his place.

No one would rent them a car so the Fat Man bought one, a lumbering armored camper-van convertible. Sid did the driving, the Aleutians stayed in the back. He sat through long, hypnotic hours, thinking about the sarcophagus and what they were likely to find there. He was appalled at the thought of going inside that place again. He’d bought himself an army surplus suit, on the Fat Man’s credit: Kumbva and Bella planned to walk in without any protection; hard rads didn’t bother Aleutians (but what about Bella!). The Fat Man had brought surprisingly little in the way of equipment. Sid assumed this meant there’d be reinforcements and supplies joining them at the tomb: but nothing had been said. He felt left out and bitter.

They avoided towns and cities as much as possible, as they passed through the fragments of what had once been Germany. Their satellite receiver picked up snowflake transmissions swathe by swathe, most of it heavily coded and/or unintelligible. If they found a cablepoint they stopped and filled up with local news and public information. It was hard to get a coherent picture, but it looked as if their route might lead them into a newly active battlefield. Didn’t matter, the van was tough.

They didn’t drive by night. Sid dreamed, in his top bunk in the back, that he was still rushing along the juddering roads. He was leading hordes of noseless humanoid monsters to a sacred place. He was taking them to the treasure, selling humanity into oblivion.

He woke up sweating with horror, and the nightmare was true.

One night they stopped by the side of the road near an old intersection, a nest of enormous concrete vipers. Sid went to sleep and didn’t dream; and woke to find himself alone. The Fat Man was totally distracted by now. He barely spoke, formally or informally. His face was like a blank veil over churning pools of industrial processing. Sid presumed he was performing superbeing mental experiments on whatever he expected to find: the effect was like traveling in the company of a large, unpredictable dumb animal. He often got out and wandered around in the dark. It was foolhardy, but Sid wouldn’t dare try to stop him.

But where was Bella?

Sid climbed down from the back of the van. The night was clear and moonless. He saw her at once, sitting with her back to him on an outer lane of the autobahn, in the meadow grass that had grown on either side of the narrow modern road. Beyond her a fence of forest trees stood black. He was going to join her, hoping that the invisible barrier might have vanished. But she was looking up, so he looked up. He saw the stars: the brilliant embroidery, the blue-black void veined with skeins and needlepoints of light. Right overhead spurted the frothy, divided arc of the Milky Way.

Did the night have skies like this on the planet they called “Home”? They lived in cities, but some of them ventured into the wilderness. Were there names in unknown Aleutian languages for their share of the galaxy’s enfolding arms—as homely and immediate and evocative as that one? He didn’t know. He thought what a crass fool he was, to blame her for seeming distant on this trip. An enormous bubble of sadness was swelling inside his ribcage.

Someone began to sing. He thought it was in his head, and that he was remembering the nights when he used to lie hearing the voices of the Silent, mimicking English, at Mykini. Then he realized that the voice was Bella’s.

Oft in the stilly night,
E’er slumber’s chain has bound me
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around me….

The light of other days blazed down; she looked so pitiful under that immensity. He moved abruptly, meaning to run to her, to comfort her somehow.

A voice behind him said, “Let her be.”

Kumbva was sitting on his haunches against the housing of the van’s retracted treads, his bulk in brown overalls softened and blurred in starlight. “She’ll need you,” he said. “You’ll need each other. Don’t doubt it. But not tonight. Go back to sleep.”

He lay awake for a long time. He thought the camper and the whole night air was filling up with years upon years: of smiles and faces, fragments of music, emotions, colors; the view from a window, the sound of a beloved voice. Outside in the dark Bella was alone, guarded but alone: mourning her dead.

ii

In Neubrandenburg, half way between the town and the abandoned campus, they ran into a firefight. Armor snapped over the windows. Sid’s field of view became a false-colored moving picture. The lights came up, the air inside the van was rent by faint squeals and zips and rumbling thunder. Sid panicked and yelled: “We’re ambushed!”

“Keep driving, it’s nothing to do with us.”

The Fat Man was right, of course. The soldiers treated the camper as if it didn’t exist. A troop in unmarked dark armor charged across the roadway. A personnel carrier heaved over a clay embankment and thundered in pursuit. The forward turret was a fused mass of hybrid metal. It was equally anonymous, wounded and on the rampage. Something thumped them. The images on the inside of the van’s armored eyelids shook and lost depth.

“We’ve lost a cam!” shouted Sid. “Who are they?”

“I’ve no idea.” Kumbva was not curious.

Then they were on the other side. The amour retracted from their windows, and the naked plain stretched out. The sounds of the skirmish pursued them, but nothing else. When they came to the wood where the Campfire Girls had landed, Sid slowed. There was another aircraft there now, an insectoid flyer, darkly camouflaged and hidden close under the trees. Three Aleutians came to meet them. They weren’t in quarantine.

“Sid,” said Kumbva, laying a hand on his arm. “Clavel you have met. This is Rajath, the trickster, of whom you’ve heard so much; and Bhairava, Clavel’s master at arms.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Bhairava, gravely.

The trickster bared the edges of his teeth, sheepishly, like the bad-boy he was.

“Hallo, Sid.”

Sid saw that Bella was not surprised. He knew he shouldn’t be surprised himself. No doubt the Fat Man had told him, or thought he had. They took so much for granted. They never understood that you didn’t understand. Clavel had changed. He seemed calm and sane.

“Rajath has something to say,” he prompted.

The trickster spread his palms, low and open against his sides, and raised his chin, just a little, in the gesture they called “showing throat”: He made a speech, in English. “I am truly sorry about the séance, librarian.”

Sid, coping with his own feelings, felt Bella steel herself.

“Don’t mention it,” she said. “We’ve all done silly things.”

said the poet. He looked at Bella, in a way that Sid could not read at all. Bella put up her arms like a child; for his embrace.

The Aleutians went to fetch things from Clavel’s aircraft. Sid retired to the van. He suited up and sat on Bella’s bunk. He hoped she was going to be safe in there. He’d seen how quickly she healed, that should mean something. He knew he shouldn’t be surprised that the other two captains were here: but he was hurt. It wasn’t fair. This was the end of the treasure trail. It belonged to Sid and the Fat Man and Bella, no one else. His belly felt at once hollow and disgustingly active.

Bella appeared at the open tailgate, climbed in.

she asked cautiously, as if unsure of his temper.

He shrugged. “You can’t trust anything that’s made in Europe. It says there’s nothing dangerous. The background rads are not what you’d call ideal for bringing up your family. But not too bad for an Old Earth battlefield. Wait ‘til we get inside.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.” Colonel Janet Ezra probably thought the evil demons spawned by an accident at a nuclear reactor had found a way to escape detection, in order to tempt humans to their destruction. Sid thought he could believe something like that himself.

Bella looked at him with sympathy for his superstition.

“Oh no. I’m coming in.” He donned the helmet and jumped into a crouch, arms akimbo: leapt down the tailgate ramp kicking out his heels: a pillow-limbed Cossack in faded urban-camo of rust and grey. “Ra Ra Rasputin! Pass the strychnine sandwiches!”

<“Sid’s” right,> whimpered Rajath, on the ground beside the insect flyer. He eyed Bhairava’s approach unhappily.

Clavel sighed impatiently. “We’re alone, trickster, because we are trying to be discreet. We won’t be far ahead of the pack. Remember the saboteurs? The locals will be onto this very soon, the same way it was when they found the shipworld.”

said Bhairava, coming near.

Rajath noted bitterly that Bhairava, while saying there was “no danger,” was arming everyone to the teeth with superheat. He accepted his own firearm with disgust.

The breach at the entrance to Buonarotti’s building was still massively sealed, the way the Campfire Girls had left it. The signs were that no one had been near the campus since. They made their own entry through Bella’s exit, and the broken window in Du Pont/Farben’s basement. They had to melt the rest of the glass before they could squeeze in the bulkiest item that Clavel had brought.

It settled on the dust-layered floor: a mass of brownish pulp. A monstrous sea anemone, a giant oxheart? The pulp looked as if it would have the texture of raw flesh. But it was warm and hard to the touch like baked earth.

“That’s a big disk,” remarked Sid. He heard his own voice, emerging from the helmet speaker as a weird high-pitched squawk.

“I hope we find a use for it,” said the Fat Man.

They stood in the dusty dark, listening. The Aleutians wore their dun overalls. Sid felt like the native guide in full witchdoctor kit. The Fat Man had a bag of tricks that Clavel had carried for him. He took out a pointed bar of what seemed to be dark metal. The surface moved sluggishly: the whole substance was heavily alive.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a cattle prod. Or an ankus, maybe.” He poked the pointed end at Sid. “It’s for herding bluesuns. It can smell those things you call hard rads.”

They prowled, shining handlamps on the array, yoked and coiled, that snaked around the underground hall. The metal still gleamed through the dust. The system seemed intact as if it had been in operation yesterday. They found the reactor chamber and looked in through panels of heavy glass. The reactor had been shut down. Sid’s suit hummed a mild warning, the ankus stirred. The chamber was orderly, undisturbed. A couple of spent fuel rods lay on the floor.

“Adding a touch of verisimilitude,” murmured the Fat Man, “to an otherwise drab and ill-seeming narrative. I wonder what happened to the technicians who were supposed to have been killed. They’d disappeared from the later reports, hadn’t they. I’d be glad to think there were no real casualties. I don’t like to think of Peenemünde causing permanent death.”