North Wind (4 page)

“There’s only one way to shift them,” he told the little birds. “Offer them an alternative. Show them something better than what they’ve got here. Otherwise we are fucked. Because nothing else makes it. Absolutely nothing we can do will touch them.”

Maitri came back on two feet, slowly, scratching the bristling gap where his nose should be. “They’re safe. I watched them to the turn.” His relief was touchingly obvious.

“No empty saddles?” The droms, engineered hybrids between horse and camel, were evil brutes, in Sid’s opinion. But the Aleutians liked them. They were living machines: homelike.

“No empty saddles,” agreed Maitri, smiling.

“You should’ve cancelled that excursion.”

“Perhaps. But he’d been looking forward to it so much, we didn’t have the heart. An isolate, you know. There’s so little one can do to make things right.”

A gleam of vivid blue flickered, through Sid’s stubby pale lashes. The aliens were supposed to be telepaths. Sid knew the limits of that mythical ability. But like any human who had to do with them, he would not meet their eyes directly if he could help it. For a moment he studied lord Maitri, covertly.

“Time to go home, Gunga Din.”

“Achcha, sahib.”

The alien bounded away: Sid picked up his tools and followed.

The Trading Post stood alone, under a hemisphere of antibiotic and carbon-strengthened glass. Once they were through the entrance-lock, they were in Aleutia. The sightseers had just arrived; domestics were leading away the droms.

Goodlooking exclaimed, “Sid, you’ve hurt your hands!”

He hadn’t realized. The quarantine started melting as soon as you were indoors. His palms were bare, and he felt the blisters. Overcome by the unease that afflicted him when he met his alien friend in front of an audience, he dropped to one knee and flung his injured hands in the air.

“She cares! I believe she loves me!”

The Aleutians laughed, their faces brimming with soundless alien merriment. They thought Sid’s routines with Goodlooking were killingly funny. A trolley passed, carrying folded napery to the dining room. Sid grabbed a red tablecloth and flourished it, the cloth in a panic struggled to escape, but Sid would have none of that. He wrestled and brought it to submission; cast it proudly to the ground, and trailed it like a bullfighter’s cape across the forecourt, singing:

“L’amour est comme un enfant sauvage,
qui n’a jamais connu la loi…”

He’d reached a wide stone basin, where an Aleutian gardener was trying to grow roses. He’d forgotten the next line. Di-dada da! Di-dada da! he chanted; he pulled a rose and flung himself at Goodlooking’s feet, snatching another phrase out of oblivion—

“Si je t’aime prends garde de toi!”

The aliens standing around applauded, human style: they knew how to do that. Goodlooking recoiled from the broken stem of the flower. She remembered her manners.

“It doesn’t matter,” Sidney told her, grinning. “With a mug like mine, you get used to reactions like that from the girls.” He headed off for his quarters, swinging his tool bag jauntily.

Maitri took his ward’s arm, and led him away. Sheets of quarantine film drifted from them as they walked, and were nibbled up by the busy air.

“Don’t let Sid’s cabaret upset you. It’s a form of shyness.”

They had spoken English together since Goodlooking was a little child. Their shared passion for everything to do with the giant planet was a bond between them.

“I know that. But I wish he wouldn’t call me ‘she.’”

“It’s natural to him. It’d be the height of rudeness if he didn’t award you a gender. In the old days, they identified some of us as feminine or masculine people on sight—with uncanny accuracy, I may say, as far as one cares about such things.”

The Aleutians recognized among themselves a spectrum of personality traits, which seemed to them to match quite closely what humans regarded as “masculine” and “feminine” qualities. It had to be said, the humans did not agree! All very confusing, particularly since in Aleutia, worrying about whether you were “masculine” or “feminine” was the sign of a trivial mind, not a cause for a shooting war.

“Don’t fret about it,” added Maitri, cuddling the thin little arm closer to his side.

They strolled, at a gentle pace. The Greek landscape shimmered through the dome, blurred by a silky cloud of Aleutian life. In front of the disk-works, artisans were dolefully crumbling a pile of their products into dust.

“We’re closing the plant,” said Maitri. “I must go and tell everyone how important their work here has been, and so on.”

“Is it true?”

“No! But what’s the first rule of good management, child?”

Goodlooking smiled. “Praise.”

They reached a bench of local material, set where the artisans liked to sit and take the air. Maitri paused as if by chance. He folded himself down, drawing Goodlooking beside him. He knew his invalid’s capacities to a step.

“You know,” said Maitri grimly,” The Expedition has enemies out in orbit. They’re going to use this mystery upset against us. Where did we go wrong? That’s the question. It
can’t
be those mountains! I suppose we’ll find out one day,” he mused, wearily. “The locals will tell us, lives from now, when they’re not angry with us and it doesn’t matter anymore. That’s the way people are.”

Goodlooking thought of his friend. Sid had no sympathy with the protestors, but he dreaded the Himalaya project. He had never put it into formal words, but Goodlooking knew that his fear was visceral: seeming beyond his rational control. He said nothing. It wasn’t the moment for a mere librarian to tell Lord Maitri that he didn’t understand the locals.

“I wanted to talk to you.” began Maitri. “I’m going to be very busy. We may not have another chance….”

Goodlooking had known a crisis was imminent, but this struck him like a blow. “Is the shuttle coming for me?” he cried. “Oh, Daddy, I don’t want to go. Let me stay with you, please.”

Maitri’s dark nasal contracted.

Goodlooking looked into his face: and Maitri’s arms went out. For a moment they clung together, Lord Maitri cradling the child in the curve of his body, as he had done long ago. Goodlooking drew away, shoulders lifting in a tremulous smile.

he pleaded.

Maitri smiled and nodded. “Come then,” he said lightly. “My brave child. We’ve time to console those artisans, before we change for prayers.”

Goodlooking laughed: suddenly freed from a net of stinging slights. Nothing could cloud these last sweet moments of their intimacy. He would remember this day, lives from now, when Lord Maitri came out of kindly duty to tell the librarian what a wonderful job he was doing.

Dear Maitri! Praise!

iii

Sid jogged through the blurred, furry walled passages, losing quarantine to the nibblers underfoot and the tiny mouths in the air. Aleutian commensals of every size—tools, notepads, domestic appliances, furniture, bustled around him; from things like viruses to things as big as dogs and cats: the life of every one of them derived from the body chemistry of some Aleutian. Their main hall, where they ate and socialized, had been the dining room when this was a human-type hotel. There was a display case by the doors, holding some reproductions of paper pages, which he’d been told were from the hotel register. Labels in English, translations in their illegible script, explaining nothing.
Virginia Woolf….
Who she? Above the repro paper sat the mug shot of a scrawny geezer with jug-ears, done in low relief on a sheet of gold. It looked modern to Sid, but Maitri said it came from the old ruins. Sid didn’t know if the gold was real.

Silent domestics were laying up tables. It looked grand and archaic, like a civic banquet: and it
was
fairly grand, though everything was disposable. In Aleutia there was no snob value in having durable housewares. The snob value was in having your famous housekeeper down with you from the shipworld, with a repertoire of exquisite designs stored in his glandular secretions. The old hotel was full of splendid Aleutian furnishings—rich wraps, throws, hangings, couches, stools, video equipment: all of it alive, all of it liable to vanish and be replaced overnight.

The food was probably equally fancy. But their food ranged, in smell and appearance, from baby diarrhea to snot soup. Humans could eat it. But you wouldn’t do it for fun.

The Silent were not slaves or possessions. Not they! They were employees, colleagues, executives in the private company that was an Aleutian household. There was no mechanical reason why they didn’t speak; nor were they elective mutes. It was something switched off, he’d been told, in their mind/brain, so that what humans called normal language was a blank.

The Aleutians would put it the other way round. To them, everything in the Spoken Word: syntax, metaphor,
he made his excuses and left,
was there in the Common Tongue. The Spoken

Word, you might say, was an odd, extravagant way of talking. After evening prayers, the company would congregate in the hall for supper. Then they’d clear the floor and dance. That was something to see: when they had their formal robes on over the eternal overalls, the colored and patterned living stuff melding and parting as they pranced around. After the dance, which often had no accompaniment but the rustle of their robes, they’d settle to their music. Maitri’s company included some talented people, but the Silent were the best. Being Silent didn’t mean you couldn’t sing. When they got together in ensemble, their mouth-music made the hairs on Sid’s nape stand.

The aliens didn’t appreciate most local music. Whatever you tried on them they said the same: too clogged, fibrous, tight, over-designed. Too many notes, basically. But Maitri, who was so deft at knowing what everyone wanted, had dug out one of his souvenir tapes: something called “Around the Parlour Piano,” involving a bunch of Victorian-dressing history fans. Everyone adored it. The Aleutians did not sleep the way humans do. They napped and socialized in hall, until dawn. Sid would wake in the middle of the night and hear the Silent ensemble practicing, mimicking the pure sounds of English words with eerie accuracy.

Be it ever so humble there’s no place like home…

Bizarre!

The domestics smiled and nodded as he passed. They didn’t
look
as if they were preparing to evacuate. Yudisthara would make them wait for the transport as long as he dared, Sid guessed. Nobody talked about it, but it was obvious that Lord Maitri wasn’t in favor at HQ. Lord Maitri the Japanese, intimate friend of the great Clavel, close associate of the Three Captains, was languishing in the political wilderness, under the Expedition’s present regime. That’s why he’d been shoved off to this god-forsaken posting. Either that or, being Maitri, he’d pre-empted them and tactfully withdrawn here. It was natural that the regime which had ousted the Captains should be wary of him. It didn’t make sense, according to what Sid knew of their immortality, but they’d be thinking: If Lord Maitri’s returned to the scene, can the Three Captains be far behind?

On Earth, legend had it that the Three—Rajath the trickster, Clavel the tormented poet, Kumbva the thinker—had never been away. They’d been secretly watching, these capricious gods; and meddling in human affairs, since First Contact. But that couldn’t be right

Sid had tried to get Goodlooking to give him the dirt on Aleutian politics. What about the shipworld clique called
“Dark Ocean,”
the people who wanted Aleutia to abandon Earth? “Dark Ocean” wanted to set off again: not to search for another landfall without awkward inhabitants, but to hunt for the lost homeworld. They’d had enough of the long adventure. Did they really have secret agents in the Expedition, working to destroy it from within? Could it be true that the Three Captains were involved?

She wouldn’t talk. She’d look at him with those little black eyes, primp up that cat’s mouth (divided upper lip, running to two black slits of nostril) and laugh all over her face.

Her
face,
he called it. To the Aleutians that meant more than eyes-nose-mouth. It meant the whole outward person, and their aura-cloud of chemical life.
Persona
might be better, but it was too formal, too rarefied in English. Face would have to do. He had no idea what she saw as Sid’s face, except that it wasn’t the sun-scoured whitey-haired goblin he saw in a mirror.

He knew from the way she laughed that there
was
dirt: but she wouldn’t tell. She particularly wouldn’t gossip about Clavel. She revered the “Pure One,” the Aleutian who admired humans so much he raped one. Sid gathered that Clavel was one of those celebrities whose legendary “goodness” withstands all attacks from the facts. The rape of Johnny Guglioli the saboteur was regarded as the end of the Expedition’s innocence, but it was not Clavel’s crime that had passed into Aleutian mythology: it was his remorse.
The Grief of Clavel.
To them that was title of the first contact story. Typical! thought Sid. What about
The Grief of Johnny Guglioli?
What about
The Grief of Braemar Wilson?