North Wind (40 page)

Kumbva wrapped his large arms round the suit.

By common consent, then, the Three Captains drew together and the others moved aside. It was as it had been at the beginning: Rajath the trickster, who had the idea of making landfall and a quick profit. Clavel the Pure One, drawn into the plan because Clavel was never content, never satisfied anywhere. Kumbva the engineer, whose curiosity was boundless: whose motto was
enjoy!

Rajath peered at the couch, nasal puckering.

agreed Kumbva.

said the poet.

Kumbva looked at him, smiling.

There was no discussion, formal or informal, of the destination.

Kumbva made a speech.

“The lord himself will provide a victim for the sacrifice. That was the message Peenemünde left for us. I have tried to understand the story in your Bible from which she took her password. It isn’t easy, but I have a glimmering. Abraham was ready to sacrifice his child, that is, his futurity, to secure his continued existence in the goodwill of the WorldSelf. To ‘sacrifice your future for your future,’ is curiously like the description we have just heard, of what must happen when the traveler leaps over the threshold, and thereby finds the power to make that leap. But perhaps, as in the story, there must be an actual sacrifice too. Someone has to pay the price,
without
stealing it back again. Abraham did not sacrifice the human child. There was an animal there, a ram caught in the thicket, and he offered up the animal instead.”

Clavel, transfigured by profound emotion, took Bella’s hands. “I never loved Johnny,” he said, “I wanted him, and could not accept that he would not play my game. I’ve been a fool, but finally, with your help librarian, I understand. Since it was never love I felt, it wasn’t love that fell into corruption in my soul. I am very glad to know that.”

Turning to someone unseen, he said: “Have I paid?”

He went to the couch and lay down. The foam closed around him, the power surged. In an instant, in less than no time, the body on the couch had vanished.

It returned to a room silent and dusty, lit by dim shoulder lamps, a room in which alignments had shifted, though Sid was unaware that any time had passed. Kumbva and Rajath stood on either side of the head of the couch, Bella and Bhairava beside them: Sid was a few steps away. Clavel’s eyes opened.

“Well, poet? Where have you been?”

There was no answer, to Sid’s perception. The eyes closed again. Sid thought the air smelled different. He thought of light: a clear, wild sunlight, a branch of new leaves opening their palms to a sky of shining indigo. He felt the shock that went through the aliens.

Kumbva smoothed away the foam, and folded Clavel’s arms crosswise over his belly: the well of life.

And the dove came back to him in the evening, and lo, in her mouth a freshly plucked olive leaf.

Time Regained

Bella and the halfcaste had left. In the secret room, the two living captains moved aside, leaving Bhairava to make his farewells in private. Rajath grumbled.

murmured Kumbva.

said the trickster huffily.

The engineer chuckled. He looked at Rajath speculatively. it is a far, far better thing that I do now, than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest to which I go, than I have ever known….
Well?>

Rajath was stunned. His nasal puffed in embarrassment. He didn’t like to reveal that he was familiar with
The Grief of Clavel.

Kumbva shrugged.

Sid had taken a pack of stone-eaters and let himself out; while the Aleutians were occupied with their dead poet, and the chemical messages that he’d brought back. Outside the tomb he extricated himself from his suit. He went round to the front of Buonarotti’s building, sat on the steps and took an Aleutian ration-pack from a sleeve-pocket of his overalls. It tasted like oatmeal gruel mixed with liquid soap: not too bad really. He squinted up at the grey sky, stared around at the scattered debris, untouched since the crooked Russians drove away, a hundred odd years ago.

In another pocket he found a scrap of tough plastic tissue: the cover note for the insurance on his new hand. Insurance was just an item that turned up on bills for fancy products, one of those commercial words that nobody used in real life anymore. He wondered what it was it had meant.

THIS SCHEME DOES NOT COVER

a) loss or damage directly or indirectly caused by, or arising from, ionizing radiations or nuclear waste from combustion of nuclear fuel.

b) loss or damage directly or indirectly occasioned by, happening through or in consequence of war, invasion, acts of foreign enemies, hostilities (whether war be declared or not) civil war, revolution, military or usurped power or confiscation or nationalization, or requisition or destruction of, or damage to property by or under the order of any government or public or local authority.

c) change in clinical prescription.

He laughed, and held it up for the wind to carry away.

Bella emerged from the hole he’d made. She was carrying two incongruous-looking packages. She came over, doubtfully.

“Hallo?”

“Hallo yourself.” Sid sniffed, and wiped his knuckles across his stubby lashes. “I suspect I’ve been difficult to live with, these last days. I’m sorry for anything offensive I did or said, in Silence. I knew the score. But it was hard.”

In merely bringing back chemical messages Clavel, dying, had achieved more than Peenemünde Buonarotti ever managed.

“It’s all right. I knew how you were feeling. If it helps at all, I didn’t enjoy accepting Rajath’s apology much.”

She sat beside him, close enough to touch but not touching. “In a way, you have the best result possible,” she offered. “One of your clerics says:
call no man happy, until he carry his happiness with him down into the grave.
That’s you Sid. It’s going to take years, lives, before interstellar travel is a going concern. You achieved your quest, and, better still, you don’t have to be here when it all goes horribly wrong.”

It was an odd comfort, but you couldn’t fault the logic.

She remembered the packages.

They were gift-wrapped, in dark green foil with Christmas bells. Sid had a receiver-less phone, with unlimited lifelong credit. Bella’s present was a pouch of white and puckered skin. It opened at her touch, revealing a row of small containers of the same material.

She held a vial on her palm. she wondered.

He saw how the pouch grown to match her own skin would become a treasure kept with heartache: and one day thrown away with heartache, because the meaning had leached away into alien years.
Deus providebit victiman sacrifici.
To the Three Captains, it was Clavel who had become the victim. But what had the poet lost? He’d be back. It seemed to Sid it was Bella who’d been sacrificed on Buonarotti’s altar. Aleutia would know about her part. But mental-model telepathy is no more just, or reliable, than any other historical record. Kumbva had taught him that. This would be the Three Captains story. Aleutia would know the truth: but they’d prefer the version with the big stars in it.

“Bel?”

She blinked, coming out of sad reverie.

“I’m not your other self. I’m nothing like you. I frequently don’t know what is going on in your head, even when you tell me.”

Bella’s shoulders lifted. “I’m not your other half. I’m definitely not female and I don’t want to upset you, but at home people thought Maitri’s librarian was masculine, if anything. Because I hate getting emotional, and talking things out, and so on. And I don’t care which you are. You’re just…. Sid.”

“Oh well,” he sighed. “So much for the movies.”

They turned towards each other: face to face. Stubby lashes flickered apart, unveiling the blue windows of Sidney Carton’s stubborn, gentle and contrary soul. Bella put her arms around him and kissed him the way Aleutians kiss, her mouth and nasal nuzzling his throat and the angles of his jaw. The cold breeze was stirring the litter and rustling the yellow fallen leaves. Over Bella’s shoulder he watched a sheet of giftwrap fly off into the chill air.

“And the north wind will blow.”

The aliens weren’t going to leave tomorrow, because Clavel had tried a local magician’s trick and it had seemed to work. From this hollow place on the other side of his heart’s desire, Sid could see how much would be unchanged. He saw that the Himalaya Project would go on: and since he knew that it must happen, he stopped fearing it so much.

“Maybe it won’t be so bad. Natural disasters never do what they’re supposed to do. Maybe leveling the Himalayas really will turn Earth into a semi-tropical paradise.”

Bella said. “I think the north wind is blowing now.”

Cold wind of misfortune, blowing away a civilization. Blowing away the principalities and the powers, the unkept promises; blowing away the riches and the lies. In times like these you do what you can: save what you can, make what new beginnings you can, for a recovery you’ll never see.

“I’ve felt the north wind before. It blows in Aleutia too. But it’s better to be out in the storm, instead of indoors and helpless. So long as you have someone to keep you company.”

“Ahem!”

Sid and Bella sprang apart. Rajath had come out of the tomb. He was followed by Clavel’s master at arms, carrying the superheat weapons. Bhariava’s eyes were still brimming and shining. Rajath’s mourning seemed to be over. He acknowledged Bella, but looked at Sid with far more interest than he’d shown before: enough interest to make Sid uneasy.

he said. He waved vaguely at the sky. He took the pack of stone-eaters.

He glanced at the tomb. No sign of Kumbva yet.

said the librarian politely.

Transparently, the trickster considered making his invitation more pressing, glanced at Bhairava as a possible ally in a kidnap: and decided against. He stared hard at Sid.

Sid barely hesitated.

“Nah. I’m Braemar Wilson. Everyone knows that!”

Rajath’s stare became comically blank.

said Bhairava,

The Aleutians loped off to Clavel’s flyer. By the time it dawned on Rajath that Braemar Wilson might satisfy his angry backers just as well—if he could get the reincarnate out to orbit, before they realized the significance of the events here today—he was strapped in a comfortable net of takeoff webbing, and Bhairava had lifted the insectoid above the trees. He resolved not to worry about it. he told Kumbva in his mind’s model of things: glad to score over the engineer.

When they’d stopped laughing about the look on Rajath’s face, they decided that the Fat Man didn’t expect them to wait. The road stretched grey across the empty plain. Bella and Sid began to walk, in the opposite direction from the firefight, and from the place where Bella, reborn, had played her first Old Earth game. Sid thought there was another town further along. A rumbling started behind them. They stood poised for flight. The vehicle was a truck: an old, slow, alcohol-fuel truck. It had no military markings and it wasn’t armored. They stuck out their thumbs.

It stopped. Three fat head-scarfed women in a close-packed row stared down from the cab. One of them gestured. The truck’s tailgate (it was open at the back, piled with some kind of vegetables) lowered with a painful whine. They climbed in. The vegetables were apples.

“I’ll have my back pay,” Sid counted on his fingers. “By which I mean, there’ll be some random credit for us from the Fat Man, when we can find a working automat that recognizes me. He’ll have done that. And there’s that tenhead note—?” Bella was not attending. He shook his head, resignedly. Never ask a gamer what happened to the money: “Achcha, forget about the tenhead.” The apples were surprisingly comfortable. He lay back, and stared up into the dusky clouds.

“You know what? Peenemünde Buonarotti may have been the greatest thinker in the cosmos, but she never played the games. She knows nothing about how I construe myself. Or you. Nor does the Fat Man, bless him. He likes gadgets, but he’s not an aficionado of the hells. You wait and see. Humans can and will go to the stars! You build them. We’ll get in that car and drive.”

Goodbye, thought Bella. To the library, to Maitri, to uncounted trivial precious things. In one of their conversations in B.K. Pillai’s house, Kumbva had told her that the world we know is perhaps one of indefinitely many. Each time you make a decision, you step into a new universe. In many of those worlds the librarian would live on, a modest isolate Signifier of Aleutia, and he would not remember, but his story would be burnished, for all the lives to come (as if brushed by an Angel’s wing!) by what others had known about this secret adventure. It was a good thought. She wished that person well. In this world, Bella would die.

A rapping noise alerted them to a face at the back window of the cab. One of the Prussian women mimed violently, cramming her hand to her mouth: