North Wind (5 page)

She’s a funny little thing, he mused. The Aleutians varied widely as humanity in physical appearance and bulk: some big as bears, some elfin. Some of them looked like humans with drooping shoulders and lumpy hips; some were much more weird. Goodlooking’s occluded nasal, as they called it when someone had nostril slits instead of a gap; and her slight build, put her on the human end of the scale. In certain moods he could see her as entirely human. It was an ambience, it was her
face.
She was the mild-mannered librarian on the holiday of a lifetime—Alec Guinness in that classic movie-drama
Last Holiday.
Goodlooking bore no physical resemblance to the glorious Alec. But his role in that movie was her. The secret boldness behind the diffidence; the dry observing wit: qualities you’d never suspect, if you didn’t know her on her own ground.

Maitri had taken care to give her that ground on Earth. He’d had copies of about half his private library shipped down with her: her room was stacked with big clumsy-looking alien tape-cassettes, a row of fat clunky alien screens went round the walls. There was barely room left for Goodlooking’s bed, a meager shelf for formal clothes; and her mixing desk.

She was a
video
librarian of course. The Aleutians had never passed through the phase of putting life’s dramas into printed words. Print was reserved for obscure technical manuals. They’d gone straight from some kind of temple-frieze picture stories (the carving would’ve been done by tailored microbes) to moving-image records. Goodlooking longed to get hold of local classics in “incunabula”—by which she meant the books—for Maitri’s collection.

But they’d be no more than treasured objects.

She’d told him that the most popular Earth record out in orbit, after
The Grief of Clavel,
was
Les Intermittences Du Coeur,
the French tv serial of Proust. She’d tried to show him what made Proust so wonderfully Aleutian: flicking the images about, stopping and starting, turning and interposing face on face. This nuance in a smile near the end. The particular tone of a scrap of dialogue back at the start.

But Sid just cracked up, imagining hordes of the alien working-classes, descending on fortress Paris, storming the Boulevard Haussmann and demanding to confess their sins and joys to the Rev. Marcel. So she pulled down that cat-mouth at him, and the black eyes got snappy. He couldn’t get her to understand why he was giggling

If it hadn’t been for her disability, he supposed she’d be in Holy Orders herself. She’d be “hearing confessions” and processing them into blurry, generated-image video footage. Maybe that should be perceiving, or absorbing confessions. What the priests of the Self did involved all their Aleutians senses. But it had to be a flawed and artificial way of compiling the story of your life. Some people—important people with a Bohemian bent—went really wild and made their own tape. But the priests would get to edit it when you were gone, so what went on your record was your life as the priests saw it. Your experience filtered through the State religion. It sounded, he told Goodlooking, like a recipe for pure fiction.

“You mean, it’s the same as your character records? Well, yes, of course. That’s what we keep telling you. You worship just the same way that we do.”

The traps of language.

He reached his room, which was at the back of the hotel, away from everybody except Goodlooking. In the librarian’s lair, whatever else was showing, she’d always have a tape from
The Grief of Clavel
on one of the screens. In two-dimensional, fuzzy Aleutian video, Sid could watch the saboteurs, Johnny and Braemar. He was a halfcaste, so he knew them well, these two: though the rest of the human world seemed to have forgotten them. The baby-faced young man with those well-nigh Aleutian black eyes, and coltish, gangling figure. Beautiful Braemar with the mulberry red hair, sorrow and pain and fear etched into every line of her deliberate loveliness. Sid could watch Johnny going to his death, out there in the shipworld: walking with the executioner in a blue-lit cavernous hall, through a crowd of alien faces.

For Goodlooking it was a romantic story about her hero. He guessed she’d never thought how it might feel to be Sid, watching that record inside an alien stronghold. He believed she still didn’t know: which was an achievement, for a human among the aliens. Sid was proud of the way he could handle himself in the Common Tongue. He didn’t blab his intimate secrets in the twitching of his features. He could keep his private thoughts private, almost as skillfully as an Aleutians.

The doors in the main hotel were converted to their specifications. Sid’s door was solid. He shut it behind him and shot the bolt: checked the ribbon of yeasted oily dough around the frame, and slicked the seal back into place with his thumb. This was an old anti-Aleutian trick, supposed to keep wanderers out. Those red lice-things that crept on Aleutian skin, that they ate off themselves and each other like baboons picking fleas: they were the principal carriers of information. He’d never heard of them being used as spies. But he didn’t want them in here.

It was believed that the wanderers were the key to the mystery of Aleutian telepathy, and Aleutian immortality. It was believed…. Sid pulled a wry face. No human knew for sure what went on inside an Aleutian body, much less in Aleutian brain chemistry. Physical investigation was a big taboo. It was dangerous to suggest the idea. But their genuine lack of interest was an equally effective block. Their living science didn’t progress by leaps of theory. It simply
worked,
like life itself, insensately trying this and that until something clicked.

Their knowledge of their own physiology had weird gaps. When it came to interactions below the threshold of life, they cut out entirely. What humans called
pure science
was to them the preserve of a minority of eccentrics.
Electrons aren’t things,
a human savant had once pronounced.
If electrons aren’t things,
said the Aleutians,
the hell with them.

He sat on his bed, a soft grey pallet unrolled on the floor. An Aleutian product for the local market: what they called “half-killed” and humans called “sterilized.” It was cozy, once you got over the nightmares about being eaten by your bedding.

…But there was no need to make a mystery of it. The Aleutians “communicated over distance” the same way they read the body language: by knowing each other
very
well. They’d learned the responses by heart in those character records. Maitri knew how Yudi would jump in situation A. Yudi knew what Rajath would say, if you asked him question Q. If everybody acted in character, and it seemed they generally did, then Maitri “knew” what Yudi, far away, was doing and saying. That was the whole thing: a feat of memory and deduction.

Which is fine for Aleutians telepathizing with Aleutians, he thought. But if you badly need to know what’s going on in the human world, and you don’t happen to know the responses of the human brood-entity off by heart: then it is time to call up the electrons and the photons. He pulled a wadded bag from inside the folds of the pallet, and whistled softly between his teeth as he put together the components of his global-mobile.

Let’s find out if there are any snowflakes in the.
Is there anybody there?
he muttered to himself.
Are my little spirit guides going to answer me?
He tried to crank up a calm and merry mood whenever he used the phone, in case his terror spilled out into the air around him. Is the chemistry of fear a cosmic determinate? He preferred to take no chances.

The transmitter’s tiny screen sizzled. We have snowflakes!

First he tried to raise his boss. Not Maitri: the other boss. He failed. He was not perturbed. He was beginning to feel more relaxed about the situation. He was indoors, which made a grand difference to morale. The aliens were calm. What could happen? He decided to go to Trivandrum and talk to the children.

It was about time. They’d be forgetting what their parent looked like. It was a cruel shame he had to leave them for so long:
“I’m a tramp and a no-good and not fit to be a mother!”

He attached the contacts.
Flip, flicker.
The phone took his picture, fired the image to a Low Orbit Ephemeral, along with a tightly detailed set of 4 space co-ordinates. Sid sped a quarter of the way around the world to the Malabar coast, into the heart of the Aleutian Enclaves

He was on the roof. It was in a mess. What can you expect? he thought defensively. I’m never here, because someone’s got to pay the rent. How am I supposed to keep up with the chores? He crouched among dirty cooking things, oddly conscious of the heat and weight of the tropic air, which his image could not feel. The kids weren’t in sight. Instead Jimi swung into view: shy and liquid fawn’s eyes, guitar slung around her neck (his neck! sorry Jim!); a pan of something in one hand.

“Sid! Is that you Sid?”

“Of course it’s me! Who does it look like?”

Correct me if I’m wrong, he thought, but wasn’t Hendrix supposed to be a fairly intelligent young man? Sentimental, yeah, but definitely not an idiot. Not this time around. If we have to believe in Reincarnation, he wondered bitterly, couldn’t we make it a tad more plausible? But the halfcaste community in Triv didn’t worry about
plausible.
It never struck them as odd, how many world-famous global-village megastars had been reborn among them.

“Thank The Self you’re here. We’re having a hassle with Lydie. She won’t go in the safe room.”

“The safe room,” he repeated, stunned. They relied on toleration but they prepared for the worst. Every halfcaste home held an armored refuge, ready in case of trouble.

“What’s happened?”

Another figure in fancy dress hove into view: a scrawny woman with lumpen peasant features and an air of iron determination. She came right up, invading his bi-location body-space, peering from under the blue-bordered veil: spoke in her Common Tongue that somehow conveyed a sing-song, chi-chi accent; with grace-notes of Albania.

Sid felt sick. “Bring her here!”

They brought Lydia, his six year old daughter. She was crying, snailtracks of tears on her dark skin: furious with herself because she wanted to be brave and couldn’t hack it. She poured out accusations against Mother Teresa and Jimi. Jimi chimed in, defending himself. Mother Teresa began a saintly reproof. There was nothing Sid could do. He couldn’t hug Lydie. Or give Mother T a punch in the nose… (Sid had difficulty with mother figures). He fought to find a controlling, sarcastic voice, in which he established that Lydie’s baby brother, little Roger, had settled in the cramped windowless cell without a murmur. He sneered at Lydia’s rank cowardice. It was horrible to hurt her, but it worked. Lydie went off with Mother Teresa. Sid was left with Jimi, finally able to react to the news.

“You have anti-Aleutian trouble in Triv? Right, you weather it, you know how. Don’t do anything provocative, stay indoors, and don’t worry about me. Don’t let Lydie start worrying. Tell her the Trading Post is going to be evacuated; we have air-transport on the way. It’s true. Uji’s sending a shuttle.”

The reincarnated guitarist blinked at him. “They’re sending you a shuttle? If you say so.”

“What d’you mean, if I say so?”

“Uh, nothing Sid, only the word among the purebreds is that the Aleutians evacuated Uji days ago, and then the locals went in and ransacked the place, burned it out. But it’s only human news. Deadworld images and all that. It’s probably a crock of shit.”

Sid didn’t say anything. His mouth was too dry.

“It’s bad for us,” Jimi carefully worked out the obvious. “The purebred news says they’ve gone, running scared. They don’t seem like superbeings at the moment, and that’s not good for Aleutian-lovers.” He tailed off. “I wish you were here, Sid.”

“Me too, but I have to go,” croaked Sidney. “I’ve been on this line too long. Do your best, Jim. I’ll be home as soon as I can get there.”

He disassembled the phone and hid it. He sat scratching at a patch of grey scale on his wrist. If you lived with Aleutians, you learned to tolerate the temporary infestations. It would go away.

He wiped his trembling hands over his eyes. Maitri’s wrong, he thought. There is no shuttle. How long have we got? A few days, yeah, certainly, a few days.

Relax, Sid. Breathe deeply. Make a plan….

2  
Well Built Mycaenae, Rich In Gold

i

In the main hall, the company would relax together through the night. Goodlooking left them after supper as usual, and went to his room. He took off his dancing robe and folded it carefully away. Robes were made to last longer than most Aleutian artifacts and this was a nice one, a gift from Maitri: a lovely clear blue, but plain enough for the librarian’s modest needs. He sat at his desk, but couldn’t think of any work he wanted to do. The moving images on the screens around his walls were a comforting background presence, speaking silently in their familiar language. But there was nothing he wanted to watch.

An hour away, war was raging. Bokr had explained: .

Sidney Carton had told him it was not true that males couldn’t have children. The miracles of modern medicine, he said, made any fool thing possible. Males could, but mostly wouldn’t. Sid had two kids of his own. But they were proper children, borne by two lovers of Sid’s who were women. Or maybe “halfcastes” who were still physically female, the way Sid was a “halfcaste,” yet still physically male….

The details of human reproduction were confusing. But in the image of Sid, carrying away his children like trophies from the enemy camp, Goodlooking glimpsed the unappeasable hunger of the childless side, the lives upon lives of psychic oppression they had suffered. Equally, he’d seen records of the appalling war atrocities against biological females. Brrr…. He was quite glad, in ways, that he was going home and leaving the Gender War behind.

I’m going to miss Sid, he thought. They had spent hours together in this room talking about Old Earth, switching from formal to informal speech like intimate friends; slipping by degrees from discussing other peoples’ records, to sharing their own hopes and fears. The librarian smiled to himself. He’d been told that all locals, including the “Aleutian-lovers,” babbled with embarrassing candor in the Common Tongue: you didn’t know where to look. Sid wasn’t that kind of idiot. But Goodlooking still knew things about the Trading Post mascot that would have shocked most of the company. He would not betray Sid’s trust.

He decided to get ready for bed. He took off his shoes, shucked off his overalls and laid out the battery, each type in its bulb of cultured skin identical to his own. One by one he squeezed the evening doses onto his palm: swallowed the intestinal ones, inhaled the respiratory ones, moistened with spittle the inner surface of his wrist and coaxed the muscle-and-skin ones onto the damp surface; where they oozed and vanished. Mugging cheerful reluctance, (he hated this part) he delved into his underwear and inserted wriggling life into his
place.

He changed his toilet pad. He didn’t need to, but taking his medication made him feel as if he smelled bad. As he scrumpled the used one into his wastebin, the inevitable wash of commentary swept through his mind, consoling, irritating, hurtful: the things he knew people said and felt about his condition. He endured it.

The librarian was isolate. His body produced no wanderers, or very few; and could not assimilate other people’s mobile cells. It was a rare condition, and incurable. The deficiency was so bound up in his chemical identity that there was no way of correcting it which would leave Goodlooking in existence. Synthetic wanderers gave him partial communication, and allowed him to lead a fairly normal life. But they didn’t proliferate in his body, they had to be replenished daily; and he had to spend his nights alone. The doctors said other people’s wanderers might invade him while he napped and make him ill.

He lay down on his pallet, feeling tired but restless. He would have liked to stay with the others tonight. In a sense it was silly not to. It hardly mattered if he got ill now. But he’d felt he’d be letting the company down if he didn’t behave exactly as usual. They were traders. Traders are born to take risks. It’s part of their obligation. Maitri’s company counted it a point of honor to accept the luck of the game without any fuss. Goodlooking breathed the populated air, wondering what messages it carried that his medication failed to translate.

He had known that the anti-Aleutian crisis was serious, and that Yudisthara at Uji had no answer except to hope it would go away. If he was normal, Maitri would not have had to take him aside to explain the rest. The truth was all round him, shed by the bodies of the experienced traders. There was no shuttle. There would be no evacuation. Disaster was closing in on the Trading Post, and no one would escape.

he thought, willing the feeble chemical caress towards Maitri.

The others would be thinking that Lord Maitri’s grief was overdone. It wasn’t as if Goodlooking was an infant. This would be more fuel for the “disguised prince” rumor! Goodlooking cringed: and then laughed, because it didn’t matter anymore. He should have taken Bokr’s offer while it was going.

He rolled over and tucked his face into his folded arms. How long was it since the librarian lay down with someone? Too many lives. But making love is nothing, if it isn’t an act of physical communication. Few people wanted to lie with an isolate. Anyone who did had some humiliating motive, vulgar curiosity at best. The way Sid spoke of his lovers, as fleeting partners in not very friendly encounters, had struck a chord of rueful sympathy. Like Sid, he remembered none of his “sexlife” experiences with unmixed pleasure.

But he still wished he’d taken Bokr up on that offer.

He curled himself down in the pallet in his underwear, thinking he’d dress again in a moment. He must have dozed. He woke with a tremendous, heart-thumping jolt, as if from a nightmare. He was lying sprawled across the floor. What had happened? The lamps that clung to his walls gave off their dim night-time glow. What were those noises? Were people shouting?

He picked himself up and crawled back to the envelope of bedding. Blurred sounds of voices and footsteps reached him; and the sharp rattle of local dead-weapon fire. Goodlooking didn’t stir. He knelt in an agony of tension, for so long that he fell into a kind of trance. At last the door of his room softly opened. Sidney Carton stepped inside. He was carrying a small tray with a beaker on it. Goodlooking jumped up. He clutched his desk and grabbed wildly for Maitri’s favorite tapes. They were copies, but he felt he must save something. He realized he was in his underwear, dropped the tapes and groped for clothes. Then his mind cleared. There was no shuttle waiting. This was the end.

Still clutching his overalls, he looked up at Sidney Carton, wondering
why the tray?
It was a dead thing, it must belong to Sid. He found himself staring at a large black object that was tucked in a belt-loop of Sid’s Aleutian overalls. It was an old-fashioned local pistol. Goodlooking had seen it before. It belonged in Bokr’s collection of souvenirs.

Sid’s face was almost ugly, and full of deadly meaning.

.

Goodlooking recoiled. Instantly he knew that Sid could not have said that. Goodlooking must have misread him, projecting terror onto terror. He calmed himself.

“I didn’t want to be in the way,” he said aloud. “I thought I’d better stay here. Have you been sent for me?”

“I’ve brought you a nightcap,” said the halfcaste, in a voice nothing like his own. “Maitri says you’re to drink it.”

Goodlooking took the beaker, but did not drink. He could not make sense of Sidney Carton’s demeanor.

He spoke hesitantly. He felt half-paralyzed, as if he was dreaming. But Sid must have read something in his face: because he swooped, grabbed the hand with the beaker in it, and pinned Goodlooking’s other arm against his side. Goodlooking fought silently, but the liquid spilled into his mouth. He could not stop himself from swallowing. The grip that held him didn’t give up till it was gone. Sid let go, breathing hard.

he gasped.

Goodlooking dropped to his four feet and ran. He reached the door, and was out in the corridor. Desperation gave him strength he had never possessed before. He ran through the hotel, his limbs giving way under him, reeling from one wall to the other along the corridors. He was aware of lamps darkened and fallen, of air that tasted of death. As he reached the main hall there was smoke everywhere, and flickers of fire. But he was not afraid of what was happening there. Fear was behind him, in Sidney Carton’s face.

The hall doors had been ripped down and hung in tatters, leaking vital fluid. The hall was full of local soldiers. They were pressed around the walls, their big dead lights trained on a space in the center. They had the remaining company lined up two by two facing that space. Beyond it lay a tattered heap of bodies. Those who waited for their turn were joking and chatting informally, or maintaining a dignified silence. Some crouched on four feet, in too much pain to worry about appearances. In the middle of the floor four soldiers held down a naked figure, blood-stained tatters of a brown overall trailing from its wrists and ankles. Another soldier, buttocks bared, pumped and thrust at the figure’s belly. The soldiers were yelling with laughter that was like screams of agony. No sound came from the Aleutian.

cried Goodlooking,
No!>

Something dragged him back. He fell, and came up struggling, desperate to join his friends. An inexorable will dragged him away.
“Maitri, Maitri!”
he sobbed. The walls of the corridor swayed black and red. Gaping mouths and eyes loomed out of them.

“Come on! There’s nothing you can do!”

Goodlooking’s will to resist suddenly gave way. He would have collapsed, but Sid hauled him to his four feet. They crawled back into darkness. Goodlooking was swimming in blood-hued visions. He lost track of what was happening, until he felt by the change in the air that they were outside the building.

Sid’s grip told him, in a reflex of panic.

Lights assaulted them. There were more soldiers everywhere, soldiers and jeeps grinding up the night in the ruins of the shattered dome. Two of them were separate from the rest, conferring, haloed by a blaze of white. One was stocky, with a white scarf wrapped thickly around his head and a bush of facial hair. The other was tall and slender. As he turned, a badge glittered on the shoulder of his uniform: a golden leaf.

“Shit!” breathed Sid.
“Ochiba!”

They had not been spotted, not yet. Sid crouched, studying the frieze of light and movement. he muttered. Goodlooking was gazing at something pale that lay in a glimmer of viscous movement. He realized that it was Bokr’s hand. The rest of the doctor’s body was a black hummock, one wrist jutting out. Wanderers crawled in the gap between, feebly trying to make good the damage. They were dying.

He heard Sid grunt: “This’ll do.” The halfcaste had got hold of something palm-sized, rounded and heavy. Goodlooking saw him rise to his feet, bent double to avoid the light. Sid disappeared backwards, and then reappeared, running out of the shadow. A soldier yelled. Sid’s arm swung in a level arc. The big white light on their left exploded, with such violence that they were flung flat on the ground.

“Shit! It was a grenade!”

Goodlooking heard that choked gasp, and nothing more. He fell into unconsciousness.

He came awake, moving, feeling that not much time had passed. He was being carried on Sid’s back. They were climbing between thin dark shapes that lurched out of the darkness: trees. His cheek was against Sid’s shoulder. Through the stink of blood and burning from Sid’s overalls he could taste the resin of the pines. Oh no, he thought. I’m outdoors without quarantine. Something other than the trees appeared: a bulk of stonework. Sid had carried him from the hotel to the
archaea
in the conifer plantation. He must be exhausted. As he thought that, Sid dropped to his knees. Goodlooking slid to the ground.

They stumbled on, hand in hand. Once, Goodlooking baulked and tried to turn back. But his will was broken. He let Sid drag him through a maze of black walls, with cold dark empty air above them. Then Sid picked him up and carried him again, down an endless series of steps. And then, abruptly, Goodlooking found himself tumbling from Sid’s back onto a bed of stones. How cold the stone felt. How dead!

“Where are we?” he whispered.

“It was a water cistern, I think. I found it when I was poking about in the ruins, months ago.” A shuddering sigh. “The entrance isn’t obvious. I don’t know if we’re safe. I couldn’t think of anywhere else.” There was a faint fumbling. Reddish light welled. Sid appeared in lamplight, his face an abject mask.

“They came out of nowhere,” he whispered. “They must’ve used a rocket to blow the dome. It wasn’t proof against military assault. Why should it be? It was supposed to be there to protect humans from
you
. There was nothing I could do. All I could do was get you out. I’m going to put out the light. I don’t think it can be seen from above but—”