North Wind (22 page)

It was happening again. Either he was going mad, or something was happening. Why should Aditya flatter and pursue Maitri’s librarian? As the Beauty’s fondest admirers would admit, disinterested kindness was no part of his obligation.

Don’t do this to me! Please, people, stop it. Don’t you know you could drive someone crazy? If you keep on telling someone he isn’t who he thinks he is, it isn’t funny, it’s frightening …

The cry remained stifled, locked inside.

crooned Aditya, smoothing Bella’s hair.

ii

Darkness. Darkness striated with light. A slow adjustment and the skeins of fire and dust take on the form of an amoebic entity, connected over vast distances: like stringy, runny, swirls of beaten egg, pervading a glass of murky liquid. It’s all moving around the inside of a limitless sphere. “Space,” says the voice of the letterbomber. “The final frontier….”

Then light shines on a large, soft-bodied woman with a mass of heavy golden hair knotted up on her head. Though you can see her clearly in color, she’s staring upward at a cloudless dark sky. You may realize, if you are familiar with the night skies of Earth, that there are remarkably few stars visible: yet a handful of the scattered points are very large, brilliant and new to you. Are they planets? Air-cruisers, satellites? No, they burn with the deep stillness of the constellations. As the sequence moves on, the light that bathes the big woman picks out color in the foreground. The undergrowth she’s treading has a subliminal strangeness.

“These are the
stardate diaries.
These sequences have been loose on the samizdat of Old Earth for a long time. They appeared in the net after the death of a scientist called Peenemünde Buonarotti. Buonarotti’s career ended when the first Gender War began in Western Europe. She’s forgotten now.” The heavy woman fades (into the past). There is a different night sky: and then another; and another. The heavy woman continues to fade….

“Results,” says the letterbomber. “Nothing but results, no working-out. Someone left us a trail of strange skies, we think it was Buonarotti. At a later date something else appeared: a list of real stars, some extremely far away from us here on Earth. Some are stars identified as planet-bearing, long ago; some are unknown in that context, but to those who know about the diaries the inference has always been obvious. The stars on that list have Earthlike planets, and Buonarotti visited them. The stardate skies were drawn from life.”

I need a bit of contemporary newsreel,
thought Sid as he worked, sitting on the floor with his desk inside the “limitless sphere.”
I need Peenemünde Buonarotti: place her and fix her real physical appearance. Need that before pasting her on the night skies sequence. And the foregrounds need work. Buonarotti painted night skies because to her the stars said it all. It’s also hard, even if you really did go there, to make a generated image of the surface of an alien planet look—

Suddenly he stopped working.

“Cut the playback, Lyd.”

The night sky collapsed. Sid pulled off his eye-wrap. In a bare, functional little room, Lydia Carton presided over a heap of dun-colored boxes. Roger was lying on his front in the dust beside them: alternately chewing something and trying to poke it into a crack in the concrete floor.

“This isn’t working.” Sid announced.

Bella had fled, and they hadn’t a hope of kidnapping her again. The Fat Man had decided they would try to win her over to their cause by persuasion instead. It had been his idea that Sid should make the letterbombs seem personal. If they fell into the wrong hands, the aliens would see an infatuated lootie-lover, performing a native ritual. But Bella, who had spotted Sid for an anti-Aleutian, would know there was more to it.

Pride kept Sid from protesting, because he was sure his boss somehow knew everything that had happened between him and Bella, and was well aware that the “lovelorn” campaign caused Sid untold pain and humiliation. But he had decided, unilaterally, to use the
diaries.
They were supposed to be pursuing Bella for the sake of information she possessed without knowing it. Surely it made sense to try to jog her memory.

The stardate diaries had been precious to Sid when he was a child. He knew they were faked. Anyone could see that. Buonarotti couldn’t have taken a cam with her on her trips. If she’d had anything to do with the “diaries,” she must have constructed the images afterwards, from memory. So what. That didn’t make her journeys less real!

He’d been miffed when he introduced the Fat Man to his treasured images and found him unimpressed. Now that he was older, he could understand. The diaries were part of the legend: he still loved them. And they were junk. But that wasn’t what was wrong with this letterbomb.

No,
he said to himself.
No, it won’t do. This isn’t working. She has no memories for us to plunder. She’s an innocent bystander. The poor kid!

The situation was intolerable. Sid had always been the one who was going to be innocent of the Gender-War crimes, never giving a woman any kind of grief, full parent to his children: and all without surrendering a nanometer of his beloved masculinity. He’d dreamed of finding someone—girl for choice, boy would do if he was happy in the role—who would play the glamorous-girl to Sid’s boy-wonder, view fun and nostalgia. Someone like him, who rejected the Gender War yet loved the game of gender-difference.

But what happened? Life and the Fat Man had turned Sid the full time parent into an absentee-father; Sid the aspiring movie-hero into an unmanly creep who had sold his girl for a handful of
milk tokens.
Finally had him pestering this poor alien—who probably wasn’t interested in Sid at all by now—like some mindless crypto-rapist waving his dick in the dark park.

I can’t stand it! I won’t do it! I can’t go on with this!

She only wanted to be left alone. But there was no chance of that. She didn’t know it yet, but there was nowhere she could run to get out of the way of the crossfire. He couldn’t save her. He could only do what the Fat Man said was right: and hope. He pulled the desk towards him again, miserably.

Lydia was onto him at once. “Daddy what are you doing?”

“Starting again, it was no good.”

What should he tell his photochemical pen pal? Cactus is still in a dreadful state. I need to get hold of a skinny female-to-male transsexual with big hair, who plays electric guitar like an angel, view lasting relationship with an invalid gene-therapy victim who can’t do sex. Do you know anyone?
Fingered me straight off did you? What a bloody cheek. I WANT YOU BACK, you sneaky two-faced little—

“Daddeeee! That’s not fair! You can’t start again! We’ve been here hours!”

Oh, and remember how I wanted to spend more time with my kids?

“I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“Daddy, there’s someone coming.”

Footsteps in the corridor. Sid ran to the door: jumped up, grabbed the rim of the glassed light above it; hung there peering. The studio was supposed to be empty today. He’d borrowed the printkey from a friend of a friend.

“It’s the management! Everybody out.”

He ripped his meltoptics from the boxes, grabbed his desk and Roger, and discovered to his horror that the thing the toddler had been masticating was
Lydia’s pillbox,
her fx generator on a wrist-strap. It was soggy with baby-slime.

“Are you part slug, Rogie? I’ve often wondered.”

“I
wanted
that.” Roger spoke seldom but with decision.

“Sssh.”

He hooked Lydia by one wrist and hauled everyone through the back window: an escape he’d checked beforehand. They were in an alley. Their exit was blocked by a vast, knobbly-hipped brown cow. She had a collar round her neck which would say, in Malayalam squiggle, that she was milked for an anti-cancer vaccine, or some such thing. There were loud inquisitive voices from the studio.” Get out of my way!” yelled Sid. “You’re not a sacred animal; you’re a pharmaceutical production-line!” The cow—they knew their rights—just sneered. Sid barreled through, hauling Lydia behind him.

She was squealing “Daddee, I left my pillbox!” God help Roger, when she saw the state of that precious possession. He burst out into Man Town, without an atom of energy to spare for creating the right impression. So much for the near-Aleutian skill, that permitted Sid to blend in anywhere. Such is the life of a savior of humanity, in ungrateful times.

When he next heard from the Fat Man, he learned that the campaign was suspended anyway. Their letterbombs were being intercepted.

The persecution stopped. Bella didn’t know how it was done and he didn’t ask. He became a daily visitor at Aditya’s “little cottage.” In the old days everybody had lived in the manor house; over lives, local-style private retreats had sprung up throughout the grounds. After the Protest, and the triumphant Return, this decadent custom had quickly been restored. The smart set escaped to their “cottages” whenever duty allowed, to play at being locals, and indulge in other naughty games—not even returning to hall for prayers or to spend the night, unless specially summoned.

There was a proliferation of unearned Sanskrit in the post-Protest cüompany. Aditya’s friends, disdaining this vulgar ostentation, had decided to call themselves after characters in the classic
Les Intermittences Du Coeur,
instead. Apparently the moving-image transcription of the Confessions of the Rev. Marcel Proust was a great favorite with Aditya—though the Beauty himself, transparently vain of his genuine Sanskrit, usually forgot he was supposed to be Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes. They tried to rename Bella, but the isolate protested he’d get too confused.

The materialist Viloma had also declined the honor. He claimed he’d been given his Earth name by his spirit guide, Samhukti, a Landing Parties cleric who’d been Rajath’s chaplain at First Contact; who was not presently alive, but whose wishes must be respected. Viloma had been recruited to the Expedition by Aditya, when everyone from Uji was back on the shipworld during the Protest. His previous history was obscure. His “occult” ideas couldn’t have been more different from the mysticism of Seeker-after-truth. At the “little cottage” h held séances, at which—Bella gathered (he’d never taken part)—the believers sat around a piece of cloth with a dead person’s decayed spit on it, or some such relic. They asked the person questions and were given vague replies. Transmitted by Viloma, of course.

Bella wondered what Samhukti would have to say, if he returned to life while Viloma was still around. He found it hard to be polite about this sort of thing. Luckily the séances took place at night when the isolate was safely away from the cottage on medical grounds. Even more luckily, Aditya seemed to have forgotten the idea that Bella must be “fascinated” by the medium.

He’d realized that it was the bored Beauty who was blocking his passage home, but found he didn’t mind. It wasn’t as if he had anything to go home for. He would get back to the shipworld eventually. Meantime it was pleasant to be summoned, from his humble room in the sick bay, by a fashionable and friendly young trader, and “carried off” in obedience to Aditya’s commands. It was flattering to be consulted about
Les Intermittances Du Coeur.
(Aditya’s “little clan” liked the names, but they were as irreligious as most socially successful people, and knew very little of the record itself). In all his lives, Bella had never dreamed of being a social success. Suddenly, he was a highly privileged member of the smartest set on Earth. People said that Yudisthara had to make his appointments at the cottage days in advance!

One morning he was summoned by Albertine—the more sensual of Aditya’s two closest favorites. Aditya was often casually brutal about Bella’s disability, but he never forgot what it meant. He always sent someone in person to fetch the isolate.

Bella noticed that Albertine was full of suppressed excitement, but thought nothing of it. The “little clan” could get excited over very little. They found Aditya taking breakfast with his household in a nest of local-silk cushions, while Alison de Vere’s
Black Dog
played around the walls: just like the fashionable décor of Earth in the Landing Parties’ day. Francoise, a domestic who was a talented musician, sang to them unaccompanied; a fragment of an Old Earth poem, to music of the same date—

Who knocks?
I who was beautiful
Beyond dreams to restore
I, from the roots of the dark thorn am hither,
And knock at your door…

sighed Aditya: and then, jumping up: