North Wind Read Free Page A

In fact they’d come out so that Sid could scoot down the road, to the place where the modern town of Mykini had been resettled, when the Aleutians moved in. That prefabricated huddle had been abandoned before it was finished, but there was a functioning public cablepoint. Sid sneaked down there often, on his weekly half-day, to keep up with the human world’s news. (The feudal Aleutians were bemused by the notion of private “holidays” and “working hours.” But he’d squeezed the concession out of them).
    They didn’t like human telecoms. All their technology involved living material, tailored secretions that oozed from the skins of their artisans. In some sense everything they used and touched was a physical extension of themselves, every communication mediated by living physical contact. They had their own science of audio-visual records, but it was almost exclusively for religious purposes. They were immortal—at least in their own estimation—and had no dread of death itself. But they called the place on the other side of a screen the deadworld, and feared the unliving images on their blurry video screens. To talk to someone who appeared to you in a screen; or to a free-standing dead image; or to answer a voice propagated through emptiness as dead signals: for an Aleutian this was very like speaking to a ghost.
    Maitri’s staff would have been shocked to know that their tame local went in for eerie native rituals. But Maitri was a special case. Sid had few secrets from him.
    “Nothing,” he said. “Cable cut somewhere up the line, complete services collapse. This is a very bad sign, Maitri. Our local amateurs wouldn’t cut cable.”
    The Peloponnese had been encabled for longer that the Aleutians had been on Earth. Rural encablature had been a matter of regional pride back then. The population had shifted further into the cities and the system had fallen into disuse. The public points remained as lingering beacons of a lost global civilization: Sid’s last beacon had gone out.
    “What about the LOE GPS system?”
    Lord Maitri was a “Japanese,” which meant he’d been a member of the original landing parties; the aliens’ first patron on Earth had been an ex-Japanese billionaire. That was where the Sanskrit names came from. Sanskrit being, Sid had been told, a sacred language for Japanese Buddhists. Sid grinned, a little nervously. Maitri was very knowledgeable!
    “Low-orbit ephemeral satellite communication’s no use to us. It’s controlled by the military. And the snowflakes get shot down right off, if something’s going on.”
    Involuntarily they both stared around. They were unarmed, in accordance with the Landing Party Treaty.
    “Is it Men I’m looking for, or Women?” wondered Maitri.
    Sid groaned. “Both: if we’re very unlucky.”
    “Of course. I understand that. There are biological males on the Women’s side, and biological females on the Men’s side. I’m not completely ignorant.”
    Aleutians were “hermaphrodites,” to borrow a human term. They could all give birth, and there was no strict equivalent to the male role in their reproduction. Maitri pronounced the technical terms with care. Sid looked at him suspiciously, wondering if the boss was being deliberately obtuse. The alien’s shoulders lifted. The planes of his face moved upward, under the glinting quarantine film. This complex shrug was their smile. Bared teeth meant something else: but Maitri never snarled. He was the most gentle, the kindest of baboon-fanged telepathic superbeings.
    “But it does seem odd. Individual treachery is one thing. This en masse mingling, between two nations at war, still strikes me as bizarre.”
    Sid was tired of trying to explain the Gender War to Aleutians. “It’s not about “the Men versus the Women.” That’s your perception. It’s about an attitude of mind. About ways of relating to the cosmos, to the WorldSelf, as you would say.” He attacked the concrete violently.