North Wind (32 page)

muttered Rajath sulkily.

Clavel snorted. He stared into space.

Rajath injected a note of realism.

agreed the poet absently.

“Broken when we found it, officer,” murmured Clavel, in English. “Never laid a finger, honest….” He moved restlessly: Rajath felt him tense as if for flight.

Rajath felt boredom creep over him, the boredom that (in Rajath’s model) was the whole Expedition’s secret, overwhelming reaction when
The Grief of Clavel
came up. In Rajath’s view the true reason that Clavel hid himself away at Akashi, was because he couldn’t stand to face the covert groans:
Oh no, here comes Clavel the Miserable.
He kept the idea to himself. He was a little afraid of the poet, and at this age not good at concealing his fear from himself. However much they irritate you, it is daunting to know that someone you honestly admire (though you think he’s a kind of holy fool) seriously wishes you did not exist.

he offered at last. He warmed to his theme.

Clavel suddenly smiled. It was like the old beautiful smile of the one they used to call
forever young.
But in his eyes a chill weariness lingered.

Somewhere else in the house there was noise: doors opening, voices. No known new person entered the air. Rajath started nervously. Clavel wasn’t alarmed.

Two faces peeped around the study door. called Clavel to the hovering domestics behind. He turned to his guest.

Two concave profiles, two pairs of dark-on-dark eyes. Small clawed hands with horny knuckles but smooth skin. Two lightly made bodies with sloping shoulders and angular hipbones. They were barely more than infants. They were barely dressed.

Clavel stood, sweeping the midnight robe behind him.

Rajath, after standing for a moment with his jaw dropping, followed Clavel into a cavernous hall. A stairway swept upwards. The little halfcastes had gone up there with the Expedition’s Pure One! The thin, dead effluvia of their skin tainted the air.

exclaimed the trickster, scandalized.

Bhaivara was at the foot of the stair, holding a lamp. He turned to Rajath, with a sad, eloquent lift of his shoulders.

Rajath shrugged in equal forbearance. Maybe it was a good sign, a kind of recovery. He ordered food, comfort and company.
Don’t try to leave.
Cheek! He had no intention of leaving. He’d accepted an offer of hospitality, and he planned to enjoy it.

iii

In the virtual casino the punters lost money (real money) in imaginary luxury, and somehow found this delightful fun. The spiders practiced direct-cortical telekinesis on the software of a virtual roulette wheel, a virtual baccarat pack. The House tolerated their depredations, within reason. Spiders were an important part of the decor. Some punters came for them, not for the games.

Bella went straight to the roulette wheel when she came in. It was her preferred game, though it was the most difficult to fix. Later, she would move to Baccarat. The liveried attendants knew her. They rushed to push in her chair, to take her coat, to bring her coffee and petit fours. The hour was late (in the virtual casino it was always late). The room was full. Jewels sparkled in the yellow light of many electric lamps. Footfalls and voices were muted by the acres of thick red carpet, the gold and crimson hangings that swathed the walls. Croupiers murmured their time-honored lines, players chattered between the tables, glasses clinked. Music played softly. A man-high bipedal reptile moved through the crowd, grinning affably as the punters gave way.

Covertly, Bella watched its progress.

This slight young person, with glossy cropped hair that lay close as scale or feathers, with her “concave” face and “oriental” eyes—so dark there was no visible distinction between iris and pupil—was not as bizarre in appearance as some players at the tables. Among the merely perfect humans in archaic evening dress sat a woman’s naked body with the head of an owl, a tabby cat in white tie and tails; a Black Dog in a skirt of pleated linen, with the torso of a man and the Key of Life lying on his muscular breast. One of the perfect humans wore (rising from the shoulders of his classic black dj) a pair of rainbow-burnished wings that soared halfway to the ceiling.

The House provided a choice of masks, or would accept most standard formats if you brought your own. If you preferred, it would scan your own appearance and present you in your own image in the game. Halfcastes traditionally chose this option. Masks meant nothing to them. Status among halfcastes was tightly bound up in the reality of your transformation. The punters who were queer for imitation aliens didn’t trust to convention. They prowled, flitting from spider to spider: unable to make up their minds which would remain most truly weird outside the
envie.
Bella ignored these scavengers. She’d never had to stoop that far, not yet.

She won some small bets. The attendants were attentive because the House knew what Bella was. She wasn’t making sly random gestures—playing imaginary piano under the table, pulling her earlobe, shuffling her feet: however, the House knew she must be doing something. But the attendants were décor too. Bella kept half an eye out for the
deinonychi.
The deinonychus dinosaurs, with the teeth and raking claws, were big solid humans in the real. If they threw you out it would not be a virtual experience.

She began to lose. The heap of plaques and jetons at her elbow melted. The dowager on her left commented sympathetically: and stopped following Bella’s “system.” The tabby cat on her right gallantly continued to lay the same bets as the little halfcaste, saying that luck is not everything, he preferred to throw in his lot with youth and beauty. They were all of them, in a sense, striving to control the spinning wheel and the tumbling ball. Most of them were submitting to the fantasy, in which the wheel was
a real object out there.
But someone else, besides Bella, was nudging the software. The person was not necessarily at this table. They could be anywhere in the
envie.
She fought back. She won, and lost again. She saw that she’d lost forty thousand ecu, which was her limit for a night’s play. She tussled briefly with her addiction, and left the table.

On her way past the Baccarat she dropped a couple of green plaques over the shoulder of the player known as The Tinman. It was a habit some people had in this
envie,
it was supposed to bring you luck. The Tinman was not a beggar. He had to be rich to afford to play so badly. Bella had no idea what the player in the clunky robot mask thought of these whimsical handouts. She had never spoken to him. She tipped him because he appealed to her, with his spirited determination to lose. He jerked around his cylindrical head, and cranked out a shy, jagged gash of a grin.

The balcony overlooked feathery tamarisk trees and a shore of yellow sand. Masses of magenta flowered bougainvillea tumbled over the white-painted stone balustrade. Sparkling waves swept across the beach. Further out, great walls of color broke over a spit of rocks: cobalt, emerald, turquoise.

Bella stared through the illusion. She was tired. In the virtual casino the hours you spent at play were real hours of the world outside. The boring punters preferred it that way, but it could be exhausting…. This was getting strange. She had moved into the casinos, out of battle games, to escape from her adversary, and chosen the purest game of chance to discourage his attentions. But if someone wants to duel, they’ll find a way. She still had no idea who the duelist was. It could be the tabby cat, the owl woman, or someone she’d never had any interaction with at all. She didn’t know if she wanted to find out.

“Have you ever seen the sea?” The Angel had come out to join her. He wore the mask of a man in evening dress, in a cut that matched the casino’s mid-twentieth decor. The wings had vanished. “Around here,” he added, with a faint smile.

“I had a chance once. But I missed it.”

The black “higene tomboy” Bella wore left her limbs and shoulders bare, and closely outlined her breastless torso. The Angel studied her frankly, in character. In character his eyes offered the approval of a connoisseur of womankind. Some players clung to their mask-persona in a kind of desperation. Some of them were having fun. Bella wasn’t sure about the Angel. The smile in the mask’s eyes deepened. He took out an untipped cigarette, tapped it on his cigarette case.

“What’s your name, child?”

“Bella.”

“I’m surprised that you play the tables. The virtual casino is for middle-aged punters on a nostalgia binge for a world they never knew. You’re young, and so fast: I’m impressed. I should have thought
Death Lizards of Venus
would be more your style.”

So the Angel had decided to tell her he was another spider.

“I play for a living. There’s money here.”

“I see.” He smiled again, the smile that might be desperate or assured, or both. He drew on the cigarette, which had become lit but was shrinking without dropping ash. “A rational explanation. Too rational. How much more sensible to be a punter, and enjoy the delights of fairyland. For you and I, I would guess, there’s as much pleasure for the senses here as in a game of virtual noughts and crosses. Yet such absorbingly complicated noughts and crosses!”

“But what’s in it for them?” asked Bella, feeling both wary and oddly relaxed. “I can’t make it out. Why not a real casino? If they like throwing money away.”

“With Old Earth in the state it’s in? How can you ask? Make believe is cheap. When all the money you possess will hardly buy clean food and water, why not spend your nights in hell, dripping with imaginary diamonds?”

The Angel considered the glowing tip of the cigarette. “If you’re trying to be like an Aleutian, Bella, you should hate the games. Or so convention would say. Yet are these truly deadworld devices, in the alien sense? It’s a debatable point. Maybe you’ve thought about it. On the scale at which direct-cortical impulse technology operates, where lies the threshold between “death” and “life”? Between the material world and the void? It’s a puzzle for alien philosophy.”

Bella laughed. “Someone once told me something like that. I’d like to have tried one of the
old
games,” she added, shyly. “To be able to fly. I’ve been able to fly in dreams.”

“Ah, that takes coralin. The indefinite potential of the dreaming state is not an easy thing to model or sustain. There are no wings in the waking brain, not so much as an abandoned stump that can be made to twitch. We are not dreaming, Bella. This is only a game.” The mask grinned wryly. “And there are practical considerations. A flying tank is not a place one can easily evacuate. A body pod is not a nice place to wake up in a power-cut. Or an air-raid! We’re safer in the hells, these days.” He tossed the end of his cigarette over the balcony. “You and I should be friends, Bella. We seem to know each other, don’t you feel that? It’s as if we had met before somewhere.”

With a nod of farewell, he returned to the brilliant room.

Bella stood looking at the sea, listening to the waves. The illusion had the same effect on her as printed words did. It was there, but it felt like nothing. So, she thought, mechanically.
I’ve found him. So that’s him.