North Wind

by Gwyneth Jones

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

The earth changed forever when the Aleutians landed. A hundred years after the invasion, the planet is firmly under extra-terrestrial rule. While the aliens pursue a form of immortality, small bands of human rebels still try to fight back. Bella is an Aleutian, with a limited understanding of human cultures and gender. Their expectations of society and life are shaped by their own upbringing. But then they meet Sidney Carton, a human. Bella learns quickly as the pair scour the war-ravaged ruins of Europe to find the last vestige of human technology that could be the only hope for saving civilisation as it still exists. Nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke award, NORTH WIND is book two of Gwyneth Jones' critically acclaimed Aleutians Trilogy.

Release date: September 7, 2021

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 400

Sample

i

grumbled Bokr, “And we went anywhere we liked!”

The doctor had been telling a story about his first stay on earth. His last words were spoken aloud and in English, disturbing the golden, resin-scented silence. The Aleutian sightseers started, and looked at him accusingly. Bokr quickly reverted to informal speech.

Perhaps there was no need to be nervous. Aleutians had come out from the Post to visit these relics often. There had never been any trouble before, though sometimes they’d been aware of curious watchers keeping out of sight. But the Trading Post was on the northern frontier of Aleutian presence. An hour’s journey away by jeep a war was raging.

There had been war on the giant planet—the same war, breaking out in one place as it subsided in another—since the Aleutian shipworld arrived and settled in orbit around earth. Some people had longed to interfere, convinced they could teach the benighted locals to abandon their superstitions and live in peace. Others had reminded the rest that they had no reason to feel superior. There was no armed conflict on the shipworld because they were a single nation. War was a normal feature of international affairs at Home.

At least the locals had no proliferating weapons. They couldn’t do each other any lasting damage, with their limited armoury.

Aleutian traders had retreated from trouble spots, consolidated where they were welcome, discreetly refused to take sides and all had been well. But suddenly, for reasons no one at the Post could understand, the Expedition was in trouble. The ‘Government of the World’, the local body the traders had always dealt with, professed itself no longer able to protect them.

The staff at Expedition Headquarters, at Uji, in Karen state, north of Thailand, claimed that there was no cause for concern. Naturally, it was a matter of pride to remain equally calm on the frontier but this was not the time for provocative formal speeches about the burden of quarantine. It was known that the locals could be eavesdropping, even in a spot like this. The Aleutians waited, half afraid of a lightning strike out of the blue sky.

Nothing happened. They relaxed, laughing at themselves.

Goodlooking laid his hand on a slab of worked stone. The scale of this relic astonished him. A massive grey-golden wall rose far above his head, webbed by a network of dark lines so regular and so harmonious that the effect was completely lifelike. But these stones were dead: cut and set mechanically by the hands of local people; or by non-living machines. He stretched his fingers, so the quarantine film, which looked soft but was very tough, glittered in the sunlight. The film covered him entirely, over his clothes and every scrap of exposed skin. It shimmered in front of his eyes. He breathed through it: when he opened and closed his mouth it stretched and shrank.

On earth, he told himself. Life is separate. Every being is separate. They do not grow their machines or their buildings, from stuff impregnated with their own life. The animals and plants I see around me are separate, whether they are wild or tame. They are not designed by the secretions of farmers or gardeners. They are not escapes from food-making changes of long ago that have survived and gone their own way. Our wanderers, (that the locals call ‘mobile semi-sentient cell colonies’) are passing information between us all the time. The locals have no such means of contact. They are afraid of our cloud of presence. The spaces between us are filled with a mist of common self. They are each alone, and it seems natural to them.

Strange and wonderful!

The Aleutians wandered in the circle of turf enclosed by the giant walls: Bokr, the post’s physician, and Panisad the trader, who were Signifiers like Goodlooking; plus eight of the ordinary staff. These were artisans, technicians and domestics who, like the majority of Aleutians, never used spoken language.

Goodlooking found a fallen block and knelt down, using it as an armrest. His disability made physical effort exhausting. At home or in the shipworld no one would have dreamed that he could join in an outing like this: out of doors! An unlikely recruit for the Expedition, he was here because Lord Maitri, the head of his household, was the chief trading officer at the frontier post: and because Maitri was also, for this life, Goodlooking’s beloved and indulgent parent.

The Self moves in mysterious ways. The last child Maitri had nurtured in his body had been a technician. The child before that had been the great Clavel, one of the original captains of the Expedition to Earth. Clavel the Pure One: who was so little like a trader, but whose influence was so important to them … This time Maitri’s offspring had turned out to be his own dim, disabled librarian. But Maitri loved all his children equally. He was the kindest of lords: lives ago, he had practically invented the post of ‘librarian’ for his invalid dependent. He’d known his ward longed to visit the giant planet, therefore he had arranged it.

So here was Goodlooking; equipped with a double set of underwear against the rigours of the climate, and the novelty of a formal name. In Aleutia your identity was never in doubt, it filled the air around you, and it was customary for only important people to have personal names, descriptive tags that might change from life to life or mood to mood. But on Earth everyone adopted a name, local style: so they had dug out Maitri’s baby-name for “Goodlooking”, since he had no other.

In the middle of his visit the locals had turned hostile, and whatever the people at Uji said, the situation was obviously deteriorating. It wasn’t Goodlooking’s fault, but he was fragile, and he knew he’d become an embarrassment.

He smothered a rueful sigh. He would not have missed being Maitri’s ward, or coming to earth, for fifty other lives, and the risk of sudden death didn’t bother him. One more shortened life was neither here nor there in his feeble career. It was the little things that marred this wonderful privilege. That woefully inappropriate formal name; which he detested. The feeling that he was a nuisance. The slight falseness of his ‘position’ as Lord Maitri’s ward.

Every hour was full of tiny stings.

In the silence, he was acutely aware of his disability. All the staff of the post belonged to Maitri’s household, but Bokr was the only one of these people he knew well. The group’s use of the Common Tongue, the silent language of their expression and gesture, was unfamiliar. He could follow the gist, but he didn’t have the key, the intimate knowledge of their past lives that would have made every meaning clear. At home—which for lives had meant onboard the shipworld—it didn’t matter that he found communication difficult. He lived in his little closet, buried deep in the house, surrounded by Maitri’s private records; immersed in the moving images. Ironically, this meant he ‘knew’ plenty of famous and important people: even famous inhabitants of this giant planet. He could have read their every gesture, from what he knew of their recorded lives. But he was never likely to be on a picnic with them.

Dr Bokr appeared at his side: materializing without warning, as people seemed to do even in plain sight, when they were wrapped in the quarantine film.

His kind, professional eyes told his real feelings: poor cripple.

Goodlooking tried not to recoil from the blast of concern.

he declared brightly.

Sure that he had the invalid’s attention, Bokr moderated his gestures. Goodlooking could understand the Common Tongue perfectly, regardless of quarantine, if familiar people put themselves where he could watch their faces.



He settled companionably by Goodlooking’s block, and spoke of the naked white radiance of the homeworld sun: the way it rained down on you, unfiltered by the presence of life, in the wilderness when you were right away from any city. In the shipworld, light dispersed from the bluesun reactor faded from blue day into indigo night: never reaching full darkness, or the diamond blaze of noon. Earth’s sun was an improvement. But if you were an outdoor person. If you’d travelled in the mountains, as Bokr had done once, with the great Clavel, this brassy glow was no substitute.



When he spoke of his previous trip to earth, which had happened in his last life and was part of his most recent recorded memory, Bokr seemed to be describing the distant past. When he talked of the homeworld, which he had left—in earth terms—thousands of years ago, he seemed to feel he’d been there yesterday and planned to return tomorrow. It was natural. On Earth, times had changed. The lost Home remained frozen in their minds in the state in which they’d left it. But it was no wonder earth people found the Aleutian concept of time confusing.

One life, thought Goodlooking, awed by such deprivation. To awake into consciousness, as a child wakes, but with no one to tell you who you are. No one to show you your possessions, no one to bring records of your past that will teach you how to be yourself. One life and then nothing: out of darkness into darkness!

suggested the doctor, with a roguish twinkle.

Goodlooking felt uncomfortable, and vaguely.

There was an aura of mystery around the librarian’s incarnation, this time round: because he was Maitri’s ward, and because Maitri made an unwarranted fuss of him (in some peoples’ opinion). A rumour had got about that he was really the truechild—the fated lover—of someone very important, and he’d been given a false identity at birth to hide him from his lover’s enemies—until he was old enough, or when the danger had passed. The stuff of fairytales: these things don’t happen! But it made people like Bokr interested, and it was embarrassing.

To find your true self, born in the same generation, was the Aleutian ideal of romance, and most romantically unlikely. There were millions of selves on record in the shipworld, and there was believed to be a ‘natural prohibition’ on the same person being born twice in the same generation. But susceptible young Aleutians secretly dreamt of finding their ‘trueparent’, while susceptible elders searched young faces for their ‘truechild’. If someone important (and romantically inclined!) thought he’d found such a treasure, maybe he would want to hide the baby. A person like that might well have artisans, medical technicians, who could fake anything.

The rumour was absurd, yet plausible enough to have earned a dim, disabled librarian some surprising attentions.

Goodlooking might have asked Maitri to deny the story. But his lord seemed not to notice the gossip and Goodlooking couldn’t bear to broach the subject: Maitri, am I a prince in hiding? He’d have felt so stupid. He’d decided to ignore the whispers, and pretend he didn’t understand the hints. However, he did not see why he should be grateful for flattering advances directed at the supposed secret celebrity.

“I was thinking about permanent death,” he said, in English. “Such a sad idea.”

The doctor stared. “Permanent death? Yes, horrible. Pure superstition. Their physiology may be odd, but how different can they be? A person is a person.”

He had answered the formal speech in the same mode, as politeness required: but his face was a study. He could hardly believe that he’d been snubbed, by the meekest of his patients. Shortly he got up and moved away, with a dignified shrug and headshake which cunningly managed to convey two messages: informing Goodlooking that his kindness had been misinterpreted, while letting the rest of the company know he’d merely been making sure the invalid was not overtired.

It isn’t sensible, thought Goodlooking wryly. If I’m attractive because I’m a disguised prince, with a lordly fated lover in my future, why are they surprised when I turn them down?

The Aleutians continued to stroll, admiring the stonework; the plants and the scuttering, flittering scraps of wildlife. Goodlooking settled against his block, revelling in the sunlight that wasn’t good enough for Dr Bokr, and catching fragments of conversation; the occasional, clarifying, spoken word of English (the official formal language of the Expedition) from the Signifiers in the party. English had been the most widespread dialect when they arrived. It wasn’t so useful now, but the habit remained …





He was glad to be ignored for a while. To Maitri’s humble librarian the modest company at the Trading Post was a mad social whirl. It would have tired him if he’d felt quite at ease. As it was, he was only truly comfortable alone in his room: or chatting with the local interpreter, the halfcaste Sidney Carton.

Sid had become important to Goodlooking. When he wasn’t feeling well it was Sid who would sit with him, entertaining him with tales of Old Earth. The others called him impertinent. They said “halfcastes” (the local term for locals who admired Aleutians) were a shifty lot. But the halfcaste didn’t find it intriguing that Lord Maitri went on caring for his humble invalid child, and to him the secret identity story couldn’t mean anything: Sid’s friendship was sincere. And Maitri trusted him.

Goodlooking been staring upwards absently, into the branches of the pinetrees that surrounded this sunken chamber. Thinking of his halfcaste friend, he gazed at the person who was looking down without at first feeling any alarm. The local’s ruddy features were divided by that jutting growth they called the ‘nose’. From the bottom of it sprang a flourish of black, bushy facial hair, seeming to defy gravity. At this angle, everything looked upside down. Those swollen purple lips could be a single grotesque eye. The deep-set, white-ringed eyes could be two small open mouths with white teeth. The local, as far as Goodlooking could see him, was fully dressed, his clothes covered in marks of status and fashion. He must think the Aleutians looked funny.

It had taken the traders some time to realise that people on Earth never slobbed around in public in a state of undress. They must have created a ridiculous impression in the early days, when they went to grand receptions in their bare overalls. What did the human up there see? A party of slick-haired, flat-faced people in long underwear, making silly gestures at each other (normal people always overdid it, in their effort to converse through the quarantine)—

The librarian realised that his mind was babbling in panic.



No one noticed his feeble alarm, but now others had seen the face. Bokr straightened his burly frame. His height was imposing. He towered over most locals; as over most Aleutians. He spoke, in the dialect of the region. The person answered. Goodlooking caught the word archaea, old things. The face retreated.

“He just wanted to know what we were up to,” announced Bokr.

The Trading Post staff exchanged glances. Their guest looked at the ground, embarrassed. There were things it would be rude to understand. “We should be getting back,” Bokr went on, casually, with a smile of mild social apology for the invalid. “I’m afraid you won’t see the ancient palace today, my dear.”

“Never mind,” replied Goodlooking, automatically. He could only help by joining the charade. “Another time.”

Panisad the minor trader put an arm around his shoulders. he told Goodlooking, earnestly distinct.

All of them had seen frank murder in the local’s eyes and felt the threat and hatred: nobody mentioned these things. Someone fetched the droms, and Bokr took the invalid in his arms to carry him out of the tomb. The shape of the old palace could be discerned through the trees, but Goodlooking knew he would never see it now. He wouldn’t be leaving the Trading Post again, until the evacuation shuttle, which was surely on its way, came to take him to safety. He would never see these stones again, nor the yellow sun nor the blue sky. Suddenly he was horrified. Had he really wasted such a precious hour, brooding on his neurotic wrongs? But it was too late for regrets. The adventure was over.

ii

The Aleutian pipeline ran north to south across the Argolid plain: a regular trace of darker soil, diminishing until it disappeared into conifer plantation. It was a component of the pump that was drawing thick foul brine from the gulf of Korinth, and churning out clean seawater at Nafplion to the south. Where it passed near the site of ancient Mycaenae, above the road from Argos to Korinth, Sid Carton was at work, supervised by Maitri.

Sid was chipping away at a splash of grey concrete that marred the neat dark band. Anti-Aleutian protestors had dug up the channel and poured in a plug of quick-hardening liquid stone, which they had laced with a wide-spectrum bactericide. The technicians at the Trading Post monitored their water-plant constantly, and were unconcerned: Aleutian industrial bacteria could deal with anything the locals threw at them. But Maitri liked to keep his pipeline looking nice.

The protestors were amateurs. On either side of their plug, the ‘pipe’ of sterile soil that had surrounded the bacterial flow was broken, and there was every chance that alien micro-organisms had made a break for freedom—an ironic result for the anti-Aleutians. But Sid had seen too much of the reality of so-called Total Quarantine Enforcement to be upset. The living power tools used by the Aleutian artisans stayed inside the quarantined compound, and had no local equivalents. Sid was using a hammer and chisel: his own property. He liked to see himself as a simple, old-Earth handyman (and if something needed fixing in his quarters, he didn’t want aliens nosing around. If you lived with the Aleutians you learned to keep your territory clearly defined). Otherwise they’d be all over you. Literally.

It was hard work. Sweat trickled on his forehead. The film, which he had to wear the same as the aliens, licked it up with a million tickling mouths. He squatted back to scratch the itch and his slickly encased hand dropped, defeated. Quarantine was a pain.

Maitri dropped into an animal crouch beside him. “Let me have a turn?”

They were half-hearted bipeds, slipping easily and strangely into a four-footed gait. They’d been called man-sized baboons in clothes: it was close enough. The hairless, noseless, muzzle of a super-sentient monster with formidable fangs, leaned cosily by Sid’s shoulder. He was careful not to flinch.

“No thanks, sahib. Your prestige is my safety. I don’t want some partisan with an antique Kalashnikov to come over the hill and spot an immortal superbeing stooping to manual labour.”

But the sunburned landscape was empty.

“No messages at all,” mused the alien, gloomily.

Ostensibly they were here to chip concrete. In fact they’d come out into danger so that Sid could scoot down the road, to where the modern town of Mykini had been resettled, when the Aleutians moved in. The prefabricated huddle had been abandoned before it was finished, but still held a functioning public cablepoint. Sid sneaked down there, 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 a real sense, everything they used and touched was a physical extension of themselves; every communication mediated by living, physical contact.

They had a non-living science of audio-visual records: but only for ritual, religious purposes. The aliens were immortal—in their own estimation!—and had no dread of personal death. But they called the place on the other side of a screen the deadworld, and revered as supernatural 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; to answer a voice propagated through emptiness as unliving impulses: for an Aleutian this was very like speaking to a ghost. They didn’t like it.

Some of 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. “Not a thing,” he said. “Cable cut somewhere up the line, complete service collapse. It’s a 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. But the system had fallen into disuse as population contracted into ever-more crowded cities: public points out in the countryside surviving as lingering beacons of a lost, global civilisation. Now Sid’s last beacon had gone out.

“What about the LOE GPS system?”

Lord Maitri was a ‘Japanese’, which meant he’d been (in another life) a member of the original landing parties. The aliens’ first patron on Earth had been an ex-Japanese billionaire, that’s 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. Nothing stirred, no gleam of metal, no covert movement.

“Is it er, Men I’m looking for, or Women?” inquired 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 close 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 and side-switching 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, not least because he despised the whole thing, himself. “It’s not ‘Men versus Women’. That’s your perception, mate. 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. “I don’t know why you’re complaining to me, anyway. I’m not involved. I’m a halfcaste. Why can’t you remember that?”

Maitri considered his human friend. He recalled the first meetings between humans and Aleutians, when the whole giant planet had been in the grip of ‘Aleutian fever’. Some locals had gone to extremes. They cut off their noses, they abandoned their extravagant use of the Spoken Word. They had their ‘male’ or ‘female’ bodies altered, in imitation of the ungendered traders; they declared themselves immortal, and searched human moving-image records for traces of their past selves. Their fellows called them crazy Aleutian-lovers, and treated them badly. Nowadays the afflicted were called “halfcastes”—a term that had nothing to do with the facts, and clustered wherever Aleutians could be found. The “purebreds” (another term that made no sense), both Men and Women, still despised them.

Sidney Carton was a halfcaste by birth: this Maitri knew. But his nose was intact, and he’d kept—as was detectable even in roomy overalls—the male lying-down equipment. He spoke English aloud, all the time; for preference; though he could understand the Common Tongue very well, and used deadworld communications without shame or reluctance—

He also did not seem to regard his employers with undue reverence.

To Maitri, all of this was proof of Sid’s good sense. The others didn’t agree. Unfairly and inevitably, Aleutians despised the “halfcastes” as much as the locals did. Even more unfairly, people then decided to be suspicious of Sid because though a halfcaste he didn’t make a grovelling fool of himself … Maitri sighed. He remembered humans with whom one could be friends; he remembered mutual respect, a meeting of minds. Somewhere along the way that meeting had been entirely lost.

“Maybe you should cut off your nose after all. Your nose and um, so on. That might help.”

The opaque goggles Sid wore over his quarantine managed to express his disdain. “To me, being an Aleutian-lover is a spiritual thing.” He studied the end of his chisel. “Mutilation is a mug’s game, and halfcaste is an idiot’s word. There’s no such thing. We can fuck each other, your people and mine: I have heard tell. But it’s not reproduction. To get a real halfbreed Aleutian-human, you’d have to grow the bugger in a vat. And who’d want to do that?”

He looked up, the blank goggles mildly curious now.

Maitri shrugged. “Who indeed?”

Sid resumed his bashing. “Truth is, I don’t know what I am. I’m not a Man, not a Woman, not an Aleutian. Whichever role I take, I feel like one of the others playing a part. That’s why I called myself Sidney Carton. He’s a character in a drama-movie, chiefly famous for pretending to be someone else. Played by the lovely Dirk Bogarde in my favourite version. A Tale Of Two Cities. A tragedy of human redemption.”

“Ah, a former life! We must view the tape together,” said Maitri politely. “When we have a quiet moment.”

To the Aleutians, watching a movie was sacred ritual. You were either ‘learning to be yourself’, by studying the records of your past lives. Or you were saying your prayers, by studying other, celebrated selves. Their religion was worship of the Ur-Self, WorldSelf, in all its aspects; each aspect an Aleutian person … At First Contact, when the landing parties saw the natives glued to their tv screens night and day, they thought everyone was fanatically religious. They still couldn’t grasp the truth about humans and the deadworld, not even Maitri … Aleutians were like that: not good at changing their minds.

The funny part was that the average Aleutian trader was no more ‘religious’ than your average human sinner. They ‘went to church’ because they were in the grip of a State religion. They weren’t keen … Maitri had a rare love of the records for their own sake, like having an aesthetic passion for temple dancing or church music: but you could hear in his voice what he thought about Sid’s humble prayers. Alien says: “Oh yes Sid, I’d love to come to the temple and make puja with you.” Alien thinks: how nice for them to have such childlike simple faith …

“Some of my proudest moments,” agreed the unregenerate Sid. “I would be honoured to share them with you. Can we go back indoors now, sahib? I’m not achieving anything here.”

Maitri didn’t answer. “I wish I knew what the problem was,” he said, after a silence. “Is it the disk plant?”

The Aleutians, having secured this toehold in the north on the strength of the Mediterranean Pump, had started manufacturing ‘disks’—discrete energy-packs, Aleutian organic batteries. They looked like palm-sized cowpats and packed an amazing charge. Officially this was against the rules, but the Government of the World had convinced the Greeks to turn a blind eye, when Maitri had arrived, a year ago; full of plans. An ‘old hand’ from the original expedition, a famous figure from the glory days of that so-called Government of the World, Maitri had seen himself settling down for long chats with Sid and the Mycaenans about the works of his favourite human clerics: the Revd. Wim Wenders, the Revd John Huston. Even the Very Revd Miss Jane Austen, pe. . .