Read Online North Wind by Gwyneth Jones - Free Book Online Page A

terrible could happen to the superbeings. Now he was lost in space: no global, no cable, no hope of rescue. But somehow he had to smuggle an invalid alien through a country he didn’t know, that was crawling with heavily armed maniacs who were slavering to tear her to pieces.
    “This is my plan. We’re going to disguise ourselves, especially you, and head for Athens. It’s our nearest city.”
    Cities had become relatively safe places, because urban populations were still mixed. You got terrorism and assassination squads, but no old-style population destruction. Modern warfare was guerrilla warfare on a continental scale: no massive air-raids, no strategic nuclear strikes. Just the slow, almost accidental murder of a civilization.
    His plan should make sense to her. An Aleutian ‘city’ was an enclave of life, life on every scale sharing the same myriad-aspected identity: life creating and tailoring a microclimate and a whole biosphere to the will of the sentient inhabitants. Their shipworld was a city like that: a city in space, built around the trap that held the bluesun: their homeworld was netted with “cities,” joined by tendril-corridors of life, while outside in the wilderness balls of blue lightning prowled, the wild blue-sun reactors that could be trapped and harnessed like great dangerous draft-animals…
    He pulled himself up, out of a vision of the reality of that alien place. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My mind’s wandering.” How could he give her confidence? “It’ll be like a game. No, wait: you don’t have games. It’ll be like Johnny and Braemar. The saboteurs. We’ll be like Johnny and Braemar on board the shipworld, when they were sneaking to the reactor chamber, trying to pass for aliens.”
    She hunched there in her battered underwear, a dun quilted bodysuit with a pocket in the crotch for their sanitary arrangement. She looked so pathetic, his poor librarian. If he was lost in space, where was she?
    “You’ll need another name. Goodlooking doesn’t sound right. How about ‘Bella’? It means the same, in a better dialect.”
    He watched, curious to see how she’d take it. She hesitated: her shoulders rose a little.
    Sid grinned, his spirits enormously lightened by that alien smile.
    “That’s my girl.”
    
    He shook his head, with rueful pity. She was going to have to take in so much, and he knew how little things rankled with her.
    “No. You’ll be traveling as a human. If I had any pads we’d have to leave them behind. You’ll have to do like the natives do.”
    He bent over his bundle, giving her privacy while she handled the bad news. “This is called a chador.” He spread the dark folds. “An honor cloak. It’ll cover you from head to foot. It’s female costume, worn by both sides. By males too, sometimes. A chador’s a useful thing, when you don’t feel like facing the world. There are clothes to go under it. I had some of my wardrobe stored in the stable, you see, that’s how this stuff survived. Fact is, I was expecting that shuttle, but I didn’t know if there was a place on it for me. Sadly, I hadn’t got round to moving my ration box.”
    He passed over these revelations quickly. “We’d better change.”
    Aleutians didn’t like to be naked, but she made no fuss. She stood and peeled down her underwear, toilet pad and all. She scrumpled the outfit up, mugging distaste.
    Sid had not meant to look but he couldn’t stop himself, the pull of the grotesque drew his eyes. Aleutian skin had no red or blue tones. The whole human range from indigo-black to milk-and-roses was missing. Some of them were darkly olive, like the smoke from a fire of green wood; some a startling acid yellow; some very pale. Goodlooking was white as a swan in twilight. She stood in the dull chemical light, frail limbs glimmering. He could see the line of the vertical cleft in