North Wind Read Online Free PDF Page A

purebreds’ metaphysical angst. He didn’t see what was special about a meat (as it were) mountain. They were on digital record somewhere, surely. You could experience them anytime. Sid’s dread was practical.
    The Aleutian technicians admitted that there’d be a disturbance of local weather systems, and a rise in the death rate: but nothing to notice, since there was a global war going on anyway. The effects would pass in a generation or two. The net gain in climate improvement was worth the cost.
    In a generation or two… Sid crouched with his arms wrapped around his knees. He thought of tons upon tons of rock and ice, shearing away. The skies filled with mountain-dust, the North Wind rushing down out of the cold desert. He thought of the footage he’d seen of life after the Japan Sea cataclysm: a marginal upheaval compared to this one. Some scientists feared that the inevitable “benign cooling” would tip the earth into a million years of winter. It hardly seemed to matter. Like a long drop, or deep water: after the first hundred whatevers, who’s counting? But the Aleutians didn’t understand that. They didn’t believe in permanent death.
    A flock of sparrows flew down and started to scratch in the disturbed pipeline for food. They’d be lucky… The purebreds were such fools. They woke after a hundred years, and thought they could kick the aliens out, just like that. Sid watched the sparrows. What I would like, he thought, is to have a house of my own, with a garden, and live in it and provide for my family. I could grow vegetables. He wondered how long before an air-transport from Uji could get here.
    “There’s only one way to shift them,” he told the little birds. “Offer them an alternative. Show them something better than what they’ve got here. Otherwise we are fucked. Because nothing else makes it. Absolutely nothing we can do will touch them.”
    Maitri came back on two feet, slowly, scratching the bristling gap where his nose should be. “They’re safe. I watched them to the turn.” His relief was touchingly obvious.
    “No empty saddles?” The droms, engineered hybrids between horse and camel, were evil brutes, in Sid’s opinion. But the Aleutians liked them. They were living machines: homelike.
    “No empty saddles,” agreed Maitri, smiling.
    “You should’ve cancelled that excursion.”
    “Perhaps. But he’d been looking forward to it so much, we didn’t have the heart. An isolate, you know. There’s so little one can do to make things right.”
    A gleam of vivid blue flickered, through Sid’s stubby pale lashes. The aliens were supposed to be telepaths. Sid knew the limits of that mythical ability. But like any human who had to do with them, he would not meet their eyes directly if he could help it. For a moment he studied lord Maitri, covertly.
    “Time to go home, Gunga Din.”
    “Achcha, sahib.”
    The alien bounded away: Sid picked up his tools and followed.
    The Trading Post stood alone, under a hemisphere of antibiotic and carbon-strengthened glass. Once they were through the entrance-lock, they were in Aleutia. The sightseers had just arrived; domestics were leading away the droms.
    Goodlooking exclaimed, “Sid, you’ve hurt your hands!”
    He hadn’t realized. The quarantine started melting as soon as you were indoors. His palms were bare, and he felt the blisters. Overcome by the unease that afflicted him when he met his alien friend in front of an audience, he dropped to one knee and flung his injured hands in the air.
    “She cares! I believe she loves me!”
    The Aleutians laughed, their faces brimming with soundless alien merriment. They thought Sid’s routines with Goodlooking were killingly funny. A trolley passed, carrying folded napery to the dining room. Sid grabbed a red tablecloth and flourished it, the cloth in a panic struggled to escape, but Sid would have none of that. He wrestled and brought it to submission; cast it proudly to the ground, and