The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  “There’d still have been an investigation. He couldn’t risk that.”

  I was about to ask why he couldn’t, but I’d thought of something more important. “Where is he anyway?”

  “He’s gone north to Khamsin to get an army,” he said.

  Khamsin. So the Sandalman wasn’t at the compound after all, and the bey was probably making a nice meal of Evelyn’s message by now. And when he arrived in Khamsin nothing I could say would convince Bradstreet something wasn’t going on. I wondered if Lacau had figured that out yet.

  He unlocked the cage. “I’m taking you to see Evelyn Herbert,” he said. “But I want you to file a story first.”

  “Okay,” I said. I had already decided what I was going to send. I wasn’t going to be able to fool Bradstreet, but maybe I could throw him off just long enough for me to get my scoop.

  “I want a printout first,” Lacau said.

  “This burner doesn’t use one,” I said, “but you can put the message on hold and then delete whatever you want from the monitor before we burn it.” I pointed to the hold button.

  “All right,” he said.

  “I put it in lock,” I said, but he kept his hand on the hold key through the whole message.

  I typed in a private priority that read, “Big Doings at the Spine. Hold 12-column.”

  “You’re trying to get him out to the Spine?” Lacau said. “That won’t work. He’ll see the dome. Anyway, he can’t uncook an official message, can he?”

  “Of course he can. How do you think I knew you had a ship coming in? But he also knows that I know he can and he won’t trust this message. This is the one he’ll believe.” I tapped the code for ground transmission, fed in the message; and waited for the burner to tell me it wouldn’t go through. It couldn’t do that until Lacau let go of the hold key, and I didn’t even have to ask him. He raised his hand and put it over his chin and watched the screen.

  I waited the length of time it would have taken me to weigh odds that Bradstreet would ignore a local message if it weren’t flagged with a priority and then decide to send it straight. “Coming back as fast as I can. Stall,” I typed. I signed it, “Jackie.”

  “Who’s this message going to?”’ Lacau said.

  “Nobody. I’ve got a relay set up in my tent. It’ll put the message in store and hold it. I’ll file a story in the morning about the Spine. It’ll be transmitted from here, which is a day’s trip from the Spine.”

  “So he’ll think you’re doing just what you said. Heading for Lisii.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Now do I get to see Evelyn Herbert?”

  “Yes,” he said, and started back along the maze of boxes and electrical cords with me following. Halfway there he stopped and said, as if he had just remembered, “This…thing they’ve come down with is pretty bad. They look…I want you to be prepared,” he said.

  “I’m a reporter,” I said, so that if I didn’t look horrified enough Lacau would think it was because I was used to seeing horrors, but I made the speech for nothing. I didn’t have any trouble registering shock. Evelyn looked just as bad the second time.

  Lacau had put some kind of contraption across her chest. It was plugged into the spiderweb of cords overhead. I set up the translator. There wasn’t much I could really do until Evelyn did a fix for us, but I fiddled with it anyway, and the bey watched me, all eyes. Lacau sprayed on plasticgloves and went over to the hammock to look at her.

  “I gave her her shot half an hour ago,” he said. “It’ll be a few more minutes.”

  “What are you giving her?” I said.

  “Dilaudid and sulfadine morphates. It was all there was in the first aid kit. There were IV packs, but they kept leaking.”

  He said that without emotion, as if he had not had the horror of trying to put an IV in an arm that could cut an IV pack to ribbons. He did not seem at all afraid of her.

  “The dilaudid puts her out cold for about an hour, and then after that she’s pretty lucid, but in a lot of pain. The morphates are better for pain, but they put her under after only a couple of minutes.”

  “If it’s going to be awhile, I’m going to show the bey the translator, okay?” I said. “If I take it apart and explain everything, we decrease our chances of finding it taken apart tomorrow morning. Is that all right?”

  He nodded and went over to look at Evelyn again.

  I pulled the face off the box, motioned the bey over, and started my spiel. Every burn chip, every hold strip, every circuit. I pulled them all out and let her handle them, hold them up to the light, stick them in her mouth, and finally put them back in the way they belonged with her own dirty little hands. Halfway through the electricity went off again, and we sat for five full minutes in twilight, but Lacau made no move to get up or to light the photosene lamp.

  “It’s the respirator,” he said. “I’ve got one on Borchardt, too. It keeps overloading the generator.” I wished the lights would come back on so I could see his face more clearly. I was more than ready to believe the generator could overload. The one out at Lisii was off half the time without benefit of respirators, but I was still sure he was lying. It was that double-door refrigerator next to my cage that was overloading the generator and making the lights go out. And what was in that refrigerator? Coca-Cola?

  The lights came on. Lacau leaned over Evelyn, and the little bey and I snapped the last burn chip in place and put the face back on the translator. I gave the bey a burned-out hold strip to keep, and she went off in a corner to examine it.

  Lacau said, “Evelyn?” and she murmured something.

  “I think we’re about ready,” he said. “What do you want her to say?”

  I handed him a clip mike to fasten on the plastic drape above her head. “Refrigerator,” I said, and knew I’d gone too far. I was liable to find myself back in the cage. “Have her say anything you want so I can get a fix. Her name. Anything.”

  “Evie,” he said, and his voice was surprisingly gentle. “We have a machine here that can help you talk. I want you to say your name.”

  She said something, but the box didn’t pick it up. “The mike’s not close enough,” I said.

  Lacau pulled the plastic drape down a little, and she made a sound again, and this time it came out of the box as static. I twiddled dials to get an initial sound, but couldn’t get it to match.

  “Have her try it again. I’m not getting anything,” I said, and punched hold so I could hang onto the sound and work with it, but it was still noise, no matter what I did. I began to wonder if the bey had put one of the tubes in backwards.

  “Can you try it again?” Lacau said gently. “Evelyn?” and this time he bent so far over her he was practically touching her. Noise.

  “There’s something the matter with the box,” I said.

  “She’s not saying, ‘Evelyn,’” Lacau said.

  “What’s she saying then?”

  Lacau straightened up and looked at me. “Message,” he said.

  The lights went out again, just for a few seconds, and while they were out I said, trying to sound a little impatient and not at all nervous, “Okay, then, I’ll get a fix on ‘message.’ Have her say it again.”

  The lights came back on, and then the centering lights on the translator blinked on, and her voice, sounding like a woman’s voice now, said, “Message,” and then, “Something to tell you.”

  There was a deadly silence. I was surprised the box wasn’t picking up my heartbeat and making it into the word “caught.” The lights went out again and stayed out. Evelyn started wheezing. The wheezing got rapidly worse.

  “Can’t you switch the respirator onto batteries?” I said.

  “No,” Lacau said. “I’ll have to get the other one.” He pulled out a sticklight and used it to light the photosene lamp. He picked the lamp up by its base and went out.

  As soon as I couldn’t see the wavering shadows along the hall of boxes anymore, I felt my way over to the bed. I nearly tripped over the bey,
who was sitting cross-legged by the bed, sucking on the hold strip. “Get water,” I said.

  “Evelyn,” I said, using the sound she was making to tell me where she was. “Evelyn, it’s me. Jack, I was here before.”

  The wheezing stopped, just like that, as if she were holding her breath. “I gave the message to the Sandalman,” I said. “I handed it to him myself.”

  She said something, but I was too far away from the translator to pick it up. It sounded like “light.”

  “I went right away. As soon as I left you last night.”

  This time I made out the word. “Good,” she said, and the lights went on.

  “What was in the message, Evelyn?”

  “What message?” Lacau said.

  He set the respirator down beside the bed. I could see why he hadn’t wanted to use it. It was the kind that fastened over the trachea and cut off all speech.

  “What were you trying to say, Evie?” he said.

  “Message,” she said. “Sandalman. Good.”

  “She’s not making any sense,” I said. “Is she still under the morphates? Ask her something you know the answer to.”

  “Evelyn,” he said. “Who was with you out on the Spine?”

  “Howard. Callender. Borchardt.” She stopped a minute as if she were trying to remember. “Bey.”

  “That’s fine. You don’t have to tell me the others. When you found the treasure, what did you do?”

  “Waited. Sent bey. Waited Sandalman.”

  “Did you go in the tomb?” He had been over these questions before. I could tell by the way he asked them, but on the last question his tone changed, and I waited to hear her answer, too.

  “No,” she said, and the word came through absolutely clearly. “Waited Sandalman.”

  “What were you trying to tell me, Evelyn? Yesterday. You kept trying to tell me something, and I couldn’t understand you. But now I’ve got a translator. What were you trying to tell me?”

  What would she say to him? Never mind? I got somebody else to deliver it? It crossed my mind, then and later, that she could not tell us apart, that her ears were filled with honeycombs, too, and our voices bending over her sounded the same to her. That wasn’t true, of course. She knew exactly who she was talking to until the very last. But right then I held my breath, my hand hovering over the switch, thinking that if I waited she might tell Lacau I’d been in here before. Thinking, too, that if I waited she would tell me what was in the message.

  “Were you trying to tell me about the poison, Evelyn?”

  “Too late,” she said.

  Lacau turned around. “I didn’t catch that,” he said. “What did she say?”

  “I think she said, ‘treasure.’”

  “Treasure,” she said. “Curse.” Her breathing steadied. The translator stopped picking it up. Lacau stood up and let the drape down over her.

  “She’s asleep,” he said. “She never lasts long on the morphates.” He turned around and looked at me. The bey had been waiting for her chance. She grabbed the Coke bottle off the cargo carton and ducked past him. He turned and looked at her.

  “Maybe she’s right,” he said tonelessly. “Maybe it is a curse.”

  I was watching the bey too, as she stood there waiting for Evelyn to wake up so she could give her a drink, no taller than a ten-year-old, clutching the Coke bottle in one hand and the hold strip I had given her in the other. I tried to think what she would look like when the poison started working on her.

  “I think sometimes I could almost do it,” Lacau said.

  “Do what?” I said.

  “I think I could poison the Sandalman’s bey to save the treasure if I knew what the poison was. That’s a kind of curse, isn’t it, wanting something so badly you’d kill somebody for it?”

  “Yes,” I said. The bey stuck the hold strip in her mouth.

  “Ever since I saw the treasure, I…”

  I stood up. “You’d kill a harmless bey for a goddamned blue vase?” I said angrily. “When you’ll get the treasure anyway? You can take blood samples. You can prove the team was poisoned. The Commission will award you the treasure.”

  “The Commission will close the planet.”

  “What difference will that make?”

  “They will destroy the treasure,” Lacau said, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

  “What are you talking about? They won’t let the Sandalman or his cronies anywhere near the treasure. They’ll see to it nobody damages the merchandise. They’ll take their own sweet time about it, but you’ll get your treasure.”

  “You haven’t seen the treasure;” he said. “You…” He put up his hands in a gesture of despair. “You don’t understand.”

  “Then maybe you’d better show me this wonderful treasure,” I said.

  His shoulders slumped. “All right,” he said, and everything in me said: Story.

  He locked me in the cage again while he hooked the respirator back up to Borchardt. I didn’t ask to go with him. I had known Borchardt almost as long as I had Howard, although I hadn’t liked him as well. But I wouldn’t have wished this on him. It was nearly noon. The sun was practically overhead and hot enough to burn a hole right through the plastic. Lacau came back in half an hour, looking worse than ever.

  He sat down on a packing crate and put his hands up to his head. “Borchardt’s dead,” he said: “He died while we were in with Evelyn.”

  “Let me out of the cage,” I said.

  “Borchardt had a theory about the beys,” Lacau said. “About their curiosity. He looked on it as a curse.”

  “Curse,” Evelyn’s bey had said, huddled against the wall.

  “Let me out of the cage,” I said.

  “He thought that when the suhundulim came the beys were curious about them and the ‘snakes underneath,’ so curious they let them stay. And the suhundulim enslaved them. Borchardt maintained the beys were a great people with a highly developed civilization until the suhundulim came and took Colchis away from them.”

  “Let me out of the cage, Lacau.”

  He bent over and dug down into the packing case beside him. “This could never have been made by a suhundulim,” he said, and pulled it out, spilling plastic bubbles everywhere. “It’s spun silver strung with ceramic beads so tiny you can’t see them except under a microscope. No suhundulim could make that.”

  “No,” I said. It did not look like beads strung on a silver wire. It looked like a cloud, a majestic desert thunderhead. When Lacau turned it in the light coming through the plastic roof, it shaded into rose and lavender. It was beautiful.

  “A suhundulim could make this, however,” he said, and turned it around so I could see the other side. It was mashed flat, a dull gray mass. “One of the Sandalman’s bearers dropped it bringing it out of the tomb.”

  He laid it carefully back in its nest of plastic bubbles and taped the box shut. He walked over and stood in front of the cage. “They will close the planet,” he said. “Even if we could keep it out of the Sandalman’s hands, the Commission will take a year, two years, to make a decision, maybe longer.”

  “Let me out,” I said.

  He turned and opened the double doors of the refrigerator and stepped back so I could see what was inside. “The electricity goes off all the time. Sometimes it stays off for days,” he said.

  From the moment I had intercepted Lacau’s message, I had known it was the story of the century. I had felt it in my bones. And here it was.

  It was a statue of a girl. A child, twelve maybe. No older than that. She sat on a block of solid beaten silver. She was wearing a white and blue dress with trailing fringes, and she was leaning against the side wall of the refrigerator, her hand and forearm flat against it and her head leaning on her hand, as if she were overcome by some great grief. I couldn’t see her face.

  Her black hair was bound in the same silver stuff the cloud had been made of, and around her neck was a collar of the blue faience etched in silver. One knee w
as slightly forward, and I could see her foot in a silver shoe. She was made of wax, soft and white as skin, and I knew that if she could somehow turn her sorrowing face and look at me, it would be the face I had waited all my life to see. I clutched the wire of the cage and could not get my breath.

  “The beys’ civilization was very advanced,” Lacau said. “Arts, science, embalming.” He smiled at my uncomprehending frown. “She’s not a statue. She’s a bey princess.

  “The embalming process turned the tissues to wax.” He leaned over her. “The tomb was in a cave that was naturally refrigerated, but we had to bring her down from the Spine. Howard sent me back to try to find temp control equipment and coolants. This was all I could find. It was out at the bottling plant,” Lacau said, and lifted the blue-and-white fringe of her trailing skirt. “We didn’t try to move her till the last day. The Sandalman’s bearers bumped her against the door of the tomb getting her out,” he said.

  The wax of her leg was flattened and pushed up. Nearly half of the black femur was exposed.

  No wonder Evelyn’s first word to me had been, “Hurry.” No wonder Lacau had laughed when I told him the Commission would keep the treasure safe. The investigation would take a year or more, and she would sit here with the electricity flickering on and off.

  “We have to get her off the planet,” I said, and my hands clutched the mesh so hard the wire cut nearly through to the bone.

  “Yes,” Lacau said, in a tone that told me what I should have known.

  “The Sandalman won’t let her off Colchis,” I said. “He’s afraid the Commission will try to take the planet away from him.” And I had burned a story about the Commission to scare him. “They won’t do anything. They’re not going to give Colchis to a bunch of ten-year-olds who keep sticking things in their mouths, no matter who was here first.”

  “I know,” Lacau said.

  “He poisoned the team,” I said, and turned to look at the princess, her beautiful face that I could not see turned to the wall in some ancient grief. He had killed the team, and when he got back from the north with his army he would kill us. And destroy the princess. “Where’s your burn equipment?” I said.