White Queen (3 page)

At nightfall they changed their clothes and danced, all but the sick, and the Expedition’s baby. Agnès and his guardian handed each other through the figures, everyone stooped as they passed him to include the baby, who sat clapping hands on the sidelines. The sounds of feet scuffing on a dance-floor of mud and leaves, the feel of branches snagging hair, had everyone giggling as usual. The rite was taken seriously, nevertheless. What can’t be conveyed by normal means of communication must be put into words. What is too deep for words is expressed in Dance. The other crews, far away, were dancing too. Briefly, the three parties were peacefully united.

The baby, whose guardian was also Benoit, fell asleep: after tearfully exhorted promises that nobody would sell anything else that he loved while he was unconscious. The adults sat and chatted. They would have watched tape, but that was another loss: the sacred equipment had been injured beyond recovery. Agnès’s chaplain was grieved and anxious. The captain teasingly begged him not to wallow in superstition. No one would collapse and die if separated from their narrative for a while. Although the locals seemed to believe otherwise….

“They live surrounded by ghosts,” he explained. “The other world, the land of the dead, is on show everywhere. I don’t know if they
have
any more rational knowledge of God.”

Most of his audience, unused to abstract description, didn’t quite understand. They laughed, to be on the safe side, and were comforted. It was worth something to be in the company of a great poet, even if it was all a little above one’s head.

Agnès sat with knees reversed in a relaxed posture, one hand cupped over his nasal against the chilly evening air. He argued with Guillaume, about that episode in the workshop yard.

stand
for people being mean to machines. I think it’s much more offensive to play tricks of your kind. They’ll find you out; and they’ll get mad. We all want to go home rich, of course. But lying and cheating isn’t the way—>

With Agnes, Guillaume replied, pity was like a disease. Which attitude would Agnès himself prefer, from visiting strangers? Would he enjoy being pelted with Improving Tracts? Agnès admitted, with a grin, that he would far prefer to be cheated.

Agnès’s guardian, the person who can always find something to smile about, came over to combed wanderers from the captain’s hair. The beloved leader, dear child, turned with a blind, nestling movement to bury his face in the other’s lap. How sadly sweet it was to feel him there: little grub, lost forever.

“What is your formal name here? I keep forgetting.”

“Benoit
—at least, that’s the nearest I can get.”

“If I win nothing else out of this life,” said Agnès, his voice muffled by his guardian’s clothes “At least you and I will always be connected, in memory of the Great Expedition.”

Endless speeches! This was one of the trials and fascinations of being so close to Agnès. Benoit hugged his grown-up ward, and they discussed in more commonplace fashion the difficulties ahead. The accommodation with Guillaume was inevitable, an interest-free loan unlikely. The value of this crew’s share in the adventure must take a fall.

pointed out Benoit.

Rueful, smothered giggles from the poet. Agnès’s lax grip on material success was notorious, proverbial.

value
failure. And yet, mysteriously, people still long for a chance to serve you. Yes, even Guillaume.>

Agnès uncurled, pulling faces.

Guillaume, the wilful one, had always wanted to announce himself and everyone else to the locals. Agnès had fought and won on this point before they left home. The tables would be turned if the Poet had to fling himself on the other’s mercy…. But the self-styled “Benoit” noted a last remark—informally expressed, quickly retracted; only someone who knew Agnès intimately would have caught it.
There:
a message that had to be a misunderstanding.

In that night, another of the injured died. Agnès’s physician had died in the crash. Anyone who had been seriously hurt was as it were still trapped in the wreckage: little could be done for them. It was no surprise. Anyone who had volunteered for this expedition must, by definition, have a tendency to court early and maybe violent death. But another deathbed brought their plight home to them once again. Agnès assisted his chaplain at the making of the person’s last record, and then retired with his sketchpad and a lamp to the fan rooted tree. He did not return to his poem, but he stayed out there for hours, copying carefully, from memory, certain odd patterns of lines and dots and curves. He was even more determined to hold onto his independence, not only for his own sake, but for the sake of those who had chosen to depend on him, in this life and all the lives to come. Guillaume had put all his efforts into making a big impression. Agnès knew that there were things about this new world that the Wilful One had not noticed, or had entirely misunderstood. Agnes would not come to their meeting, when it was eventually forced on him, completely empty-handed.

iii

L’Iceberg was one of those monster hotels left abandoned all over the globe by the collapse of long haul tourism. Its yellowed tower rose up from the French-planned New City center, forlorn marker of the high point of a far-retreated tide. In fact the air of decay was an illusion. L’Iceberg (officially the St Maurice) survived very well. Johnny would not dare try to enter its front doors, but there was a garden bar at the back called The Planter’s, which was less intimidating; the watering hole for every foreigner in town.

The Planter’s was on Johnny’s regular circuit in his search for the mystery girl. He’d never caught her in here yet, but there had to be a first time. Besides, his pocket money was burning a hole in his pocket. Greasy notes were not generally current in L’Iceberg, but the barstaff were friendly. Johnny bought a beer and carried it himself to a red plush island.

The glass wall to the garden was dark, the bar a gloomy cool cavern washed in the hiss of rain. On his screen talking heads around the Pacific Rim discussed gravely, with ill-concealed
schadenfreude
the demise of the New York Stock Exchange. He tuned it out, without touching the keypad. By the bar a party of white South Africans arranged tours with their holiday guide. Two Fo bourgeois, a man and a woman, talked urgently and sadly in a tiny alcove. A group of Nigerian businessmen passed by, going out to eat, clapping each other across the back, talking loud and showing big teeth. It was the dead time of the afternoon. Johnny nursed his beer, wondering how long before he got the bum’s rush.

A white woman came down the stairs from the hotel, wearing a small-waisted, short-skirted dark dress with an effect somewhere between petals and armor. Between the segments of the skirt a cool green ripple of chemical glow came and went. Johnny registered the dress as Big World high fashion. He was thinking that for a whore she looked too expensive for Fo, when he realized with horror that he
recognized
this person.

She saw him. She came over to his island with a false and meaningless smile on her face.

“It’s Johnny Guglioli isn’t it. D’you remember, we net—”

The talking heads now surrounded a centerpiece illustration of Times Square. Thousands of bodies swirled to and fro under a wild, rapidly changing airwriting of charged slogans. These rhetoric-parties had become a feature of New York life apparently. Like a dance craze.

The truth was, Johnny didn’t give a shit for the revolution. The Hisps and the Blacks duking it out with the Wasps and the Jews and so what. Nothing in it for Johnny, he was still dead meat.
A plague upon both your houses.

The falsely smiling woman was called Braemar Wilson. She was British. European foreign correspondents, engineer-journalists, worked for their national governments or the media giants, just like Johnny. Wilson was either not good enough to be anyone’s employee, or didn’t have the right background. She was no journalist, just a glorified presenter. She did cod-intellectual “developments” on topical concerns: sold her stuff to packagers, scheduled tv, the Brit net-tabloids. Johnny had networked with her on a couple of gigs, never met her in the flesh. Never wanted to. She made her living by telling the people what they liked to hear. Close the dome. Chute the poor.
It’s not your responsibility.
The Big Machines, (or Mother Nature, as in the Youro version) will decide who sinks, who swims.

It was the height of ill luck for anyone from the past to turn up here. Maybe he was glad it was an unsympathetic stranger.

“I heard about what happened. How awful for you, I’m so sorry. May I sit down?”

She sat beside him.

“What a swell party they’re having,” she remarked, with an edge of provocative scorn. “Next July we collide with Mars, but who cares about trifles? You’re well out of the whole fracas, in my opinion.”

Johnny glanced around and was immediately, painfully riveted by half naked breasts rising from a calyx of dark petals. She had more of the chemical light on her mouth. It was wet ruby there, a brazen signal to all comers.

“I’d be home if I could. I love my country.”

“You haven’t much reason to do so, Johnny.”

He stared coldly. Everybody knew his business.

“I’m the victim of a freak medical error. The Machines get it right for nearly all of the people nearly all of the time. I’m a Democrat. I’ve nothing to bitch about.”

“Medical? I heard it was a political problem.” She took a matt black case from her purse, removed a tobacco cigarette and lit it. A coil of blue-silver poison rose: she returned her attention to Times Square. “I think it started with the identity crisis. Do you remember? When you Liberals stopped knowing what to call yourselves. USians? United States Citizens, in full, all the time? It was clumsy, it was ominous.
American
is what you all are, North and South. Capitalisto rococo, the children of Eldorado: same orgiastic violence, same oral-fixated dreamlife, same crazy gulf between rich and poor. If the USA had been able to make sense of that, instead of trying to pretend that the Third World was something that happened to other people—”

There was nothing unmannerly in Ms. Wilson’s approach. Her aggression was merely fashion. It was perfectly correct for her to address a slight acquaintance via what was happening on the tv screen they shared. Johnny had no right or reason to take offence. But his bruised, starved sexual psyche got the better of him.

“Ma’am, you’re wasting your time. If I need something with a face to hold my baggie, I generally call upon the ghost of my ex- wife. I find her rates are most competitive.”

Ms. Wilson laughed. She leaned forward into his space with electrifying audacity: and was out again before he could gasp at the shock. She hadn’t touched him. She had laid on the table a small rectangle of pale green pasteboard with a darker stripe, meticulously turned down at one corner.

Braemar Wilson
New Things Inc.
More…

“I’m not selling,” she said. “I’m buying. You and I have an interest in common.”

“Are you the real Braemar Wilson?” said Johnny. “Gosh, I am impressed. You know, you look much younger on the screen.”

He got up and left.

Seimwa L’Etat, the proprietor of The State of The Nation, had been a very rich old lady before Johnny was born. By the time he met her (never in the flesh) she was fabulously old, fabulously rich, and arguably quite insane. She acknowledged no family ties, allowed no one to refer to her or address her except by that bizarre and arrogant
nom de guerre.
It was her pride that her empire of news and entertainment holdings was scarcely contaminated by a human workforce, except for the chosen few, her artists, the young “engineer-journalists” trained and licensed to handle the protean goop at the heart of the latest phase of the Information Age. Johnny and Seimwa’s relationship had been personal from the start. He humored the old monster, enjoyed her, loved the life she gave him. One day he discovered that she, or someone, was aware of his Union activities. He braced himself for the earthquake: none came. The next time Johnny went on a trip it was up to the Space Station. In prospect this was an obscure piece of excitement. No one went to Space anymore, not even the Chinese. It was several years since the Station had been abandoned. The crewed trip was a one-off: assess and retrieve. In practice, they discovered that eyeball evidence didn’t differ much from pictures relayed by the station’s compromised communications; they retrieved nothing; and nobody watched them on tv. But at Johnny’s medical debriefing, he was declared infected with a Class Q petrovirus.

Petroviruses had been developed by the military, designed to dissolve organic polymers. The Class Q type combined this ability with a propensity to attack the protein based “living” material that had replaced conventional silicon-based processors. No one knew much about QV: except that it had appeared from nowhere, ruined the Mars Mission, soured the relationship between the USA and Russia for years, and arguably had been the final death knell of Man’s attempts upon the High Frontier. No one had ever claimed responsibility for the Mars debacle. The theory that QV was an artificial product, designed by terrorists, was perhaps no more than a reassuring myth. Maybe it had just growed.