White Queen (7 page)

“Johnny! Braemar! My friends!”

David Mungea, high as a kite, swooped down on them and carried them away.

Johnny had been on the town with David often, though not since Braemar joined the gang. He had managed to enjoy himself in a distanced way. He appreciated the music, became passively stoned in smoke filled clubrooms; he got into tiring intellectual conversations with drunks. Tonight was different. He had to relax, he couldn’t help it. For once he let himself enjoy the painful pleasure of being near Braemar, without prissy reservations. He felt safe in the crowd: safe to tease her and get teased, to meet the lick of her eyes. They sat around rickety tables in a concrete floored shebeen. David put his arm around Brae and whispered loudly.

“Braemar, do you find this boy attractive?”

“Yes.”

“You sound sad about it, don’t be sad. Everything is always coming right. All will be well.”

“Tell us that when you’re sober,” said Johnny.

“But I am never sober,” laughed the Minister. “That’s my great secret.”

In a canvas-walled dancehall with the rain rattling down outside he watched while she danced, and let his imagination run riot. The floor was sheets of plastic, the musician at the desk sampled its crackle and slither, beat them and the rain into rhythm. Natural! everybody sang. This is Natural music. This is Natural music. Musiiique Naatuuurellle.

About two a.m. she’d had enough. He walked with her back to L’Iceberg. There was still a muted row from The Planter’s Bar, but the front of the hotel was dark and quiet.

“Johnny,” she said. “I realize that this coralin stuff is tricky. As I understand it, while the blue clay is fabulously more effective than any previous processing substrate, it’s also marginally vulnerable in new ways. But data processing has always been vulnerable—to thunderstorms, hackers, fluff and dust; bugs physical and informational. To people pouring cups of coffee over their keys. There’s caution and there’s insane paranoia. You must know it’s actually quite difficult to pass on a retrovirus. The processor in my phone is coralin, true. But even if you were not framed, you’re unlikely to bring the invisible walls of the world crashing by handling its powerpack.”

Sex with a machine. The source of that nasty joke was that the QV was partly descended from the group that caused the last century’s most famous human plague. AIDS was unremarkable now, submerged in a slew of mystery-mutant-plague scares. But the joke had a point. Intimate contact, exchange of body fluids: Johnny had no right to risk any of that.

He stared ahead, aching, hating the sly liquid glance he caught as she smiled and talked. She couldn’t mean it.

“Maybe you no longer have a career as an eejay. But look at me, Johnny. I’m no engineer. I still get my stuff on the screen, more or less. No one expects my hands to be clean. The precautions are taken for me.”

Again that soft, meaning glance. He hated her deeply.

“What’s the point in this self-flagellation? Do you think that the Big Machines will look down and see how patiently you’ve suffered, and take pity?”

This was pretty well what Johnny did think: that if he kept all the rules to the letter and beyond, somehow it would stand in his favor. It sounded ridiculous spelled out in cold blood, so he didn’t answer. He didn’t want to talk at all. He felt like a walking lump of tumescence: the horny adolescent boy, one of Mother Nature’s more hideous practical jokes.

She used her roomcard to open the gates. A body lay curled peacefully by the watchman’s hut. She touched the leaves of the shrubs that peered over a low wall, so that lights sprang up; night-opening flowers. She sat by one of them.

“This city is on the brink and doesn’t know it,” she said. “Fo, New York, Seoul, Bruxelles. You and I may be the only two people in Africa who can hear the seconds ticking away. It’s a strange state to be in. It makes everything very intense, here in the last days. What d’you want to do now, Johnny?”

She looked up at him, so still that he knew she would not move if he touched her. He could do whatever he liked. He could peel back that petalled armor from her breasts, she would only stir to lift her throat so they rose more freely to his mouth. He could push up the glowworm skirts, unfasten his pants and take her right here. She wanted him to do that. He had never been more certain of anything in his entire life.

This is how one becomes a rapist.

Johnny drew a breath of bitter outrage.

“What do I want to do now? As I believe you know very well, I want to fuck you until we’re both unconscious. Since I can’t do that, I think I’ll crawl back home. Maybe stopping in some doorway on the way to jerk off. I haven’t had a sexual partner for two solid years. If we are going to work together you’ll have to understand what this means. I have a hormonal problem. It’s something any young male of chaste habits has to live with. I cope,
but don’t push your luck.
I’m bigger than you. Excuse my frankness. After all, this is the twenty first century and we’re both grown ups.”

He collapsed on the end of the wall, staring at his feet.

“Oh, I forgot. I tried to seduce a guy at a party in Amsterdam, a few months after I dodged quarantine. But I did not manage to persuade him to go all the way. Or even very far.”

“I didn’t know you were bisexual.”

She had the nerve to find his plight funny.

“Not in any of those files you’ve been tampering with, eh? I’m not. I was utterly gonzo.”

His outburst had relieved the pressure momentarily. God bless words, he thought. Where would we be without them. He ought to leave now, find that doorway. But this thing had gone beyond mindless arousal. Brae’s body had acquired meaning beyond itself. He put his fists to his eyes: images of those country people in their pitifully decent poverty, thoughts of what the coming of the visitors might mean to them, to billions. His memories were not to be trusted—the car that whined and lay down like a dog, his daughter kidnapped. Yet there had been a meeting. He was convinced, right now at any rate. The world would be changed forever. But he would still be shut out. He wanted to be wrapped and hidden. Please. Let me come home.

“Johnny, come here.”

He was desperate enough to obey.

She took his hand, and closed it over a small, slick package. It was a gesture he had only seen in risqué foreign films. Decent kids in New York didn’t need to be protected against casual pregnancy or disease. You got married, you stayed married: end of options. The touch of her hand, the sophisticated way she closed his fingers: the effect was incredibly erotic. His tongue was too thick for his mouth.

“That won’t keep out the QV. Okay, you’re not risking your job. What about your life?”

“I thought I’d made myself clear. I’ll try again. You turn me on. I’m forty seven years old. At my age one doesn’t hesitate when lightning strikes. You tell me you haven’t got QV: that’s enough. One takes the reasonable precautions, one takes one’s own risks.
C’est tout simple, l’amour.”

“Or am I too old? Is that it?”

She laid his fist on her bare shoulder. He was in her space, and falling, dazed with gratitude.

A strange thing happened then. Braemar was not, after all, tumbled in the bushes, as she had fully expected to be. As soon as they were in each other’s arms, the two figures stayed quite still: for so long it was as if they’d mysteriously found, these sparring strangers that nothing more needed to be done or said. Johnny sighed. Braemar stood and took his hand; they walked sedately into the hotel.

She found a book in his bumbag: an ancient paperback, nearly a hundred years old, the pages protected by plastic film. He had a weakness for old books, that was in the files.
“An abode without birds,”
she read,
“is like meat without seasoning. Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them…”

She remembered a babyfaced prince of that bizarre brief Camelot, twenty-first century New York, with his motorized skateboard and a rather sickening line in clean-kid arrogance. He always carried a silvery tool, stiffly prominent in a belt loop or his jeans pocket. To her unregenerate eye it looked like some kind of ancient druggie impedimenta. It was the shank of a coralin drill, the badge of the latest elite brotherhood, fusion of art and science; engineers of the word. And now. She wondered if Johnny was aware of the way he wore the ubiquitous crotch-bulge bumbag of a young adult male slung on his shoulder. Of course he knew. He wasn’t stupid, not at all.

It was immeasurably touching, that the young exiled American should carry
Walden
in his pocket. The hunter who had been condemned to become one with his quarry: the birddog, caged among the singing birds. And trying to like it. Good boy.

Saddest of all was his conviction that what had happened to him had been done deliberately. She thought how strangely the whole world spiraled back towards the mindset of old Africa. No weather anymore, only the effects of human villainy. No death except by witchcraft.

Some people said the QV incident was invention from start to finish. There never was a virus. There was only an excuse to close down a space program that had become a meaningless expense and political suicide. An excuse that only cost a few space-jock disappeareds. Was that the truth? Maybe the truth was worse, maybe the whole business was a random error thrown up by Johnny’s precious Big Machinery. Or maybe, why not, the virus was real, the NIH was right, and she and Johnny were both doomed. You can’t know the truth, you can only choose your risk.

Through the glass doors to her balcony the sky was a mass of baroque violet, magenta and heavy orange, folded and crumpled down to the black and unlikely margin of Asaba’s volcanic spine. The chances that the curtains would part and the mountains that were gods appear in person were poor, at this season, but it was still a wonderful show. Around the ’04, you used to get sunrises like this in the tepid post-industrial UK, but that was all over. You had to come far south nowadays to find a good, rich, poisoned sky.

She had lived through fire and flood and earthquake, and seen the world go on just the same. The plate-armor of the soft earth shrugged: seas churned, the twisted islands fell burning into the abyss. The blue sky turned livid, wild lightnings wrecked the man made networks that threaded the atmosphere. Cold and famine took the world, that had been preparing for hot flushes and rising seas…. Everyone got ready to die. But in a few years, it was as if nothing had happened. The human race, somewhat rearranged, carried on getting and spending, making politics, having fun. Starving and suffering if anything a little less, just now, than when Braemar was young.

Though you wouldn’t persuade Johnny to believe that.

She wondered how soon before the drug wore off (not the one she’d taken); and he started to think again. He would remember the rifle. Stupid panic, to have let him see it. She would have to do some nifty handwaving to get around that. But she would have help. Poor child, he’d been so much on his dignity at first—and rightly so—but here he was with his hand in the honey jar all the same. It was so easy, she ought to be ashamed. She was ashamed. She could only tell herself (fearing it was nonsense) that one day it might be possible to explain.

Leaning on the page she turned to look at Johnny, his bare arms startlingly white, vulnerable and pitiful as a child’s despite the deep curves of muscle. Under the influence of Oneiricene, drug that infects the waking world with the loose poetry of dreams, she saw a white hound lying there: clean-limbed, earnest-eyed, eager and absurdly faithful. The muscle-shadows of his power a dapple of urgent words.
A lamed hound is a murdered hound.
One more betrayal couldn’t hurt him. She had not wronged him. Johnny was beyond harm.

On the bedside cabinet lay a crumpled 3D snapshot of a little girl (better put that away again…) A sprig of creeper in a toothglass of water, the blue flowers already faded. What a dog’s life he’d been living. Johnny Guglioli, friend of roaches, with his leper’s bell and his chastity. The power of American New Age morality astounded her. To think, she murmured, I used to wonder how the devil people could hope to sell Coca-Cola with no sugar in it and no caffeine.

“I believe in pleasure,” said Braemar.

2 
THE ALEUTIANS

i

At ten fifty eight a.m. (STZ10) on the fifteenth of July, 2038, Colonel Hebron Everard, commander of USAF base St Francis, Cape Copper Ridge, Alaska was in his public office with his PR. They were about to take Access Hour. The Colonel, an ethnic Slav at the end of a routine career, had regarded this command as a peaceful prelude to retirement. He’d never been very wide awake, politically. The Revolution had plunged him into acute, almost precancerous depression. There had been no enemy across the cold straits for a generation. But barely ten miles away there was a new town of some one and a half million people, a sprawling de facto arcology of plastic burrows, decrepit clapboard and half-empty power starved towers. If revolutionary violence broke out in St Francis, Everard’s duty was clear and horrible.

Major Louis Parker, the commander’s PRO and (in the modern structure)second in command, was a stocky Afro American with a wife and two children on the base; Everard was a childless widower. He had a reputation among the men for cautious and intelligent kindness. As they waited for the floodgates to open, he listened patiently to Everard. St Francis town—the blue lit burrows paved in spongy carpet tile that smelt always of stale beer and vomit, the miserable population, the mindless murders. There was nothing for the people to do, besides drink and watch fabulous animations in the movie theatres. Or else stay at home and spy on each other through the soap nets. They lived on handouts. They didn’t go outside. No one stopped them, but there was nowhere to go, no fuel to spend.

The base had been at action stations, all overground duties suspended, since the State of Emergency was declared. The bunker’s main screen window showed an idyllic scene: burrows and silos overgrown with nodding flowers, like the peaceful ruins of some long-dead civilization. Only the all-weather strip, and the perimeter fence, spoiled the illusion.

“It’s the death of capitalism,” said Everard. “Okay, Communism had to go first. But there’s too many people, that’s the beginning and end of it. No system can survive. We’re going to see the Dark Ages return, Lou, right here in the USA.”

The revolution, which had at first seemed such an ebullient success, had suffered a few mood swings in the last weeks. But the arcologists were unlikely to stampede, and almost certainly there would be no order to harm them if they did. Very shortly Parker expected to hear that the President had finally surrendered, and the phony civil war was over. But Everard was beyond reason in these moods.

An aircraft appeared, coming in to land. It touched down silently, a black and white checkered spaceplane without visible ID. Both men stared at it, and slowly, as if drawn up on strings, rose to their feet. Six people left the plane. Nothing else stirred.

“Oh, my God.”

“Systems failure,” stated Parker. “Excuse me Sir—”

The plane had not registered, did not register, on horizonless radar. It did not exist, it had never been in the sky. But there it stood.

There was no eyes-on human surveillance outside, closer than the main gates. There was nothing on the board to show that any man on duty had noticed this invasion. Parker did not raise the alarm. Six figures crossed the window. A full frontal view of them, starred by frisking lines, showed at bunker access.

“Who are you?” said Parker. “What do you want?”

The man was wearing a light brown coverall, again without any ID. He was unarmed, unaugmented, carried no communication devices.

“Access,” he explained, in nasal and oddly uninflected English. “This is Access time. Isn’t that right.”

The visitors all wore light brown coveralls, but each of them had added some form of decoration. One wore plastic clamshell fragments knotted in her hair, another had a “sealskin” tunic strung with fringing and beads; and so on. They were uniformly slender limbed but bulky in the trunk. Their hair was dark and lank, their skins medium light. They had no noses. They came into the colonel’s office smiling grotesquely, showing their open hands, the fingers pointing downwards.

One of the six was a child about ten years old. He perched himself at the communications console to the right of the commander’s desk. He ran his hands over the keypads: an odd gesture, as if he were stroking a pet animal. Then he went in slickly, never pausing for a second.

Louis Parker watched, fascinated, still unsure what kind of incident he was facing. Public access—livespace—was such a sensitive concept right now that he would tolerate almost anything in this hour, in this contained space. A bunch of naked feminists could come in and spray graffiti over the walls, over himself and the colonel too: in fact, they’d done it. At this incredibly delicate juncture…. He told himself the kid could do no harm, no chance of him starting World War Three. The Big Machines could look after themselves. They had to, no one else in charge!

The others stood around. They didn’t speak, but their faces kept twitching. It was a little eerie: they seemed evidently insane. But there were no pre-violence indicators. The child accessed a gift catalogue, the commander’s morning paper, and the LANDSAT gazetteer. When he’d finished with LANDSAT he stood, swallowing a split-lipped grin as if he thought it might give offense. He shrugged his narrow shoulders.

“Thank you very much,” he said, in the flat adenoidal English.

Parker smiled warmly.” Glad to oblige, kid. What were you looking for, by the way?”

The six noseless visitors joined hands, and began to dance.

Louis Parker stared. Belief came over him in a rush, irrational but complete. The dance over, they calmly turned to leave.

“Wait!” yelled Parker, “Wait a moment. Can one of you kindly tell me in plain English—just what is going on!”

The one in the sealskin tunic was, by all non-verbals, their leader. He raised his eyebrows.

They walked out.

On one of the small screens a disconcerting image flickered. Commander Everard and the chief alien arranged armchair to armchair against a blue curtained backdrop. A ruddy aging blond, with the eyes of a worn-out peasant farmer, faced an olive, noseless savage. Some Public Domain trawler company had scooped, and was pasting up a news item. It whisked away.

Colonel Everard was shaking all over. He looked sick as a dog, as if the room had been pumped full of nerve gas.

“Got to get them back,”
Parker told himself, subvocal.
“The girl, the one like a pretty girl with the clamshells in her hair. She’s their weak link, sexual favors bimbo. We could turn her.”

It was the way he had been taught to assess terrorists.

“Oh, Lou,” gasped Everard, sweat standing on his pasty face. “Oh, Lou… The aliens have landed!”

There was a knock on the door, a startlingly immediate and physical sound. Parker hesitated a split second: slapped the pad. The visitor with the clamshells marched in and stood, fists balled at her sides, within a foot of him.

How dare you
assume that means I would take your part in a quarrel!>

A small red object, a little bug, crept out from under her hair. She put up one hand and absently tucked it into her mouth. The distraction seemed to calm her.

important.>

She turned about, she marched out. She had not spoken a word. Parker saw that from Everard’s face, and knew what had happened to him.

“What?” he yelled. He recoiled from the closed door.
“What!”

Outside, through the screen, the checkered spaceplane quietly took to the air.

Parker recovered, dizzy and stressed but in control again. The systems failure, the odd aircraft, would be explained somehow. He
knew
about the noseless people. It was a Francistown cult, an algal bloom of the hopeless ocean, few months old. People had their noses cut off, ate no solid food, and became spiritually pure, or whatever. Maybe it was a feminist thing, nose equals penis. Which made you wonder about the noseless men.

Colonel Everard was looking dog-eyes at his PR; a scared hound to his master. Parker laughed shortly. “No such luck, Heb. No demigods are going to come and haul us out of the shit. It’s a hoax. Listen to me. We’re going to rub the camrecord for the last hour, including what I’m saying now. Nothing happened, okay? We don’t want the media all over us. Let’s get through with the revolution shall we, before we move on to alien invasion.”

The alien girl left another note for Johnny at the Planter’s Bar. This time, the meeting went smoothly. Since Johnny wouldn’t touch any of her coralin-based equipment, Braemar bought a “dead” camcorder and stock, locally produced but still ridiculously expensive. The hotel terminal in her room had a port for the adaptor. It processed the images: constructing statistical approximations of the information unavailable to a flat lens. She sat on her bed, remote in one hand, taking Johnny and his alien apart frame by frame: obverse profiles, upward angles, backviews. Braemar had once saved her own life by exploiting a housewife’s tv science of pop-anthropology: explaining to her fellow-housewives the far-reaching implications of a bride’s behavior at an English middle class wedding. She turned that science on the alien. She was trying to find answers—in gesture and glance and dress—for the questions that might be so vitally important.

What kind of people are these? What do they respect, what do they value? What do they fear?

She soon gave up looking for the zip-fastener. The alien kept her overalls on, and her brown cloth baseball boots with the ankle ties. She did not, if one could express it so,
mug
“alien life form” in any way; she didn’t ham it up at all. But she was entirely convincing.

Johnny took the alien’s hand. The creature allowed him. There were three rather short fingers, a thumb, the stub of a fourth finger. With the “thumb” locked in a fist, pads on the outer surfaces formed a thick horny paw. The nails were trimmed claws. The skin of hands and face looked faintly scaly, with visible pores: goosebumped like chicken skin, but no trace of down. He felt her forearm through the cloth, laid his own beside it.

“This is the pentadactyl limb!”

The alien observed his awe with mild amusement. Braemar saw her wondering,
Why shouldn’t an arm be like another arm?
When Johnny ingenuously offered to trade nakedness, the alien was at first overcome with mirth: then suddenly deeply wary.

What was that anxiety? Not sexual, not simply sexual anyway.

They called her “Agnès.” It was the only name she offered aloud, and Johnny reported no other. Confusingly, she sometimes seemed to use it to “name” Johnny as well as herself. It would do for the moment. So would “her” gender. The alien still seemed feminine to Johnny. Braemar accepted his attribution: but it had taken a very few frames to convince her this certainly was no woman. “She” had not been aware that the name “she” borrowed was a girl’s name. The reaction to Johnny’s probing
—are you female?
was odd. “She” did not appear to misunderstand, or to find the question alien. She was embarrassed for Johnny, no sense of taboo broken, just a minor social gaffe. Johnny was continually embarrassing her. She didn’t want to believe how easily he was impressed.

Johnny wanted to know: “Why have you come here?”

She saw that Johnny was dissatisfied. She shrugged in disappointment.

Braemar read body language: emotion and unconscious habit. No voice spoke in her mind. The alien’s facial gesture was swift and delicate: Braemar could not identify any organized system of sign. On the tape, Johnny spoke aloud and the alien rarely spoke at all. When the conversation became intellectual she had to rely on Johnny’s notes. As far as she could judge, the gaps in the dialogue were filled with reasonable likelihood by the “telepathic” communication Johnny reported. But how much did that mean? Maybe nothing at all.

said Agnes.

(‘inside’ and ‘outside’; sic; Johnny’s notes.)

Not a word of this for Braemar, only an impression of unshakeable youthful earnestness.