White Queen (14 page)

Rajath’s gnomic utterance was typical. The ones who spoke aloud seemed able to handle any language. They’d gravitated to English, but shared Humpty Dumpty’s robust attitude: words mean what I say they mean! They spoke in proverbs, sometimes they made no sense at all. The term “Aleutian” was a case in point. It remained current, because when asked the
real
name of their home planet, or their native country, they replied with enthusiasm, “Aleutia!” The names by which they were known
—Rajath, Clavel, Lugha—
were of the same uncertain provenance. They’d emerged from a succession of alternatives: Rajath had been “Duke” for a while; also, briefly, “Hanuman.” Lugha had been “Coyote.” The SETI database called the final, relatively fixed, forms ‘Sanskrit-like terms,’ which was exciting, for those SETI followers who believed that humankind was a lost tribe of some great galactic race—

Visitors to Uji, on days like this, were bemused by the silence, disappointed that they didn’t hear voices in their heads. They’d been told but they didn’t understand that the human experience of Aleutian telepathy was a fugitive thing. Most Uji-watchers had never “heard voices”: yet the aliens said “but we are always talking to you, and you are always talking to us,” and she believed them. She could never catch it happening, but there was constant communication: and she was not excluded. At the end of every day she remembered no absence, no blank spaces.

One learned not to scorn the daftest theories. Not Rosalie Troi’s idea that they were honest to God holy angels, nor even Kaoru, whose motivation was the barmiest of all. Ellen’s own secret was her joyful feeling that
if these were superbeings,
everything she’d ever fought for was vindicated. It seemed so right, that the possessors of such advanced technology and powers should be above all social-ists: interested in each other, caring for each other, a true community.

If Rajath was an angel, he’d have to be the unholy kind. They called him “captain” because he behaved like a leader: the “pirate” part was pure anthropomorphism, pure fun. She watched fondly as he waltzed away with Sarah’s hand tucked in his arm. Where
had
he picked up those gestures? Fred Astaire! It only wanted the top hat.

She looked around to see what the day’s hazard was doing, and beckoned Robin with a nod. The freedom of the press is sacred, of course, but Ellen had an old fashioned conviction that one can and should keep the sacred vermin under control.

“I want you to watch that woman with the dark red hair. Braemar Wilson.”

Silence became a habit at Uji, but Robin did not seem averse.

“Don’t get any daft ideas, she’d eat you alive. Just be ready. She’s up to no good.”

“What’s she likely to do? Throw acid? Claim indecent assault?”

“Something on those lines. She won’t find any news here unless she makes it, and she’s not the type to waste a journey.”

On that historic day in Krung Thep, Rajath had spoken in fractured proverbs.
We come in peace, bearing gifts. Don’t look us in the mouth. Let me shake you by the hand.
But it had seemed clear that the Aleutians intended to initiate trade. There had been guesses at exciting waste disposal techniques, genetic material for super efficient foodplants. Nothing like that had yet transpired. Nor did the aliens justify their existence in other ways. They couldn’t be interrogated and they wouldn’t be vivisected. The Uji-watchers were beginning to feel anxious for their charges.

Someday soon this false calm would break, the real world would burst into this magical retreat. It would only take one incident—

Near the center of the hall a fountain plashed in a massive terracotta basin. Braemar leant casually on the rim of the pool. She ought to be safe here. The Aleutians had an alien attitude to water. They didn’t like indoor plumbing, thought the sound of the river a miserable irritation—

Aleutian trivia. That’s what people like, that’s what sells. An alien response that makes sense, which is to say, something completely incomprehensible, isn’t going to satisfy the global audience. So we pick at the edges, drawing quirky tidbit out of the awesome void…. She was thinking about work, work and money. How could she make this trip financially viable? She had to pay off the Karen government, pay through the nose to have her maker “processed” (every shot vetted for covert anti-alien bias), by the Eve-riots gang in KT. What a racket….

She touched the control on her wrist, switching her POV to check her own appearance. She was looking all right, she thought. With the ease of long habit, she was looking exactly like someone thinking about money. But the cams that were watching could be anywhere, was she okay from every angle? Impossible to keep check.

A dun-overalled figure appeared in her left rear quadrant. It looked different from the others. A body was evident under the overall: lumpy hips and breastless torso.

Beyond the fountain stood a glass case, taller than a man, ribbed in gold. The Itchiku kimono, from the
Symphony of Light
sequence, one of the three elements of this stellar art-work still physically in existence.
Aitatabu
Clear water, mountain calm.

The glorious colors of autumn, drowned in stillness. How wonderful!

She walked over to admire the kimono. It joined her.

“Do you find this work of art beautiful?” asked the human.

“Yes.”

“Could tell me what it means?”

said Clavel, taking such a question as an invitation to drop the formalities.

“Speechless with admiration? Well, that makes sense.”

Braemar knew that this was “Agnès,” now known as
Clavel.
She had been careful in Fo. As far as she knew, Johnny’s alien had never seen her. But if the telepathy was real, then Agnès/Clavel had “seen” the inside of Johnny’s mind, and must have “seen” Braemar. Too bad. She was here because she had to be here, just as in Africa. Clear water, mountain calm. It cannot read your mind. Braemar couldn’t imagine why she was feeling so nervous. She had nothing to hide.

The alien spoke. Braemar was too scared to know if its lips had moved. The alien too (was this imaginary?) seemed paralyzed and confused by its own boldness. She desperately tried to pretend it hadn’t happened; to look like someone thinking about a beautiful art work.

But the alien was on another tack.

“You’re right,” it said, grinning. The sound was definitely real this time. “I saw you working it all out. You’re gonna have a tough time trying to make money out of this gig.”

And Johnny Guglioli stood there: rueful, unforgiving.

The shock was awful. The ghost vanished, into the planes and angles of the alien mask.

Braemar laughed. “You won’t believe this, but I’m not here to make money. I wangled my way onto this guest list out of pure curiosity.”

The alien smelt vaguely yeasty. They looked at the kimono again. Braemar’s confidence strengthened. All perception is perception. Even a telepath
(doesn’t exist!)
must have prior assumptions; and looks no further if the evidence seems to agree. If it knew her, it knew her through Johnny’s eyes. She was safe enough. The terror (which had no basis) receded, replaced by an intuition, strange enough in its way, that Clavel was herself quite anxious to change the subject.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Clavel at last, “Mr. Kaoru?”

No words formed in Braemar’s mind, no telepathic expansion. Kaoru, what?

The Uji watchers probably had not told these people anything. They were being run by the amateur slaves of a Californian semi-AI with a theory of how to meet alien intelligence defined by twentieth century tv shows. The Prime Directive! Thou shalt not impose thine ideology! Or even thine own simple general knowledge.

Kaoru was sitting at the back of the room in a big English club armchair. A handful of eejays from China and the Rim clustered around him, along with some Corporates and Braemar’s own sponsor, the man from the BBC. The Chinese carried their hardware like unwanted bouquets. They were of course diplomats or even, God help us, military. They shouldn’t bloody well be here. But the “government of the world” didn’t have a chance of keeping them out. The Corporates in their dark suits, streetwear of a bygone age, looked like members of a monastic order. As perhaps they were. The Dominicans of the new Christendom, where money is a God grown old and respectable, the days of red sacrifice over: a public institution. That’s the way it happens with us, Clavel. There’s just so many approximate spaces, into which the approximate pieces fall.

The old ex-Japanese was not attending to business. He sucked at a gold filigree inhaler, doubtless medicinal, and gazed dreamily at something far away and very dear.

“You want me to explain Kaoru? Well, here goes. Thirty odd years ago, something terrible happened to your sponsor. Do you have earthquakes and volcanoes on your planet? Plate tectonics? I won’t attempt to explain, but it was
spectacular.
Great cities were destroyed, mountain ranges exploded, the islands they stood on vanished under the sea. A whole lot of people died. Kaoru’s problem is that he should have been among them. Does that make sense?”

Clavel’s mouth and nose-space had changed shape.

“Some kind of sense,” decided Braemar. “Now comes the best bit. Afterwards, a legend grew up that a handful of the people had escaped in a secret spaceship, I mean starship. Mr. Kaoru thinks that you are those people. No, it’s a little more complicated. He thinks you are their extremely distant descendants, returned along a giant loop in space-time.”

It had not spoken, this time. Do any of us
speak,
in casual conversation? Approximation fills the gaps, each fills in the other’s part. But how could an alien play that game?

“About the starship? I doubt it, but what really happened was so
terribly
strange, we earthlings would believe anything about that time. As for the rest, I have no idea. Is that who you are? You know better than I do.”

“You want to know why he didn’t tell you this story himself, I suppose. He’s afraid you’ll burst his bubble, of course.”

Johnny was right, the invasion was horrible. It felt like hot wires in her brain (it isn’t happening!) Amazing that the Uji regulars thought that telepathy was wonderful, a rest cure for the mind. Or not so amazing. They’d been hand picked: the animals most amenable to training. But revulsion didn’t protect you, she found. She felt a shadow of the old Japanese’s hunger, of Johnny’s faith. The epiphany, which she knew was within herself, not born of alien nature but of human need, came rushing over her, nearly irresistible.

Save me or kill me. Do something wonderful.

“Clavel, there are many things your sponsors won’t tell you, not because they mean to deceive but because you’re supposed to know without asking. You should bear this in mind. What happened to Mr. Kaoru happened to all of us. Do you have post-traumatic stress on your planet? This organism has recently suffered a profound insult. We lost a huge chunk of our notional financial capital, among other inconveniences. Imagine you’ve arrived in Europe, thirty years after the peak of the Black Death. Can you grok that in its fullness? Can you feel the effect of such a swathe of death and famine, the shockwaves of the massive resettlement? On top of everything difficult that was happening in the normal run of things, say in Bangladesh and the Sahel? Of course not. Well, we tucked the survivors in somehow. Things were pretty tight: they still are. We have unrest and political turmoil all over the shop. Our concerted psyche took a massive jolt. We’re not ourselves. People will believe the wildest tales, people won’t know how to react to a silly little thing like alien invasion. But we’re going to get better.
Don’t you fool yourselves about that.”

“All’s fair in love and war,” said Clavel.

It had not been listening, but watching. Watching every quiver, not of her facial muscles but of some inner surface.

“Excuse me. I see someone I have to talk to.”

Braemar fled. Out of the main hall, into a shadowy gallery. She found a double-leaved door, sealed with three bands of some kind of resin. Out of bounds, must be something interesting. She started as someone came up behind her.

“What’s in here?”

“Their dead,” said Ellen Kershaw. “Some of them were injured in the crossing, in ways beyond the expedition’s medicine. It’s the Aleutian custom to seal a funerary room, dry out the air and leave the bodies to desiccate.”

Ellen reported what she’d seen, all anyone could do, the Aleutians did not explain themselves. It sounded, she decided, pleasingly authoritative. Ms. Wilson shuddered conventionally.

“Gruesome—”

The next room was open and dimly lit. Ellen followed her into it. A group of Multiphon desks sat huddled together, talking to themselves. The teams called this a ‘taboo’ room. The aliens didn’t call it anything, out loud.