White Queen (21 page)

(Hi Robin, Hi Ellen)

Everything went dead quiet, for no discernible reason. There were plenty of astrals, he noticed. By this point no one was worried about offending the Aleutians. The Multiphon became for him its screen-self: a great assembly, a hall full of people, all equally present. All of us in here, and all the billions outside. They were one entity. He was dying, he could do what he liked. He took Martha’s hand and willed himself part of that being. Every one that wants to live, push on this balance, push, with all your hearts.

Ellen was simply tired; Uji a lost paradise, one more in a long line of them Aleutians and Earthlings both, their capacity for turning away from joy appalled her.

Then something happened. Poonsuk took the screen, began to speak. She looked dazed, stumbled out a few half sentences: listening to and watching something going on elsewhere. Ellen couldn’t hear a word, but she thought that she was being told that Uji had been destroyed.

Six Aleutians walked down to the dais. More followed, then more. They were all here, the infants being carried. Two of them, she couldn’t tell who they were, got up by Poonsuk. They wei’ed, and began to take off their clothes.

Naked, they remained human as angels. No nipples, no navels, no swelling breasts, no external genitalia. Idealized, ungendered bodies from a stained glass window. Ellen shook herself, and managed to see what was really there. The exaggerated hip joints were bone and muscle, no swaddling flesh. Each body had an identical line of shadow in the groin: a vertical dimple, with a darkness of fur or loose scale more or less marked at the lower end. They simply stood.

“Oh my sainted aunt,” said Ellen softly. “Naked into the conference chamber. I can speak Aleutian. Robin. Do what I do.” Resolutely, she stood and unfastened her sensible skirt. Douglas saw what Robin and Ellen were doing. He began to do the same. The infection spread. The humans undressed. Some eagerly, some reluctantly, some as if entranced. A wave of awkward, fumbling dance went all around the hall; the video-conferencers undressing too.
Peace,
they said,
peace,
with naked flesh unarmed, unprotected. It was extraordinary how easy it was to understand each other. How ridiculous that they’d ever built this crazy Multiphon.

Poonsuk Masdit, head and shoulders on the speaker’s screen, with the round Earth in a starry sky behind her. She was still looking and listening elsewhere, hearing voices in her head.

“I have an announcement. Ms. Nazarene Rahchan and Mr. Chen Juntao are empowered to speak for the peoples of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and for the Peoples’ Republic of China-with-ex-Japan. We have achieved closure. We
are
the Government of the World. And we are empowered to make peace with our honored visitors.”

The chamber filled with sobs and laughter. Such scenes, such extraordinary scenes, yelled the voice of some eejay in the press gallery. He was not immune. His voice was naked as the day it was born.

“We are here,” said an Aleutian. “To make peace. We don’t want anyone to get hurt. We have so much to offer, if only you’ll be our friends.”

Did he or she speak? In English, aloud? Whether or not, the message was understood by everyone. The chamber exploded in delirious joy.

Douglas felt himself
deliberately
let reason and caution go. He let the wild delight, the pride too, of meeting beings from another planet, rush through him, as if
this
was the moment of first contact. He grasped Martha’s hand, and the hand of the nearest other human being, and bellowed out

“Arise!”

“Arise! Ye nations of the earth

The day of glory is at hand

Stained with the blood of martyrs shed….”

The anthems battled, embracing, stumbling together: finding, like the naked bodies, a remarkable degree of basic similarity. The
Internationale
won out, except for the Oz contingent, who went on roaring
Waltzing Matilda.
Singing people poured down from the desks, the Aleutians spread into the crowd.

“I would also like to declare—” yelled Poonsuk’s voice, above the babel, “The conference on Women’s Affairs is closed! There are no women or men here. We are human beings!”

Ellen was muttering through her teeth keep your head, lass,
keep your head when all about you….
This is drunk-driving, she thought. We’ve all gone mad. We’ll be sober in the morning: and there’ll still be terms to be made. But the good people had been restored, their virtue intact. The Aleutians had sued for peace when they had no need to do so; when they had all the earth in their power. And here, in this assembly of the powerless, the first act of the first Government of the World had been to answer them with generosity and trust.

They didn’t let me down after all! Her eyes were stinging. This time, though every other brave beginning in history ended in grief, this time it might be true. One world! If the Aleutians could achieve that, even for an hour, what else might not follow? She grabbed Robin’s hands. Hope and promise! Never deny them. Never, no matter how many times you’ve seen them fail.

Extraordinary scenes. At Uji Kaoru blanked his tv, and sat watching the empty screen for a while. It was dawn, the coverage had been thinning out anyway, beginning to struggle to find new bursts of emotion. He went outside and dragged from the space under the cottage floor the ruins of one inflatable lander, plus two others neatly packed down and in much better condition. The outer surface that remained was checkered black and white. It bore traces of a sloughed carapace already consumed by Aleutian waste-disposal bacteria. He hauled all three together in the rain on the stone terrace in front of the cottage. It took him a long time. He laced the heap with liquid and laid a fuse. Kneeling a prudent distance away, he set a light. The fire traveled, there was a gasp of vanished air: very little sound or visible flame.

He had no doubt that when they desired to return to that “planet” of theirs, his protégés could grow themselves new vehicles out of whatever trash came to hand. His destruction of the evidence was by way of reparation for the poor advice he had given. He hoped and believed that they would now do well. Accepted as equals, respected and successful in their own right. But he could hold off the curious world no longer.

He went indoors and sat thoughtfully at his desk.

In the time of the catastrophe each person had made his or her own choice. Some had chosen to die, some to live. The diaspora had Kaoru’s respect, but he was not one of those who could accept another country, not even China, in the place of his own.

“I will never know,” he said at last.

He dreamed of an immeasurable voyage, extraordinary changes. Time is not the same out there. The future can revisit its past.

“Nor will anybody else. I can believe what I please.”

Out of his desk drawer he took a sword and a dagger. He’d bought them at an auction: he’d never had the right to own them. He looked the blades over, and shook his head.

“If not then, then not now.”

He reached into the front of his kimono, and carefully peeled a circular patch of translucent plastic from over his heart. He opened the door to the garden and lay down beside it, his head pillowed on one arm. He watched the summer rain, falling on green and quiet groves.

7 
AT THE GATES OF SAMARIA

i

Johnny had a job shooting steers for a real meat business. His employer, a Mr. Hargood, ran 300 head of Sussex Reds on a farm just outside London, partly on reclaimed freeway land. There had also been a stately home turned conference center on the site, but a typhus variant had ended its career. Johnny walked the cold February pasture with his trusty sporting rifle. The gun was forty years old and an excellent piece of equipment. He used the sights to identify his numbered victims, and stalked them casually as they browsed on the other side of a fence. Beyond the ruins, pasture merged into the spindly woodland where Mr. Hargood reared pheasants. The herd was used to people with guns.

Kapow…Kapow…

The last animal collapsed, without fuss. The others barely looked up. It was a depressingly corrupt arrangement, he felt like the secret police.
Keep your heads down, brothers. Don’t rock the boat. You want to be fed and get your vax, don’t you?

Mr. Hargood leant on the gate and grunted appreciatively.

“I knew you’d do, John, when I saw you pick up a gun. At least he knows one end from the other, I said to my missus. Unlike our local aspiring cowboys. And the Youros are no better.”

“My Daddy wanted me to be an accountant.”

He went in, skimming over grey grass, and forked up the beef. The herd drifted out of his way, unconcerned. He backed out, changing the dappled forklift’s skirts to wheels for the track. Mr. Hargood was on foot and required a lift. Johnny ticked off the dead animals on his dashboard spreadsheet, and blinked slightly at glimpsing the day’s price for the meat.

“Fancy a bit of a bonus, John?”

“What’s it taste like? Is it worth what the nobs pay?”

“Not to me. I prefer the regular stuff.”

He gave Johnny a reproving glance, aware that this didn’t sound good. “I’m not squeamish, mind. Farmers don’t get romantic about their food. I go for the taste. It’s good for you, though,” he added, with conviction. “I’d take it for my health if I could afford it.”

Johnny mildly despised Hargood’s affectation of poverty. But it was the British middle class disease, as natural to them as breathing. He waited in the gleaming farmhouse kitchen, where the Hargood’s child was teasing the cook and a young girl in spruce uniform was fervently cleaning knives, until Hargood’s wife delivered a tepid squashy parcel. “Wrapped with her own fair hands,” remarked Hargood. “I can see I’ll have to watch out.” The meat was folded up neatly in ersatz rhubarb leaf (the living, breathing, foodwrap), just as if he was a real customer.

Life with the Hargoods was a tonic. His cruel loss meant nothing to them. A rational human being who would work out of doors, with his hands, shedding blood, was simply pure gold. He was a valued associate.

He traveled home on the Tube, empty at first but filling up as the houses thickened; the video-band chattering softly at the straphangers. A veneer of civilization slipped away. He enjoyed the wary glances at his rifle case, and his own consciousness of the bloody parcel in his bumbag. He stretched his legs in as manly a style as the cramped space allowed, and smiled aggressively at his opposite neighbor. I do a dirty job, ma’am. And I do it well.

The train dived into its burrow, into the warren of London.

Johnny had come to roost in England for a variety of reasons. After Amsterdam and Vienna, London was the home of expatriate ex-USians. He had little in common with the current émigrés, but he’d made London his base, because of the language, before the revolution and he was still better off here. There was probably less stigma for notifiables of various kinds than anywhere on earth, and such indifference to the Big Machinery that QV was rated no worse than a typhusoid. The average Brit barely knew that a “living” material had taken over from etched silicon. He would get asked—but isn’t a computer virus a kind of program? How can that infect a person?

But he’d been trapped by history, since those B movie days last June. His pocket money had stopped. Seimwa’s assets had been seized: and had proved to be pure 2D finance, the kind that vanished when exposed to reality. The USSA had made a commitment to maintain pensions like Johnny’s, when it started raiding the rich. Then they’d axed him, practically the next day (with sincere apologies), as part of an austerity drive.

The last remains of his old life had seemed to slough off him, almost painlessly. The last of his privileges vanished with the last of his fame. Nobody cared about the eejay with the QV anymore, nobody at all. Izzy changed her number and didn’t let him know. He found out from the Embassy; she’d moved, too, without leaving him an address. Their relationship had become hostile. She claimed she had to protect Bel from the taint of his politics, which was pretty funny. They both knew Izzy’s superstitious dread of the QV was the real problem, as it had always been.

He didn’t pursue her. The loss of Bella faded, a scar that he would touch sometimes and wonder how it got there. He discovered one day that he’d lost his copy of the “Agnès” interviews, in a box of books that he’d sold as a job-lot, when he didn’t have work and was liquidizing a few assets. It seemed like fate.

The aliens were as distant as Mars, and he preferred it that way.

When he first got back from Africa he’d tried to investigate Braemar Wilson. He took her commercial artworks out of the public library.
Death and the Human Family, Home and the World, The Safe and the Sacred.
They were tacky, but surprisingly good—he discovered with regret. Her original name wasn’t in any public file, nor her date of birth. She’d been married once, to Anand Datar; they’d had two children, a boy and a girl. The boy was dead, so was the husband.

It had always seemed to Johnny, coming from his protected environment, that people in Europe got sick and died at a ridiculous rate. The daily news was constantly full of plagues and epidemics. It was an illusion. People died just the same at home, outside the cleaned-up citadels. Still, her losses sobered him. He took the lozenges that he’d confiscated to his doctor, a somewhat shady young man who did National Health Notifiable Disease work as a front for more lucrative activities. Jatinder handed one of them back in a slip of plastic, at Johnny’s next visit.

“It’s not peppermint. Not sure what it is, to tell you the truth, except it’s something custom. There’s a castanospermine, interferon; a lot of trace things. She’s had a serious premature cancer, I’d guess, and is on this stuff for life.” Jatin looked embarrassed. All doctors are Americans at heart, the man was ashamed for Johnny’s friend.

“Yes, I’d say your ladyfriend’s a controlled, serious cancer; and not getting any younger. But could be in very good shape, considering, with one of these personally tailored concoctions.”

“She’s been very sick?”

He knew that she used
onei,
the cannabinol analogue Youros called “the ladies’ drug.” He’d presumed it was for pleasure, but clinically oneiricene was a rehabilitator.

“Don’t be downhearted Johnny. Look, you should sit where I sit, trying to make babies out of people with genetic values like dogdirt. To have a big one and live means the main systems are high class. Go on driving your old car. She won’t let you down.”

“I’m celibate, you know that.”

Jatin leered cheerfully. “Of course, John. ’Course you are.”

He’d been hoping for a tabloid story, an explanation out of a cheap thriller for the way he’d been treated. But if there was anything in Brae’s medication that was sneakily unknown to earthly science, Jatinder wouldn’t be the one to spot it.

It was too late, anyway. He’d lost interest. She was no engineer. If he’d passed her something, it would never reach the heart of a machine. She had used him, she had ditched him. She was still trying to get near the aliens; he glimpsed her efforts. She was welcome to them.

Something profound had happened to Johnny in Fo. It had taken time to work through, but it was complete now. He was grateful to Braemar Wilson and the alien, both. He was no longer a broken piece of Johnny Guglioli the eejay. He was someone else, commonplace and humble but whole again.

The train reached his stop. Johnny woke up and piled out, avoided the attentions of the helpful guards who never had enough seniles and disableds to keep them all happy. Checked his card through the manual gate: lot of people did that. Ran the barrage of beggars and musicians in their package taped pitches. The smell of London enveloped him (the train smelt of citrus-based antiseptic); acrid, slightly fecal, oxygen starved, mysteriously cozy.

He lived on the Gray’s Inn Road, a locution that was strictly accurate: like most roads in central London it had been whittled down to an alley by new housing. Johnny navigated the tiny footways through the chill and dusky undercroft of Holborn Infill, where ancient hardbacks could still be found, stacked in the back of little plastic-wrapped booths. The wind was bitter. He dug into the ramshackle pile of hutches that was his building, attempting to hang on to the daydream he’d been enjoying. Hargood would make him a partner. He’d get in touch with Izzy, send money for fares. They’d live in the country, Surrey borders, near the National Forest. Bel would have a pony. No harm in wishing. He had an active fantasy life. Braemar featured in it too, but those dreams weren’t convenient on the train.

“Aren’t you going to check your mail, Mr. Guglioli?” whined the evil concierge, holding the end of her sari modestly over her brow: one corner clamped between her sparse yellow teeth, dark with spittle, one eye peering rancorously. Johnny turned resignedly to the booth. She read everything that came in, it must be a nasty of some kind. He snapped on his gloves. Gone were the days when he’d rather never touch a keypad, than make this humiliating, useless gesture. Plastic exam gloves were no real barrier against the QV, if it was there.

The new Johnny kept the rules, without any fuss. It didn’t bother him to humor this paranoid old world. As Braemar used to tell him: you can have quite a normal life.

In New York before the revolution there was one number and it was your slave brand, but at least it covered everything. He groped around his various homemade mnemonics, fighting that rabid urge to enter code that would make the Post Office forget how to spell the letter “e.”

The concierge cackled.

“Not there, Mr. Guglioli. Private mail.”

There was a white envelope for him in the dusty, empty pigeonholes. That explained the rancor. She probably hadn’t managed to pry it open.

Just as in Fo he lived like an aristocrat, the only tenant with an en-suite. It was a sad drain on his finances. But even Brits (if they were respectable enough to live indoors) wouldn’t share a toilet seat with a Notifiable. His shabby room was the biggest on his floor, even after the capsule bathroom took its chunk. Mrs. Frame, his landlady, preferred single, male working persons. No children, nobody on Benefits, no ladies under a certain age. The rest of the building was the same, which suited Johnny. Strictly no cooking, though he was allowed a microwave for drinks and takeaways. He’d give his bonus to Mrs. Frame. He wondered what she’d make of it.

The girl brought in a plate of buttered toast and a pot of tea. She lingered, telling him about Gerald-ji Jones, a tv personality who was walking to Sri Lanka to celebrate the aliens’ tour of Europe. It was “for world peace,” explained the child, fired with vague enthusiasm. She had only one hand, the left was a small lump fringed with buttons of very pink flesh. She habitually kept the lump tucked on one hip, elbow out, to conceal it—which gave her a rakish air.

“That’s nearly the end of your butter ration, Mr. Johnny. Shall I ax Mrs. Frame can you lend some?” She gazed passionately at his envelope. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

Johnny had never been able to understand people who lived through others, even when it was his job to provide vicarious thrills. But Mrs. Frame’s girl’s hunger was so candid, he couldn’t disappoint her. He opened the envelope carefully.

“It’s an invitation.”

“Oooh! It must be someone important getting married!”

He held out the card, forgetting she couldn’t read. It didn’t matter. She dumped her tray, got it in her good hand and stood there saying “Oooh!” and examining it in rapture, while Johnny stared ahead of him in amazement. I don’t want this, he thought. I have my daydreams, I have my toast. I’m
happy.

The reception was in the Barbican. A white gloved receptionist punched out a lapel tag for him. Come and meet the aliens. The aliens have landed! The first date of their first European tour. It had been weird to see those headlines on the street corners, with his square of archaic virgin pasteboard in his pocket. A live chamber orchestra played behind a black curtain: the musicians outlined in crimson below the digitized visuals; mathematical aurora of vibration. Stands of greenery, elegant red brick pillars. The aliens were far away. He glimpsed those theatre nurse uniforms through a frieze of evening wear. The English Prime Minister, that utter nonentity, was chatting with them, along with some more interesting celebs. Those who couldn’t get near, or didn’t dare approach, clustered around the courtesy monitors, as if the other end of the room was at the other side of the world, and watched the main event interspersed with Grade A filler.