White Queen (23 page)

“What’s wrong with that?
‘To see beyond the surface realities of life.’
I like it.”

Oh, this was cozy. The old friends talking over old times. Let’s forget completely how those times ended. How British! He laid his white packet on the table. “Exit one drug-crazed lady in red, enter the distinguée Asian matron who never touches anything stronger than seltzer and never leaves the house without a veil. What d’you really look like, Brae? Can you remember?”

She leaned across, took the packet, took out the passport and looked it over. She lit a cigarette: a series of studied gestures. “You want to know what this means? I can tell you, but not yet. I think you’ll find it’s real. Or ‘nature identical’ I suppose I should say. I think you can look on it as a kind of taster. A promise. ‘Clavel,’ who was our ‘Agnès,’ remembers you.”

Braemar Wilson was the Anti-Aleutian pundit. He’d seen that in development, and appreciated the tactic. She’d had one terrific piece of luck, but the aliens story was a tough gig for an independent. Presentable opposition, however, was something the aliens’ promoters were short of. Her hostility, one could surely assume, was pure marketing. This lady would surely have nothing to do with a small group of crass extremists—rumored to be British based—called “White Queen.” Crackpots who were persistently trying to convince the world that there was something bad, dirty, evil and monstrous lurking up there at Uji.

But Johnny remembered a certain night: a journalist with a deadly weapon. The drunk at the party, scared stupid, loose mouth had said
ask Barearse, she knows.
The respectable matron smiled at him demurely. Johnny’s eejay nerves were twitching.

“What’s going on, Brae?”

She put down her cigarette. She hesitated, apparently wondering how far to trust him. The cigarette started chewing itself to ash.

“I don’t know—”

“You were there for the Sarah Brown incident, weren’t you?”

“Her name wasn’t ‘Brown.’ Girls like Sarah don’t have fathers. When they take on maids at Westminster they allocate surnames in rotation: Jones, Brown, Patel, Kelly.”

“So you know something about her?”

She changed the subject. “Nobody knows anything. Nobody knows about you, Johnny. The aliens have never told anyone, because they don’t understand a contact that involves just two individuals. I think Clavel maybe does, but she has other reasons to be reticent. You’re still special, Johnny. We could still have our story on the front page.”

He didn’t react. He’d expected something like this.

She touched the passport. “Your contact isn’t with the tour, she stayed behind. But this shows she’s trying to get hold of you. What about it Johnny? Shall we go into business again? I’ve always wondered why you didn’t try to capitalize on what happened to us. Couldn’t you think of a way; or were you afraid to open old wounds?”

Johnny gasped, thrust the heels of his hands against his temples. “Shit! I never even asked myself! My God, it must be a post-hypnotic suggestion. Galactic conspiracy!”

She waited for him to tire of the joke. Johnny dropped his hands, and glared at her.

“You dumped me, because you thought you could get the stuff you needed without having to share. You’ve found out it’s not so easy to get real close, and you want me back. You must be
fucking
joking. I’m not buying and I’m not selling. I lost the tapes. I don’t want to know anymore about aliens than I see on the tv.” He slapped the false passport.
“You
got me invited to that party. You probably had this thing mocked-up yourself, and had it handed to me, as some kind of crazy lure. You’re wasting your time.”

The baby had been in and out from under the table, muttering and driving a little red and blue dustcart around. He chose this moment to come barreling up onto Braemar’s knee. She laid her cheek against the mite’s soft dark hair.

“What if the superbeings could get you back on stream? Have you heard from Izzy recently? Does she still send pictures? How old is Bella now?”

It was nice that she remembered his story.

“That’s cruel, Braemar.”

“I’m a cruel person. I thought you knew that. Cruel and sentimental, like James Bond.”

She put Billy down, went to the dishwasher and rooted out a beaker. She filled it with juice. The little boy said thank you nicely and returned to his game. There was a window where greenery crawled in pots and trays. Braemar stood with her back to the light, her lovely face obscured.

“Okay Johnny. I won’t bother you about the aliens. Can’t we still be friends?”

A tv at the end of the room came on. The
Times
masthead: it must be one o’ clock. Their lead story was the Eve-riots in Russia, a heaving mass of bodies in the streets of some comfortless breeze-block city, where dirty snow lay about. Harsh policing going on.

“Silly fools,” said Braemar. “There is a state of affairs, it is the way things are. The men give the money to the women, the women give the men sex, and bring up the children. The less any woman tries to mess around with that arrangement, the happier she’ll be.”

Johnny laughed aloud. “Do you really think that’s about sex?”

He jabbed a finger at the violence. The screen, which was a good one, seemed to gobble the space around it. The sight of a boot hitting a face made your blood pump, it was truly horrible. “We’re running out of land and food and money, Brae. We’re heading for hell. Okay, we don’t know much about the visitors, but we surely need help from somewhere.”

He leaned back, and stared at the floor plan on the monitor. Big house. Big dog too. London Public Health regulations implied her pet must be more ostentatious even than it looked. That drunk had known what he was talking about. She was nothing more than a high-class, self-publicizing tart. Knowing Braemar, she’d probably hired the police rig out on the street to impress her friends.

It was nothing to Johnny how she made her way. But there was a mystery about this woman and the aliens. It had been bothering him since Fo: and probably, against his better judgement, he was going to try and get some answers.

“Is that a real dog?”

“She’s an antisense. She eats, but she doesn’t shit, isn’t that wonderful. Doesn’t come on heat, either, lucky girl. She’s based on a pedigree Doberman bitch called Keymer Sunburst Orange: I call her Trixie.”

“Hardwired?”

“No, I trained her myself. Attaque! Trixie. Attaque!”

For a split second his blood ran cold. The engineered monster leapt to its feet: and crashed onto its side, legs in the air, whining.

“A true female, you observe.”

Johnny hoped she’d missed his moment of panic. “Very witty. And if you tell her to roll over—?”

Braemar slowly grinned. “Then she dies for the queen.”

“I’ll remember that.”

She released the dog somehow; it resumed its heraldic pose.

Johnny stood up. He looked at the housebox. It was ancient, pre-coralin; and never updated.

“You’ve been plugging your phones into this, haven’t you. You shouldn’t do that. I know it works, but it’s a false economy. The Blue Clay in the phone kind of humiliates your silicon, you have to rig up some objective distance between them.” He sighed, slipped the passport into his bumbag and slung the bag on his shoulder. He couldn’t fix anything, not ever again.

“You’re leaving? Damn, I didn’t even offer you a cup of tea.”

“I have to get to work. Invite me back. I’ll try to fit you in.”

Kamla got pregnant for the first time when she was twelve, and aborted herself in a panic. Braemar was the one who found her, and comforted the blood-spattered guilty child with whatever nonsense came first to hand.
Don’t be absurd, God doesn’t punish babies, it will just go back in the queue.
Six months later she was pregnant again, and defiant. Braemar had taken her in, earning the undying hatred of Kamla’s mother (but that had happened long before). A teenage girl, neither clever nor specially pretty. Naturally she wanted a baby. What other prize was within her reach?

Johnny’s response to the Eve-riots was childish. Of course it was about sex. Nothing in this world that wasn’t about sex, unless it was about money. And of those two, which came first? The chicken or the egg? Braemar’s fear of men, bone deep (never acknowledged anywhere but inside herself) seemed to her rational and completely normal. She was convinced that President Carlotta felt the same. But their dominion was a fact of life, if not
the
fact of life. One doesn’t fight facts. One puts them to use.

She sat with her chin on her hands.

She’d left Johnny alone since Africa, never tried to trace him: but here he was. Fate had brought him back. Fate, and the aliens themselves. She couldn’t, in conscience, refuse the gift a second time. She wondered if he had really given up hope of returning to his old life. Good for him, if that were true. What he’d lost did not exist anymore, and he was young to have learned that lesson. Maybe he was just sulking: Achilles in the alley. But no matter why he’d chosen to vanish and abandon his quest, he was still ridden by the demon curiosity. She could use that. She would find a way to help Clavel and Johnny, and be a fly on the wall at their reunion.

She chuckled: a wry, half silent breath of laughter. Had the boy never been in love, that he “couldn’t understand” the alien’s message? He didn’t like Braemar Wilson much, and who could blame him. But he was lonely as hell. He’d be back. Braemar smoked another cigarette, savoring the pleasures that were promised her, for another while. To have him in the same room again. To make him laugh. Treasure.

Kamla came down and heaved a theatrical sigh of relief. “He smelled of blood. What do you want a jobard like that around for?”

“He gives terrific backrubs. What do you think?”

Kamla giggled dutifully. Naturally she didn’t really believe that adults had sex. Especially not elderly members of her own family.

“Nani, can I borrow fifty ’cu?”

Braemar flashed a glance of awful warning, at the forbidden word. “No you may not. No more cosmetics. You’ll thank me later, when your friends are growing moustaches and melanomas.”

Braemar tapped softly at the green baize door. It opened. She was in a laboratory of many ages. At the small, bright, modern end the scientist was at work.

“Come and look at this.”

A passage opened before her, between benches laden with curious shaped flasks, retorts, gruesome creatures wriggling in jars; colored flames. The scientist showed her an array of tiny sausage filaments, that shimmered with different, delicate patterns.

“Look at this. Look here, and here. These strands are all from daughters of the same cell. Do you know what that is? Of course not, why do I ask. That is
Cairns-Hall mutation.
The cell shapes its own future, by producing some protein tailored to process any chemical stimulus I provide. Here you can see it happening, in the temporary single-strand. There is testing going on. They are
thinking.
Full-blown Lamarckian evolution in action, that’s what you see. And more. The ability to create a function to deal with a situation!”

The scientist believed that s/he’d invented hir peremptory “mad professor avatar.” S/he was blissfully unaware that to those who knew hir outside s/he seemed exactly the same as in life. The real person also hated personal contact, and loved virtual meetings because of the power it gave hir to switch you off.

“Would this happen in the brain, Clem? Could it work on something like a—a talent for languages?”

The scientist hissed in disapproval. “Everything has some chemical origin. Why not, maybe, though there are logical difficulties…unless they have some mechanism I don’t know of for exchanging genetic material. At the moment we are studying alien tissue, not fairytales. Try to concentrate, Your Highness.”

“Sorry—”

The scientist hummed on, forgetting hir own admonition instantly. “Evolutionary timescale, pah. Your body, Highness, is built of dumb animals and vegetables. What could grow into the ‘you’ called mind is switched off nearly everywhere. Imagine, Gracious Highness, if your whole body was teeming with cells that could behave like this, another glandular system; and every cell was—I can’t be sure, but something like that
you.
Was a vehicle of your will. You could shed skincells that would be little tiny factories. They could keep you clean, like the colony that was mother to my world in here. They could be tools. Take a few cells, offer each a different stimulus, add some waste plastic, maybe some turds. Your intimate servants grow for you a cine-camera.”

“Okay. These mobile factories, are they harmful?”

“To humans? Not so far as I can tell.” Clem’s voice smirked. “I can’t say for sure. Give me, say three hundred thousand humans. Permission to kill half of them. Let me loose. Then, I guess I might one day be able to put on the aliens’ packet ‘harmless to your health.’”

“What
are
they?”

The scientist chuckled. “They are big colonies of protozoa.”