White Queen (26 page)

“Clavel convinced me.”

He was annoyed then, because she’d lulled him into mentioning Clavel-Agnès, that whole experience, which they both knew was out of bounds. He moved into the attack before she could take advantage.

“For one moment let’s be serious. Something’s over, a phase of our existence, yes: and it hurts not to be the Crown of Creation anymore. But
they are superior.
It sounds corny but face it, we have to trust them, we have no choice.”

“Oh certainly we should trust them. All they want is to take over a few little smallholdings, shoot a few
turkeys.
How many treaties was it, Mr. American? Two hundred and fifty two? Have I got that right?… Johnny, I
know
they don’t mean us any harm. They don’t have to. Harm is historically inevitable. If they’re superior, we’re inferior.
Right?
If we’re inferior, then give it a generation or so and there’ll be Aleutians in all our jobs. Aleutians in the White House; and two doors to every Leisure Centre; two kinds of life.”

The classic, racist, Wednesday evening whinge.

“I think you’re a damaged human being, Brae.”

“The White Queen,” she said, “is a character invented by Charles Dodgson, a nineteenth century mathematician who was intrigued by nonsense-theory. You may have seen an
anime.
The White Queen’s special characteristic is that she screams before she’s hurt. To save time.”

“Thanks. I’m familiar with the works of Lewis Carroll.”

He leaned back, expansive and aggressive. “You’re up to your neck in this vile reactionary business, aren’t you Brae. Letterbombs and all.”

She nodded.

It’s always a shock when a major suspicion is finally confirmed.

She broke in on the silence, before he could decide what to do next. “I’m not a terrorist, Johnny. But our response to the Aleutians is
dangerous.
It’s sleepwalking, it’s mass hysteria. It is madness for us to treat them like gods. They’re few and we’re many. I think they hoaxed us quite unintentionally at first. Now they’re simply playing up to our fantasies.”

“Oh, sure.”

“They aren’t telepathic. They just think they are.”

Johnny choked, spraying nature-identical coffee.

“Brae, I think you’re on drugs.”

She poked a seedy dishcloth at him. Johnny pushed it down wind and mopped himself with the sleeve of his jacket. She returned to the attack, fired up.

“Listen
to me. Babies don’t learn to talk so they can communicate. They don’t need words, they get on perfectly well without words, as long as they’re with people who know them. Am I right?”

“Uh—”

“When you say you
‘know what someone is thinking’;
and you’re right, is that telepathy? Gesture, body language: when you know someone well, an educated guess.
That’s
what the Aleutians have. Imagine living in a silent movie. You know how silent movies work Johnny,”

There had been a vogue for them a few years ago. He knew.

“The pictures tell a story. The plot’s a simple tale, which everyone can follow without much help, because everybody knows it already. There’s a lot of emotional detail, sheep’s eyes and visual gags: and
occasionally
a title, a few words carefully framed for emphasis. That’s how the Aleutians communicate.”

“Doesn’t make sense. They’d keep on fucking up all the time.”

She was ready for that. “You know, people used to look at gibbons swinging through the trees and think:
how amazing, what perfect acrobats; how is it they never fall?
Then one day some spoil-sport did a survey of gibbon skeletons, and found bones that had been broken and mended, over and over again. They fall all the time. It’s simply that, statistically, swinging works well enough to make sense. The Aleutians have been here for—how long?—and they’re still convinced we operate just the same way as they do. Does that sound like ‘real’ telepathy to you?”

“The truth is, their theory that we’re linked by this ‘Common Tongue’ of theirs has only worked once.
And it was with you.
Do you see what that means? You and Clavel together, you could change the nature of this meeting of worlds!”

Johnny had found out nothing new about his own situation, by hanging around Braemar. He still didn’t know what to believe about the invitation to the Barbican, or the false passport. But he kept on coming here. Perhaps, in a twisted way, he was even drawn to White Queen. He’d caught himself,—alarmingly—wondering if he could sign up with reservations, with a get out clause or observer status. It was the old, vanquished need to be part of the main event.

She was overstating the case. There’d been reports of other humans who heard the alien voices in their heads: as far back as Alaska, and sporadically ever since. Johnny was unique and vitally important because he was within Braemar’s reach.

A single lamp stood on the table, echoing summer twilight. Braemar’s arms and throat glowed through layered muslin. How beautiful she looks when she’s lying, he thought. He put aside the dregs of his coffee.

“I still love the way you talk.”

“Thanks. But I’m trying to recruit you, hadn’t you noticed? What do you say?”

The babylistener function on the housebox sighed and muttered: Billy was restless. Kamla’s shrine glowed. On the screen at the other end of the room someone was walking around an expanse of grass in Argentina: the first enclave was being readied.

“Why didn’t you try to recruit me in Africa?”

She groped in the litter on the table for her cigarettes, good excuse not to look him in the eye. “Does it matter? I’m being as honest as I know how, here and now. To you the aliens look like saviors. Maybe you’re right and maybe I’m wrong. Fine. But you
must
agree that we need to know them, to make real contact. And you, with your training, are possibly the only man for the job.”

She grinned at him. “What’s the verdict. Will you join up or turn me in? You could try telling the White Van Man outside, for a start.
Habeas corpus delicti,
it used to be the rule. I keep throwing
corpses
at him. But you know what? It’s almost as if there’s a conspiracy to keep White Queen out of the public eye. They won’t arrest me. They don’t want to take us on.”

Johnny was frowning. “You were at Uji, that day when Sarah Brown died.”

Braemar sensed danger, but couldn’t see how to avert it. “I was there.”

“The attempt to steal tissue was a White Queen stunt. I’m right, aren’t I? Has anyone else made the connection? Your friend outside, does he know
that?”

She took refuge in messing with her cigarettes. “No one’s ‘made the connection’: it was before our time, the Westminster government still gets the blame. I was supposed to cause a distraction. The idea was that I acted hostile and Sarah acted demure. When she accidentally pricked an alien with her darning needle, I’d be throwing some kind of wobbly on the other side of the room. It didn’t work quite like that. It was a stupid stunt.”

“Yeah. I’m glad you admit it. In effect, you killed that kid.”

“We didn’t know they’d kill her.
We had no reason—”

Johnny shook his head. “No good, Brae. There is no excuse, and you know it. Anyone who takes up terrorist action of any kind accepts that their life is forfeit.”

She stared at him, silenced: abruptly pulled away from the grip of his eyes.

“But we got the goods”

She hated to think of it. That squirming thing in her mouth. No idea what it might do to her.

“What?
Don’t
try and tell me you took something out of Uji.”

“We did. A bug. Remember, in Africa, Clavel was covered in them. We have one of those things. It’s not a louse. It’s a mobile scavenger colony, their way of keeping hygenic.”

“Are you making this up?”

“The decontamination was rushed that day. No one asked me to open my mouth. I hid it in my First Aid kit, in a glob of wound-dressing jelly. Got it back to London in perfect condition. Our scientist was over the moon. So much better than blood, she said. The telepaths didn’t notice a thing. It was easy as shoplifting.”

Johnny said nothing, staring at her.

“You see, they aren’t angels and we can prove it. We have a sample of Aleutian tissue under analysis.” She took a breath. “I suspect they shed living cells, like that thing only much smaller, and maybe somehow ‘conscious,’ into the air around them, constantly. I had studied the Agnès tapes endlessly, I knew it wasn’t telepathy. After Uji, I was convinced that I was right. It’s a kind of very intimately informed guesswork. You and I can speak Aleutian Johnny: we humans speak to each other all the time in their ‘Common Tongue.’ But the physical difference makes them able to trust their guesses, while we can’t trust ours.”

She finally lit her cigarette.

“People will tell you Duality was invented by a chap called Rene Descartes. It’s nonsense, we were always like it. We have our persistent fantasies that
everything is one, man.
But our experience has never borne that out, never. I look at you, you look at me. Something passes from my eyes to yours: well, that can’t happen, because the space between is ‘empty.’ No action at a distance. That’s our predicament. We’re all alone. When we speak or touch each other separation remains what we believe in, it’s our default state. If we lived as I think the Aleutians live, in a kind of soup of tiny emissaries of ourselves, then where would we have fixed the borderline?”

Still he didn’t speak.

“Our old tapes are nearly useless, they’d simply look faked in this climate. But if you and Clavel could do it once, you could do it again. I don’t know…. The mad scientist says their basic chemistry is very like ours. Call it convergent evolution, the anthropic principle, or what you will. Maybe a few of us are somatically, semantically nearer to them, and you’re at the top of the scale. What you have is precious Johnny. A piece of this enormous story belongs to you by right.”

He didn’t say a word, didn’t move a muscle of his face.

“You could learn so much. And
she wants to talk to you.
Why d’you think she sent you a passport, of all things? She wants you to come to her.”

Not being an Aleutian, she didn’t know how much trouble she was in.

His silence could mean anything.

“You killed that kid,” said Johnny. He slammed his hands down on the table. “I thought you were in this for the money. I knew you were into alien-bashing, even the letterbombs. I thought it was a cynical career move. I never
dreamed
you were serious. You are
sick.
You were trying to get evidence that they have poisonous blood or whatever racist nonsense: and in effect, you caused all the deaths after that incident. You are
crazy!”

She tried to keep calm.

“Whatever we did had to be invasive. No one was going to get away with ‘accidentally’ taking a rubbing of Aleutian skin. We’d been told they were good and gentle people, Johnny. We believed that. We only wanted—openness.”

Johnny stood up. His hands were shaking. he stuffed them in his pockets.

“Oh no. You don’t catch me with the same bait twice, Ms. Wilson.” Outrage made him reckless. “I’m supposed to be a sucker for exotic sex, so you want me to fuck the alien for you, pick up some dirt from her pillow talk. Thanks very much. But no thanks. Those aliens are the people who could save my life, clear my name. I don’t expect you to rate that. But the world’s starving. London’s packed like drawers in a plague mortuary. The planet’s bubbling with toxic waste. We need their help.” He stabbed a finger at Kamla’s shrine. “At least your idiot niece is
trying.”

She had been close to them. Locked in her crazy obsession she had not been touched. Braemar was the one who was unreachable, unable to conceive a truth obvious to everyone.

“What a bunch of mindless fascists. Do you realize what could fucking happen, to all of us, if they find out what you’ve done? Just because your life is so dirty it is not worth living. You suicidal, murdering whore, you hate them. You hate everyone.”

He stormed out, blundering over Trixie on the way.

He emerged from the tantrum several blocks away, outside the neighborhood incinerator. It was after midnight. He’d be lucky to find a taxi at all. He felt a fool, and almost turned back to apologies: but no, he would not. White Queen was far more sinister than he had guessed. There was something ugly, deeply ugly going on, and he didn’t want any part of it. A false idyll was over.

iii

The Aleutian Affairs office in Ruam Rudi was about to close. Martha and Robin were hanging around the lobby, talking quietly. They would be going out together as soon as the access light went off. Ellen sat at the duty officer’s desk. Robin’s rosy Gainsborough fairness beside the glacial American blonde jarred on her a little: a poor color combination. But their association, however far it went, (she did not inquire) kept the boy out of worse trouble. Chutima brought the last freight mail delivery. There were always presents for the aliens: clothes, food, music and home movies; long and rambling handwritten letters. Robin and Martha followed her in, idly curious. It was Robin who identified the suspect package. They were off guard at Ruam Rudi. The terrorists usually preferred to bomb the Corporations, whose public offices were traditionally fair game.