White Queen (28 page)

“Yeah, there’s a fault. We’re trying to fix it, but it’s kind of endemic.”

He was naked. “Excuse me.” He pulled on his jeans. He brought out a towel and handed it to her. She buried her face, scrubbed vigorously at her hair.

He reviewed the new situation, feeling drunk with relief.

“You’re real, aren’t you, Clavel.”

She dropped the towel. The dust-mask she must have worn for disguise hung under her chin, sopping. The dark center of her face didn’t look so bad in real life. He was kneeling in front of her, she reached out and grasped his upper arms and stared. What a gaze! He was grateful for her understanding.

“You have to travel incognito now you’re famous, I can guess. Thank you, Clavel. I don’t know why you’re here, but thank you for being real.”

She turned her joints the human way round again, dripping onto Mrs. Frame’s turf-effect rug. “You didn’t come,” she explained. “So I came to you.”

Johnny was entranced. He gazed at the creature from another star, staggered by the impossible abyss that lay between them. The wonder of her presence was far greater than it had been in Fo, because she was accredited now. Not a fake or a figment of his eejay’s imagination. She was genuine. He reached out a tentative hand. Immediately, she grasped it. He felt the weird texture of her skin, saw the trimmed claws, counted the fingers, stroked the thick horny pads that would make her fist into the foot of a running beast.

Clavel, her dark epicanthic eyes fixed on his, bore the handling without protest. She drew a deep, shaken breath. He realized he might be distressing her. He laid her hand down gently, and went to fetch the passport.

“Why did you send me this? You sent it, didn’t you?”

She lifted her shoulders: the gesture that reached her eyes, much more like a smile than her bared teeth. “Jivanamukta made it for me. One of Lugha’s people. Oh, I’ve been begging borrowing and stealing to get us back together. Most of my own artisans died, you know. Why didn’t you come, Johnny?”

The easy spoken English startled, and almost disappointed him. She was dressed in Karen street clothes, dark embroidered breeches and a batwinged linen blouse; a sash wound around her muscular waist. The clothes were deeply grimy as if they’d seen months of wear. She was carrying a small daypack, ASEAN make.

“Never mind. I came to you, there’s no difference.”

She shrugged out of the wet straps, and produced a bottle of clear brown liquid without a label. “It’s whiskey. We copied it. Three of your months old, I promise. I wanted to bring you something.” She looked up at him very solemnly, the nasal space pinched in and a corner of a sharp white tooth chewing at her lower lip.

Mesmerized, Johnny fetched two beakers: dispenser cups that he rinsed out and reused until they split. Mrs. Frame’s precious crockery always went back to the kitchen. He was in the game again!
Stuff
Krung Thep, Johnny Guglioli’s on stream. He thought of Carlotta: of home and freedom.

“Shit, I can’t make a record.”

Clavel showed teeth. “I ought to tell you, Johnny. I should have told you before. I don’t reckon much to organized religion.”

“Neither do I.” He could understand her English, but he didn’t know what she meant. He’d have invited her inside his head, if he knew how. “Will it be okay if we have a recorded session later?”

He grinned. “Great. Thank you.”

She poured the whiskey and they drank.

Clavel swallowed the spirit carefully. He had taught himself to manage open beakers, dipping his face and tipping his head quickly back. The false warmth running through and through him couldn’t stop the shivers. He felt the intimacy of the quarrel within himself: Clavel had as much Rajath in him as anyone, still as keen on the loot. But things would get dangerous, and things would get ugly: he could see it all laid out. It was Clavel’s curse and blessing, this capacity to be frightened at a distance. What harms us ever, harms us now. What harms any part of our self, is injury to us all. And sure as Johnny is my self, this world is part of us.

“I want to tell you everything. No more kidding around.”

Clavel’s teeth were chattering so he could hardly speak, not from cold but from excitement. How to proceed? It must be true, after all. He truly had never been in love before, because he’d never felt like this. How do people manage to lie down together in this state? (No! He really—
go away!
— Did not need any advice). He laughed, showing his violently trembling hands.

“Oh, of course.”

Johnny brought another towel and Clavel stripped to his underwear. Johnny’s eyes followed every move, with a candor that burned. The selfishness of love burns clear through the body. My claw is in your flesh. I will lie down with myself.
Now,
they thought, Clavel and his lover, half out of their single mind with lust and pure spiritual joy.
Now and here, myself and I—

Johnny knew Thai “Mekong” whiskey: brewed in a fortnight, but civilized stuff, not much stronger than beer. He was half-way through his drink before he realized he’d been fooled by the universal translator gadget. This was not Mekong. It was something very soft and very potent. Johnny wasn’t much of a drinker. He looked into the beaker ruefully. At least it wasn’t eating the plastic. He was in Fo again, taking unknown risks. But the kid wouldn’t harm him. He’d always been sure of that. She’d gone very quiet. He was afraid he’d offended her modesty by staring at that breastless torso, the weird dropped shoulders; great V of sliding muscle wrapped where her ribs should show. Her damp and scanty dun undersuit showed every detail.

said Clavel.

Johnny was shocked at having his need stated so bluntly, by the voice in his head. It was like getting fingered by the faithhealer. Hey, you there. You in the back row, with the shameful crippling fatal disease!

“You know about that? I guess you do. And you can help me?”

said Clavel.

The alien was shuddering visibly. “Huh? Oh, yes.” He held out his hand. That seemed to be what she meant. Two half-naked bodies, a sticky smell of yeast—briefly, the accusation he’d yelled at Braemar crossed his mind.
You want me to fuck the alien for you!
But he wasn’t going to risk his incredible prize on account of petty squeamishness. She was such a kid. Quite harmless. She used his hand as an anchor, and pulled herself into his arms. The closeness must be part of it, skin against skin.

Clavel told him.

She reached into her bodysuit-thing, brought out a hand crawling with blood colored lice. They glistened. Johnny stared, too disgusted and fascinated to move a muscle. The arm around his shoulders drew his face down. She began to kiss at him, the way a cat kisses: thin stretched lip and an edge of tooth. She touched his nipples, traced whorls of hair down to his belly. She pressed the bristling hollow of her nasal cavity to his face, at the same time trying to reach the louse covered hand into his pants.

She touched his nose. this.
It gets in the way.>

He was paralyzed with astonishment. A mad voice inside was still asking quite seriously
how much is the cure worth.
Then he tried, gently, to get away: and found he couldn’t. This was beyond a joke. Clavel shucked off her underwear. The naked chickenskin baboon crouched over him. It took his hand and buried it to the wrist in a fold that opened along its groin. The chasm inside squirmed with life. Part of its wall swelled, burgeoning outward.

“Ah—”

The baboon clutched his wrist and worked its bellyfold up and down, its thighs slipped along his hips. It wasn’t female after all, but a kind of hermaphrodite. Something slid out of the fold: an everted bag of raw flesh, narrowing to a hooked end. It was enormous. Johnny felt a jolt of horrible arousal, like the affectless clutch in the groin he’d get from a glimpse of violent pornography. Clavel’s eyes were still fixed on his,
still sweet and childlike.
Suddenly, he lost his nerve completely. He struggled and protested, still attempting to laugh off this gross and ludicrous social error but inwardly totally panicked.

The alien didn’t know what he meant, or didn’t care. It descended on him. He tried to scream. He could not. And this was what he had always feared, why he had run from Braemar. Stark horror! This was how it was always going to end. The faith so close to fear, wonder so close to terror, betrayed him utterly: stripped him, robbed him and flung him out, meaningless, into a bursting vacuum.

ii

Braemar, mistress of signs, never worked from home. She was unavailable for phone-in interviews, held on to the enhanced status of mobility: you won’t make plug-in bonded labor out of me. But on a night like this she was glad enough to shut the mortuary drawer behind her.

Billy was crying. Kamla was fast asleep in his nursery with her head in a box tv, her dreams awash with advertising aimed at people sixty years or so her senior. Brae left her: she’d wake and grizzle if you took the thing off. She changed Billy’s wet pajamas and bedding. The poor little bugger then wanted to chat, he probably hadn’t had a word out of his mother all day. But she stonewalled on that. One has to keep the limits clear.

Fed Trixie. The smell in the kitchen was vicious. Braemar had refused to buy a gimmicky new robot that Ionela wanted, and this was the Transylvanian revenge. Ionela, drunk on nouvelle consumerism ever since Braemar shipped her tribe over here, had decided it was her Christian-Sustainable-Developmentalist duty to make do with just one cleaning product. The evil woman had been caught using toilet cleaner to rub up Braemar’s antique furniture.

Domestic robots don’t work, and they make one look a vulgar fool. But the peasant craved toys, craved any kind of power. Braemar could remember going through that stage.

She had been to her pharmacist. It was lucky that the poor still devoured patent medicines, or undead monsters like Braemar would be in trouble. There were hardly enough of them left to support the surviving illicit dealers on their own. Nowadays, everything was bloody legal. And the official quacks (Braemar didn’t believe in doctors) never prescribed anything but electricity. If you broke your leg, they’d give you a course of ECT.

She ought to eat. There was nothing in the larder but a dish of potato mash, smeared with baby saliva, and the end of a carton of nature identical egg. She poured eggy goop into a dish and stuck it in the micro. Eat sparingly, keep calm. Maybe you’ll live forever.

Trixie followed her to the drawing room. The wallpanel had defaulted to its river scene, green and moony shadows. The floor-length windows were wet and black, the glass set to let in no light and reflect nothing. She thought she would use no more Looney Tunes, that was getting stale. She would move on: maybe Alison de Vere. She walked around tidying things. Stopped in front of a mirror and preened. That’s a pretty woman still, in her pretty suit of peacock blue and gold thread. She felt how the love of lovely things would grow on her, as other pleasures receded. She would be a dragon buried to the eyes in her musty hoard, like granny in the old house (so long gone) in Nairobi. Outside in the wet dark there were rows of glistening tended vegetables, that Braemar would never see on her table. No one can change their nature, she was not a giving sort of person. But it was soothing, a secret indulgence, to let herself be robbed blind by the Marmune tribe.

She woke up the tv and checked a few headlines. The bouncing rouble. Korean concerns, will New Zion once again bale out Moscow? The failure of New Zion: overcrowding, Eve-riots, trouble brewing. How strange to see the human world going on so complacently. She had an urge to reach into the illusory depth and shake someone by the shoulders. News! Once the newspaper barons owned the tv companies, it was obvious that the papers would take over the screen. The tabloids, and the quality dailies, and the weekend sections: faxed to your breakfast bar, still on the street corners; dominating the wallscreen in the living room as well. Once again, money achieves the inevitable. What else but a “newspaper” could carry enough conflicting viewpoints to satisfy the twenty-first-century punter? What was less predictable was the way the rest of the tv staples had withered away. There was the BBC (or similar) for worthy projects and Westminster. That was practically it, but for the news in a myriad forms. People scarcely wanted anything else. There was enough horror, enough drama, enough art, enough pathos there for anyone. Certainly enough fiction. She’d done a minor commercial about this trend:
Death Of A Sitcom.

It was against Braemar’s principles to pay for Indie tv. If anyone wanted her to watch their self-indulgent rubbish it had to be free. She rifled through the hot codes that had come her way, thinking about the absurdity of keeping Kamla in education. Thinking about the incredible barrage of human diversity tapped by that space hanging on her wall. Johnny Guglioli’s worldview had been formed by the citadel of New York, before the fall. A beleaguered fort, waiting for the Cavalry. So young. How could he see the world that Braemar believed in? Always more problems, always more solutions.
It’s just the normal noises, Johnny. We don’t need any help.