White Queen (36 page)

“What
is
this place?” he whispered.

The icons were derived from a humanoid body. In icon the ship itself was a forked animal, not a hollow rock: blood, lymph, nerves and guts standing for the various essential systems. He had been moved on from the “mountaineering” to the “tv hall” by rubbing a big rayed eye. That was weirdly easy to interpret. The Eye. The “I.” He remembered Clavel, suddenly and intensely: covering her broken face in that gesture of deep respect.
The Self is God.

Oh, it was eerie!

He was being shown their temple, an alien cathedral.

Television had a supernatural significance for the Aleutians. He knew that. What happens behind the screen happens in “the land of the dead.” They kept video-records about themselves in a place apart at Uji. No one understood why, not even his favorite authority on Alien Culture, (or if she did she wasn’t saying). That wasn’t a communications center, it was a church of “Self.” But here he stood, using a tourist information desk. The radio-room, if he found it, couldn’t be that whacky.

“What about those moons?” murmured Johnny.

He found them, by trial and error. Here are our satellites. Here is a gap in the default configuration. One of our satellites is missing. No, it has gone walkabout, an eye on a stalk to peep around the big moon.

“Oh,
hey—”

No one had ever caught the Aleutians making or receiving a transmission. But there it was, the proof. In an emergency, the landing party “telepaths” could phone home. Was he awake or dreaming? He couldn’t tell. But a brilliant plan slipped into shape.
He could hack their coms.
He could hijack that eye on a stalk and break their cover. Absolutely. This was the key. Here it was (the fuzzy air brushed across his face). Power over the aliens!

Guiltily, he became aware of Braemar; of the way she was standing there quietly letting him have all the fun. She seemed to like him to take the lead. And he felt he could do anything while she was around: that tender, enabling presence. He remembered the ruthless way she’d made herself seem obnoxious, in Fo, to save him from moral danger. (Or something like that, some esoteric Braemar reasoning that he’d never understand).

Why was she so rough on herself?

There was a fantasy, it almost seemed her favorite, where she would say
no,
and
please, Johnny, no;
and softly fight him, all around the room. She’d introduced this in Africa: a close-quarters reversal of the teasing come-on she’d given him before. It was horribly exciting, so completely against all the rules. It worked for her, too. She would be frantic, teetering on the brink when he had her down, when he forced her. It was a game they hadn’t played again, and never would, not since the Clavel incident. But the thought of it started to give him an erection.

Getting hyper-associative. His idea was sexual, inevitably: it was about
doing it
to the alien. This hyper effect (not only in terms of sex) was a hazard of computer gaming; one reason why he’d never been crazy about virtuality. Smart people only used this drugless drug for business meetings.

He stood back.
“You
have a turn,” he said, like a child.

Of course, she wasn’t there.

A brisk march down the spooky, off-real corridor restored him. He wondered if Brae was here at all, and how he could possibly find her. Things had changed while he was in the pod-room. There were scrabbling noises, odd shadows. Things watching him, and following. He should have nothing to fear from Aleutian security cams, because there wouldn’t be any. But reason breaks down, addicted gamers become classically paranoid, and they must have some kind of analog. He bumped into a yielding panel, backed off, rubbed the icon and was plunged into a city street. He did a swift U turn. Something grabbed him: he opened his mouth to yell, but it was Braemar.

He hugged her exuberantly.

“I’ve been finding things out. And you?”

She shook her head. She seemed overwhelmed, her eyes stared as if blinded. He hugged her again. “Isn’t this terrific!
We’ve got them,
Brae.”

The passersby weren’t taking any notice. He flashed on Clavel’s experience in Fo. It’s easy being an alien. Keeping his arm around Braemar he drew her into the corridor he’d left.

“I’ve figured out a plan. Have you seen any maps? We’re in the hub here. We’re going to climb out into the scaffolding. We’ll climb in again at a different level. The exit we want is two floors up, I mean out, closer to the equator.”

“How do we get there?”

“Simple. We take a bus.”

The bus set them down at its terminus, by which time they were the only passengers. The transition from living-space to wilderness was oddly natural. Behind them, the walled city. Ahead, the edge of the wilderness, overgrown with bushes like giant clubmoss, very dark green. A kind of turf; several different flowering plants. There was nobody about. They stood, heads tilted, peering. It was chilly out here, even so close to human habitation. A dizzying landscape, impossible geology of struts and spars, sprang out and down through the dark air, with no visible limits. You could see how venturesome young Aleutians would come to test themselves, and maybe break their silly necks.

Johnny told her about his symbolic literacy, and read her all the information provided at the bus stop. They could have used public transport (which seemed to be free) for the whole journey, but somebody would surely have spotted them. Safer this way.

Braemar was very quiet. He had the impression she’d spent her time alone wandering vaguely in a state of shock.

“‘Down’ is out, remember,” said Johnny. “Out to the shells. We don’t want to get too far, just crawl around the outside of the living-space and find ourselves another bus stop.”

They climbed into the rock web. Perception and perspective shifted. It became possible to see that they were crawling in a mess of irregular bracing between two roughly concentric spheres, under a convex curved surface, and above a concave far away “floor.”

Goblin claws scratched at Braemar’s attention. She looked around and around: nasty things slithered away unseen. She clambered through an algal bloom of memory, the air was full of fragments of her past, fragments of meaning. She’d gathered all the information she needed, she’d had enough of Aleutia, but Johnny must have his own adventure. She was afraid to cross him, although he was such a baby. She was afraid at every step that she would fall out of this precarious reality, into a spasming void where anger was the rock, fear the air, shame and guilt the space that held her. They followed waymarks, integral like the maps. The rock-like metal or metallic rock was well worn. Mountaineering might be a minority sport, but they were using a popular path.

“Johnny? Do you think this is real?”

“I haven’t a clue,” he called back. “It’s bloody good fun, though. Lemme think. Down is out: We have to turn here.” He closed his eyes, trying to orient himself by inner-ear balance: and instantly wailed, fell to his hands and knees.

“Wow. Don’t try that.”

“I didn’t get any video of the engine room,” called Johnny. “But I think they must be using the sun for power. That has to be it. Some kind of massive harvesting of the solar wind; of the energy-skirts of each star as they pass through its domain. They’re lost, you know. They must be lost. No one would have come out to this godforsaken neck of a spiral arm on purpose.”

The whole primitive operation grieved him. Somewhere in Johnny the vision of Planet Aleutia had survived. Pure waters, rolling meadows, lovely eco-malls scattered like dewdrops.

“They’re no better than us, they’re in the same fix themselves. How useless.”

He had to keep parleying all the time with hyper-associative Johnny. Who was anxious for excuses, because he wanted to shaft the aliens in the worst way. The aliens had become somehow entangled with Braemar.
Get down, you stupid animal.
The battle in his mind/body was eerie and horrible. Brae mustn’t know what was going on. She’d be terrified.

“On the contrary,” corrected Braemar, softly. “They’ve learned to run a world the way our world needs to be run. They’re what we need.”

She touched the deep worn treads: hand and footholds. So old a race of wanderers. So ancient and single an organism.
I want that ship,
she had said, and here it was. But where was the proof of Aleutian equality? That was all she asked. Not that they be inferior. She only wanted them to be equals. Why couldn’t they be equals? Why did she always have to be afraid?

Goblins crept.

“One consolation,” Johnny called, cheerfully. “This is a spaceship. When we start climbing, technically there’s a slight gravity gradient: we’ll be doing less work—”

Then he fell.

He fell away from her, a blur of movement. She yelled and clung to the rock. He was lying below, about thirty meters under her feet, caught in the fork of two rocky branches. Frightened, but not yet terrified, she scrambled down. Johnny rolled over. He was not unconscious, he had not broken his back. He was clutching, two-handed, at a red spring that rose from the dun cloth; from his inner thigh. Nicked the femoral artery.

“Can’t…stop it…”

“Yes I can!”

She stripped off her Aleutian suit. It wouldn’t tear, she wadded the whole thing: rammed it against the flow. The dun colored underwear, pocket in the crotch for their sanitary pad hung off her hips and cramped her shoulders.

Oh God, someone help me—

“Stay calm, breath shallow. Don’t move.”

We do not wake up, why don’t we wake up. People have been known to die in virtualities. Known as the Huxley effect, it can happen quite easily, if shock and a vulnerable mental state combine. Until this moment she’d been half convinced she was really dead, all this a dream of the collapsing neurons. It was only a vision: hallucination, wish-fulfillment. But she couldn’t wake herself. Her heart was pounding. Johnny lay back, breathing shallow, watching her from under half-closed lids with a faint apologetic smile. He was unconscious, but he was still here. Aleutia remained solid and the blood kept coming.

Something moved above her. She didn’t turn her head. It scratched around in front, a little creature with a segmented body and clawed legs. Its head was marked like a face, eye-patched like a caterpillar.
It had a human face.

Something landed with a meaty plop. It hopped on a single rear limb like a coiled spring. It had a row of eyes, human eyes: two pairs of little baby hands. More of them came, none larger than a squirrel. Some were very small. Go away! she sobbed, her hands fixed rigid in the welter of Johnny’s blood. But the goblin creatures came up close. They were all over her and Johnny, taking emergency measures, before the Aleutian arrived.

Having made the injured intruder as comfortable as possible, the doctor returned. Braemar sat crouched against the wall in the lobby of the First Aid station, half naked and bloody. The doctor folded himself down near her. He reached out a hand. The skin of his fingertips crept, living dust motes danced in the air. No action at a distance in Aleutia. A trolley came up. He took a blanket, and patted the trolley: a magnified sign, Aleutian kindness to animals, of the endless chemical caresses that kept everything going. The doctor wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. It was alive too—not to Braemar’s perception but she knew its status from the way he touched it. Everything was alive. Rock, metal, food, tools. All crawling with the infection of Aleutia: a world of flesh, infested with the life of its people.

He made a short speech, in the unknown Aleutian language. He probably said. “How did you get here?”

She shook her head. No answer.

The doctor began to explain something. The dumbshow he used, the grotesque half-alive tools he showed, conveyed nothing. They didn’t have to. She was inside the Aleutian paradigm. She already knew what he was bound to say. She knew the story.
Your friend needs blood. It must be yours, our blood would kill him.

She shook her head, desperately negative.

He’d expected this reaction. Stealing tissue is an act of war. He covered his face, the gesture of reverence. He tried hard to convince the stranger, not of his brood, that he wouldn’t dream of taking advantage. He explained, perhaps, that he had made a vow:
I swear by Apollo.

“No.”

No answer.

The doctor was patient, puzzled, but only mildly curious. Aleutia was such a small place. He’d surely heard about the expedition, was aware that there was a habitable and inhabited new world on his doorstep. The arrival of a pair of alien intelligences in his own voyaging home left him unmoved. He wasn’t even very interested in knowing how they’d got here The unknown had no chill for him, no thrill, no
numen.
On a counter there were things growing in dishes: his house-plants, his pets, his children. Some had eyes that seemed nearly conscious.