White Queen (42 page)

She was too tired to read. Deadly weakness overwhelmed her, as if the weight of the air could break her bones. She had schooled herself for so long to think no further than
this is a bad day, this is a good day.
She had fought to disregard her illness in the same spirit as it coolly disregarded medical science. Now she was thinking:
I am dying, they could cure me.
It was a catastrophic breach of discipline.

Cures that might cost humanity everything it owned.

Martha murmured to Robin. “Someone should warn Carlotta about what she said.”

He never knew when Martha was joking. But Poonsuk had not seemed herself since Carlotta’s rash words about the princesses. You just
don’t
show disrespect to the Thai royals.

Ellen overheard. “The President was disgracefully rude,” she muttered, in the unsilibant undertone that gives the adept privacy in livespace. “If she suffers for it, serve her right.”

Martha wondered if Ellen knew how rough and dirty things could get behind the smiling mask of KT politics. She slid a curious glance; the English woman’s face gave nothing away.

Robin shifted himself a psychic millimeter out of Martha’s space, smiling faintly.
I can speak Aleutian.
I know when I’m not wanted…. The euphoria of that night in the Ephemerides House was long gone. Here was the reality. The aliens are refugees.
More
bloody refugees. Is that what it comes to? Just that? Something terrible and beautiful has passed us by, he thought. The handwritten English of a Thai technician melted into haphazard dots and curls. Words turned into heaps of electron-magnified genes, solid and mysterious. He stopped trying to decipher them. He would tackle the implications of alien biochemistry another day. Maybe the Government of the World would want to send earthlings to the mothership. He would volunteer. Life is made of glorious moments, they have no lasting value. There is no meaning. I’ll build my career on the fact that I was one of the first at Uji. I will excel, because I play the game for
sensation,
not for profit or status. He rubbed his face with his hands.

The air-filters hummed. The room was too warm. This conspiracy had begun as modified aggression, an attempt to debunk the superbeings. As soon as the ship had been discovered, and Carlotta’s analysts began to lay bare its less-than-supernatural secrets, the impulse to protect their protégés had returned. Now, yet another mood was taking over.

Go away,
thought Ellen.
Come back in five hundred years. We can’t deal with you, and all you bring to us, right now. We have too much on our minds.
But whenever the aliens arrived they would find the same world. The same futile wars, festering grievances; fragile new beginnings.

As soon as they arrived they’d become part of what was happening. The alien infestation had become, inextricably, a factor in the situation. Rajath and his crew were the unchanging catalyst, speeding up the movement towards a new
gestalt.
An end to the old power blocs, and the new power blocs: the beginning of a different order of union. But it had all become too fast, too fragile. Without the Aleutians as angels, the forced, hothouse plant of world government could not possibly survive. A new message arrived, and was delivered by a slender young man with the token tonsure and yellow scarf of a temporary vocation. He weied as he handed it to Ellen. The words were English but they made no sense. She looked at him in bewilderment.

“A human person has been seen in space.” explained the part-time monk.

The sequence was short, and perfectly clear. The human face was well-known. Johnny Guglioli, White Queen’s tame ex-eejay. Robin Lloyd-Price began to laugh, a little hysterically. “My God! It was a hoax! It’s not the alien mothership at all. It’s an obscure new way to deliver a letter-bomb!”

“It’s
possible,
Robin,” said the Multiphon technician, watching code on his subscreen. He looked up, smiling politely. “Anything can be faked. But the weight of the evidence is heavy. I think we must believe he’s out there.”

Robin sobered at once.

Poonsuk, in her motored chair, looked from face to face.

“What is it? What is it you know?”

“Letterbombing is a very minor criminal offence,” said Robin. “White Queen has committed worse crimes, and we know it: but you don’t take media-manipulators like that to court. No one’s ever accessed Wilson’s phone, but we get some information about the calls of one of her associates, an unsavory character, quite apart from the White Queen activities. A few days ago Wilson spent some time using her shady friend’s phone, talking to a third member of the group. He’s called the ‘White Knight.’ He’s a retired nuclear physicist. We don’t yet know what was said, we’re still waiting for the UK police to let us have sight of their transcript.”

“Nuclear, as in
weapons?”

“Not strictly speaking,” muttered Robin, rifling the Multiphon intranet at a neighboring desk. “But it’s a problem.”

“Could be a
real
problem,” agreed Martha, grimly.

Johnny was gone now, out of their sight. The Peter Rabbit necklace saw only the big hall, quiet and empty as it had been since the ceremony Carlotta had shown them.

“White Queen may have known about the ship for a while. They’ve always insisted it was there. Damn, I can’t find Carlotta’s
first
techies’ report.”

The alien spaceship was being studied avidly, mountains of reports—

“Please be clear,” said Poonsuk. “What are you suggesting?”

“Guglioli and Wilson have left London,” said Ellen. “We think they crossed the Channel, we don’t know where they went. Guglioli has no passport. Braemar Wilson, of course, does have a passport—which has not left the country—but one of the group, that same unsavory character, is an expert in providing false papers. We don’t have the authority to do more than observe. They have never been charged with any crime, and we’ve wanted to keep it that way, keep their campaign low-key. We’ve assumed they were courting publicity because they had nothing else—

Suddenly the White Queen conspiracy loomed enormous. To get out into space, they must be backed by some of the richest people in the world.

“Johnny’s
there,” said Martha. “He’s not alone, you bet. Where’s the lady?” She looked around, taking in expressions that laid bare the covert terror in all dealings with the Aleutians. “I’m guessing our friends from Outer Space have a sabotage problem. What the fuck do we do?”

It wasn’t too far from the cathedral to her destination. She could read a symbolic map as well as Johnny; and retain the information she needed. You have to have good memory, as an independent in the media business. The evening street was quiet, but her body was shouting fear and guilt. She saw an alley heading the right way and ducked into it. It was a dusty tunnel, the kind of shortcut that children use, never adults. The dust was a good sign: few living wanderers here. It became frighteningly narrow, but it was heading in the right direction so she persevered. For this sequence, some deep down dirty jingoism. Charles Villiers Stanford,
Songs of the Sea.
Can we get hold of that? We may have to go back to CD: this is
not
New Youro, post04 music.

Drake, he’s in his hammock an’ a thousand miles away,
(Capten, art tha sleeping there below?)
If the Dons sight Devon,
I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven.
And drum them up the channel, as I drummed’em long ago….

The imaginary letterbomb, cynically sentimental, staunched emotion and made it possible to function.
Rataplan, rataplan rataplan, beat the little drum.
The dusty crevice delivered her into daylight. She’d crossed a time-zone boundary, or something. There were people—bustling about, twitching their animal faces; even speaking aloud. There was traffic: trambuses, things like mopeds. Braemar stared in horror. She covered her face…. She sobbed.

Courage.

If this was Earth, the central power-station would have been sited as far as possible from the population. Maybe they were pragmatic. If the heart of your spaceship explodes without warning where are you going to run to? Maybe they simply were not scared. Braemar walked into the complex, off the street. Staff glanced up as she passed. She fed them disinformation:
I’m none of your concern. I’m supposed to be here.
They believed her. Politics must be quiet in Aleutia at present; and apparently no one feared for her safety.

No one was wearing anything special. Dun colored monotony, with the black seaweed-hair slick to the shoulder. A few bangles, brooches and scarves. In Aleutia, read Braemar, mistress of signs, everyday clothing is not a product. You don’t buy it or choose it, you use it like a paper towel in a public toilet. Few things have the status of consumer goods: extras, decoration. The domain of economic activity is much smaller than in our world. Rousing sea-chanties rattled on behind the social analysis. As long as she could
make tape
in her head, no matter if the tracks didn’t match up, she would be all right.

Getting close, by the symbols, to the reactor chamber, and still nobody challenged her. If quiet footsteps approached (the silence of Aleutia!) she had time to duck into a doorway, or another passage. She found her way barred, an icon that wouldn’t open the door, no matter how she rubbed it. Then she noticed the closet, which opened at a rub, and there were helmets, gauntlets, suits. Protective clothing at last. A gauntleted fingertip opened the locked door.

What can one take out of a virtuality? Information. What can one carry back? She had given the White Knight the information, he had given her the tools to plunge Aleutia into utter chaos. The looking-glass parallels continued: Everything that we are not, they are. Everything that we can’t do, they can. But the seal between the viewer and the reflection is not complete, a trickle seeps through. Aleutia lives on the edge of all our possibilities. She heard the White Knight’s slow words; her fate.
What you saw sounds very like a fusion reactor. We can make something of that kind: it’s called a ‘spheromak.’ But for us, the beast will not behave: we can’t tame it.

They have an analogy for everything. Gender identity, metaphysics, even death. The immortals had never known the crushing weight of mortality. But they too, surrounded by their own life everywhere, recognized a realm that was unreachable, the domain of incalculable powers. They entered this realm to commune with their past selves, protected by what humans call religion. In other circumstances, those awesome powers were the same in Aleutia as anywhere in the cosmos. Force, energy: the stuff that makes the wheels go round, fuels the processing.

She was alone in a corridor that circled the reactor’s core. There was a great cylinder of the thick blurry glass. She saw what she had glimpsed the last time she dreamed this dream, when she’d got as far as the doors to this antechamber, then the doors had opened and she’d had to run away. Run away half-blinded, believing herself asleep or dead; fled in horror from a nightmare impulse. But she had carried the information with her, knowing before she spoke to the White Knight the fatal discovery she’d made. Now she was back.

The sun in a cage: a fearsome captive, held in a state of anomalous stability. A state that ought not to be possible. On Earth it wasn’t possible to hold this creature, not for any useful length of time. The White Knight thought the Aleutians must have some way of doping super-hard metal to keep it from weakening under neutron bombardment. How the mini sun had been manufactured or captured in the first place he couldn’t fathom.

All Braemar had to do was to increase the pressure; squeeze the bars of the cage. This must be possible, for the anomalous state of the blue sun had to be constantly shifting, constantly being corrected. She didn’t have to alter the super-metal. The vital component of this cage wasn’t material. Through the glass, the blue sun. It was unbearably bright, despite the dark visor of her helmet, so bright she couldn’t imagine how her sight had survived, the last time. The light roared like a million silent furnaces. The fuzzy blue sphere had all the aspect of a ferocious animal, struggling in the irregular coils of metal between which it hung, enchained.

The Aleutians on earth, the landing party, had made themselves look big because they were afraid. As far as they knew they were among equals, and all they had behind them was this vulnerable wandering home. They took advantage of the hopelessly impressionable locals, how very human of them. If only the aliens had been what they honestly believed themselves to be: just folks, just people, completely unremarkable.

But they were not. They were what the landing party had pretended to be, superbeings with magical powers. They would not mean any harm. At full expression they were still very few, if Clem was right. But those “three to five million” would soon rule, and change utterly, the miserable savages they’d stumbled upon. How could they help it?