White Queen (45 page)

No one asked him how they’d reached Aleutia. He was hazy about the details himself, it didn’t seem to matter much. He was glad the White Queen spacers had got clean away.

Johnny walked into the shrine, flanked by detention-center people. The executioner had been to the cell and introduced himself earlier; he came up and they walked together. Johnny was composed. As he stepped onto the open floor, he stopped dead.

“Is this being recorded?”

A sizeable crowd had gathered, around the dancing floor and between the ranks of character shrines. The outburst of Spoken Words bewildered Johnny’s guards, but almost immediately his request was understood, in a flurry of embarrassment. By some extraordinary oversight, no religious arrangements had been made.

“I want to see the cam,” said Johnny stubbornly. He looked likely to avail himself of the sentenced criminal’s immemorial right to fight or flight; to make things difficult. They hurried to reassure him. Shortly, the executioner was able to prove to the prisoner that his death would be recorded. Across the floor, the other prisoner smiled. Evidently Johnny felt that touch. His eyes were seen to scan the crowd, and meet the eyes of his partner.

As soon as she saw him, she remembered everything.

“Johnny!” she shouted, leaping forwards, electrified. “Johnny, it doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to die! Fly away! Vanish!”

The disturbance was contained. The person whose aspect is often comfort of the defeated hurried over there.

“I want to make a speech,” announced the prisoner.

The person who is always aware that spilled blood can spatter, metaphorically, and leave a stain, was not presiding. His people made it known that this was perfectly in order.

“I know that I don’t have to be here.”

Johnny’s speech was clear in the Common Tongue, but his physical attention was so focused that not many Aleutians could make out what he was saying. It didn’t matter, he wasn’t speaking to them. “I’m here of my own choice. I know what we meant to do and I know my life is forfeit. This is my real situation. I don’t want to change it. I would not change an instant,” he said. “I would not change one measly virtual particle in the sum of things that made you.”

Clavel was with Braemar. He had persuaded the guards to stand back and give the prisoner space. He stayed close, quelling the grief and pain that could only seem a meaningless intrusion.

Braemar shook his head.

Now. The knife-edge. The fountain of life.

Braemar seemed to take the stroke in his own body. He would have fallen, but Clavel held him up. “Go to Johnny,” he whispered, urgently. “You
must.
The newly dead remember: so he will know you when you two wake again—”

She ran across the dancing floor, and dropped onto her knees. She pulled him up and held him. She tried to wake, to be rescued, to plunge into the void. But they had stayed too long and the dream had come true. There was only Johnny, warm and lax in her arms; and heavier than usual, like a sleeping child. She laid her cheek against his hair, she closed her eyes. No one disturbed them, for what seemed a blessedly long while.

14
ENVOI: BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART

Braemar Wilson came back to earth in an Aleutian spaceplane, with Johnny Guglioli’s body and the record of his death. It had been proposed that she would serve the UN mandatory life sentence for peacetime terrorism in an English prison. Nothing came of that: no appeals, no public debate. She escaped from police custody on her way home from Thailand, and was never recaptured. The mystery of how Johnny and Braemar had reached Aleutia was investigated with zeal, for the record: and then, along with active pursuit of Braemar, quietly abandoned. This was not a time when the Government of the World wanted to find itself uncovering a massively resourced anti-Aleutian conspiracy, involving Earth’s space-capable governments and the super-rich.

The White Queen group continued its activities under the name “Oroonoko,” on a smaller scale. Braemar did not contact any of her old associates, she never returned to London or to the house in New Cross. Eighteen months after Johnny’s death she surfaced as a face in the front line at an Eve-riot in Leipzig. Once a terrorist, always a terrorist. Nobody who knew anything about Wilson believed she had turned feminist. It was feared that the White Queen was gathering new allies for her own cause; adepts in guerrilla violence.

But there was no need to worry about Braemar Wilson anymore. She surfaced again, at the registration desk of a large public hospice in an English city a few months later. By swift and devious means, this news reached tv screens around the world before it reached the police or the Aleutian Office. To the global audience Braemar was of minor interest; they’d forgotten about the sabotage drama. Enough interest was generated, however, to hold the forces of law and order at bay for long enough.

Braemar remained a symptomless carrier of the deadly virus to the end. Her problem was lung cancer, a hazard of nicotine addiction. She’d waited too long before surfacing, it was too late for any treatment. She was sixty six years old.

She lay under the white sheet, a thinking egg balanced on top of the ruin inside her skin. She’d refused a flotation tank. The bed approximated a narrow hospital cot of another age, for her reassurance, but it kept her miraculously comfortable. So long as you have enough money, you’re in good favor when you’re dying. People feel grateful.

The Aleutians will stack us in arcologies, she thought, because that’s what they know. And we will thank them for it. How ridiculous. Considering the Japan Sea Factor, the cancer rate, and all the rest of it, by the end of this century, the last thing we should be worrying about is over-population. She was making tape, still
Braemar Wilson, New Things:
a mildly controversial topical opinion on any subject, any time. She lifted her hand, the one not braceleted with the pain-blocker. It still looked human. Could be quite well and whole, really. Could be waking with a bad hangover, or out of one of those thick cloying dreams that weighs on the heart like stone.

Sometimes she remembered lying down on the couch in Buonarotti’s cell; she remembered that fall into the void as if she was still waiting to return. But the FTL trip was incredible. It couldn’t have happened, her memory must be a delusion. Human beings cannot pass through the gates of death and live. Naked souls cannot commit terrorist acts.

Sometimes she thought, and it seemed logical, that this was why she and Johnny had failed. She had been in such a strange state then, when she condemned herself to live and go on trying to kill Aleutians; and condemned Johnny to die.
There’s no way back to civilization from here.
She had always been so set on protecting his innocence. When your mind’s unraveling, you cling to the few ideas that remain with crazy devotion. She often thought of his last words. Did he understand what he was saying? She liked to think so. He had died on his own feet, for his own reasons, but she would never look into his sweet eyes and see a racist killer.

She would have laughed if she’d the strength. How perversely it had all turned out. But to love one’s enemy, to heal the divided self, is not simple. Compound that struggle with the cosmic shock of first contact, and what can two poor humans do but cry:
this is the world of our love.
Rotten to the core maybe but I wouldn’t change a word of it.

I’m still glad we tried. I’m desperately grateful that we failed, but fuck it, I’m glad we tried. You and me, together.

It was a pity to give up the work, still a lot that could be done in damage limitation. At least she was freed from the company of those dreadful women.

Johnny?

She laid her hand down, with the impression that she had been writing something on the air. An epitaph for the old world?
Exoriare aliqis nostris ex ossibus ultor?
No. She closed her eyes. In a moment she would wake.
Fail again. Fail better.

“I like that,” she murmured. “I’ll have that.”

It was getting on for five in the afternoon. At this hour, in the warm, broken light of a monsoon sky, the fort was at its best. Palms nodded their graceful heads in the shadow of its walls. In the crumbling holes made for cannon, ferns and flowers were shining after the rain. The West African Office of Aleutian Affairs was next door. Its gardens joined the public grounds of the monument; its white painted front verandah looked across a sweep of smooth green lawn to the old stronghold.

Ellen sat out on the verandah to watch the road. She was expecting a visitor, and she had nothing else to do. The Asabaland office was the quietest of their locations, little more than a rest house for Aleutian travelers. There were a few of those now: the curious, the thoughtful, the adventurous. She helped them with quarantine regulations, and sorted out their collisions with local custom. Not many people understood why Ellen had taken this post. She had access to the Multiphon, and was often consulted by the main office in Krung Thep, but effectively she had abandoned what could have been a prestigious third career. Ellen just told anyone who hinted at puzzlement that she was feeling old. It was time to slow down.

The last local bus of the day came struggling along the granderoute Macmillan. It was an open-backed truck, one of those near-immortal African machines, a makeshift conversion of an old gashog somewhere in the mess. It stopped. A passenger got down. The driver came round to collect his fare, and met a ferocious harangue: he backed away as if from a physical force. The battered
capot
went up, the passenger pointed to something in the dreadful depths of the poor brute’s engine, and made cutting, sarcastic suggestions.

All this could be read from gesture.

Ellen saw no reason to intervene. Soon enough the bus was on its way again, the driver uncowed. It would take more than the indignation of a few tourists to inculcate kindness to machinery in the stony hearts of humanity’s poor.

Clavel was wearing a dark business suit, the lightweight and well cut jacket open over a DONT BLOCK THE EXIT tee-shirt. This was a shock. Ellen had not seen the person they used to call “the poet princess” for over a year. She’d heard that Clavel had “joined a Corporation,” and wondered what that meant. She hadn’t expected to see the alien actually wearing the uniform.

“You’ve seen the news?” said Clavel. “There wasn’t much in the way of services. I was surprised.”

The story of Clavel and Johnny and Braemar was legend back in the mothership. That tragic collision of loyalties, the “self” who finds the “other self” in the wrong camp: it was the very stuff of Aleutian romance. It would be difficult to convince Clavel that the death of Braemar Wilson didn’t mean much to the earthling global audience. He
tried,
but he was still obliged to assume that the human race was a single entity. As far as Clavel was concerned all of this multiple creature (the brood-selves of Earth) had shared almost as closely as he in that drama—the chamber-tragedy acted out behind the tumultuous headlines of the past three years.

There was no use in fighting these assumptions. The Aleutians wouldn’t change. Humans just had to find ways around the obstacles. Wasn’t it always so, in the dialogue between a native culture and their far-come conquerors?

“Come inside,” she said, aware that she had been speaking in her pidgin Aleutian; and had probably given offence. She was not in control of that language, never would be. Sometimes she tried hard. Sometimes she didn’t care.

They went inside. Ellen made tea. They sat in the cool of Ellen’s living space, the Aleutian curled on the floor; the human woman preserving her dignity on a rattan sofa. They spoke of Robin, who was currently living in the mothership, teaching English to adventurous young Signifiers who planned to visit Earth. They spoke of Clavel’s decision, briefly. The alien’s determination to enter the service of humanity’s God (as Clavel saw it) was intimately connected with his tragic love for Johnny. Ellen understood that, but she didn’t want to discuss it.

Clavel was reading Marx as part of her studies: and was enthralled. She produced an antique paperback from her daypack: Aleutians dislike to carry “deadworld” gadgets around with them. They hadn’t yet come to terms with e-books, personal organizers, eye-wraps, headboxes: things that both had no live-chemistry, and also carried messages from the dead world. There would be artisans who would convert these Earthling toys, but for the moment Aleutia rejected them.

“It’s hard going. But oh, listen to this, Ellen.
‘Along with the tool, the skill of the worker in handling it passes over to the machine. The capabilities of the tool are emancipated from the restraints inseparable from human labor power. This destroys the technical foundation on which division of labor.’
You see what that means. So do I! I learned it long ago. Self is both tool and hand. Division of one from the other is one of the basic lies that allow us to function.”

Clavel was not aware that he had broken off his mangled quotation in midsentence. Whatever the Aleutian did to serve as “reading,” it didn’t work like the human version. Perhaps his eyes sent out little motes to reconstruct, chemically, the ur-hieroglyphs of mental construct behind the letters. Something mind-boggling like that. Their physiology, especially the neurological part, was still a bizarre mystery.

“Ah,” said Ellen. “That reminds me.” She went into an inner room, and returned with a curious padded tabard, which she pulled over her head. It was dun colored and quilted, shaped into two exaggerated breasts before; two jutting buttocks behind.

“I had forgotten to put on my uniform.”

The Aleutians could not get the “war between the two broods” out of their heads. It was the first thing they’d learned to see, and they couldn’t unlearn it. They were certain that the Eve-riots, and the festering problem they represented, formed the most important factor in earthling politics. No amount of official denial could convince them otherwise. Clavel was mortified. He sat back sharply, hips twisting into an animal crouch. If he’d been human he’d have been blushing scarlet.

“Now then.” Ellen saw no harm in letting Clavel know how she felt. She advanced, the alien recoiled before a blast of fury. “What’s all this about ‘cupmen’ and ‘clawmen?’”

“It won’t last.” Clavel bared his teeth, and shrugged placatingly. “There are some total idiots. They reckon that if we don’t know the difference between one brood and the other, we’ll always be getting into the firing line by accident. Don’t worry, Ellen.
They are just trying it on.”

The idiom made Ellen smile in spite of herself.

“I don’t worry. I stopped worrying about you people one hot winter’s day in Thailand, about two years ago. What will be, will be. Just don’t ask me to like it.”

“I’m sorry.”

There was a silence. For both the immortal alien and the old warhorse of human politics, that silly tabard opened vistas of all the harm that might be done, in generations ahead.

Clavel sighed. “You people still see our Signifiers, users of formal language, as rulers.” His nasal puckered, thoughtful. “We don’t have rulers. We are, I think, an
anarchy—
from the greek an, arche. No rules. Each of us works out things for himself.”

“Hmph.”

Clavel shrugged, accepting Ellen’s skepticism. “Oh, well, of course: there are people who are naturally inclined to look big, and have followers. But that’s different. To use language doesn’t mean you have power, it means something else. I think you should call us the
consciousness
of Aleutia. Ask yourself, as a human being. Does that mean we are in control?”

He rearranged his limbs, recovering composure.

“But I came to cheer you up. You must believe me, Ellen. Johnny is not dead. Johnny is not gone forever, nor is our friend Braemar. Your friends are not lost, you should not grieve. What they did was beautiful and tragic, and right. They will be welcomed as heroes when they come again.”

No one at Uji would help when Ellen was begging them to intervene. Later, Aleutians had learned of the horrific belief in permanent death, and humans had learned that Aleutians genuinely were, in a sense, immortal. The execution had been a grim misunderstanding. Aleutia had had no notion of what they were doing to Johnny. The official Aleutian reaction was typical. They simply refused to believe in permanent death. But Clavel had called Ellen up and told her everything: the first meeting here, the sweet courtship (as Clavel had imagined it). The rape, the raid on Braemar’s house; Clavel’s belated understanding.