White Queen (46 page)
Authors: Gwyneth Jones
Tags: #Human-Alien Encounters—Fiction, #Journalists—Fiction, #Feminist Science Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Tiptree Award winner, #Reincarnation--Fiction
Ellen had taken the job of defense lawyer partly from a sense of guilty complicity. By the end of that ordeal she’d known more than she ever wanted to know about the two terrorists, and her grudging sympathy had become real. She had never liked Braemar Wilson. She had considered the pair her enemies. But the fate of those lovers would haunt her for the rest of her life. Scenes from the execution record still recurred to her on the edge of sleep. Braemar and Johnny, separated by the alien crowd: their complicated human love and desperate gallantry. The witness of that scene was so powerful that it had never been allowed near the global audience.
Clavel gazed earnestly.
“You let her escape.”
Ellen frowned. “Anyone with any sense knows that.”
“Of course. I meant: you did the sensible thing. But you could not stop them. Don’t blame yourself, they were doomed. Ellen, that business of the cupmen and the clawmen is so wrong. I started it, but I know better now. I don’t pretend to be able to prove it with science, but you are all
one
brood. Johnny and Braemar were true lovers, I’m convinced of that: and self can only love self. In reality, you know, that’s why they were driven to suicide. They believed they were incestuous lovers, committing exogamy.”
“Exogamy,” Ellen noticed, had been a sin that had not worried Clavel, when he fell for Johnny. The alien was a proper little Jesuit with his own religion, twisting it any way he liked. But
that
was typical too. Whenever you fell into thinking of them as magic savages, trapped in feudalism by their biology, they’d show you another face—no more bound by their obligate chemistry than any bourgeois-individualist earthling.
Clavel lowered his eyes, nasal flaring.
“I have joined the Corporation to learn. I am an adventurer, trade is my obligation. But I had to come to earth to find a world where trade is a vision of the whole: of the WorldSelf. Where it could mean something
great.
You have healed something like a division, deep in me. And I have done you an injury. I was in love, I was confused by new ideas: that’s my fate, to know what’s right and still go on doing wrong. But for Johnny’s sake I will do all I can, in this life and for all the lives to come, to make amends.”
Ellen took off the tabard and went to put it away. When she came back Clavel was sitting out on the verandah, ready to leave: in an unguarded pose of great loneliness. She sighed. In certain lights, she could still see a young girl with a face like a flame, the ardent purity of a teenage idealist.
If the talkers are consciousness, she thought, then
you
are conscience itself. She wondered how many like Clavel there were. Very few, she guessed, sardonically, even at “full expression.” It was irony on irony that Clavel’s status in Aleutia was the same as the status of the “voice of conscience” in humanity. A necessary evil, shall we say. A respected nuisance. Humans and Aleutians were so alike. They were two almost identical surfaces, at first glance seamlessly meeting: at a closer look hopelessly just out of sync, in every tiny cog of detail.
“I will go now. May I call on you sometimes?”
“I’d like that. Please do.”
Clavel walked away across the lawns. The cut of the dark jacket straightened the line of his shoulders and covered the lumpy oversized hip joints. His seaweed hair had been coaxed into a skinny pigtail that flopped on his shoulder. He’d forgotten to put
Das Capital
back in his pack, the book bulged in his jacket pocket. Ellen frowned, and wanted to rub her eyes.
She had asked Rajath about the love story once, when she understood something of the way Aleutians recognized identity. Those dun overalls signaled that physical feature wasn’t important. The nameless, thousand-named presence resided elsewhere.
“And Clavel’s fantastic mistake?
Were
they alike? You’ve seen records of Johnny Guglioli.”
“Actually, yes.” Rajath screwed his shoulders up to his ears, eyes sparkling. His bumptious personality overspilled the screen. He would always be her favorite.
Talk loudly and carry a little stick!
Rajath liked to say that. He thought he’d stolen this fine aphorism, and admired it greatly. Ellen didn’t correct him. She preferred the alien’s version. “Like as two pees in a pot. Damndest thing I ever saw.”
Clavel stopped, and stared at the Devereux fort. The swift tropic dusk was falling. He walked on, down to the road, and joined a few Africans who were waiting by the unmarked bus and taxi stop, for a ride back into Fo. From indoors came the quiet chatter of the satellite news. The Eve-riots, big problems surfacing between the ex-Japanese and their various hosts. The Americas war was that was still trying to happen, the Indonesian Empire in bloody eruption. The West Africa Federation was pulling itself into shape, looking set to become a major power.
For so much of the human earth the Government of the World in Thailand was still a sideshow, and the aliens an exciting curiosity.
Sometimes she felt like a stranded time traveler, trapped in a world that didn’t exist yet. A kind of relic of a future that she would not live to see.
In Earth’s terms, it could be that both Aleutian “immortality” and their “telepathy” were cultural artifacts: shaped by their exotic physiology. Obligate illusions. But that was logic-chopping. Aleutians remained, in their own reckoning, telepathic immortals. Where could they go from there? They couldn’t be better protected from alien influence. But humanity would change. Ellen foresaw the working out of Clavel’s amends: the third sex that would develop, schooled to alien ways. The devaluation of the masses who failed that standard. Earth would give up the use of coralin for fear of alien contamination, would give up all biochemical technology because the aliens could achieve the same effects so easily. In a couple of hundred years, if faint traces of another version of this meeting were discovered in old texts, neither the “superior” nor the “inferior” race would believe their eyes.
So it would go on. The unconsummated wedding, the irremediable almost-matching of two worlds. There was a powerful minority in the mothership that said they should continue the journey: leave this soft and fascinating landfall, prefer the dark ocean and the stars. But the aliens would stay. And it would be Clavel, more than anyone, who would keep them here. Clavel, with his intuitive grasp of the alien culture; his poetry, and his earnest desire to do good.
No, she would not give way to self-pity. The human race had made a nest of horrors for itself, and the Aleutians were still saviors, no matter what. Strange things happen: and the strangest is that things happen (that was Buonarotti). The two races might be good for each other, in the long run. Some kind of fruitful union might be achieved.
Good luck to Clavel. No language matches another, no language models the world. But almost, almost…and between the dropped and the caught stitches of that immaterial, impossible weaving, somehow: the meaning comes.
But I’m too old a dog to learn new tricks.
Clavel was still at the bus stop. The Africans were puzzled, bemused by the rich tourist’s eccentric slumming.
I must tell her about that tee-shirt, she thought. It’s not very tactful
Clavel rocked in the back of the truck, dreaming of Uji. The manor house, almost deserted now, the gardens overgrown. Nearly everyone had gone home or moved on. The sound of the rain, the sound of the river: pouring away, pouring away. He slept in the main hall: woke in the night with tears filling his eyes, and wondered how long grief could continue to be so poignant. The river rushed on, eddies spilling around the sunken timbers, shining faintly out until they vanished into the stream. A door would open one day into another world: how far away or how near to this one he could not know. He would see Johnny again, and go to him and cry
Daddy, baby, don’t you know me:
This time it would come true. It would not come true. Johnny belonged to someone else, and Clavel had no right to dream of him. But he would cling to the lovely fiction, knowing it false.
He was learning. He knew at last why people flee from doubt, he understood what it means to call something a “necessary lie.” So much that was painful! This is
good,
thought Clavel. I will learn this, I will make it mine. And the lesson of humanity, the unappeasable sorrow, passed through him into Aleutia: sinking into the depths and spilling outward.
The river. Dark water in starlight. Sorrow is real.
Over Neubrandenburg, the summer night sky was a grey canvas roof of unbroken cloud. Peenemünde climbed heavily to her secret laboratory, a huge empty water tank on the roof of her building. She had moved everything up here. There was business to be done with the aliens these days. Professor Buonarotti was back at work, her little cell no longer invisible. She sat, puffed out, at the foot of the last iron ladder, and looked up at the murk that hid the beautiful land, the dark and bright plains of time. No one would ever know what she had done. The facts of earthling limitation didn’t yet penetrate far enough into the Aleutian mind for them to realize there was a mystery. They thought an illicit spaceshuttle could be crumpled up and stuffed in the nearest waste chute. The governments of earth, never mind the Government of the World, didn’t wonder how it had been done because everybody suspected everybody else, and nobody wanted to know the secret truth.
“And so,” muttered Peene, “the legend will lie fallow, one day to give rise to fairystories, tales of mystical earthling-magic. Pah.”
She clambered again. Human beings cannot use faster than light travel. Every time she lay down, Peenemünde knew the risk. So easily, one can become confused, mislay one’s return ticket, even if one has a life as placid as porridge, as neat as silicon circuitry. She descended into the chill, echoing interior of the tank, and began to ready herself. In her own bed, every time she looked up the eyes of her friends reproached her. Stupid Peenemünde! There must have been another way. If she had been the kind of person who can speak out, a person with some moral fiber. The beautiful lady with the iron eyes and that romantic boy would have been convinced by gentle and invincible argument to give up their plan.
She’d known they were going to be in no state to harm anyone. She just had not foreseen the consequences. She was stupid about “situations,” always.
We carry nothing into the world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out of it.
Peenemünde had noticed that this mournful warning quite possibly did not apply to the aliens. Those space-planes of theirs, as it were budded from their own living selves. What of them? Weren’t they conscious, infected with their owners’ consciousness? It could be that Buonarotti could give them what they’d pretended was theirs already: the freedom of the stars.
The couch wrapped itself around her. Temptation was sometimes painful, but she could do this much for Braemar and Johnny. She could keep silent. Someone else would stumble over the Buonarotti discovery soon: doesn’t that always happen in science? Let someone else tell.
“Time’s cheap. Don’t they say that? Let them wait.”
She was gone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you Storm Constantine for the use of her post-gendered pronouns. Sam Daniels for a discussion of the petrovirus, Dr A J Power for the blue sun. Richard Jones for a patriotic sentiment. Ruth Sinclair-Jones for vetting KT 2583. Peter Gwilliam for support, advice, criticism and not least for the paradise slices. Aleutians Comms Tech reviewed by D&P, thank you.
Thank you also (a short bibliography): Chuck Jones for
What’s Opera, Doc?;
Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and others for their West African novels; Louise Gerard for
The Golden Centipede,
the book that distantly started it all; and the chickenpox virus. Thank you Susako Endo, Murasaki Shikibu, and Sayko Komatsu for the brilliant
Japan Sinks.
Ian Stewart for
Does God Play Dice.
Gaston Bachelard for
The Poetics Of Space.
Powys Mather, the translator and Chauras the orginal composer of the poem known in English as
Black Marigolds
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Gwyneth Jones, writer and critic of science fiction and fantasy, is the author of many novels for teenagers, mostly using the name Ann Halam, and several genre novels for adults, often addressing feminist, popular culture and gender issues. Her critical essays and reviews are collected in Deconstructing the Starships,, 1999, and Imagination/Space, 2009 . Recent honors include the P. K. Dick award for Life, published by Aqueduct Press, and the Pilgrim award for science fiction criticism. She’s done some extreme tourism in her time, and enjoys mountain walking, playing with her websites, and watching old movies. Her latest novel is Spirit, or The Princess of Bois Dormant (Gollancz UK). She lives in Brighton UK.
