I opened my eyes. Braemar was kneeling beside me, but she’d turned into a glistening creature with gills and goggle eyes. I sat up and pushed aside my net. We all slept on deck; it was only luck that Johnny or the Major hadn’t woken too. The glistening stuff was wetware: the bulbous head, a mask, and some kind of soft bag-like air supply.
“Brae? What are you doing?”
The bag pumped. She pulled off her mask.
“The Creature From The Black Lagoon. I’m sorry, Anna. Don’t be scared. I turn out to be some kind of goodie in the last reel.”
She looked, as they say, as if she’d seen a ghost. “Do you believe in the law, Anna?”
She sounded drunk. Maybe that was the explanation. She’d stolen some fancy diving gear from Derek’s boxes, swum ashore, and located a disco somewhere.
“I suppose I do. Not anything more than you could put in two sentences; but the law, yes, I do.”
“Thou shalt not kill, and so forth? So do I.” She shuddered. “But there’s the agrapta nomima. There’s what Antigone says to Creon in the play: Sophocles. She could disobey the king’s sacred edicts because the unwritten law, agrapta nomima, was greater.”
“Braemar! You haven’t been chucking Major Derek’s stuff into the lake?”
She shook her head. She looked awfully strange. Was she a pod? I almost demanded what have you done with the real Braemar? But I’d have felt such a fool.
“I was horrified when I saw you at the airport. You knew me Anna: I knew you’d wonder, and you’d suspect. But I think I can trust you. In the end, I think you’ll understand.”
I lay there trying to read these omens until another dream engulfed me. Black water parted under the swampy trees. Figures rose to their feet. Standing waist-high they seemed human as shadows, or spirits: smooth, ungendered bodies. They looked out at the empty lake and mugged relief and excitement. One of them lifted cupped hands with reverence and solemn delight. As the drops fell a voice whispered in my mind. Water of life — They all made the same gesture, bowed their faces and drank as if taking a sacrament. Shipwrecked but undismayed they stood triumphant in Eldorado.
We have come home.
Next morning Johnny had vanished. Apparently he’d swum for it, because both boats were where they should be. I remembered my dream, but I said nothing. Derek was livid. He sent out a search party. He stamped around glowering like an outraged father. I will be master in my own house! It says something for the effectiveness of the military regime, that while the row was going on Brae and I didn’t speak. We didn’t risk exchanging so much as a glance.
About an hour before noon something came roaring out of the trees on the lake shore. It was a motorbike. Johnny jumped off the back and hailed us cheerfully.
“Ahoy, African Queen! Anyone want a cold beer?”
He’d been to town. Walked out to the trail and hitched a ride to the local cosmopolis. He had brought back a sack of bottled beer and a lump of ice wrapped up in sodden straw. He was inordinately pleased with himself. Derek recalled the search party and, controlling himself violently, announced that he could no longer be responsible for us. He had radioed for assistance. We’d be leaving as soon as our transport arrived.
The heat settled. Major Derek sulked in the deckhouse. Johnny wavered along the African Queen’s rail clutching a beer bottle, in shorts and a singlet — right foot in a wetware ankle boot, left foot bare. This improved his balance, he claimed.
“A trick I learned on the rat-ridden wharves of New Byzantium.”
My dreams had dissipated. It was only Johnny and Brae, up to their eyes in some stupid scheme of revenge. And I was sick as a dog. I didn’t want to vomit, only to die. I crawled under my net and let the voices fade.
Johnny shook me gently awake. I felt as if I’d been asleep for days, but was aware that only an hour or two had passed.
I sat up. “Where — ?”
The African Queen was eerily silent. Johnny’s backpack and camera bag were on the deck beside him, all strapped up. My kit was there too.
“What’s happened?”
“Major Whynton and Lieutenant Krua have been called away.”
“Where’s Brae?”
“She’ll join us.”
Sackey rowed us to the shore. We took a different path from the one that went up to the plateau and soon reached a red dirt road. A couple of other people joined us, and then a jeep with an open back full of passengers came rattling along. Johnny paid our fares. A teenage girl’s personal stereo buzzed by my ear. A very weary young boy swayed opposite me, hugging an assault rifle as if it were a teddy bear. After an hour or so little bungalows in swept, bare yards began to line the road.
“What about the war?” I asked, bemused.
Johnny shrugged. “Oh, wars. People learn to live with them.”
We sat outside a cafe in the market place of the small town. Johnny explained everything. Simon Krua and Major Derek had planted evidence of illicit weapons testing. Johnny and Brae had been secretly undoing the evil work: this morning was the climax. When Johnny sneaked into town he had suborned the staff of the local radio station — not hard, the man hadn’t been paid for months — and consequently Major Derek had learned of an exciting development in the local war. He and the soldiers had rushed off to join in. By the time they discovered there was nothing going on, their plans here would be in ruins, and the three of us would have got clean away.
The story was a little garbled; I felt like a child left out of secrets. But mostly it went right past me. I just wanted to be at home, safe with Syb and David and the kids.
“Where’s Brae?” I asked again.
“She’s tying up a few loose ends.”
The market place was surrounded by crude, breezeblock buildings with red iron roofs. A few women, one or two men, listlessly guarded the pitiful goods: children’s nylon underwear, little blackened corpses of smoked monkey, piles of ancient French magazines. Johnny had ordered beer for us. It came warm, with tumblers full of dirty ice.
“Pity there’s no story.”
“No chance,” he agreed. “In a war-mongering global situation like the one we have now, even exposing a fake is dangerous.” He frowned, staring toward the road we’d come in by. “I hope she’s okay back there… Well, she ought to be. She’s an African.”
I started. “You knew that?”
“Yeah, well. I read her up when I got the passenger list, before we left London.”
He sounded a little ashamed of himself, as well he might. I got the feeling that this confession signaled some kind of breakdown between them, and I was glad. I wanted to welcome him back into our haven of shared assumptions. But I felt too ill, and his mood seemed bleaker by the moment.
“Johnny, don’t fall in love. It’ll be bad for both of you. She hates men, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “I know she does.”
Above the cinema a hand-painted poster featured a giant, snarling white woman in a bikini. Our getaway car, a big old Mercedes, hunkered by the storm drain below. Children in grimy old western clothes were playing (what riches!) with a bright plastic toy. I felt so low. I couldn’t think of anything to say to Johnny; I was glad when he got up and went to talk to our driver.
So there were no aliens. I drank beer and let myself admit the disappointment. How sad. To have hiked out into the desert to the burning bush. Knees knocking, ready to meet God: and found there was nothing but the sun on an old plastic bag. Of course that was why Johnny seemed so odd, and Braemar too. The embarrassment of having almost been believers… It was going to take us three days to drive to Maiduguri and the airport, right through this war that “people had got used to” (My blood ran cold, to think of my Johnny expressing such a hard and commonplace opinion.) I would pull myself together. I would record the trip. That and the river journey should make a saleable item.
The toy that the children were playing with caught my eye. I tried to look away: but found that I could not. I called to the childr
en in French: “May I see that thing?”
A little boy came over and put it on the table. It was like a kind of…millipede? It was the same blue as the metal I had found. I couldn’t for the life of me tell whether it was alive or a machine. I reached out to touch. He giggled and grabbed it. In a moment the group of children had scampered out of sight.
Excitement burst out like cold sweat. With a sudden dire premonition, I grabbed my camera bag. I use the simplest stock and hardware. I need to be able to edit my own work, cheaply. I don’t have the might of a big company behind me. The cassettes looked all right. When I took the seals off, they fell apart. It was gone, every scrap of my forward echoes. Johnny came back. He stood looking at the wreckage with his blacked out eyes. I stared up at him, having the most ridiculous nightmares.
“Johnny, what’s going on? Where’s Braemar?”
“She’s blowing up a kind of plane,” he said, with the air of someone abandoning all pretence. He took off his glasses. He was Johnny Guglioli still. It was everything else that had changed.
I said, “They’re here, aren’t they. The ufo was real.”
Johnny nodded warily.
“What is Braemar doing?”
“What I told you. She’s blowing up an abandoned aircraft. Okay, a spacecraft. I’m sorry Anna. But you must see, we couldn’t tell you. They have to stay in hiding for now. Or the Major Dereks of this world will fuck up everything.”
His smug grin affronted me. I felt for a moment that I was still reacting like a sulky child. But I had my forward echoes: their occult message, no good at the end of this quest. I had the certainty that there was nothing benign behind Braemar’s charade. The sickness in my belly. I could not tell him why, but he was wrong: he was wrong.
“I’m going back to the lake!”
I didn’t wait to see what he would do. I ran for the car, and he came pelting after.
Braemar was on the deck of the African Queen. She studied her face in a small mirror. The tomboy nudity that Johnny so approved, she had captured it exactly today. Good. She stowed the mirror in her flightbag. Her hands were sweating. Braemar had none of Johnny’s confidence. Such power as she possessed was stolen goods, liable to betray her at any moment like the giant’s purse in the story. She thought of the horror of what she was doing and of the innocent virgin whom she had seduced and ruined. She straightened her shoulders and half-unconsciously began to sing as, she waited for the seconds to tick away: lost voice of a small girl in a scratchy uniform. She had loved that brown serge from far away very dearly, though it was so hot and ugly.
“Land of our birth our faith our pride, for who’s dear sake our fathers died —”
The naive sentiment of words and music comforted her.
We came over the rail. Braemar turned around. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sackey, who had rowed us out, mugging apology. Her allies were everywhere, confederation of the dispossessed: the colonized. How strange that I had seen her as acting the role of her self. What I’d seen was Braemar undercover, recreating her old effects for a new purpose. Had she really needed an accomplice? She could probably have managed alone: but Braemar couldn’t change that far. And she couldn’t have used the Major either. His response, the response of his kind, would no doubt be the same in the end, but it would be too late. Braemar wasn’t going to wait; she knew all she needed to know —
“Where are they?” I cried frantically, “Are they alive?”
“I think so,” said Braemar, without so much as blinking. “I was still getting readings of warm things moving around inside the life pod, when I placed the charges.”
Johnny’s stunned silence made her furious.
“Don’t you judge me, Johnny!” she shouted. “Oh, judge me if you like, I don’t care. I’m right. This is self defense. I know they won’t mean any harm, not at first. But you, you and I and our whole world and history, we will still be worse than dead: meaningless.”
“They could be ordinary,” said Johnny, in the voice of a child at Christmas, dreaming of walking snowmen, talking animals. “They could be our friends.”
“If they’re so ordinary, how come they’re here? You need to lie to yourself, Johnny. I don’t. That’s the only difference. I can call them human as I am, call them innocent, and still do what has to be done.”
I began to move in, carefully. The talking was a good sign.
“Where’s the detonator, Brae? Please, come on, tell!”
I risked a glance at Johnny, signaling him (I hoped) to grab her while I lunged for that bag. His face was blood drained.
“Braemar, you can’t be serious,” he whispered. “You know I never meant this.”
She began to sob. I lunged; Johnny grabbed me.
Across the water the shore rose into a low red cliff, crowned with trees. As I fell headlong, I saw the bottle glass surface under this cliff burst open. Water leapt into the air. Trees shook, ran like liquid: tons of earth and greenery began to topple. Everything was shaking. I lay on the deck with my hands clasped over my head.
The soldiers were waiting for us. Strange meeting: it’s difficult to recall the details of that aftermath. We were escorted to the trail, put into a jeep. Our personal baggage, which we’d left in the Mercedes, came back to us minus the recording equipment. Eventually Major Derek appeared, got in beside the driver, and we drove away.
Later, we had a debriefing. The military had found nothing: no aliens, no crashed nuclear fighter. The “landslide” had been a natural occurrence. There was no story. Braemar, at this time, reprised for me the story she’d told Johnny. She was a secret agent for peace. The rest, she said, had been a “smokescreen.” Her eyes, while she explained this, were supremely cynical, the eyes of a coquette who knows no one will ever untangle all her lies. She walked out of the hotel in Maiduguri and disappeared into the African crowd. I suppose I’ll meet her again in a year or two — pale skinned, immaculately feminine. She will expect me to have forgotten everything; I will know this without asking.
After she’d gone, Johnny told me the other version. The secret network of the faithful, who knew the aliens had arrived and protected them from the authorities. He had played along, “suspending disbelief,” he said. It had seemed like another of her games. And now neither of us knew what to believe. Was there a secret organization, devoted to stamping out alien intelligence wherever it appeared? No, it was just too far-fetched, we agreed. Already, like the military, we had resigned ourselves. Already we began to suppress and deny our own memories (so that now, as I write, I do not know what really happened). My forward echoes are gone. They would have shown nothing anyway, nothing but a certain atmosphere…
But as we traveled home together I could barely bring myself to speak to Johnny Guglioli. I still remembered that he had grabbed for me, not Braemar. That moment of choice had been real, even if the aliens never were. She’d recruited him all right. Without even trying, she’d shown him exactly what happens to the colonized. Her cheating ways, her sly subservience: expert rituals of self-contempt. When he was faced with it, Johnny had been ready to kill the innocent strangers, because he didn’t want to be a nigger. He didn’t want to be a woman for the rest of his life.
I sat staring out of the plane window. At least I didn’t feel pregnant anymore. But Johnny and Braemar haunted me: that doomed encounter between self and otherness. I saw my face in the glass, gazing solemnly in from the empty air. And I wished that I could darken every window in the world; so that every clear, hard barrier would become a mirror, and no one who looked through would be able to see anything out there; but their own face, looking back.
May 1990
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 Imagina
tion/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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
In the Forest of the Queen
Total Internal Reflection
Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland
The Universe of Things
Blue Clay Blues
Grazing the Long Acre
Collision
One of Sandy’s Dreams
Gravegoods
La Cenerentola
Grandmother’s Footsteps
The Early Crossing
The Eastern Succession
The Thief, the Princess, and the Cartesian Circle
Identifying the Object
Author Biography
The Universe of Things Page 27
