White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  “On doit fai ’mene le para—”

  “She thinks you ought to see a doctor.” Braemar became professional. “But I don’t think we want that. Too suggestive of the colonic irrigation in the spaceship, you know the one. Not right for us at all. The chopper’ll be here soon. I’ll ask her to fetch your clothes.”

  “Come and have dinner with me,” she said, when they landed at L’Iceberg. “Have dinner with me, and we’ll talk.”

  He returned to The Welcome Sight and spent the hours dozing, trying to work out what he really believed. He and Wilson had scripted the stance he’d take in the intro carefully. It was meant to put him on a level with the audience, no sneering disbelieving voyeur; and yet retain some intellectual credibility. It dealt with the likelihood that Johnny Guglioli would spin any kind of yarn to get attention for his plight, and made that part of the story. But what was the truth? Something had brought him to Africa. Something had held his peripheral attention, for years. He could not be counted among the believers. But a true disbeliever would reckon his files, his open-minded interest, so much crackbrained waste of time and memory. One had to face that.

  Now he was inside one of those hapless real-life true stories. It had happened to him, and it still wasn’t evidence. It seemed to him that his only evidence was that gut-wrenching, bone-deep terror, far more vivid than the inconclusive and easily faked events. But Braemar apparently believed in something; something that made her willing to carry a deadly weapon. However she’d got hold of it, smuggled it, no journalist would take up a firearm lightly. It was ethically impossible. She’d be as career-dead as Johnny if anyone caught her with that.

  Was she faking? Was she being used by some unknown agency? He felt very angry when he thought about the gun.

  They ate in the Planter’s Bar, as if it had already become their sentimental rendezvous. She wore the glowworm dress, he’d hoped she would. Since it was her bill he chose fresh asparagus, carrot soufflé, coeur de paume gratin aux truffes; a silly confection of spun chocolate, cocoa liqueur, marrons glacés, and ice cream; and a fancy bottle of wine. She accepted his raid on the menu with quiet amusement, then put him down (childishly, he thought) with an African and frugal order of foofoo and the local “green stew.” His meal was more food than he’d seen in front of him for years. Unfortunately his stomach rebelled: he could not eat. He tried the wine. It smelled slightly of dog shit, and tasted like caramelized printing ink. Bob Marley was on their screen, Johnny’s choice. He stared at the tragic and beautiful prince of sound, Braemar’s gorgeous body and the alien’s swiveling joints entangled horribly in his mind.

  “I wish he hadn’t died of cancer. That’s so defeatist.”

  “You Americans. Can’t a person just fall ill, without being a moral degenerate?”

  “Some diseases are willed. That’s fact, Braemar.”

  “And some are thrust upon us, eh Johnny?”

  She’d finished the wine, but showed no sign of it at all. She shook out a couple of small lozenges from the base of her cigarette case, and put them under her tongue. Johnny was intrigued. Maybe she favored taking her travel-protection by mouth. AIDS, polio, TB, malaria: you had to keep up your defenses out here. Strange drugs also had their place in the classic scenarios. He faced a possible ex-human, already in the thrall of the baboon-telepath invaders….

  The waiter left them with coffee and Armagnac. Johnny refused both. She touched off the screen, breaking contact with the hotel’s systems.

  “Alone at last. Shall we talk about aliens?” She smiled at him. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Yes. So do all these other people.” There were two tables of other diners, far away in the recesses of the red cavern. “Why don’t you take up a clean modern habit, liking chewing betel?”

  Braemar sighed.

  He reached across the table and picked up her purse.” Fair exchange is no robbery, okay?” He shook out the contents onto the cleared tablecloth.” Take your phone. Don’t tell me you never use it to record private conversations, just let me see you disable it. We’re not going to say anything important. Call it a small courtesy.”

  Smiling, she pulled out the powerpack.

  He flipped open her cigarette case, removed two of the lozenges, wrapped them in a scrap of paper napkin and put them away. She used a European Citizen passport not a British/European one. He read the first page, being careful not to touch the biometric stripe. “I see we belong to the same one-eighth of the world’s population. That’s handy. A good colleague on this circuit has to be a blood brother. Or sister. Isn’t that right?” He leered bitterly. Johnny’s blood was good for nothing.

  “Do you have an ex-husband, Brae? Can I have his number?”

  “If I had it, yes. I don’t.”

  “Why ‘Braemar,’ anyway. It sounds disgustingly Brit-suburban: the name of a semi-detached villa on Acacia Avenue.”

  “That’s exactly right. It’s the name of the place where I was living when I made my first tv sale. I thought it was appropriate for an obsolete housewife.”

  “You don’t look much like an obsolete housewife to me.”

  “I was a lot older then. But the name still fits. I am the place. You are the thing. I am the place that you come into.”

  She dropped her eyes, glowing like a blowtorch.

  “Generically speaking, of course.”

  Oh, it was a fun game, flirtation. He wondered how he could stand all the fun he was going to get if this partnership materialized. He wondered if she was just a clever tease, purely faking the heat that seemed to come back at him. He swept stuff back into her purse.

  “I’m not into gender reification. I thought we were supposed to be talking about aliens. As we both know, you can lie through your teeth and there is nothing I can do to defend myself. You can turn me inside out and I can’t touch you. But tell me some sort of story. For the sake of appearances.”

  “Okay. This is what I have. There were three landings. There’s an area in North America and another in Thailand. At both places there may be aliens, interacting with the local people. But there’s a—a wall. We can’t get near. The humans who know about the aliens won’t talk: I mean literally not a word, not to anyone. It seems the aliens don’t wish their presence to be known, and have ways…. I have friends in this search. We are almost if not entirely convinced that it’s real this time. The Asa UFO was part of the same cluster but it was reported confusingly: we got onto it late. I came to Fo. When I found you here of course I looked you up. Anyone who’s interested in aliens is interesting to me right now; I knew at once you must be on the same trail. I asked a few questions. I learned you had a contact of some kind. I made my offer. That’s all.”

  “You truly believe that those characters last night were, are, aliens from outer space?”

  “Could be. And one of them is interested in you. And you’re still talking. It’s my intention to keep you talking.”

  He recalled, horribly, the utterly disorienting sound of that voice in his mind. He believed nothing, except that there was a lot Braemar wasn’t telling…and yet his simpler instincts cried out that she must be mad if she wanted to share the experience he’d had last night.

  “I see. I kiss and tell. You sell my story to the world.”

  “Don’t be disingenuous. You have the contact. I have the access to systems. I’m not trying to rip you off. All I want is to be close to them. From the first. To be one of the few.” She grinned. “I’m a space-invaders groupie, and I think you can get me into the dressing room.”

  Johnny was meant to be the observer, that was his role. He did not like this reversal. But if he was to be bought then he wanted Braemar Wilson’s body, which he could not have. At this juncture, frankly, no other trade was remotely interesting. He’d rather have her, right now, than his old life back intact.

  A laughing, talking mob of Africans came streaming by.

  “Johnny! Braemar! My friends!”

  David Mungea, high as a kite, swo
oped down on them and carried them away.

  Johnny had been on the town with David often, though not since Braemar joined the gang. He had managed to enjoy himself in a distanced way. He appreciated the music, became passively stoned in smoke filled clubrooms; he got into tiring intellectual conversations with drunks. Tonight was different. He had to relax, he couldn’t help it. For once he let himself enjoy the painful pleasure of being near Braemar, without prissy reservations. He felt safe in the crowd: safe to tease her and get teased, to meet the lick of her eyes. They sat around rickety tables in a concrete floored shebeen. David put his arm around Brae and whispered loudly.

  “Braemar, do you find this boy attractive?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sound sad about it, don’t be sad. Everything is always coming right. All will be well.”

  “Tell us that when you’re sober,” said Johnny.

  “But I am never sober,” laughed the Minister. “That’s my great secret.”

  In a canvas-walled dancehall with the rain rattling down outside he watched while she danced, and let his imagination run riot. The floor was sheets of plastic, the musician at the desk sampled its crackle and slither, beat them and the rain into rhythm. Natural! everybody sang. This is Natural music. This is Natural music. Musiiique Naatuuurellle.

  About two a.m. she’d had enough. He walked with her back to L’Iceberg. There was still a muted row from The Planter’s Bar, but the front of the hotel was dark and quiet.

  “Johnny,” she said. “I realize that this coralin stuff is tricky. As I understand it, while the blue clay is fabulously more effective than any previous processing substrate, it’s also marginally vulnerable in new ways. But data processing has always been vulnerable—to thunderstorms, hackers, fluff and dust; bugs physical and informational. To people pouring cups of coffee over their keys. There’s caution and there’s insane paranoia. You must know it’s actually quite difficult to pass on a retrovirus. The processor in my phone is coralin, true. But even if you were not framed, you’re unlikely to bring the invisible walls of the world crashing by handling its powerpack.”

  Sex with a machine. The source of that nasty joke was that the QV was partly descended from the group that caused the last century’s most famous human plague. AIDS was unremarkable now, submerged in a slew of mystery-mutant-plague scares. But the joke had a point. Intimate contact, exchange of body fluids: Johnny had no right to risk any of that.

  He stared ahead, aching, hating the sly liquid glance he caught as she smiled and talked. She couldn’t mean it.

  “Maybe you no longer have a career as an eejay. But look at me, Johnny. I’m no engineer. I still get my stuff on the screen, more or less. No one expects my hands to be clean. The precautions are taken for me.”

  Again that soft, meaning glance. He hated her deeply.

  “What’s the point in this self-flagellation? Do you think that the Big Machines will look down and see how patiently you’ve suffered, and take pity?”

  This was pretty well what Johnny did think: that if he kept all the rules to the letter and beyond, somehow it would stand in his favor. It sounded ridiculous spelled out in cold blood, so he didn’t answer. He didn’t want to talk at all. He felt like a walking lump of tumescence: the horny adolescent boy, one of Mother Nature’s more hideous practical jokes.

  She used her roomcard to open the gates. A body lay curled peacefully by the watchman’s hut. She touched the leaves of the shrubs that peered over a low wall, so that lights sprang up; night-opening flowers. She sat by one of them.

  “This city is on the brink and doesn’t know it,” she said. “Fo, New York, Seoul, Bruxelles. You and I may be the only two people in Africa who can hear the seconds ticking away. It’s a strange state to be in. It makes everything very intense, here in the last days. What d’you want to do now, Johnny?”

  She looked up at him, so still that he knew she would not move if he touched her. He could do whatever he liked. He could peel back that petalled armor from her breasts, she would only stir to lift her throat so they rose more freely to his mouth. He could push up the glowworm skirts, unfasten his pants and take her right here. She wanted him to do that. He had never been more certain of anything in his entire life.

  This is how one becomes a rapist.

  Johnny drew a breath of bitter outrage.

  “What do I want to do now? As I believe you know very well, I want to fuck you until we’re both unconscious. Since I can’t do that, I think I’ll crawl back home. Maybe stopping in some doorway on the way to jerk off. I haven’t had a sexual partner for two solid years. If we are going to work together you’ll have to understand what this means. I have a hormonal problem. It’s something any young male of chaste habits has to live with. I cope, but don’t push your luck. I’m bigger than you. Excuse my frankness. After all, this is the twenty first century and we’re both grown ups.”

  He collapsed on the end of the wall, staring at his feet.

  “Oh, I forgot. I tried to seduce a guy at a party in Amsterdam, a few months after I dodged quarantine. But I did not manage to persuade him to go all the way. Or even very far.”

  “I didn’t know you were bisexual.”

  She had the nerve to find his plight funny.

  “Not in any of those files you’ve been tampering with, eh? I’m not. I was utterly gonzo.”

  His outburst had relieved the pressure momentarily. God bless words, he thought. Where would we be without them. He ought to leave now, find that doorway. But this thing had gone beyond mindless arousal. Brae’s body had acquired meaning beyond itself. He put his fists to his eyes: images of those country people in their pitifully decent poverty, thoughts of what the coming of the visitors might mean to them, to billions. His memories were not to be trusted—the car that whined and lay down like a dog, his daughter kidnapped. Yet there had been a meeting. He was convinced, right now at any rate. The world would be changed forever. But he would still be shut out. He wanted to be wrapped and hidden. Please. Let me come home.

  “Johnny, come here.”

  He was desperate enough to obey.

  She took his hand, and closed it over a small, slick package. It was a gesture he had only seen in risqué foreign films. Decent kids in New York didn’t need to be protected against casual pregnancy or disease. You got married, you stayed married: end of options. The touch of her hand, the sophisticated way she closed his fingers: the effect was incredibly erotic. His tongue was too thick for his mouth.

  “That won’t keep out the QV. Okay, you’re not risking your job. What about your life?”

  “I thought I’d made myself clear. I’ll try again. You turn me on. I’m forty seven years old. At my age one doesn’t hesitate when lightning strikes. You tell me you haven’t got QV: that’s enough. One takes the reasonable precautions, one takes one’s own risks. C’est tout simple, l’amour.”

  “Or am I too old? Is that it?”

  She laid his fist on her bare shoulder. He was in her space, and falling, dazed with gratitude.

  A strange thing happened then. Braemar was not, after all, tumbled in the bushes, as she had fully expected to be. As soon as they were in each other’s arms, the two figures stayed quite still: for so long it was as if they’d mysteriously found, these sparring strangers that nothing more needed to be done or said. Johnny sighed. Braemar stood and took his hand; they walked sedately into the hotel.

  She found a book in his bumbag: an ancient paperback, nearly a hundred years old, the pages protected by plastic film. He had a weakness for old books, that was in the files. “An abode without birds,” she read, “is like meat without seasoning. Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them…”

  She remembered a babyfaced prince of that bizarre brief Camelot, twenty-first century New York, with his motorized skateboard and a rather sickening line in clean-kid arrogance. He always carried a silvery tool, stiffl
y prominent in a belt loop or his jeans pocket. To her unregenerate eye it looked like some kind of ancient druggie impedimenta. It was the shank of a coralin drill, the badge of the latest elite brotherhood, fusion of art and science; engineers of the word. And now. She wondered if Johnny was aware of the way he wore the ubiquitous crotch-bulge bumbag of a young adult male slung on his shoulder. Of course he knew. He wasn’t stupid, not at all.

  It was immeasurably touching, that the young exiled American should carry Walden in his pocket. The hunter who had been condemned to become one with his quarry: the birddog, caged among the singing birds. And trying to like it. Good boy.

  Saddest of all was his conviction that what had happened to him had been done deliberately. She thought how strangely the whole world spiraled back towards the mindset of old Africa. No weather anymore, only the effects of human villainy. No death except by witchcraft.

  Some people said the QV incident was invention from start to finish. There never was a virus. There was only an excuse to close down a space program that had become a meaningless expense and political suicide. An excuse that only cost a few space-jock disappeareds. Was that the truth? Maybe the truth was worse, maybe the whole business was a random error thrown up by Johnny’s precious Big Machinery. Or maybe, why not, the virus was real, the NIH was right, and she and Johnny were both doomed. You can’t know the truth, you can only choose your risk.

  Through the glass doors to her balcony the sky was a mass of baroque violet, magenta and heavy orange, folded and crumpled down to the black and unlikely margin of Asaba’s volcanic spine. The chances that the curtains would part and the mountains that were gods appear in person were poor, at this season, but it was still a wonderful show. Around the ’04, you used to get sunrises like this in the tepid post-industrial UK, but that was all over. You had to come far south nowadays to find a good, rich, poisoned sky.

  She had lived through fire and flood and earthquake, and seen the world go on just the same. The plate-armor of the soft earth shrugged: seas churned, the twisted islands fell burning into the abyss. The blue sky turned livid, wild lightnings wrecked the man made networks that threaded the atmosphere. Cold and famine took the world, that had been preparing for hot flushes and rising seas…. Everyone got ready to die. But in a few years, it was as if nothing had happened. The human race, somewhat rearranged, carried on getting and spending, making politics, having fun. Starving and suffering if anything a little less, just now, than when Braemar was young.