White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  The park in which Uji manor stood was large. It didn’t seem polite to ask whether it was Kaoru’s private property, or if recreationing locals had been forbidden for the duration. But the poet felt trapped. There was a world outside, which he had barely glimpsed. And would not see again, until Rajath and the rest were satisfied.

  Rajath, who had been Guillaume…. As a compliment to their host they had all taken formal names from his favorite ceremonial language (different again from his own formal language; these people were so elaborate about everything). Rajath, then: a part of Clavel, a mundane appetite that must be appeased before the poet could concentrate on wonder. Also a very irritating person. Rajath had come out of their long argument, during the separation, with an entirely different opinion from Clavel as to how things had been left between them. It was always the way. Comparing notes you found that he “recalled” a totally unfamiliar conversation: and with such wide-eyed innocence. Clavel had not been pleased to discover that he was supposed to be coming to this inventive person as an abject suppliant, begging to be taken in.

  If anything, it was Kumbva (who had been Eustache) who had the right to declare himself dictator. Kumbva was the one who’d found this place, and met Kaoru. But that open-hearted person had no interest in such distinctions, and Clavel loved the Engineer’s detachment. He wouldn’t want to erode it, to enlist Kumbva against Rajath; even if he could.

  Clavel had made the best of things. He’d added some suggestions of his own, inspired by his conversations with Johnny, to Rajath’s trade-war tactics. He and his crew were in a much better position as a result; they had a substantial stake again. But he’d been too clever for his own good. The locals were now so impressed that Rajath thought he could make the killing of all time, and he couldn’t decide where to start. He dithered, tipsy with greed, while the poet remained a prisoner.

  Leaves, rocks, sunlight. There is nothing new. We are always at home…. Clavel started at the sound of motion, distinct through the white noise of the stream. He looked up, and met a tiny bright eye peering through the green. Piping notes came from the thing, in a high register of fury. Why weren’t they alone in quarantine? They had been promised that these “material beings” were harmless, but it was extremely hard not to react, when something with the half-alive presence of a weapon came rustling out of the bushes. Everything was so familiar. This could be any park, in any city: and then along came a reminder of the awesome, scary truth.

  None of them had left home before they came together at Uji. Poetic remarks of this kind annoyed the self-declared dictator mightily, but it was the truth. They’d been living in the margins of their own adventure, habit of mind blurring experience and refusing the evidence of the senses. They were inside the adventure now: and Clavel was afraid of what it was doing to them. For so long, at home, there had been only one nation. Opportunities for lying, cheating, stealing, had been limited. Fear of weaponry had played no part in most peoples’ lives. Here, things that had been hidden for generations began to be expressed: lost memories that would have been better left unstirred…. Clavel perceived the trickster and wise but lazy Kumbva, chatting in the character shrine below. Rajath jeered at the poet’s distaste. The notion of “progress,” the idea that certain kinds of behavior “should” disappear forever was absurd, he said.

  The bird flew away. Clavel pondered. He was afraid he’d gone too far in the help he had given Rajath. He needed to come up with a new intuition to restore the balance, something that would make the locals look like less of a push over. If the person who can never resist a profit saw his easy pickings threatened, that would concentrate his mind, and get the business dealings settled.

  As in Africa, the air was populous but held nothing truly alive. Clavel wondered how this was achieved. Was there some kind of exquisitely life-sensitive barrier suspended over the whole valley? He tried to remember seeing skin-wanderers in Fo, but he couldn’t recall them. How does one see, taste, feel, an absence? , he told Lugha.

  He slipped a finger inside his collar, picked a wriggling iota and considered it for a moment: the microcosm of all complexity, all being. And ate himself.

  Curling down in his niche among the rocks, he withdrew from his companions. They said he was singing love songs. Let them say. Uji was enough of a prison. Clavel would not be teased out of the sweetness as he could still enjoy. People had told him the infatuation would pass, that the reality was physically impossible, and he had half-believed them. But time passed, and “Johnny Guglioli, late of New York city,” became more vivid to Clavel every hour. The poet gazed on the stream: Johnny’s presence as real as the water. Johnny was here in the rocks, hunched up in the angular way of these people, who never forgot their bipedal dignity.

  Clavel told him.

  The memory of a bungled declaration still made him bare his teeth and shudder.

 

  agreed Johnny, shrugging.

 

  Johnny laughed.

 

 

  said Clavel. (It felt like the truth. Lying down with people, even marriage, meant nothing beside this meeting of souls).

  The years had not seemed long. He had been absorbed and happy, engrossed in the purpose of becoming himself. It had been a time of learning, incident, rebellion. Of coming arrogantly into knowledge that no one could match: as arrogantly letting dead ends slip by and dwindle, until the very entrances to those pathways were lost. Scale shifted, different sets of rules came into play: the pattern was the same. Clavel remembered dimly, as a lost purpose hundreds of years in the past, that one reason he had joined this enterprise was to look for childhood’s end.

  He sat by the stream, entranced, gazing on himself through his lover’s eyes. He’d heard epicures say that this was the best part of a love affair. Love returned, but undeclared. Physical separation could be perfect, at the right juncture. Each of you acutely conscious, so that it stung like a bruise, like constant half-arousal, of that other self in the world. He was amazed at the power of the experience, yet why shouldn’t it seem all-important? This is the event, thought Clavel, that makes sense of the whole cosmos, all the infinite reflection on reflection. And he burst into speech, such a speech as he had promised Johnny, when they talked together on the garden seat in Fo.

  “Self of my self, parent of my heart.

  If I reach out in my mind’s world, you feel that touch

  wherever you may be.

  I lie down to embrace another, my kisses go straight to you.

  For no one can share pleasure, it belongs to the Self alone.

  I can only come to you, I can only be with you, sleeping, waking,

  living, dying, always. Your mouth is in my cup, my claw is in your flesh.”

  His own words stirred him
beyond endurance. He jumped up with burning cheeks, and only recovered composure several rocky turns downstream. By then it was too late: the mood was broken. He walked on, in a kind of isolation he had only known since Fo.

  One of the pools was occupied. Maitri, who had been Benoit in Africa, lay there contentedly: knees and head and shoulders rising from a mass of soapy bubbles.

 

  Clavel bared his teeth and crouched beside the pool. Young shoulders lifted and fell, spiky with resentment.

 

  Maitri squeezed his sponge reflectively.

  Clavel’s firm presence set into childish sulks. “Do not laugh at me. I’m not mad, or vicious. It is not impossible. Look at those pictures Lugha is reading. These people are built of atoms, same as we are. They’re part of the natural world. We all know stories of strangers who fall in love, and it turns out they are not strangers. Their love is proved by their sharing wanderers, like you said. That can happen, why not this? Chance never gives up you know. The probabilities get smaller and smaller. They cannot vanish.”

 

  Clavel’s attention turned to the sharp one’s study: which he offered as proof positive that this beautiful coincidence was possible.

  Maitri sighed. It was seductive to have his baby back, but disconcerting to have Clavel, on whom one was quite genuinely dependent, gibbering like this.

  The baby shrugged. Then he frowned, cupped hand over his nasal.

 

  Laughter was wrong. It jarred on some complicated poetical misgivings. Clavel was afraid he’d made his vital contribution to the scam knowing it would snarl things up. Because, for reasons he could not, dared not, understand, he was afraid to be free, to go and find the beloved Johnny—

  The information came in a burst so choked even Maitri found it hard to follow.

  He sat up, wincing on the shifting and bony pebbles.

  Clavel stood, abruptly.

  cried Maitri, Too late. That young person,—oh, forever young—, had already vanished into a tumble of boulders.

  His guardian was left squeezing bubbles and brooding. Here they were, a tiny group of quarantined traders who could hardly remember how anything was done—and Rajath bent on embroiling everybody in a scam that looked increasingly dangerous. They badly needed Clavel, the backwards-pulling, the reluctant power, to cog the wheels of that other’s energy. It was Maitri’s fate to be the one Clavel needed. And what happened? Instead of making the poet wake up and take notice, he found himself arguing with a teenager about true love.

  He wondered gloomily if it would have been easier if his ward had been born a boy. Such shifts were not unknown. Maitri and his lover were both masculine types, (not, he hurriedly added, that they took a lot of notice of such parlor games!). It might have helped. He shook his head. Impossible to imagine his Clavel different, even in the most trivial respect.

  In the character shrine at Uji, Rajath and Kumbva ate breakfast together.

  A complete set of records for every member of the expedition had been carried by each party, and had survived through every adventure, even when the living subjects had not. One of the first things they’d done at Uji was to set up a proper chapel, with display equipment converted to use the local dead-power. None of them was particularly religious, except Clavel in his own peculiar way: but in this ghost-bothered world it seemed like self-defense.

  An excerpt from Rajath’s story played on one of the screens. A child born in poverty, trekking through swamp and forest to the big city to claim his greatness; sleeping under the stars. Neither of them was paying any attention, but it was an episode that Rajath found reassuring. It conjured up the best that he knew about himself.

  , said Rajath, spooning his gruel with habitual verve.

  The food was terrible, tasteless mush. Atha couldn’t seem to get any variation from the local hard stuff.

  Kumbva chuckled.

  Rajath agreed, grinning.

  He had made no speeches in Francistown, there had seemed no call for them. It annoyed him deeply that it was Clavel, who didn’t even care, who had come up with the idea of formal announcements that were outright lies. He sucked his spoon, dropped it; and made a speech.

  “Let me try this on you. Today, when the priests come, one of them insults us. We require compensation. We take it in property rights. We sell at an immense profit and carry home the loot.”

 

  The “Africans” had lost most of their tradegoods in the crash, and traded the clothes on their backs, practically, just to stay alive. The others had fared better. But Rajath insisted that the stores of toys, textiles, deadware, rare synthetics, had to be kept under wraps. He was convinced that the expedition could do better without them.

  mused Kumbva, weakening.

  Kumbva could see as clearly as Clavel how horribly it might all go wrong. The chance of much greater gain, for himself and his household, was sufficient to offset the risk. But he made a cautionary speech: a rare outburst from the person who always takes life easy.

  “Just be careful, Rajath, for all our sakes. When two strangers meet neither of them knows what to believe, and the advantage goes to the boldest liar. But no one likes to be made a fool of. One trick too far, and respect could switch to hostility in a moment. There is a whole planet full of them. We don’t know how many. And we are scarcely forty.”

  grumbled the misunderstood leader.

  He scowled at Clavel, sitting out in the garden hating him. The poet’s disapproval was a constant goad. He hated himself for caring: Clavel didn’t care if Rajath lived or died.

  murmured Clavel.

  Kumbva ran his nails a
cross the other’s neck muscles.

  Rajath acknowledged the touch with a tiny nod, calming under it.

  said Kumbva, picking and eating,

  Rajath took the other by the shoulders and turned him to the scenes on the screen. he said.

  He laughed.

  It was unfortunate. The African and Alaskan crews had both had casualties, in both cases the losses including that most important person. Even now Kumbva’s artisan couldn’t provide for them all. There had been some embarrassing moments! Such are the joys of an obligation to the adventurous life.

  5

  THE END OF THE HONEYMOON

  i

  Braemar took her companion’s hand and stepped neatly down.

  “I do admire a woman who can dismount from a field tilt-rotor gracefully.”

  She accepted the compliment with a smile.

  It wasn’t such a feat as it might have been. From the look of this party, a passion for much strapped and belooped overalls had swept the world of ladies’ fashion. It was the Uji uniform, designed by the Karen government as a compliment to their guests. Gentlemen could wear their own clothes, so long as they didn’t mind having second-skin sprayed over the material. Every inch of flesh covered in glistening anti-contaminant film, every head decorated with some form of bug-eyed 360: the journalists were a fearsome sight. Pity the aliens, faced with this monster crew.