White Queen
Page 12
The alien spoke. Braemar was too scared to know if its lips had moved. The alien too (was this imaginary?) seemed paralyzed and confused by its own boldness. She desperately tried to pretend it hadn’t happened; to look like someone thinking about a beautiful art work.
But the alien was on another tack.
“You’re right,” it said, grinning. The sound was definitely real this time. “I saw you working it all out. You’re gonna have a tough time trying to make money out of this gig.”
And Johnny Guglioli stood there: rueful, unforgiving.
The shock was awful. The ghost vanished, into the planes and angles of the alien mask.
Braemar laughed. “You won’t believe this, but I’m not here to make money. I wangled my way onto this guest list out of pure curiosity.”
The alien smelt vaguely yeasty. They looked at the kimono again. Braemar’s confidence strengthened. All perception is perception. Even a telepath (doesn’t exist!) must have prior assumptions; and looks no further if the evidence seems to agree. If it knew her, it knew her through Johnny’s eyes. She was safe enough. The terror (which had no basis) receded, replaced by an intuition, strange enough in its way, that Clavel was herself quite anxious to change the subject.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Clavel at last, “Mr. Kaoru?”
No words formed in Braemar’s mind, no telepathic expansion. Kaoru, what?
The Uji watchers probably had not told these people anything. They were being run by the amateur slaves of a Californian semi-AI with a theory of how to meet alien intelligence defined by twentieth century tv shows. The Prime Directive! Thou shalt not impose thine ideology! Or even thine own simple general knowledge.
Kaoru was sitting at the back of the room in a big English club armchair. A handful of eejays from China and the Rim clustered around him, along with some Corporates and Braemar’s own sponsor, the man from the BBC. The Chinese carried their hardware like unwanted bouquets. They were of course diplomats or even, God help us, military. They shouldn’t bloody well be here. But the “government of the world” didn’t have a chance of keeping them out. The Corporates in their dark suits, streetwear of a bygone age, looked like members of a monastic order. As perhaps they were. The Dominicans of the new Christendom, where money is a God grown old and respectable, the days of red sacrifice over: a public institution. That’s the way it happens with us, Clavel. There’s just so many approximate spaces, into which the approximate pieces fall.
The old ex-Japanese was not attending to business. He sucked at a gold filigree inhaler, doubtless medicinal, and gazed dreamily at something far away and very dear.
“You want me to explain Kaoru? Well, here goes. Thirty odd years ago, something terrible happened to your sponsor. Do you have earthquakes and volcanoes on your planet? Plate tectonics? I won’t attempt to explain, but it was spectacular. Great cities were destroyed, mountain ranges exploded, the islands they stood on vanished under the sea. A whole lot of people died. Kaoru’s problem is that he should have been among them. Does that make sense?”
Clavel’s mouth and nose-space had changed shape.
“Some kind of sense,” decided Braemar. “Now comes the best bit. Afterwards, a legend grew up that a handful of the people had escaped in a secret spaceship, I mean starship. Mr. Kaoru thinks that you are those people. No, it’s a little more complicated. He thinks you are their extremely distant descendants, returned along a giant loop in space-time.”
It had not spoken, this time. Do any of us speak, in casual conversation? Approximation fills the gaps, each fills in the other’s part. But how could an alien play that game?
“About the starship? I doubt it, but what really happened was so terribly strange, we earthlings would believe anything about that time. As for the rest, I have no idea. Is that who you are? You know better than I do.”
“You want to know why he didn’t tell you this story himself, I suppose. He’s afraid you’ll burst his bubble, of course.”
Johnny was right, the invasion was horrible. It felt like hot wires in her brain (it isn’t happening!) Amazing that the Uji regulars thought that telepathy was wonderful, a rest cure for the mind. Or not so amazing. They’d been hand picked: the animals most amenable to training. But revulsion didn’t protect you, she found. She felt a shadow of the old Japanese’s hunger, of Johnny’s faith. The epiphany, which she knew was within herself, not born of alien nature but of human need, came rushing over her, nearly irresistible.
Save me or kill me. Do something wonderful.
“Clavel, there are many things your sponsors won’t tell you, not because they mean to deceive but because you’re supposed to know without asking. You should bear this in mind. What happened to Mr. Kaoru happened to all of us. Do you have post-traumatic stress on your planet? This organism has recently suffered a profound insult. We lost a huge chunk of our notional financial capital, among other inconveniences. Imagine you’ve arrived in Europe, thirty years after the peak of the Black Death. Can you grok that in its fullness? Can you feel the effect of such a swathe of death and famine, the shockwaves of the massive resettlement? On top of everything difficult that was happening in the normal run of things, say in Bangladesh and the Sahel? Of course not. Well, we tucked the survivors in somehow. Things were pretty tight: they still are. We have unrest and political turmoil all over the shop. Our concerted psyche took a massive jolt. We’re not ourselves. People will believe the wildest tales, people won’t know how to react to a silly little thing like alien invasion. But we’re going to get better. Don’t you fool yourselves about that.”
“All’s fair in love and war,” said Clavel.
It had not been listening, but watching. Watching every quiver, not of her facial muscles but of some inner surface.
“Excuse me. I see someone I have to talk to.”
Braemar fled. Out of the main hall, into a shadowy gallery. She found a double-leaved door, sealed with three bands of some kind of resin. Out of bounds, must be something interesting. She started as someone came up behind her.
“What’s in here?”
“Their dead,” said Ellen Kershaw. “Some of them were injured in the crossing, in ways beyond the expedition’s medicine. It’s the Aleutian custom to seal a funerary room, dry out the air and leave the bodies to desiccate.”
Ellen reported what she’d seen, all anyone could do, the Aleutians did not explain themselves. It sounded, she decided, pleasingly authoritative. Ms. Wilson shuddered conventionally.
“Gruesome—”
The next room was open and dimly lit. Ellen followed her into it. A group of Multiphon desks sat huddled together, talking to themselves. The teams called this a ‘taboo’ room. The aliens didn’t call it anything, out loud.
It would have been less surprising if the telepaths had ignored all forms of tele-communication. They’d been in contact with each other, mind to mind, spread over the globe from Karen to Alaska. There were signs that they kept in contact, in the same way, with their impossibly distant home. They reacted with firm distaste to most mechanical objects. How could they make any sense of the earthlings’ jabbering peepshows? But oddly, they were not indifferent. They tolerated 360 cams: record-making was a familiar, acceptable activity. There was another room, the one the team called “the ship’s log,” where Aleutian audio-visual records and display equipment were kept. It was also taboo, but in a more relaxed way. Likewise Kaoru’s magnificent library. Sometimes several of the nameless (the aliens who did not speak) would be found in there together, absorbedly watching an ancient movie.
It was the live conferencing that caused problems. No one really knew whether the aliens were aware of the real status of the assembly at Krung Thep, and were just playing along; or if they just didn’t care about the petty grades of earthling authority. But their first appearance in the Multiphon had been thei
r last. The “Government of the World” had provided full delegate facilities for the visitors, in the early days when people still thought in terms of a charade, showing respect to the vanguard, while frantically planning to deal with an invasion force. The Aleutians had said thank you politely, and quietly moved everything in here. They left the video-conference desks permanently running, perhaps out of good manners. Occasionally, Aleutians had been spotted making brief, almost furtive visits.
They called the world one saw through the screen “the land of the dead.” It was alarming, Robin said, to think someone might have introduced them to virtuality gaming, on their travels. They’d probably have been so appalled, they’d have instantly blasted Earth to flinders.
Ellen didn’t want Braemar Wilson in here. She knew what this room would look like on television. She could feel it in her bones: the insult, the rejection. All those human faces, human voices, human concerns, pushed away and ignored.
Braemar looked around. “It seems our visitors don’t watch television. Don’t they respect the Government of Earth? I mean, that’s what’s going on in there, isn’t it.”
They sing and dance, thought Ellen. They have their own instruments, and the nameless make music without words. They create pictures, they play games. They find each other endlessly absorbing, they don’t need artificial stimuli. She knew better than to say anything out loud that was remotely critical of the sacred screen.
“On the contrary, they treat the ‘television’ concept with reverence. Their visual-record technology is curiously close to ours. You must have heard of the ‘ship’s log,’ which has given us our glimpses of the Aleutian home planet. Why should they be interested in our political squabbles? They don’t have any kind of organized violence, on their home world.”
There had been a massacre at a camp of young female construction workers near Islamabad. The girls were Central European migrants, trucked into the region, undercutting the local skilled male labor. The Women’s Affairs Conference was deciding, at great length, what kind of slap on the wrist it should dispatch to Pakistan.
Braemar ought to get back to the main hall, but she was frightened of Clavel. She told herself she was being useful here, since she’d trapped the chief nursemaid. She knew Ellen Kershaw of old. One of those ancient idiots who thinks boats shouldn’t be called “she.” She bore the woman no ill will, but it should be easy to keep her tied up.
“Ms. Kershaw, Ellen. You miss your conference desk, I’m sure. But it must be pleasing to see how many women are here today.”
Ellen grunted warily.” Middle class women with careers in the media. That’s hardly news.”
“My goodness no. But I don’t envy the mothers among them. I recall too well the childcare-guilt and panic that goes into one of these trips.”
“Some children have two parents.”
Braemar laughed lightly, and nodded at the massacre scenes. “Seriously, what do you make of the alien attitude to gender politics? Have they an opinion on the Eve-riots?”
Ellen was furious. The 360 cam that ogled her like a second little head beside Braemar’s face had a “light shell,” that included most of this room. There was no way she could escape with dignity. For a moment she was recklessly inclined to rely on censorship: but that too could be a gift to the media monster.
“How could they have? We humans tend to perceive gender in them, but the Aleutians don’t respond. We have no idea how they reproduce, you know.”
She smiled, smugly putting the sex-mad media-person in her place. Kershaw, old maid socialist, saw brotherly love and no nasty sex. Poonsuk Masdit, whom you had to respect, spoke about “medical possibilities”: dreaming of a cure for her mysterious wasting disease. They were all blinded by privilege, all of them. There was no way of warning them. Nothing could make them see a new race of superiors through the eyes of the powerless.
“No gender. I see. But they have a rigid caste-system. Isn’t it true that most of those here are slaves of the dominant few, with no life at all outside their hereditary tasks?” To the corrupt all things are corrupt. Ellen was morally certain that Aleutians didn’t think like that, but Wilson would smear anything. It was absurd to jump to conclusions. What Uji needed was time, and patience. A patient, quiet appraisal of the new that came naturally to the visitors, but that humanity seemed to have forgotten.
“I’m afraid you’re ahead of the project, Ms. Wilson. We have no firm basis for any interpretation of their social behavior.”
“There’s no firm basis for anything, is there? All right then, tell me this. If they don’t intend to stay, why did they bring the children?”
Ellen set her jaw, tried to loosen it again; drew breath. “They have some form of belief in reincarnation. The children are here because they are considered to be the avatars of important people. They are valued members of the community. Does that offend you, Ms. Wilson?”
“They came here in ships nobody has seen. They don’t understand tv, they don’t have any normal machines, they spend all their time doing ritual dances. They’re supposed to speak English, but all they really do is mimic a few whacky phrases. They’ve been described as magic savages. Would you say that’s fair? We come to meet the superbeings, we find ourselves staring at performing animals. Ellen, would you mind telling me who recruited you to the Uji team?”
Everything was negotiated through Kaoru. But he was no puppetmaster. Anyone who spent an hour here, with an open mind, must admit that. The Aleutians understood everything. Kaoru operated the way they all did, on intuition and trial and error. That was all anybody had in the face of this enigma, the sentient but unresponsive other. There is a classic test of self-consciousness: does the creature recognize its own face in a mirror? The Aleutians would fail. They did not look in mirrors, had put away the few they found at Uji, reckoning them even less useful than tv. Humans would fail too. A human adult meeting a mirror for the first time would fly at the beast in the glass, immediately recognizing an enemy.
“Ms. Wilson, if you insist on using the methods of tabloid journalism—”
“Is that an insult? Do you despise my audience, Ms. Kershaw?”
Ellen’s frustration was on the point of explosion. She was saved by the pirate captain, who came swaggering in. They wouldn’t let earthlings disappear, in ones and twos. They didn’t like it.
Rajath glanced at the screens and briefly covered his face, a curiously human gesture before the broken bodies laid out in the red dust. Then he stood, hips spread in a gruesomely exaggerated cowboy pose, and pointed his fingers at them.
“Bang, bang! Get off my cape!”
He loped forward, peered at another screen, turned to Braemar.
He put a long, powerful arm around each of them. He smelt like a stale dishcloth.
“No fighting in church?”
A journalist interrogated Kumbva.” Do you believe in the paranormal?”
“Does a frog croak? The paranormal is my stock in trade.”
“But you are an engineer?”
This alien was built like a bear: both bigger, and thicker in the arms and legs, than most of them. He had a waist-pouch made of plastic cowries tucked into one of his sleeve loops. He pulled it out, stowed his hand into the bag and made puppet-mouths at the cluster-eye fastened by the journalist’s ear.
“You cannot be serious,” said the alien: and walked away.
Maitri had brought out a recorder. He had often thought of taking minor orders, and felt quite at home at a “priest conference” (or “press conference” as they seemed to pronounce it). It seemed only polite, when so many people were recording him, to return the compliment. Rajath hadn’t come here to sell religious impedimenta, so he could hardly complain that Maitri was revealing their hidden assets.
A local cleric came up, and boldly touched his recorder.
The baggy brown box slung f
rom the alien’s shoulder felt like rubber. The eye-band was thick and opaque: a rubber blindfold.
“What is that?”
“It’s a secret,” said the plump alien confidently.
The priest, or deacon or whatever he was, seemed disconcerted.
The alien who rarely spoke had said in English: marriages are made in heaven. Rosalie couldn’t read Aleutian lips well (difficult, when they had none), but these words were clear. She tried to read the meaning. It must be referring to this meeting between two sentient species. Its face and body showed a warm concern, a slightly mocking anxiety; above all the alien spoke personally, as if the “marriage” was a meeting of two individuals.
But there was doubt, and that chilled her. Might the human race be found wanting? Speak to me clearly! she signed, with all her heart. Mind to my mind!
Douglas Milne missed Lugha, the demon child, who had not appeared today. He had to content himself with the nameless Aleutian identified as “Rajath’s cook,” who was, Douglas believed, Lugha’s birth-parent. By all the signs, Lugha was considered as exceptional as he would have been on earth. The nice thing was, it made no difference that his father (mother?) was a lowly, mute hereditary servant. Douglas laid picture cards, squatting on his heels beside the alien. Aleutian child, human child. Aleutian adult, human adult. Human adult couples, showing affection. Human mother, hugging baby. All the humans were modestly clothed, in deference to the alien taboo against nakedness, but Douglas was trying to convey the question where do babies come from?