White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  Johnny would meet the Ride of the Valkyrie as he came up the stairs, and find Elmer Fudd in his Siegfried helmet chasing Bugs around the drawing room walls. He’d hear the Samaritan’s guests discussing popular new releases: Things Can Only Get Weirder, The Death Star Hypothesis—Still More. Apparently the aliens had arrived instead of something worse, but Braemar’s friends were not grateful on that account. There was discreet cocktail-party enthusiasm for “White Queen” at these gatherings; for the gang’s clever tv flyposting, and their letterbomb campaign. The kind of support that starts: While one can’t approve their tactics….

  He let himself to become a fixture at New Cross Wednesdays, through that spring and summer. He never saw Arthur of the Beeb there, but he met the rumored to have become Arthur’s successor as the Samaritan’s meal ticket: Pierre Larrialde, the Basque diplomat—who had no tickets to Uji but did have a lot of money. Larrialde was one of the boldest anti-Aleutians.

  Perhaps the Basque felt he had nothing to lose. He was a controlled drug-resistant TB, feverbright eyes and horribly skinny.

  Most of the regulars were the same kind of obnoxious rightists. They thought it was smart not to believe in QV, because maybe there was some connection with the aliens’ “superpowers.” They loved to cross the room and shake Johnny by the hand, as a kind of obscure sideswipe against Aleutia; and Socialism. He would stand around, listening to the cut-glass Brit middle class voices, wondering which of these fat cats were the real terrorists.

  “White Queen had a very good point there—”

  “The KT conference is playing into the hands of people who’ve been hacking away for generations at the very roots of national sovereignty—”

  Johnny was quietly eavesdropping, one night, when a hand landed on his arm. He found beside him a tall, scraggy old bloke with floppy white hair, who gazed at him wistfully.

  “Mr. Guglioli. You like the KT idea of ‘one world,’ I suppose?”

  “Don’t see much wrong with it,” agreed Johnny.

  He spoke a little too loud. The talkers moved off, but the old guy forgot to let go.

  “What exactly is it these ‘White Queen’ people are afraid of? The Aleutians seem like good guys to me, now we’re at peace.”

  The old man blinked, in slow motion. For a moment he seemed to have fallen asleep on his feet. “They call me the White Knight,” he murmured. “No, indeed you’re right. There’s nothing to be afraid of, not for your generation. Or maybe the next. That’s why it takes great concentration, great clarity of mind to be afraid. You are not afraid?”

  “Nah,” said Johnny. “I come here for the cartoons.”

  “Ah yes, the cartoons. The implications are serious,” sighed the White Knight. “Ours is a post-literate world. We cannot record detail: there is too much. We resort to diagram and symbol.”

  Johnny nodded politely.

  “In the animated cartoon, we abandon the Quattrocento. We no longer peer through the lens of Alberti. We no longer experience story as a dream, centered on the self. The frame is decentered, the illusion of ‘realistic’ depth is eliminated.”

  Classic Animation, with its armies of workers, was revered. They liked their slave-labor over here. The intelligentsia missed no chance to rip into digitized realism. The auteur of the famous, award laden Red Chrysanthemums was no hero in Europe. It was politics disguised as aesthetics. The day Eve-Riots hit the big studios, and the slaves became a liability, the computer-generated stuff would have its artistic license back instanto. Johnny didn’t bother to say this, there was no call for any contribution. The old guy was the type who thinks every conversation is an interview, and the interviewer is a kind of space-bar, a carriage return. Maybe he’d been famous at some time… Besides, they weren’t really talking about cartoons.

  “And yet, there is the realism for our times; of our situation. In a classic cartoon, if you fall in the water there are always sharks.” The White Knight waited a moment for Johnny to make the right response to this cryptic come-on: then patted Johnny’s arm again and wandered away.

  The alien circus had returned to Uji after an impenetrable progress through the European capitals. Those baboon faces were everywhere—hazed towards humanity, the open hole blurred into a vestigial nose with wide nostrils, the jaw smoothed to vertical. Since they’d decided against blowing the world away they’d become fantastically popular. They were more respected than the Greenest of the Corporations; more popular that the most adored Balkan royalty. A startling number of polled global citizens believed that Earth would be under alien rule within five years, and felt this was a good thing. Negotiations over a modified version of the famous “real estate deal” continued. The visitors were staying.

  Kamla was an impressionable girl. She despised Johnny for a while, then she started the serious flirting. Catching him alone in the kitchen, she shyly pushed a science fiction comic across the table. There was a small bump under the film-sealed antique cover.

  “What’s this?”

  She rolled her big eyes and thrust out her chest. Another of those messages about population strained over her plump breasts: DONT BLOCK THE EXIT. She was also sporting a Natural Death Movement headband. He wouldn’t be surprised if Braemar encouraged the illiterate teenage mama to dress like this. It was like her idea of fun: a walking one-liner on the absurdity of any attempt to shift human nature from its crazy defaults. He hurt himself trying not to laugh. Or trying not to cry. Those monstrous eyes were still like enough to sting him.

  He pushed the gift back. “It’s books I go for, not comics. Sorry kid.”

  Braemar herself never recalled those African nights by a single glance, or word, or gesture.

  He went to the beach with them: with Kamla and little Billy, and Kamla’s brother, a slender arrogant ten year old in prep school uniform. It was his day out, but he didn’t seem too thrilled. This was obviously one of those dismal “treats” that children have to endure from their relatives, because they don’t know how to say no. Johnny felt about twice lifesize, and cast himself as the hulking minder. He lurked along several paces behind his employer’s family, kicking the desolate shingle. The English Channel off East Sussex was officially no more polluted than it had been forty years ago. It was grey and scummy, and slithered rather than lapped along the grimy pebbles.

  The women and the baby retired to a heap of concrete knucklebones. Johnny and the boy, Piers, chucked stones.

  “The Normans,” said Piers, “came up here.” He turned and pointed to a line of office blocks that showed above the sea defenses. “We were over there, up on the hill above the field that got called Senlac. It was farther from the sea in those days. We’d come rushing back from walloping Danish Harold at Scotch Corner, and everyone was simply exhausted. But we had to fight.”

  Oh. Those Normans. The name of the beach had meant nothing to him.

  He looked down at Piers: the boy’s milky coffee skin, with freckles two shades darker, the refined, overbearing hatchet profile that made him look like the great-grandson of Benazir Bhutto. Irish grey eyes, nappy chestnut hair in aspiring dreadlocks. Johnny couldn’t detect a scrap of native flesh in the brilliant mosaic.

  “The Saxons, you mean. You don’t look much like a Saxon, Piers.”

  The boy stared, the way the British stare, placidly, totally dismissive of the foreign worm.

  “It was still us, don’t you see?”

  Johnny thought of Larrialde. I will not endure to see my country once more overrun. The blind simplicity of these territorial urges. He hated Larrialde. You could bet the callous bastard never worried too much about the risk of spreading infection. A memory of Braemar in a cloud of eau-de-nil taffeta, whispering with her sickly patron under cover of the evening’s music, came into his mind; sharp as life. It choked him.

  She turned, in his mind’s eye, and looked at him, and smiled. Come on in Johnny. I know you know. Join us in the preemptive resistance movement. Be mine.

  Well. He’d known all along
, really. He’d known since one night in Africa, about Braemar’s hidden agenda. It was still hard to believe. It seemed so banal, so unsophisticated, so unlike her.

  It was late. Johnny was babysitting. The Marmunes, who lived in a “grannyflat” out in Braemar’s yard, were busy people. Kamla had a date. It was natural now for Johnny to do favors like this. The housebox came to life (the keys were working again). He saw her on the doorstep: she let herself in and came downstairs, Trixie loping after her. The giant hound, to Johnny’s relief, always stayed in the front hall when Brae wasn’t around.

  She’d been at The Times studio, cutting chat for one of their tabloids. She was wearing the new season’s fashion. For reasons the White Knight could probably expatiate at length, the Frock World’s response to Aleutia’s apotheosis was a retreat from lady in red frank outlines to a flimsy, fragile, misted-up appeal. Braemar wore about three shades of apple green tunics, and silk leggings under a many-layered jacket of white muslin. She looked lovely, exhausted but lovely. Sometimes he would remember those outfits she used to wear in Fo, and it made him feel a little ridiculous.

  “Somewhere out in orbit,” she grumbled. “There is a ship. A dirty old, battered old, cramped old multi-generation spacehulk. That we could have built last century, technically, if anyone had set their minds to it. The fact that no orbital-junk tracking system has spotted it means nothing. It is black all over, invisible to radar, heavily shielded. Has to be, to last as long as it’s lasted, out there in the far from empty spaces between the stars. And they’re maintaining radio silence. I never said they were idiots. Just liars.”

  “What about the Lagrange nodes?”

  Johnny had been to space, he had the credentials for general knowledge on this topic. He watched her miss a beat, terrible fate for a pundit, wondering what a “Lagrange node,” actually was and what it did; and put her out of her misery. “You know, the comsats inserted in the lunar plane, when the space-stations did their famous weightless-fuck, just like 2001: we were all joined up at the hip, everything went splendidly and we were off to Mars? The sats are still functional, last time I looked, and their scope is comprehensive. Funny they haven’t picked up anything.”

  She blustered, unsure of her facts. “Well, even if…. It’s a great big ocean out there, easy to miss a thing the size of a sailing dinghy.”

  She was right and didn’t know it. Johnny smiled in a superior way. Braemar ran a jug of filtered water and stuck it in the oven.

  “Sorry I’m so late. Coffee?”

  Johnny was surreptitiously checking his bumbag. The Tube stopped at nine o’clock. He would have to take a taxi and haggle in pounds sterling, the daily struggle of the streets. He hoped she wouldn’t notice, but Brae was onto the flicker of green like Robert homing in on a pinch of sugar.

  “Johnny, dear, is that a twenty I see?”

  “Yes ma’am. And it is mine. All mine. For once in my life, I am going to be able to make change. This dirty, greasy, very nearly worthless little sticky-taped fragment is going to be one small personal triumph over the grim misery of twenty-first century London life.”

  “I’ll trade you two fifties.”

  Fifty pound notes were relatively common.

  “No market.”

  “But I’m paying for your taxi!”

  “If you insist. I still keep the twenty.”

  She laughed. “Watch out, you’re becoming naturalized. Did you hear all that about Peenemünde Buonarotti?”

  Buonarotti was a German physicist. She was known as “the first genetically engineered genius.” Surrogate womb, two certified genius donors. Her parents—purchasers, more like—had given her that atrocious name to represent the pinnacles of Western European civilization. Which showed you where they were coming from. Amazingly, something had worked. Ms. Nazi-Death Rockets and Brutalist Macho Renaissance-Art was a prodigy. Plenty honors, plenty Corporate funding. She was famous right now chiefly for having declared (allegedly) that she didn’t believe in aliens. That the superbeings were frauds, and she could prove it.

  The White Queen gang was trying to make something of the fact that nobody had heard from Peenemünde Buonarotti recently. They’d bombed her Corporation, challenging the fat cats to produce their dissident. The Corps were unimpressed. Released a communiqué saying Buonarotti’s a very private person, if she doesn’t want to answer the phone that’s your problem.

  Of course, Braemar hadn’t been speaking for White Queen just now. She just happened to be interested in the extremists’ harmless activities. As anybody might be—

  Johnny gave her his humoring the madwoman leer.

  “Whoops, sorry. Forgot to tune in.”

  She put coffee in front of him, sat at the housebox to check the household mail. “Bills, bills, bills. How hard it is, to eat another man’s bread and to climb another man’s stairs…. That’s Dante, you know. Bless the man, he puts things so well. Do you still have your Dante?”

  She turned, cheerfully despairing.

  “My maker, Johnny. They took my maker. I haven’t worked, haven’t published anything for two years. I’m reduced to whoring around tabloid chatshows. I can’t even mortgage my soul to replace the thing until the buggering soi-disant “world government” is good enough to admit I’m never going to get the old one back. All my nice frocks are product placement, we scarcely eat in this house unless I can lig it somehow.”

  “Aha, so it comes out! Your real reason for persecuting the extraterrestrials.”

  She didn’t laugh. Suddenly, wrong footing him completely, she was serious. She shook her head. “No, Johnny…I’m not interested in revenge. Anyone who has ever injured me is going to die. A satisfying proportion of them, if I was taken that way, in lingering pain and humiliation—”

  She didn’t finish the sentence, sat back and rubbed her eyes.

  “How tired I am, I must look such a hag.”

  Buried moments. He remembered how she’d seen him talking to that drunk, and walked away. It was Arthur of the Beeb she’d walked away from: the man who’d got her into Uji. He wondered about the price of cutting those letterbombs. How did she pay the tubercular Larrialde? He couldn’t help it, his imagination would stray to the weird things Europeans did instead of copulate. Safe Sex. When he was a little kid, that was the dirtiest expression he knew.

  If you have a friend who is a whore, and you realize you were once a trick she turned, first you hate her. Then you get used to the idea, and accept that you were probably asking for it to some extent. But he would never believe she had screwed him purely for business reasons. She had saved his life, by an act of peerless generosity. Nothing could ever take that moment away, or tarnish it entirely. They had resumed a casual “intimacy,” they did not ask each other awkward questions. The big empty house told Braemar’s story: a failed matriarchy, the sprawling family that should have been. He wondered sometimes, about Anand Datar. There were no pictures of him, none of the children either. But he didn’t ask.

  Nor did she pry into his own shabby life. They were two lonely people together, comforting each other, careful not to touch the sore-spots.

  “Kaoru suicided.” he offered helpfully. “How about making something of that?”

  “Hardly merits the word. He was well over a hundred years old, and his heart was fucked. He simply stopped taking his medicine.”

  “What about the guilty Brit minders? I heard Robin Lloyd-Price was only at that KT conference as Kershaw’s assistant due to an urgent need for evasive action. Been putting it about a bit, making himself cheap, had to go into hiding to avoid a scandal. It was a while ago, but maybe you could dig up some sexual peccadillos dirt?”

  “I’ll pass the thought on to my sources.”

  This was the way it was. They kidded along, and Braemar was never going to admit she was herself a hands-on terrorist, until Johnny asked her straight out. Which he wasn’t going to, because he hadn’t yet totally decided how he felt about White Queen.

  “It ne
ver bothers you that the whole, entire rest of the world has a completely different opinion of the aliens?”

  “It bothers me. If I mildly suggest that I don’t believe in magic, and there must be a rational explanation for what they did, they tell me they’re not human. If I say they came in a multi-generation ship, nothing we couldn’t build ourselves if we put our backs into it, they tell me that’s not possible. The ecosystem would clog up and die, the cosmic rays would have killed everyone. Everyone human, right? God give me strength. We believe they traveled FTL because it says so in the stories. That’s the only reason.”

  “That, and the fact that the Aleutians told us so. Why would they lie?”

  “Augh. Why wouldn’t they? There’s nothing like a good lie to win friends and influence people. You can’t believe the whole world could be so mistaken…. Imagine this: the USA and USSR, poised for forty years on the brink of destroying all human life. Two generations, living under the terror of the Bomb. Was that a fantasy? It was real. Then pouf, it was gone.”

  “Clavel convinced me.”

  He was annoyed then, because she’d lulled him into mentioning Clavel-Agnès, that whole experience, which they both knew was out of bounds. He moved into the attack before she could take advantage.

  “For one moment let’s be serious. Something’s over, a phase of our existence, yes: and it hurts not to be the Crown of Creation anymore. But they are superior. It sounds corny but face it, we have to trust them, we have no choice.”

  “Oh certainly we should trust them. All they want is to take over a few little smallholdings, shoot a few turkeys. How many treaties was it, Mr. American? Two hundred and fifty two? Have I got that right?… Johnny, I know they don’t mean us any harm. They don’t have to. Harm is historically inevitable. If they’re superior, we’re inferior. Right? If we’re inferior, then give it a generation or so and there’ll be Aleutians in all our jobs. Aleutians in the White House; and two doors to every Leisure Centre; two kinds of life.”