White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  Clavel in Fo. The autopilot normalizer gets to work, busily feeding you translation that you can understand. Johnny shut his eyes to clear his vision, wanting to see the alien, forgetting what a horrible effect that had. He yelped—a ludicrous infantile gasp of fear. Braemar took his arm. They passed, heads down, unremarkable, through the great doorway.

  The main hall was huge, vaulted; lit and decorated only by the screens themselves and the glassy boxes of memorabilia. It was empty. They walked about like casual visitors, stopping occasionally to peer at the lives of the famous—depicted in 2D through the same faintly blurry material that Johnny had met before. It was weird to think that these were not the famous dead. These were Aleutians who would live again, maybe were living now. There were galleries around the walls, access to other levels. But as Johnny had seen, the working studios were at the far end, opposite the great doors. They strolled up there.

  “Hey—” Johnny’s whisper echoed like distant thunder. He broke away from her. “Look at this!”

  There was a new exhibit in the Hall of Remembrance. The form was the same as the others, a boxy single screen tv on a pedestal; a display case beside it. But the video playing on this screen was absolutely riveting.

  “Shit!” hissed Johnny. “Now that is alien. I can’t think of a city on Earth where people wouldn’t be standing in line around the block!”

  So the rape had begun. The adventurers had started to ship back their loot, the first tiny installments. Braemar was filled with horror: as if, like an Aleutian herself, she saw snippets of her own flesh on display. Johnny pored over the case, cheerfully criticizing the aliens’ taste in souvenirs. She didn’t dare to go near.

  “But how did they get it out here Brae? Have you heard of any rocket launches from Uji? Maybe we’re wrong and they have a matter transporter after all.”

  “For God’s sake. Come away from there!” She swallowed desperation, the horribly familiar situation threatening to engulf her. Be a good boy-baby. Do what smiling Mama wants you to do. She fought to keep her feet, in the tumbling breakers of meaning. “We don’t know how much time we’ve got.”

  He came away. The studios were closed, the front walls dark. They heard no sound, there were no warning lights. There was a convincing impression that the place was deserted. Doors closed but not locked, and all it takes (Johnny remembered the drill) is a little rub on the pad.

  He checked the rows of desks, he walked around, looking without touching. He stood back, frowning intently. “Oooh-kay.” One hand reached to the shoulder of his dun overalls. He looked at it, and laughed softly: embarrassed. “Thought I had my totebag.”

  “Well?”

  “One can but try. I’ve seen kookier set ups. Not much, not many, but…. Let’s see if we can lock ourselves in.”

  He studied the desk nearest the door, identified a row of iconed keys. A split circle, one half light, one dark. He rubbed it. The clear wall between the studios and the big hall darkened. Lighting came on. The icon on the next key was a circle with a notched line down the middle. He rubbed that one.

  “Try the doors.”

  The glassy stuff had melded, seamlessly, in three bands around head, and knee and waist height. Johnny cackled in delight.

  “Open up again, Johnny. I’m going to stay outside.”

  Johnny frowned in puzzlement. This moment had not been covered in their script. He wanted her right beside him but he was the eejay, he had the training. Out there in the alien cathedral she might be able to hold off trouble for a few precious moments.

  “Johnny, listen, I may not be able to get back to you. When you’re done, or if an alarm sounds: go home. The way you came here, by an act of will.”

  “Is that what you’re going to do?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He’d have liked to stay and crow over the Aleutians, but it wouldn’t be wise. In the heat of the moment he might end up with his throat cut.

  “Right,” he said, already lost in his eejay adventure. “Good luck.”

  “You too.”

  She stood wrapped in impenetrable mystery, alone in her version of Buonarotti’s travel mode. Johnny held out his arms. They embraced. He kissed her face, the unreal flesh, a Braemar replica made of interplanetary plasma. He tasted salt.

  “Don’t cry. We’re going to be famous.”

  A floor of the Multiphon complex had secretly been given over to handling the mothership material. They were trying to contain this explosive news, by protecting the incoming data from grabbers as far as was humanly possible. It was a hopeless task, since their secret caucus already included the President of the USSA and an undisclosed chain of informants behind her. Plus, one had to suspect, unknown other parties including major Corporations. At least they didn’t have to worry about the general public: the world at large paid little attention to old space science. But they must be prepared. At any moment the silence could be shattered.

  They struggled to formulate a response to the explosion, and squabbled about choosing the right moment to take their news to the Multiphon. Everyone knew that the Government of the World would insist on telling the Aleutians their ship had been located: that was inevitable. But then the human world would have to be told too, and humanity might not take the demotion of their angels well. The Aleutian landing party could be in danger; consequences might be dire. The aliens could still have super-weaponry, if they didn’t have super-interstellar transport. Their security arrangements within the Multiphon building had not yet aroused suspicion. There were a lot of secrets at Dusit in those days. Plenty of little groups of people behaving strangely, while they made deals over enclave evacuation, or deliberated on future projects for the Aleutians; some of them involving highly sensitive clean-up problems.

  The conspirators had secured first sight of all new forensic information. During one long anxious day, a report arrived from the Abdus Salam institute in Banjul—copied from the Multiphon document office by a member of staff who was in on the secret, and carried “upstairs” by hand—with yet more explosive news. They sat around a table, each reading a different section and passing it on. The coarse texture of instant degradable paper took Ellen back to the raw and desperate times of the ’04—when the whole world pulled together, and courage and virtue were the currency of political life (this wonderful effect paid for by the death of millions). But that wasn’t a true analogy. She felt like a government official in some seventeenth century court crisis—throwing aside the printed books of science, resorting to astrology on animal skin. Abdus Salem was not under Government of the World control. Every word she read had been reviewed by the censors of a major Corporation, as yet unidentified. Possibly every word was false.

  “These ‘active cell-complexes” said Chas softly. “D’you think there’s any connection with their body lice?”

  No one could answer. No one had paid much attention to the lice, at Uji. It was embarrassing that the superbeings should be verminous: best passed over.

  “What happens when humans ingest this ‘living dust?’”

  There was silence, while sections were shuffled around and everybody found the reference. The alien artifacts were packed with tiny organisms. The same kind of organisms, on an even smaller scale, had been found in samples of the research lab’s air.

  The down to earth hazards of alien contamination had been a side issue, since Uji was closed to visitors, and the Aleutians had been confirmed as benign superbeings. They would never do harm unintentionally: and there was no defense against angelic punishment.

  Ellen frowned over the close written pages. “If these ‘cell-complexes’ have something to do with the function of their gadgets, I’d like to see a report on one of the machines affected in the ‘mad machine plague.’ Did any of them survive?”

  “Not likely,” murmured Dougie. “Everything was incinerated.”

  “If I’m reading these figures right, the alien material in the air of the clean room was in vanishingly low concentration
, although they’d been taking artifacts apart—”

  “So, perhaps it’s okay to have a few Aleutians around,” remarked Martha. “What about a whole bunch of them? What about the settlers?”

  We’ll have to abandon coralin, Dougie decided, briskly—as if he really were a ruler of the world, and could order it done, this afternoon. Then he remembered that Carlotta had already begun to do it. He suffered a moment of fugue, staring into the future.

  What is going to become of us?

  Poonsuk propped her head on both hands. I was there, she thought. I presided, the night the world was made one. Impossible not to glory in that memory. But it was an article of faith with Poonsuk that she had been no more present, in the Multiphon, than any one of the billions. The datasphere, the cables, the lightlines, the networks, were the means to the Buddhahood of all humankind, women and men. What if the aliens were to do away with all that? What if they had better technology, that humans would have to use without understanding—?

  She was too tired to read. Deadly weakness overwhelmed her, as if the weight of the air could break her bones. She had schooled herself for so long to think no further than this is a bad day, this is a good day. She had fought to disregard her illness in the same spirit as it coolly disregarded medical science. Now she was thinking: I am dying, they could cure me. It was a catastrophic breach of discipline.

  Cures that might cost humanity everything it owned.

  Martha murmured to Robin. “Someone should warn Carlotta about what she said.”

  He never knew when Martha was joking. But Poonsuk had not seemed herself since Carlotta’s rash words about the princesses. You just don’t show disrespect to the Thai royals.

  Ellen overheard. “The President was disgracefully rude,” she muttered, in the unsilibant undertone that gives the adept privacy in livespace. “If she suffers for it, serve her right.”

  Martha wondered if Ellen knew how rough and dirty things could get behind the smiling mask of KT politics. She slid a curious glance; the English woman’s face gave nothing away.

  Robin shifted himself a psychic millimeter out of Martha’s space, smiling faintly. I can speak Aleutian. I know when I’m not wanted…. The euphoria of that night in the Ephemerides House was long gone. Here was the reality. The aliens are refugees. More bloody refugees. Is that what it comes to? Just that? Something terrible and beautiful has passed us by, he thought. The handwritten English of a Thai technician melted into haphazard dots and curls. Words turned into heaps of electron-magnified genes, solid and mysterious. He stopped trying to decipher them. He would tackle the implications of alien biochemistry another day. Maybe the Government of the World would want to send earthlings to the mothership. He would volunteer. Life is made of glorious moments, they have no lasting value. There is no meaning. I’ll build my career on the fact that I was one of the first at Uji. I will excel, because I play the game for sensation, not for profit or status. He rubbed his face with his hands.

  The air-filters hummed. The room was too warm. This conspiracy had begun as modified aggression, an attempt to debunk the superbeings. As soon as the ship had been discovered, and Carlotta’s analysts began to lay bare its less-than-supernatural secrets, the impulse to protect their protégés had returned. Now, yet another mood was taking over.

  Go away, thought Ellen. Come back in five hundred years. We can’t deal with you, and all you bring to us, right now. We have too much on our minds. But whenever the aliens arrived they would find the same world. The same futile wars, festering grievances; fragile new beginnings.

  As soon as they arrived they’d become part of what was happening. The alien infestation had become, inextricably, a factor in the situation. Rajath and his crew were the unchanging catalyst, speeding up the movement towards a new gestalt. An end to the old power blocs, and the new power blocs: the beginning of a different order of union. But it had all become too fast, too fragile. Without the Aleutians as angels, the forced, hothouse plant of world government could not possibly survive. A new message arrived, and was delivered by a slender young man with the token tonsure and yellow scarf of a temporary vocation. He weied as he handed it to Ellen. The words were English but they made no sense. She looked at him in bewilderment.

  “A human person has been seen in space.” explained the part-time monk.

  The sequence was short, and perfectly clear. The human face was well-known. Johnny Guglioli, White Queen’s tame ex-eejay. Robin Lloyd-Price began to laugh, a little hysterically. “My God! It was a hoax! It’s not the alien mothership at all. It’s an obscure new way to deliver a letter-bomb!”

  “It’s possible, Robin,” said the Multiphon technician, watching code on his subscreen. He looked up, smiling politely. “Anything can be faked. But the weight of the evidence is heavy. I think we must believe he’s out there.”

  Robin sobered at once.

  Poonsuk, in her motored chair, looked from face to face.

  “What is it? What is it you know?”

  “Letterbombing is a very minor criminal offence,” said Robin. “White Queen has committed worse crimes, and we know it: but you don’t take media-manipulators like that to court. No one’s ever accessed Wilson’s phone, but we get some information about the calls of one of her associates, an unsavory character, quite apart from the White Queen activities. A few days ago Wilson spent some time using her shady friend’s phone, talking to a third member of the group. He’s called the ‘White Knight.’ He’s a retired nuclear physicist. We don’t yet know what was said, we’re still waiting for the UK police to let us have sight of their transcript.”

  “Nuclear, as in weapons?”

  “Not strictly speaking,” muttered Robin, rifling the Multiphon intranet at a neighboring desk. “But it’s a problem.”

  “Could be a real problem,” agreed Martha, grimly.

  Johnny was gone now, out of their sight. The Peter Rabbit necklace saw only the big hall, quiet and empty as it had been since the ceremony Carlotta had shown them.

  “White Queen may have known about the ship for a while. They’ve always insisted it was there. Damn, I can’t find Carlotta’s first techies’ report.”

  The alien spaceship was being studied avidly, mountains of reports—

  “Please be clear,” said Poonsuk. “What are you suggesting?”

  “Guglioli and Wilson have left London,” said Ellen. “We think they crossed the Channel, we don’t know where they went. Guglioli has no passport. Braemar Wilson, of course, does have a passport—which has not left the country—but one of the group, that same unsavory character, is an expert in providing false papers. We don’t have the authority to do more than observe. They have never been charged with any crime, and we’ve wanted to keep it that way, keep their campaign low-key. We’ve assumed they were courting publicity because they had nothing else—

  Suddenly the White Queen conspiracy loomed enormous. To get out into space, they must be backed by some of the richest people in the world.

  “Johnny’s there,” said Martha. “He’s not alone, you bet. Where’s the lady?” She looked around, taking in expressions that laid bare the covert terror in all dealings with the Aleutians. “I’m guessing our friends from Outer Space have a sabotage problem. What the fuck do we do?”

  It wasn’t too far from the cathedral to her destination. She could read a symbolic map as well as Johnny; and retain the information she needed. You have to have good memory, as an independent in the media business. The evening street was quiet, but her body was shouting fear and guilt. She saw an alley heading the right way and ducked into it. It was a dusty tunnel, the kind of shortcut that children use, never adults. The dust was a good sign: few living wanderers here. It became frighteningly narrow, but it was heading in the right direction so she persevered. For this sequence, some deep down dirty jingoism. Charles Villiers Stanford, Songs of the Sea. Can we get hold of that? We may have to go back to CD: this is not New Youro, post04 music.

  Drake, he�
�s in his hammock an’ a thousand miles away,

  (Capten, art tha sleeping there below?)

  If the Dons sight Devon,

  I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven.

  And drum them up the channel, as I drummed’em long ago….

  The imaginary letterbomb, cynically sentimental, staunched emotion and made it possible to function. Rataplan, rataplan rataplan, beat the little drum. The dusty crevice delivered her into daylight. She’d crossed a time-zone boundary, or something. There were people—bustling about, twitching their animal faces; even speaking aloud. There was traffic: trambuses, things like mopeds. Braemar stared in horror. She covered her face…. She sobbed.

  Courage.

  If this was Earth, the central power-station would have been sited as far as possible from the population. Maybe they were pragmatic. If the heart of your spaceship explodes without warning where are you going to run to? Maybe they simply were not scared. Braemar walked into the complex, off the street. Staff glanced up as she passed. She fed them disinformation: I’m none of your concern. I’m supposed to be here. They believed her. Politics must be quiet in Aleutia at present; and apparently no one feared for her safety.

  No one was wearing anything special. Dun colored monotony, with the black seaweed-hair slick to the shoulder. A few bangles, brooches and scarves. In Aleutia, read Braemar, mistress of signs, everyday clothing is not a product. You don’t buy it or choose it, you use it like a paper towel in a public toilet. Few things have the status of consumer goods: extras, decoration. The domain of economic activity is much smaller than in our world. Rousing sea-chanties rattled on behind the social analysis. As long as she could make tape in her head, no matter if the tracks didn’t match up, she would be all right.