White Queen (11 page)

His retreating laughter sounded loud and clear above the children’s giggles.

Braemar slipped off the bed and began to put on her underwear. “Don’t look like that, Johnny. David doesn’t mean any harm. A scooped paparazzo is funny, that’s a law of nature.”

“You knew,” said Johnny. “You fucking knew.”

It was a shot at random. He wasn’t thinking clearly, he was too angry. His great plan, crashing in ruins, was revealed as an absurd fantasy. She pulled the red dress over her head. Her face emerged withdrawn into icy distance: no more his partner in lust, hardly even an acquaintance.

“Of course, I knew
something
was up. It’s obvious in the interviews. “Agnès” wouldn’t let us put her on the tv, but she was expecting things to change, any day…. I heard the news a few hours ago. So what? There didn’t seem any reason to spoil our last date.”

She put on her shoes and flicked open her phone.

“I’m going home now, Johnny.” She made a little social grimace. “This must seem brutal. But Fo’s no longer the place to be, and I can’t afford to wait for you to fix your travel. Look me up when you’re in London. Anytime.”

She didn’t, to his profound regret, have the balls to try and kiss him goodbye. If she had, he’d have throttled her.

3 
TO DETECT AND CONFIRM THE REALITY

The night, when it came, was almost starless though the sky was clear. She crouched in the fringes of a patch of tall vegetation, which her mind called “a small wood,” and stared into the awesome void. Darkness in this context did not mean empty, but that was one false perception that she hadn’t mislaid en route. Other illusions had deserted her: flatness, up, down. She held onto things so as not to fall into the sky.

Beside the wood, in this dark, dark night, there were steady, rhythmical noises. She was sure the rhythm must be accidental, but groping around she stumbled upon a square cornered barrier. Faint light came from the walls of a broad ditch. She watched as two large beasts came abreast of her. She couldn’t see much detail, but something moved after them along the lipid surface below the towpath: they were pulling a barge. She was afraid there would be some kind of people and ran away. She imagined someone marching up with a torch, the beam catching her white blobby naked buttocks. She ought of course to step forward boldly, and announce the triumph of her race:
I come from far away, I come in peace….

Well, maybe another time when she was feeling more competent.

She sat hidden in something like long grass and giggled to herself:
ci sono canali…
How vastly, hilariously appropriate. She was not a sensual person, her life was in her mind. She huddled, knees to chin, and various sensations that she had not noticed built themselves into existence. Cold, prickles, bruises. The air that she was breathing began to taste very strange.

She closed her eyes. That almost starless void. Its few clear lights.

Peene opened her eyes. She was safely back in her cell. That was what people called her room, for its monastic simplicity. No visitors had been in here for a while, which was fortunate. The quiet movement of equipment over here was nobody’s business but her own. However, she didn’t care to be laughed at. She lay still for twenty measured minutes by the clock, which she’d moved so she didn’t have to shift her eyes to watch it. Then she carefully eased herself free of the foam, and got up.

It was cool in the room. She put on the dear old kaftan that served her for a dressing gown, and sat for a while: then went to her workstation.
Where was I?
This was the ticklish part, for she could bring back nothing except memory. She drew pictures, shifting pixel by pixel until she had an identikit image, in-depth, of that sparsely furnished night sky. One can’t just
go.
One has to be heading somewhere. She had chosen her destination advisedly, from a small set of possibilities. She had the 4-space coordinates of a relatively minute area, to contain her search for a match. The rest was number crunching. She let the program run and went to look out of her window.

Across the campus, a pair of radio-telescope dishes stood up small in the distance on their spiderweb limbs. They were not functional. Earth-based telescopy, in decline anyway, had died a death after ’04. It might recover, now that the skies had calmed. Maybe people would start again from the beginning. Peenemünde liked that idea. There should always be a place for the human eye and its serendipity. Astronomy was her passion, not her business. She had to be a little devious in accessing the space-telescope “Cannon,” and the machine-time for her processing: or someone would notice and ask questions that she didn’t want to answer. Which was partly how she came to be up so late—though on this occasion she’d been working through a night and a day, forgetting everything else. Campus road lights and broken cloud drowned all the summer constellations over the Prussian plain, and not a soul was stirring. Which was odd, as there were several non-time located projects on stream. Everybody but Peene and a few other eccentrics loathed non-time. But loathing was usually kept within bounds, it didn’t extend to wild-cat strikes. She shrugged, and went to see how the crunching was getting on.

In forty minutes (stolen in seconds here and there, from a big machine busy on other work) she had her result. She screendumped the final image, and aligned it with her identikit.

Nunc Dimittis, Domine.

Peenemünde wept, and blew her nose. The sweetest joy on earth transfigured her pudgy face.

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace

according to Thy word.

For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation,

Which Thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples.

To be a light for…

Peene had no intention of ‘departing.’ She was no saint in this respect. The glory that she saw ahead was not God’s alone. Fair’s fair. He’d had this wonderful game, this lovely trick, to chuckle over for all eternity. He should be ready to share…. But those first tears were selfless, naked delight, sufficient in itself. She blew her nose again.

“It’s all nonsense,” she muttered. “All nonsense, self-deception and, and
pseudoscience.
In the morning, I will see why.”

The smile broke out again: certainty of certainties. She padded barefoot to her kitchenette to heat up some sweet rolls and a jug of cocoa. Feeling suddenly hungry she added cheese and jam to the tray, carried it over to her single easy chair and switched on the tv. The screen had been blank since before she began this last experiment. It was a symptom of Peenemünde’s eccentricity. She was content to live for hours or even days with the curtains firmly pulled over that essential window. She was probably one of the last people in the world, excluding the terminally poor, the terminally sick, the mad and babes in arms, to discover what had happened to planet earth.

She sat opening her sweet rolls and listening, cutting hunks of cheese and spreading jam on them. Finally she just sat, staring; her mouth a little open. A race of telepathic superior beings has arrived on earth, by some unknown means of faster than light transport.

“Oh,” she said. And in English, with a lightness she did not feel
“That’s torn it.”

People thought of Peenemünde as unworldly, because she was held to be very clever and she had no small talk. In fact, like most shy “unworldly” geniuses, she was as entrenched as any other human being in the mire of getting and spending, status and renown. Filled with helpless rage, she wanted to kill someone. If no one else offered, God would do very well.

State of Karen—May 2039

4 
UJI

i

Clavel (who had been Agnès) sometimes found himself lying in the dark, scarcely aware he was awake; listening. The noise ran through him: irritating, melancholy, trapped in a never ending repetition. There must be a street-cleaner stalled below his window. He would wait hopefully for it to fix itself and go on, until at last he remembered that the sound was the river at Uji, and he was far from home. Then he would roll over and touch his guardian, listen for the breathing of the others. Count them all, as if they were still in Africa. At least no one was dying tonight. In a hollow of fragile security, with walls of grieving sound, he would sleep again.

In the early morning, he slipped out of bed and went to change himself. He never wore underwear in the daytime now. Dust covered the white pan of the shower, and of the water closet in its little cupboard. Clavel wanted to try everything, but even his long-suffering guardian rebelled at the idea of water sloshing around in their changing room. Standing naked he drew a fingertip along the inner rim of his bellyfold, and flicked the wanderers it gathered onto the thickest dust.

It would be years before this place was hygienic.

The sanitary bin was full. The local excretion pads, provided by their host, were adequate but bulky. He carried the bin to the waste-consumer, in the kitchen beyond the end of their wing. The house at Uji was one long main block, with wings jutting from either end, and various smaller buildings connected by covered galleries. The garden of combed gravel all around lay on a bed of air. Clavel took a short cut to the kitchen: the garden let him pass then shifted itself like a throat swallowing; smooth again, differently smooth.

He fed the waste consumer, built by Atha, Rajath’s commissar; and patted it. Clavel had no talent for infecting metal with self, but the gesture, habitual tenderness towards the self-pervaded world, was deeply ingrained.

The normal digestive workings of Clavel’s people did not produce bulky waste. The natural consequences of eating local-style (with or without underwear) had horrified everyone else who’d tried it. By the end, the African party—apart from their captain—had been reduced to cow’s milk, a vaguely medicinal brew that was the nearest Fo could provide to recognizable food. Now Mr. Kaoru had hard food delivered to the helipad; the kitchen staff processed it in a fermentation vat. Only Clavel persisted in following local custom.

he protested.

And heard the good-humored, jeering chorus finishing for him:

He filled a bowl with rice, prepared specially for him in water in the local way.

He had to admit the exercise was always slightly alarming.
,
was one of the more sensible protests people were making. Clavel lifted a shoulder to the dubious amusement that surrounded him: carrying his bowl and chopsticks he wandered on. To provide entertainment is part of a poet’s business.

In the room at the end of the evenside wing, Rajath’s wing, Lugha was curled up on the polished floor engrossed, a study band around his head. He scrambled to a more dignified position.

Clavel looked. Without the band he saw only flat colored patterns squirming. Local script trotted along below.

Clavel squinted.

Lugha was irritated. say.
Make the noises.>

“Deo…xyri…bonucleic…”

Clavel found it easy to match the sketched signs with the formal speech. The difficulty the other formal language users experienced bemused him. Don’t any of you dream? he would ask.

The small one had lost interest, anyway.

“It is about the fundamental elements. They only recognize five. Only milk and blood and water and fire, folded together in their pairs, and Breath for the transfer. No bread, no metal. Why do the people want samples of our tissue? I asked Mr. Kaoru and he told me to consider this information here.”

Clavel chewed rice and peered. The romance of fundamental physics stirred him: water and blood and fire!, but his understanding was slight. He tried to share the Sharp Mind’s fascination with those dead images.

“I thought you said they knew more than us about complex physics. Well, if they’ve only identified five bases that’s okay. You were worrying about nothing. You get too anxious.”

The poet and the sharp mind were drawn together by their obligation to formal language, but there were barriers that couldn’t be breached. Lugha didn’t try to explain. He contented himself with a superior shrug.

The drop into normal conversation was abrupt enough to be insulting. But Clavel saw that Lug was seriously curious, a compliment from the expedition’s know-all. He squatted on his heels, running a hand over the child’s flank. The grooming gesture stirred a tiny exudation from Clavel’s skin and from Lugha’s. The child added a scant accepting nod, for manners:

Lugha was ridiculously naive about human relations. He stiffened, nasal pinched with real shock.

He was teasing. The person who lives only to learn would never understand this mystery.

Lugha frowned.

Clavel looked around. The room was another shrine like the big one in Fo, from which their images had been ritually transported to the seat of government. The walls were banked with screens and desks, cases full of records, niches in which lay headbands and handholds like the set that Lugha was using. The equipment was familiar enough, but incredibly ornate and various. Lugha was fascinated by this place. The rest of them, even Clavel, found Uji’s wealth of occult toys a little eerie. Practically
every room
had its own shrine. They’d been forced to move most of the sacred furniture; it was just too much. He remembered the mad saints of Francistown. They too lived surrounded by ghosts, ruled utterly by commands and portents from the spirit-world.

But surely nowhere in Francistown had been as empty of life as Uji seemed. Everything they touched was dead. Everyone who came near them, except for Mr. Kaoru and the images, ghosts on a screen, was wrapped in protective clothing, a comprehensive hygienic barrier.

Lugha gave him a withering look. He pulled the band down again, small horny fingers dived into the flabby gloves and were thrust into the box in his lap.

At night the whole valley was filled with the sound of water. By day the mournful babble retreated. Clavel followed it through the gardens, past the trail that led to the helipad. There had been a ground-access road when they arrived, but Kaoru had advised them to have it blocked. The heap of earth piled in the cutting was already furred with greenery. The cottage used by their benefactor was concealed by the grove of trees that screened the helipad. He came and went very discreetly: Clavel was the one who saw most of him. The wandering poet would glimpse that slim figure, sitting on the rocks or under the trees in a dark stiff suit, like a mildly embarrassed piece of statuary; and they would talk informally. Clavel had made a little Kaoru record. He didn’t actually want to do this: Clavel, intensely religious in his own way, was embarrassed by all conventional rituals. But he knew from Johnny that it was the polite way to make friends.

Kaoru puzzled them. His welcome was a different order of mystery from the behavior of those holy lunatics in Francistown. In a way he’d acted as one hoped one would oneself, if visitors from another planet arrived in the garden. He often said that their arrival had filled an empty life, and they saw no reason to suppose he lied. There was clearly a tragedy in his recent past. But there was also the quarantine, so quietly imposed. There were bound to be other areas in which he’d favor his own people: the mystery was that he declined, formally and informally, to acknowledge this conflict of interest. They must take him at his own estimation, until they knew better. He was a
shosha-man:
a broker, helping business relations along. The term “honest,” associated with that title, was a local joke. Clavel delighted in their humor: so dry, so neat.

A stream fell down to the river, through stands of feathery green and over carefully placed rocks. It tumbled recklessly from pool to pool. Clavel settled beside it in a favorite spot, knees reversed, with Johnny a close and comforting presence.

And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven.

Some poet of this planet of free running waters had described a situation he could never have known. It was strangely moving, intensely suggestive. To recount the verse gave Clavel goose pimples. The skin of his forearms budded and wept small chemistries, and a breath of
Clavel
slipped through the weave of textile; entered Uji’s air.

Farmland began beyond the valley, fields that produced mulberry (a textile); and cow’s milk, the medicinal fluid exuded by a large material being. The quarantine zone was extensive. Nothing natural, not the simplest commensal, moved in those fields. And what lay beyond?

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.