White Queen (13 page)

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. You
are crazy, my friend. We all are. That’s why we’re here.>

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.

These obsessive precautions came late in the day, from the earthling point of view. The alien artifacts that were defying analysis in secret somewhere had passed through several hands, before they reached the swiftly cobbled-together Aleutian-research teams. Other objects were known to have vanished into private collections; who could tell what picnic debris still lay festering in the West African soil, or in the remote Aleutian islands. But they were necessary. The Aleutians were highly sensitive about physical interference, and nobody wanted to upset the superbeings. Not a flake of human skin must contaminate their enclave; not a mote of Aleutian tissue would leave.

Even through plastic film the air was miraculously sweet after Karen city. They passed through an ornate stone gateway, of old Balinese work, into the pampered grounds of Kaoru’s retreat. A single survivor of the old teak forest towered like a sentinel. There were artful grottos, a “ruined temple” in the distance; some charming animal sculptures by the water. The house itself stood above the river bank. Metallic dragonflies hovered around the visitors as they descended: a fanciful reminder of Kaoru’s external security system.

In Africa and in Alaska search parties swarmed over the landing sites. Some were nominally scientific, some rather transparently military. They were hunting for secret portals, doors in the air through which you could step across the galaxies; through the dimensions; or into another lobe of the multiverse. Braemar was not a believer: but the collective hysteria still grabbed her. She stared with unnatural attention at portions of the fine lawns, seeing places where odd shadows seemed to fall from nowhere, and the air seemed to shimmer.

Uji’s press releases dwelt on the complete security of this valley. They stressed that the aliens were safely contained, and no threat to anyone. This was nonsense, if anything the Aleutians claimed was true. The rest of the invasion force could arrive, here or anywhere,
at any moment.

Braemar walked sedately, thinking of the time of the ’04, when the whole world (the whole tv audience) became expert on the mechanics of plate tectonics and the behavior of molten material. In the queue at the chip shop, the underclasses discussed the importance of an angle of less than 60o between compressed crystals in the crust; bandied comments on the relationship between oceanic ridges and superheated plumes. Your landlady at the pub would explain the unregarded warning of the great Californian quake that never was, the grim precedent of those huge ancient molten flows in Southern India, that killed the dinosaurs.

Once it starts it doesn’t stop you know. They all go off, one by one—

Now it was the aliens. Chip shop queues would be chattering on why Faster Than Light Travel is supposed to be impossible, and how superior beings might have bent the Laws of the Universe. The world’s media had been caught napping, Outer Space had been out of fashion for so long, but it was all being hauled out of mothballs now. The UFO cluster that had been fatally ignored. The failure to discover any sign of the mothership. The landing at Francistown
recorded by the USAF:
for which all official evidence had mysteriously disappeared.

The whole “glob-pop” knew about the lack of “habitable planet candidates” in this neck-of-the-galaxy. Housemaids could recite to you the “best guesses” at the “actual distance in light years” that the aliens had traveled. No one cared a hoot about a Socialist revolution in the USA, but a Californian “expert system” (that is, glorified database treated like a demigod) called SETI had become a global celebrity. The networking masses discussed Clavel’s
blue sun;
and tried to explain to each other the meaning of the expression E=mc2.

What were the dazzling conclusions reached by this mind-meld of the billions? The alien planet was beyond reach of human knowledge, and the FTL vessels had vanished until they were needed again. The aliens, perfectly harmless but perfectly enigmatic, settled in Mr. Kaoru’s up-country retreat, where their host (their keeper?) invited favored members of the media to attend occasional open days

By a ridiculous accident, the visitors had decided that the Eve-riots Conference was the seat of Earth’s World Government. It had been in session at the time, and nominally at least was a more inclusive gathering than the UN. Thank God, the powers-that-be (whoever the hell they were, these chaotic days) had realized this was a very lucky mistake. The mistake had been allowed to stand, while the real governments kept well clear, and waited to see what would happen. The major disadvantage was that when the aliens had asked for human company (through Kaoru), they’d apparently named (through Kaoru) a handful of Eve-riots delegates, who had taken their fancy.

The chosen few had been swiftly coached by SETI. (“We were shut up for a weekend.” reported Robin Lloyd-Price, in a candid interview, “Forced to absorb an inordinate quantity of science fiction, and left to invent the rest.”) They came up from Karen daily, six or eight of them on tours of a fortnight at a time. When they came away they reported everything to SETI, supposedly without omission. But they couldn’t use any form of recording equipment in the house or grounds, the aliens wouldn’t allow it. Kaoru and the “Government of the World” policed each other to keep Uji clean, and the “open days” were obviously specially staged.

You might conclude, if you were skeptical, that nobody uncompromised knew what went on up here. The “Uji-watcher” teams were still
talking;
still held to be psychologically normal. But their allegiance had shifted: this was obvious in their releases, and the SETI debriefings.

Braemar checked off faces. The British pair, Ellen Kershaw and Robin Lloyd-Price; the slick Public Schoolboy who turned any question you asked into an oh, so British joke. Dougie Milne from the USSA, and his assistant Martha Ledern. A skinny old Vietnamese, Vu Nyung Hong (Chas), with his ethereal looking compatriot Rosalie Troi—his niece, and some kind of RC cleric. Milne had been a psychotherapist before the revolution. Rosalie Troi was deaf, birth-defected stone-deaf, and proud of it. Braemar had tried to quiz her on the way up-country, but Mother Rosalie scorned her halting BSL. Brae had only managed to gather that in Rosalie’s opinion alien telepathy was beautiful and genuine. It was
not
a sneaky form of sign language.

Braemar didn’t mind if the team found her hostile. She could be tactless as she liked: she had not come to Uji to play
what is it we aren’t being told?

Ledern’s was an interesting face. That girl had been an urban terrorist (not to mince words). Had the aliens really chosen her, or had she been slipped into the pack?

The “Agnès” interviews were still in her possession. She’d hadn’t even tried to rush them to the world’s screens. Johnny Guglioli might be touched by her fair play, wherever he was. He’d be wrong. Since the day the aliens asked to be taken to Earth’s leaders the game had changed. In this round, she needed to look like a virgin.

The media-pack walked, followed by a giggling group of filmy-coated local girls, pulling the tiffin trolleys, (the aliens didn’t eat earthling food). No ground transport was allowed; no unauthorized tech of any description; not so much as a phone or a wristwatch. Definitely no live transmission. No one questioned these restrictions. It all came under the heading of “reasonable precautions.”

No muscle, no armed guards, and nowhere to run to, if the superbeings suddenly turned nasty. Braemar shuddered. An image of the tampered convertible in Africa came to her, mysteriously horrible. The path was smooth but Arthur, the man from the BBC, solicitously, possessively, took her elbow. He’d fixed the invitation, of course. An independent hadn’t a chance of meeting the aliens on her own account. She looked up at this blowsy, jowly specimen of English middle-aged manhood, and leaned a little more sincerely on his solid arm

There would be no violence. Never had been, until now.

Kaoru was waiting in the main hall of the manor house, a quiet figure in a dark old fashioned suit, gleaming discreetly in the ubiquitous quarantine. He greeted the guests distantly, then retreated to the back of the room. Those who were welcome to pursue him knew who they were; no one else had better dare. Mr. Kaoru, former wheeler and dealer for a Japanese trading house, was adept at fanning up a smokescreen of prestige.

Ellen Kershaw, senior nursemaid, made a short speech, reminding everyone they should have used “the facilities” before they left the helipad. No one yet knew what the aliens did with their digestive wastes, but they didn’t understand the human version. They would become uneasy if someone left their audience chambers for no intelligible reason. Lunch would be served out in the courtyard. The Aleutians didn’t like to watch humans eat.

Karen waitresses began to circulate with trays of the local hooch, and there was no further structure to the reception. There were aliens, at their ease: sitting, lying; curled on the floor. They wore the now-famous dun coveralls, decorated with the now-famous random touches of local color. They awaited the onslaught, unconcerned and magnificently informal as tigers in a zoo.

Arthur had slipped off to join the fringes of Kaoru’s court. He’d been here before: he knew the form. Braemar’s mouth was dry, palms wet. All her certainties deserted her.

“Agnès” on video had seemed
approximately
human, likewise the fright-mask characters on the sparse tv coverage of Uji life. The soothing illusion vanished in this hall. She saw baboons dressed in clothes. She saw mobile animal faces, lined and puckered by such depth of emotion, such aeons of experience she felt like a flatworm. She wanted to laugh and point, like a child at a pantomime—but had a terrifying urge to drop down on her knees. She had been warned about the Aleutian “presence.” She valued the reaction not at all, but she could not suppress it.

We don’t know how they shit. Or even if they do….
That was the measure of human helplessness.

Whereas we believe they can read our minds.

The days of video-conference travel were over. The Aleutians’ attitude to human telecoms was curious, a rich field of study, but certainly it was impossible to network with them. One must be physically present. Ellen Kershaw and Robin were based in KT now, moving up to Karen city when they were on tour at Uji. Ellen’s hopes had not been realized. Close on a year after the event, the Aleutians had a cult following but they did not command attention in Westminster or Bruxelles. She and Robin, picked out by the aliens for reasons that still weren’t clear, had been removed from exile into exile. To her own great surprise, Ellen didn’t care. Let the little world of Westminster go to hell. This was the place to be, the only place to be. It was a privilege to be chosen.

The hall, incense-scented and cool, dropped its shadows around her: home. The media-people spread out slowly. Rajath, “the pirate captain,” came over with a smile—bared teeth, the same modified aggression.

“Thank you for letting us bring Sarah,” said Ellen. “This will be something to tell her grandchildren.”

She and Rajath were old friends. It might eventually transpire that the “talkers” were not in charge. Maybe they were highly trained mediators, maybe they were crazy pariahs. Time would tell. Like naturalists following a baboon tribe, the teams handed out ranks, personalities that made some kind of sense; and genders, too.

Sarah, the same brown-mouse maid whose ironic costume had once amused Ellen in her exile, bobbed a nervous curtsey. She kept house for Ellen and Robin in Krung Thep, and in Karen city when they were on tour—and she’d conceived a passion for the aliens. Ellen was delighted to have been able to make the child’s dream come true, even if it pushed a few noses out of joint. Sarah’d been a godsend over the past months—self-effacing, cheerful, miraculously efficient.

Rajath swept an extravagant bow, took the child’s hand, perused her face.

He turned to Ellen. “Never give a sucker an even break!”

His manner suggested a mixture of knowing amusement and wild panic. Ellen laughed, though she’d no idea what the joke might be. Rajath’s moods were always infectious.

Sarah did not laugh. She looked for a moment as if she might scream and run: some people did react that way. Rajath crooked his arm, proffered a dun-clad elbow.

To her credit, young Sarah accepted the alien’s gesture without starting or squirming. Brave girl! But Ellen had every confidence. The Aleutians were always well-intentioned.