White Queen (24 page)

Braemar was not impressed. “Yeah, like the rest of us.”

The scientist had pronounced, once and for all, that the alien invasion was not an
enormous hoax,
the conspiracy theory that had proved amazingly robust in certain quarters. But s/he had produced nothing useful. Some of their confederates had wondered if the aliens might melt if they stood out in the rain. Clem’d refused to research this. S/he had declined to discover a devastating allergy to housedust; or common salt, or Planet Earth’s amino acids. S/he went her own way. S/he was playing. S/he liked being the center of attention, and s/he knew they were all too ignorant to challenge hir. But Clem’s attitude problem was no longer a problem, strictly speaking. The time when they could have announced to the world that alien tissue behaved like normal biological tissue, and not the flesh of angels—and broken the cursed spell—was in the past. There’d be global panic, now, if anyone heard of what was going on here. Nobody would be grateful.

If the telepath superbeings knew everything, they hadn’t yet descended in fire and thunder on the scientist’s hideaway. Maybe this was another example of their august mercy. Their abiding love of the human race—

“Now come over here.”

Braemar looked into an open topped tank, the depth within split into two. A multicolored protean animal moved in each space.” On your left, you see yourself: a human cell. On your right, the alien. By the way, this really is you, Brae. I stole it from you, hahaha. You don’t mind?”

“Um.”

“This here (the focus moved) is what we call the nucleus. In here, the chromosomes of your mama and your papa are bound together. What God has joined and cannot be put asunder: the chymical wedding that is you. These little stray pieces are the mitochondria, traits that come from your mama alone and do not recombine. Now, see the alien.”

“It looks the same?”

“Wrong!” It was sometimes a good idea to be wrong. The scientist’s tone brightened perceptibly.”
Never
think in those terms, Gracious Highness. I do not call this
stuff
this big untidy cluster, this kitten-knitting-ball of bases, DNA. I call it
alien
DNA’; or aDNA. Notice the absence of any mitochondria-analogue: and there are other very great differences.”

“Sorry.”

“There is an extra-altered-phosphate group, an extra-hydroxyl-group. Making in all seven bases. The hydrogen bonds are different, which means a different configuration within the cell. It’s impossible for any informed observer to call these two
the same.”

“Oh. I see.”

“But the greatest difference is this. You will know what “everybody knows.” That most of our own DNA is not genes, or is useless information. Quite untrue, but it’s a lay-person’s version. The case here is utterly other. Hardly any of what you see in the alien chromosomes is used by this individual. Not hardly any! The cell is a schizophrenic, it is in a terrible mess. Suppose, in the nucleus of one cell of yours lives one person?. Guess how many separate individuals I believe may be living in the alien cell? Guess!”

“Three?”

“Close! Between three and five million. Approximately.”

“Oh.”

“Each of them maybe as complex as you or I. Highly concentrated, very conservative, very acquisitive individuals. I suppose since they have no power to refresh their stocks by recombination, they dare not discard anything that might one day be useful. It is crowded in there, but don’t worry for our little alien. The snake pit is doped. I would say there is a chemical event—analogous to our ‘moment of conception’—forever deciding which of the threads, so to speak, is expressed.”

Conception. Braemar seized on a word that suggested something concrete.

“Do you mean you know how they reproduce?”

“I can guess how they don’t! How can I put it? This alien had no daddy.”

“Parthenogenesis.”

“Ah, long words. If I had a baby that had no daddy,
that
would be parthenogenesis. Leave aside a little scrappy random mutation, and external effects like the conditions inside my body, my baby would be me. If this alien had a baby. Well. There’s no reason I can see why it should not be a little Mr. Alien. But there are many more chances that it will be a different alien-person. Another one of those millions.”

The sexless, disembodied voice became dreamy.

“The most incomprehensible thing about this universe is the fact that I can understand it.
Albert Einstein said that. Alien, but not. Of course, the bases have to be like ours, this is decided by elemental factors, time, gravity, molecular bonds. Still it’s so remarkable: so near and yet so far.”

The image in the tank changed. “This is human
adenine,
the fiery humor. Touch it, put your hands on, touch your own anger.”

Braemar ignored the suggestion. She’d been boobytrapped in here before.

“Isn’t it vanishingly unlikely,” she wondered. “That they should be so like us? Surely it means maybe they
were
human, a very long time ago?”

The scientist laughed. Hahaha, Clem’s usual mechanical cackle.

“When the galaxy was seeded by the Gods with humanoid sentients? Don’t you believe it. The chemicals are God. They decide everything. Don’t you like my new joke? We are made of the five humors: watery, fiery, airy, earthy, and the one the Aristotelians called ‘quintessence.’ Adenine is the base that in its functions, suggests aggression, appetite. Therefore, fire.”

“Could we possibly get back to the Cairns-Hurt mutations?”

“Cairns-
Hall!”
The scientist must never be HUSTLED. “Enough! I have no news for you, nothing you can understand. Everything I say to you, I have to talk in bad analogy, baseless surmise. This isn’t easy work, I don’t have a big fancy laboratory, I don’t have robotics. These things keep dying. I cannot make them build me an alien. I need that trigger, and where is it? Then you ask me,
how does their telepathy work?
You ask me,
prove that what they did to the smart machines is not magic.
Get out of my lab! Get out before I blow you sky high!”

Braemar returned to New Cross Gate. She peeled off her headset and gloves, pulled the printout and began to read, rubbing her brow and chewing her lip. She found it marginally easier to make sense of this stuff on her own. Her outboard monitor held nothing but a government health warning.
You are entering a computer generated environment. Remember that nothing you see or touch or hear is real.
Too bloody right, when you were dealing with Clem Stewart.

Beneath it, another message appeared.

ii

On the stairs in the house in New Cross, there was a picture that Johnny didn’t like. It was large and plain. It showed a kind of cot or cradle standing in an empty attic. The grain of the wooden floorboards was crudely clear, there was nothing else in the picture but a shaft of light. The title was
Parsifal 1,
the artist someone called Anselm Kiefer. It was a copy. The original, he gathered, was fairly famous. But to Johnny it always seemed that the baby in the cradle (the baby suggested by the cradle) had to be dead. He would avert his eyes, coming up the fine wide stairway: remembering Brae’s child who had died. Remembering Bella, the scar that hurt sometimes when he was tired.

It was a time when the
kuss die hande
chivalry of deep continental Europe once more defined a woman’s place in the world. In Brit polite society any professional woman, especially if she was single or divorced, had to be careful. A woman working in the media was barely respectable: it was assumed that she had to be using her sexual favors in some way. But as that drunk had told him, “the Samaritan” had her niche. Her smart friends would gather every Wednesday for an evening of refined karaoke, and a little sedate role-play after supper.

The mood of Braemar’s London had been set by the ’04. There was no order in the cosmos anymore, only the shocking certainty that
anything can happen;
and a proliferation of fortune-telling theories. People were waiting for the next global disaster, because catastrophes were normal now. It could be the apocalyptic floods, it could be another massive lava flow. Popular science said the ’04 could well have marked the start of a devastating series. Anything would do. The neighbor star that goes nova and drenches Earth in killer radiation, the giant asteroid on a collision course; the new and unstoppable mutated virus, the Night Of The Living Dead. This was the world that had abandoned live action movies, stayed away in droves from the holo-films that had replaced them. Cartoon emotion was the favored artistic expression. Classic animation, the more primitive the better, the stylish art form. Drama was too slow, too ordered: completely unlike nature.

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.