White Queen (27 page)

“Quick. Put it in a bucket of water,” he joked.

He made to toss the packet into one of the fat earthenware pots that flanked the office door, where Ellen’s treasured blue lotus bloomed.
(Please,
said a polite notice, in English,
remember the flower and the jar are real here).
A chemical tag ripped. A big glistening bubble leapt into existence, and flowed swiftly into the center of livespace. Inside it, a fisheye street scene. Glimpses of bygone fashions, curvaceous old motor cars and wide, sprawling boulevards. Music. Fading.
“It’s May the tenth, 1940,”
the bomber’s disguised voice told them.
“Whitehall, London. The Panzers have cut through the French cavalry at Dinant—”
A silhouette. A bulky figure stood looking out of a tall window, into the unseasonal heat and dust on Horse Guards Parade. “I hope it is not too late,” muttered Churchill, chewing on an emblematic cigar. “I very much fear that it is.”

He turned around. “Remember ‘holosell’?” he rumbled. “Rip the tab for your free gift, and suddenly there’s a walk-round image of a three piece suite filling your front hall. How vulgar! Everybody wanted that kind of advert outlawed. So we were told. When it was put to the polls,
everybody
turned out to be the bourgeois. Ordinary people loved holosell.” The Churchill cutout grinned like a schoolboy. “Until it died a natural death…. The letterbomb lives on, because the people want to know. They understand that this is the only way that outlaws like me can reach them. Invading a public, recorded space with the news that no one else dares to tell.”

He appeared to touch the bubble skin. “Clever, isn’t it. A hollow sphere with a boundary of rearranged air, the molecules arrayed to form a reflective surface: 360 camcorder technology is a wonderful thing. It’s a pity no one will ever know. The Aleutians don’t like our media gadgets. The whole electromagnetic spectrum is dismissed to their sidelines; they’re not interested in anything we’ve learned. No one will remember this incredible age. The pathways will close, the limbs of our science and art will atrophy. I wonder, will relics ever be found by a new human civilization, on the other side? We can only hope so.”

The mournfully pompous tone of this gibberish enraged Ellen so that she could hardly speak. But speak she must. In public hours this office was routinely tracked by every news agency on Earth. She must assume this scene was already on tv somewhere: soon it would be all over the place. A letterbomb cannot enter into dialogue. The tactic was to challenge the ghost, disarming a potent illusion.

“Mr. Churchill, you greatly underestimate the intelligence of the modern public. ‘Ordinary people’ are well aware that our visitors are aliens. We understand very little about each other as yet. SETI informs us that it will be generations before—”

Churchill became a woman, a famous personality dead just long enough to have entered the public domain. “Once upon a time we had a thing called ‘Collective Ideology.’ It protected us, kept us from understanding things we didn’t want to understand. You people have SETI. You’re afraid to get close to the aliens. So SETI tells you to keep away. You’re afraid to refuse their demands, so SETI tells you to do whatever you’re told.” The embodiment of well-groomed female authority paused. “Frankly, you’re losing your grip. In my day, an expert system was a reference tool, not a pagan idol.”

The bubble collapsed just as the access light went out.

“Sorry,” said Ellen. “I walked into that one.”

Martha snapped gloves on and dropped the remains of the packet into an evidence bag. The mechanism was already melting. It wouldn’t tell them much. They could identify the private studio that produced the bomb, but it would be booby-trapped to hell, a police raid a pointless gift of more publicity coverage for the bad guys. She stared at the place where the bubble had been, psychic habit having turned that patch of space into a blank screen.

“The White Queen has an eejay in the band now.” She scratched her armpit, ruminatively. Her white-blonde looks went with the mannerisms of a hoodlum street child.

“You mean Johnny Guglioli,” said Ellen. “The young man who made an appearance at one of the gigs on the European tour.”

“Yeah. He’s good, I remember him. That looked like his work.”

No one yet knew how Johnny Guglioli had hacked the guest list for the Barbican reception; what it was that had been delivered to him there; or who had sent it. The aliens’ minders had been fully occupied trying to keep tabs on their wayward superbeings.

“One of old Seimwa’s artistes, with an imaginary disease. And an aging meeja courtesan. No great loss to their families.” Martha locked hands and pointed an imaginary pistol. “We should take them out. Applied with care, assassination
works.”

“I never know when you’re joking,” said Robin, admiringly.

The Thai Secret Service woman and Ellen Kershaw eyed each other.

“How can she be so sure?” murmured Ellen.

Braemar Wilson had been a founder member of the anti-Aleutian group “White Queen.” The accepted rationale was that the “media courtesan” had been traumatized, radicalized when she witnessed the death of Sarah Brown. But Ellen remembered an adamant hostility, coming off the woman in waves before anything went wrong. It was eerie. Of course there were risks, there were fears. It was frightening, sometimes, to realize how much they were forced to take on trust. But what did Wilson know? What was the secret horror that everyone else had missed?

8 
PARSIFAL

i

Clavel left the
SS Asabo
at Liverpool, and made his way to London. He didn’t know what had gone wrong. He had waited and waited, but Johnny didn’t come to the Devereux fort. He had not worried about his appearance, the last time he was in Fo. He was Clavel; and people either knew that, or why should they be interested in the shape of his features? But he had learned to be a stranger now. He could not stop naming himself a stranger with every breath. People would notice, they would look, and they would see one of the famous Aleutians. So he wore a facemask. No one wondered at that, it was a common gesture.

Aditya had given him some jewelry to sell, fair exchange for the delight of at least a minor scene with Rajath. He discovered that the value of Aleutian artifacts had soared: which in itself should give everyone something to think about. Rajath’s real-estate scam was more than ever just pure greed.

It was a long way to London and the traffic cripplingly slow. In the dark he pulled out of it to rest, along with many other travelers. He lay in his car, too fiery to sleep, his body crawling with excitement. He stared into awesome distances. That vast ocean, vast sky; the tiny stars that had never seemed so far away. He thought about all the starry banners in the locals’ assembly hall.

He had tried to have a conversation once with Douglas, the Dark River, (in the Common Tongue, Aleutians named him sad one) about local formal names: Ellen, which meant Shining; and her truechild Bright. All those stars, so many people who were seen as forms of light…what did it mean? But the Sad One didn’t want to talk about it.

At the city perimeter he left the car and walked. He walked around for days, surrounded by the two nations. Clavel had believed they must be defending separate territories in most places: coming together only to parley in elaborate ceremony. That was how it looked in the dead world, and it fitted what he remembered of the conditions of shooting war. But in this city the enemies lived together, just as in Fo. He hoped for their sake the fighting wouldn’t reach them. It would be dreadful: hand to hand in every house, every street.

His escape from Uji had been easy enough to organize, using the resources of the dead Mr. Kaoru, but he was very much on his own here. Nobody had any helpful suggestions, except the strong one that he should not sell anything more. He ate the food that other people left on their plates; and slept where he tired. He asked everyone he met if they knew where to find Johnny Guglioli. There might be more efficient ways of tracing an individual, but he didn’t want any fuss: and time is cheap. He only realized after several days that he was becoming terribly, terribly sad. He had no reason to be unhappy. He was an invisible explorer again, and he would soon be with Johnny. Yet a pall of grief filled his air, crept into his pores.

At night Clavel ran four-footed. Once he curled up in a dusty doorway, out of the wind, and heard a few people singing dolorously.

Were you there when we crucified our lord
Were you there when we crucified our lord
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble
Were you there when we crucified our lord…

He did not catch all the words but the meaning flowed through him like water: shame and loss and never-ending sorrow. It was as if every story in the shrine of the singers had been mutilated in the same way, cut off forever at a nadir of misery and defeat. Clavel found himself weeping helplessly, but the tears were mysteriously sweet. He didn’t want to stop, he wanted to go on weeping forever.

He found a system of tunnels, guarded by the dead. The dead trains alarmed him more than Kaoru’s jetplane. But there were maps on the walls and written signs everywhere, this made life a lot easier. He began to cover the map, methodically.

The tunnels were randomly dark and bright, packed and deserted. The mask became unnecessary. The people who rubbed against him, jostled him or hurried by accepted him as one of themselves. Some liked him, some didn’t, some gave vent to irrational bursts of hostility. Nothing was strange. He went into a canteen and walked around the tables. He ate a dish of rice, sopping it with reddish bitter sauce that he found on another plate; finished up with a kind of cake. It was no particular hour outside on the platform. There was a ghostly half light over everything. A heap of clothes shambled by, and called to him hoarsely.

“You’re low, you are!”

Clavel suddenly realized why this tunnel world was so reassuring. But he couldn’t refuse. He and the ragged man sat down.

“I need to eat and I can’t afford to pay.”

“It’s low. Bins, I’ve done dustbins. But not straight off someone’s plate.”

He patted Clavel’s thigh. “You’ve got a’ watch that. You stop worrying about what people think of you, and it’s the downward path. I’ve seen it happen.”

“Don’t worry,” said Clavel. “I’m not going mad.”

Something started a rush on the transport and bodies began to sweep by them. So many faces, all of them drawn and sad. This grief had been all around him in Fo; and at Uji, whenever the locals came to visit. He had not been able to feel it until now.

“Can you read?” asked the ragged man.

Lugha had worked hard to assimilate the written language. It had been no struggle for Clavel. He had learned once that everybody dreams, but only those who use language can describe the state to themselves. “If you’re a poet,” he said. “You don’t just remember dreams, you remember how dreaming works. You can do it in the daytime: mapping from one set of states of affairs to another, so that there arises this thing called ‘meaning.’ I couldn’t tell you ‘how,’ no more than I could tell you straight off exactly how I put one foot in front of another. You don’t ‘how’ it, you just do it. You can do it with suggestive abstract patterns as easily as with shaped sound. In fact, you can’t stop. It’s because you and I are addicted to the thing called ‘meaning’ that we use Spoken Words, and have responsibilities, and people who depend on us.”

“Ah. What’s it say, up there then.”

“Marble Arch.”

“Ah. D’you believe in God, Miss? We’re all part of God, did you know that. Every man and woman, part of one great whole. This life is a moment, a tiny step on the way. We’re animals in our bodies. We don’t matter, except for the little spark of something that carries on. Something divine. ‘Scuse me, Miss. I’m on the wrong line.”

He gathered himself up and headed for the stairs. Clavel followed, but he was soon lost in the crowd. Clavel was moved, profoundly, by the confirmation that these people were no different flesh. Sorrow was the missing link. That bottomless sorrow to which he had no clue held these people together. It stood for them in the place of living wanderers. He walked on, stirred and elated: singing softly.

Were you there when we crucified our lord…?

Johnny went a little mad after he ran out on Braemar. He knew she didn’t deserve the dirty names. Or if she did, then not from Johnny. He couldn’t claim she’d tried to entrap him. It was nobody’s fault but his own that he’d fallen in love. He wanted to go back and explain. But she didn’t want to know: and in fact the whole can of worms opened by her suggestion about Clavel did not bear explanation. So he went crazy instead.

Assailed by homesickness, he sat in his room watching rewired
Sesame Street;
and fretted uselessly at the bowdlerization of Oscar the Grouch. He would actively seek out Carlotta and the parrot, and yell advice and comment into his one-way tv remote. He told her to make friends with the aliens. They were
telepaths,
he would remind her. They’d met a few dippy East Asians and a few paranoid Youros: they thought that got through to everyone. Remind them we exist, he shouted. Ask them in, invite them back.

He cleared his room of the anti-Aleutian debris he’d picked up: personally carried a heap of paper and charged plastic down to the incinerator and saw it fried to vapor. He felt better when he’d done that. How could he expect Clavel to come and save him, if the ether around him was poisoned with blatant hostility?

He would wake up in the night feeling slimy, filthy…. This used to happen in the American hospital in Amsterdam, when he was trying to get a clean test. His therapist talked to him about the connection between his different losses: communion with the machinery, sexual intercourse, social intercourse. The doctor had advised frequent masturbation. Johnny would have to learn to enjoy self-love; and fight the self-hatred that might lead to violent behavior. If he was going
that
way, he’d be put on permanent medication. They were not easy on you in that place. In principle, they believed in noncommittal quarantine. In principle they even believed in Johnny’s innocence. But the responsibility was awful, and they let you know it.

He began to dream about the future. It was a good place. It was like a big, big ecocyclic mall, very safe and full of pretty greenery. Kids with ridiculous make-up raced around. There were some nice little babies, welcome and much loved, not stealing anything from anyone. He would wake from one of these dreams feeling peaceful and reassured. He knew that none of the people in the dream mall were exactly human, but he felt okay about that.

The end of August was hot and grey and windy: fever weather. He had less work to do because people were not buying red meat; and therefore less money, but he wasn’t going to starve. Idleness was more of a problem. It was a dull day in early September when he hallucinated for the first time. The alien looked at him out of the entrance to Holborn Tube.

He crossed the street and found a newsagent dispenser, shouting headlines at the rush-hour traffic. He inspected the machine all over: screen, masthead menupad, grinning delivery drawer. He had to buy a paper before he was convinced it was real. It was the experience that he’d had in Fo, uncannily mimicked. Far too exact a copy to be anything but fake.

He went for his six week medical, and said nothing about his problems; suffered the objective sampling with the stoicism of despair. There was nothing wrong, according to Jatinder. Johnny had always known the man was a careless crook. He didn’t need a doctor to tell him what was happening. The QV disease, which he had almost forgotten, had caught up with him after all. His mind had begun to rot.

Johnny’s room had a window. It looked into the air well between his building and a buried nineteenth century facade. There was another window opposite, barely a meter away, grimy glass intact under a lintel of blurred stone flowers. It was closed off inside by a partition wall. There was a trompe l’oeil effect: Johnny’s lit room being reflected there at an oddly convincing angle. He had often caught himself thinking he had a neighbor. When he started hallucinating he kept moving his bedscreen over, so he wouldn’t imagine an alien in the reflected room. Mrs. Frame’s girl, who considered Johnny’s view of the air well a magnificent amenity, kept moving it away again.

The rains started early that year. Everyone was pleased. The cycle of feast and famine had already become traditional: no water for months, then gulp it until you choke. The old native English felt cozy about it, dreamed they were lording over the plains of India again.
My God, the heat, Carruthers….
Johnny had absorbed something of this feeling. The night the Monsoon broke in earnest, he felt calmer. He lay in bed listening to the storm, thinking of great London steaming gently as it drowned. Londoners would have to resign themselves soon: become amphibians or get away from that tidal river.

Braemar claimed that the way people reacted to the Aleutians was a meaningless hangover from ’04. People had believed that the disaster was a “punishment.” The Aleutians were interpreted the same way: it was nonsense, mass hysteria.

She was wrong. The punishment was real, and ongoing: poison seeping into the Pacific, teeming artificial cities in desert places; too much for the world to bear. He was being punished himself, for the wild excesses of twentieth century technology. That’s why the alien swam up in his rotting brain. He closed his eyes, sick and miserable. He had always known, deep in his heart, that no one could corrupt the NIH. If the Big Machinery said so, he was infected, never mind how. How long would this foreplay last? You get confused, can’t tell the difference between two years ago and yesterday. First you forget what you had for breakfast, then you forget what the word “breakfast” means. How does a person cope with the onset of premature dementia?

The voice was so convincing that he went to have a look. The alien was out there in the wet dark, clinging to the other windowsill. “I can’t!” he shouted. “This window doesn’t open!”

It fumbled in its clothes, then leaned and reached out with one clawed hand across the air well. The glass melted. There was a pungent smell. The alien clambered, joints all wrong like giant bat, and tumbled into his room. It was Clavel.

she said.