White Queen (32 page)

She wore the Annie Mah dress and took him to the opera, to see
Young Girls Are Vulnerable,
a black comedy set in the eighties, in this famous production: in which Sharon bets Tracy that she can, with the greatest of ease, transform their two “New Man” boyfriends into heartless chauvinist pigs. Braemar thought it was very funny. Johnny found the farce painfully sad and the music ridiculously mannered, but he laughed too. She planned to go to Germany, to track down Peenemünde Buonarotti. She wanted Johnny to come.

They discussed this project in the park on top of Telegraph Hill, while Billy played in the sandpit, and two feral wallabies hopped and peered from behind stands of blazing autumn leaves. Mortuary London lay spread below. Ninety six percent of the British population lives in the cities, Johnny recalled. People piled on people piled on people. The rest is National Forest, roads, food production. A mood of smug self-denial barely keeps the packed islanders sane. It was a poverty different from Africa’s, but no less piteous.

“I imagine it was Clavel,” said Braemar, “who thought up the revenge of the machines. Remember how she used to feel about market trucks?”

Johnny nodded. “She’s important. What is she to them, do you know?”

“A poet. One of the unacknowledged legislators.”

Johnny had been to Dr. Jatinder. The news that Johnny had engaged in unprotected sex, and thought he might have picked up an infection, didn’t shock him. He took it for granted, the criminal bastard, that Johnny’s partner or partners were not to be traced. It was a relief that the doctor had found nothing weird. But Johnny still felt polluted. He thought of Braemar deliberately keeping one of those squirming things in her mouth, and her ruthless courage awed him.

The reaction to rape faded mechanically, like a bruise changing color, and he was still in mourning for the Santa Maria’s cabin girl. The Aleutians that should have been.

“I guess I ruined your best shot, Brae. I don’t think we’re going to do that interview.”

Brae avoided his eyes. “Mm. I don’t believe she’ll be back.”

Johnny filled the red and blue dustcart with damp sand and trundled it up and down for Bill.

“D’you still think of Bella?”

“Yes.” He began to shape a sand tower. “It doesn’t go away, does it.”

She had lost a child herself. She took the alien-made passport from her purse.

“We can use this.” She’d had it checked over by a White Queen mechanic. “There’s no reason a stripe-scanner wouldn’t accept it.”

“What if we run into a human being?” The morning after his consciousness-raising experience with Clavel, he’d have stormed Uji with a bowie-knife between his teeth. He had calmed down. He had no intention of being left behind on this trip: but the QV raised its ugly head. “I’m still a mad dog. They can shoot me on sight if they catch me out of Greater London without the proper paperwork. Or lock me up for life in a ward full of chemo-refusenik child-molesters.”

Braemar grinned. “I have a plan. I’m going to take you to the Red Queen. S/he’ll fix you up so the NIH itself wouldn’t know you. You’ve started to feel constructive again, that’s good.”

Johnny poked windows into his creation with the stem of a dead leaf. “Guglioli,” he said. “A little spire, see? I’m not totally uneducated.” He looked up at her, quizzically. “So I’m gonna be introduced to one of the gang, for real. Does this mean we’re going steady?”

The Red Queen operated in Folkestone, in the French enclave: commonly known as E2:500, its notional distance from Paris. The native seaside resort was now ten miles or so inland, recreated under cover. The Queen lived, apparently, in a classy old Victorian hotel-block right on the cliffs. Expensive looking joint. Johnny wondered about this White Queen bio-hacker. He detested her profession, but he liked the idea of another fabulously beautiful, loose-moraled Ancient Brit. If she was rich, and she had those skills, she could write her own face. And body.

They went round to a side entrance, where the concierge was a machine. Braemar handed him an optical pass. “But be quiet. The domestics aren’t supposed to have visitors.”

The hotel basement stone passages, peeling paintwork; a smell of brine. Something, the sea or the plumbing, whooshed and gurgled. In the service garage someone was directing robotics under a piece of Italian exotica. The mechanic came out, pulling off a hear-and-do wire. The Red Queen was small and wiry in greasy overalls, with a big nose and goblinish mouth, much silvered straight black hair and narrow, slavic-looking green eyes. Age, indeterminate: not young, not old.

Braemar introduced them. “Clem Stewart, Queen of Bohemia; Johnny Guglioli—”

“Clem,” said the Queen. She held his hand too long. She had cop’s eyes, if not worse. “I suppose you really are John Francis Guglioli? I remember you, bright baby out of the Letat vat.”

She had a slight Eastern accent.

“And I suppose you really are the Queen of Bohemia?”

“Of course. To call me Red is just a joke. Come into the alchemist’s den.”

The den was behind a false wall at the back of the garage; not all that secret. Probably one or two of the residents upstairs made use of the illegal facilities. Johnny could name some of the equipment, which meant it was years old, but it all looked to be in working order. There were photos on the walls, the kind they have to display in Brit pharmacies and cosmetic clinics, to warn people what over-the-counter “gene therapy” can do. They seemed to be up there for fun. Johnny had seen the rise of this new criminal industry in New York. A new means of threat, traceless murder. New faces, weird babies, horrible thrills. He felt a little sick.

The troglodyte chuckled. “My grandfather worked for the government, my father too. He came to England after the ’89 revolution, reverted to an old family name. Now I live as you see. Bad blood will out.” She preened, stroking her silvery hair. “I could have any post, anywhere. Public or private sector, if you understand me. I prefer this life. It suits me. I’m my own mistress.”

She walked with a shamble, like a cowboy off his horse, into a den within the den. Beside an armchair with an embroidered linen headrest a glass case stood on a table. It held a sword with an engraved blade, and a display of rotting beige documents. She posed beside this set-up, waiting for Johnny’s admiring curiosity.

“Clem’s a direct descendant of Elizabeth of Bohemia,” explained Braemar, gravely. “Who was the daughter of—um, James the First and Sixth. James Stuart, or Stewart; like the movie actor. But shorter. It was her idea that we should be queens. It’s classy, don’t you think.”

The hacker smirked.

“You’ve never thought of reclaiming the throne?”

She was delighted with this sally. “Yes, yes! A Royal Secret-Policeman, Queen in Praha. That would be a
good
joke, the kind that we Czechs appreciate. But let’s forget about me.”

Her tone gave Johnny to understand that she knew this wouldn’t be easy.

“You are a recruit, I understand, and you need a new face, short term. So you tell me about your allergies, and your bad genes.”

“I think you know about my bad genes.”

“A political disease is irrelevant. If things are otherwise, you can still trust me. I will not wake any demons.”

She led him from the furnished nook. Braemar stayed behind.

“Sit here, Mr. Guglioli.”

The foam of the chair had a bloom of age on it, a crumbling lichen. It folded around him. Clem donned eyeprotectors and dipped her hands and face in a spray tank. She yawned to spread the film over her mouth, then moved in. She took a scrape from inside his cheek, probed his cheekbones, eyesockets and jaw, like a blind woman: getting closer than was strictly necessary. He felt her breasts, nudging slyly through the overalls, something
off
about the whole thing. He imagined grubby underwear.

“Any dentistry?”

“Nngh.”

The headrest guided his face forwards into a black-mouthed funnel. Tiny fingers that he could not feel were inching his deathmask. “Keep still now, for me to take your picture. You can open your eyes. What do you see in there?”

He saw a mirror, virtually imposed on the darkness. As he watched the cheeks of the image bunched up, the bridge of the nose spread a little; the space between eyelid and brow narrowed. The chin grew thicker and square. Maybe this was Francis.

“It’s not you, is it. Quite unlike anyone you’ve ever met. We concentrate on the eye area, where most can be done to disrupt identity, with least risk of ill effects. You don’t want me to meddle too much with your bones, it’s not safe.”

She read him his rights. “You realize, Mr. Guglioli, that in gene therapy the most minor treatment can have unforeseen and serious side effects, which may not be reversible.”

“Yeah,” said Johnny, feeling a frisson of terror. “Yeah, yeah.”

“What do you prefer? Eyedrops, inhaler, paper-flowers?”

“Paper-flowers.”

The alchemist’s box of tricks went to work. Clem folded her arms and gazed at her client.

“So, tell me,” he said, not to be intimidated. “How did it all start?”

She laughed, ha ha ha, as if she was reading from a cue.

“It was a game, Mr. Guglioli. A fantasy game of strategy. Who knows why we played together: some common feeling that the people around us were aliens, and out to get us. I was a founder. I started the royal character names, of course, that appealed to me. Braemar brought in the Lewis Carroll references. We have been around for much longer than any wire-tapper knows. We collected real information for our game, and so we discovered the hypnotized Alaskans. There was a network meeting, then, of a few players who believed this was the real thing. We exchanged real names, we made solemn vows. We decided to play on the big board, and see if we could prove what we suspected. Our game was called
The Aliens Have Landed—
very simple. One could play it any style. After the first announcement from Krung Thep, we became ‘White Queen,’ and chose the preemptive resistance scenario. Oh, and it was not a fantasy anymore. That’s the whole story.”

“What’s your total numbers?”

“The technique of slipping in a casual, impossible question. Of course, I won’t tell you. But I will disclose this for free: we’ll have many more recruits soon.”

“Do you do a lot of your kind of work for White Queen?”

Her mouth stretched under the film. “Personalized ‘explosives’? Sick buildings? Traceless poison? I never touch baby-making, it’s a dirty trade.” She shook her head. “No, Mr. Guglioli. This is the first false nose I have provided.”

“So what
do
you do?”

“Mainly I experiment with alien tissue. I have studied their analog of genetic material and discovered things that would terrify you.” She watched him with those bad-cop eyes. “You don’t like me Mr. Guglioli. You wish you never got mixed up in this. But here you are, the good people: and you don’t want me but you need me. It’s like old times.”

The plant began to bleep. “Ah.” Clem retrieved a sealed dropper tube. “Your prescription, gracious Sir. ‘Take two at bedtime.’ Coming down, I warn you there’ll be subcutaneous hemorrhage. You and Braemar will make up something unconvincing about doorknobs.”

She dipped her face and hands in the tank, popped out the eye protectors: tugged at her brow and cheeks. Braemar appeared.

“All finished? Thanks, Clem.”

The two women embraced. Johnny saw that Braemar returned the hug with enthusiasm, but didn’t relish it. Clem squeezed his knuckles.

“Be careful, fellow traveler. Don’t hurt my crazy friend. Even if she seems to enjoy it, eh?”

So it had been a game. A Big Board game: lunatics out on the streets, creeping round invisible obstacles, heads locked in some frantically exciting unreality. The Cooper slotted into a midlane of the E2. The Europeans had slashed their road systems, and ran punitive fuel rationing, but the freeways that were left were always packed. The addicts could always get a fix from somewhere, for this filthy habit. Johnny couldn’t feel superior. He was about to drive to Prussia, and Brae wasn’t going to do that on her official 16.5 liters a month. The Queen of Bohemia was right, he wished he’d never got involved with these weird, cryptofascist losers.

They had to drive. It would be too risky to try and get Johnny on a plane or a ferry, the road tunnel was the best option—and Braemar hadn’t set foot on a train since the Frogs bought out National Rail. “You’re the White Queen: she’s the Red Queen, who’s the White King?”

“Clem takes care of that connection.”

“Okay, so I’m not to know…. The Red King?”

“Pierre, of course.” It was a nasty answer. The image of monkey-eyed Larrialde, furtively hiding a bloodstained handkerchief—

She glanced at him.

“What were you expecting, Johnny? You know how it goes. When the wonderful white folk come along, they are as gods, and all the decent people are thrilled. It’s only the mean, twisted old witchdoctor who plots against them, along with maybe good chief Mbongo’s treacherous discarded wife. The proverbial minority of troublemakers.”

“Sorry. But your hacker gave me the creeps. I hate hackers. How can you trust the woman?”