White Queen (33 page)

Braemar smiled sourly. “Clem is not a woman. She’s a man.”

So that’s what had felt wrong. Ouch. He apologized for himself—

“She’s a transexual?”

Brae laughed at the prim tone of his correction.

“No, s/he’s a man. Clem isn’t a woman trapped in a man’s body, s/he’s not suffering, s/he has no plans to go all the way. Clem likes having two sets of equipment.” Braemar glowered at the traffic. “Men wearing frocks, men with tits. Maybe menstruating next: Clem’s weird enough to try it. Makes me sick. You couldn’t any of you stand the real thing for long.”

The venom surprised him. But Braemar was such a consummate female, maybe it figured.

There was no break in the conurbation between Cinqcents and London. Mortuary towers heaved by. Johnny waited until he reckoned the irritable fit was over. “Brae. Don’t get mad: but is it true? Do you really honest to God have some alien tissue?”

“Honest to God.” She sighed, frowned. “The trouble is: you’ve met Clem. I trust hir as a hacker. Implicitly. You can use hir stuff without a qualm. When it comes to what she says about the aliens, I’ve seen nothing real. Genes. How would I know real from fake, on that scale? What is there that you can see, or touch? I don’t know whether to believe a word s/he says.”

Clementina settled in hir armchair, still shedding tatters of biodegradable skinshield. S/he donned a headmask with a trailing lead, and watched alien molecules that were building themselves, delicate as snowflakes, from the outside in. Such beauty and such potential! Some day soon S/he would destroy all the work, and the records. Roll on the new Dark Age.

S/he found it perversely, deeply satisfying that nobody in White Queen knew what to make of Clem the mad scientist. They had
no idea
what astonishing work s/he had done, in unraveling the alien chemistry. But oh yes, it was all true. Soon enough, (and far too late) people would begin to understand the implications. S/he gazed at the glass case, at that tarnished sword, thinking of a day that was most certainly coming. Hir goblin mouth puckered wisely. S/he fully expected to die, sooner or later, while fighting for the resistance. Fighting for the human race, which had no place, had only distaste, for the person Clem Stewart was.

“New recruits. Plenty of recruits! But which cause is just?

Which cause is mine? Ah, who can ever know?”

ii

Peenemünde was in Quarantine. Or rather, in the English phrase that better covered the situation, she had been Sent To Coventry. The University would not dismiss her, because of the scandal, but they’d taken her work away from her. Also the teaching—though that was no loss to anyone, she was a terrible teacher. She missed her project. She missed even more the human warmth: a tiny trickle of input she had not noticed until it stopped coming.

No one would talk to her. Literally no one. They would barely nod. Since Peenemünde had scarcely ever in her life
initiated
a social conversation, her loss was a strange one. She kept to her few well-trodden paths as before, sublimely unreactive: but most improbably nothing ever bumped into her. She ate in the canteen, alone, took the air at random hours; fed the ducks in the duck pond. No one came near. She could understand that her neighbors, down to the campus cleaners, would wish to avoid contact with her views on a certain subject. But they did not have to broach that subject, did they? Perhaps they did. All around her it was aliens this and aliens that.

If the superbeings were so wonderful, Peene thought, it was surprising that they would bear such a grudge against the silly notions of a mere earthling. But university people judge everyone by their own standards.

In the early days she had been notorious. There was a graduate student, a beautiful young woman, who had became wild eyed and hollow-cheeked in that period when the aliens sermonized from Krung Thep, turned robotics into monsters, threatened to vaporize millions. She developed a crush on Peenemünde, to the extent of wanting to take her to bed. Peenemünde had no sexual orientation to speak of. She’d been quite helpless to refuse, and it had been a horrible failure, of course. The young woman could have no true affection or desire for a fat and tongue-tied professor: and Peenemünde did not know how one was supposed to behave in “casual sex” situations.

Afterwards this woman became a fervent alien-lover. But her eyes remained the eyes of someone who sees terrible visions, painted everywhere on the empty air.

Peene ate in the canteen, overlapping the narrow bench. She had not yet lost weight on account of her troubles. It was around 2 am local time. Because of the present timetable of her covert use of the Cannon space telescope, she was far astray from normal day and night. It didn’t matter, no one noticed. She saw a couple of strangers among the non-time people, a well-preserved middle-aged woman and a young man who did not look like her, and was maybe not her son but some kind of gigolo. Throughout Federated Europe and the European Union, budget travelers used the universities like the monasteries of old Christendom. It was someone’s romantic fancy that had by chance survived. In theory they must prove themselves legitimate pilgrims of learning, but the service was not overburdened, so no one bothered much.

Like most unsociable people, Peene possessed reserves of idle curiosity. She speculated about the couple, until she realized that they were watching her. Especially the young man. She froze up inside. The terrible vision painted on her air was of herself crouched on Inge’s bed, quilt scrabbled around a mountain of flesh that seemed to have appeared from nowhere: the body that she never considered important. Inge’s beautiful golden face gone sullen-angry, herself babbling plaintively. “Don’t be upset, please. Maybe we could watch some erotic television?”

Peene left the canteen in a hurry. They followed her: she broke into a trot. There was no one in sight. Nor watching: campus security was at all times a farce. Her own self-image didn’t help, either. She knew she was not able to “deal with situations.” At the entrance to her building she waited, panting.
“Gehen Sie doch weg,”
she said. “You don’t want to talk to me. I am an idiot.
Idiotica:
I am a private person. Go and look at the synthetic crystal show. Go to see the stained glass in the chapel. You will like that.”

She spoke in German, to confuse them, but she saw that the woman understood every word

“My friend speaks only English,” said the woman. She had put her hand, straight-armed, right across the keyslot. Her eyes were brutal.

“You believe the Aleutians are faking. Professor Buonarotti. So do we. We should talk.”

To get indoors Peenemünde was going to have to wrestle with this slight, well-dressed woman with the eyes of iron. She could not do that.

“Can you write? Go away and write to me. It’s true I don’t like the phone, but I read my freight mail…. I may answer!”

Peene gulped on the last words, embarrassed by her own lie. The pudgy faced young man looked angry, perhaps because he couldn’t understand German. The brutal woman shook her head.

“No. We’re not going away. We have to talk. Face to face.”

She had to let them come up to her room, or things with her neighbors would have become even worse. They stared at her little “launch pad” but they obviously didn’t know what it was; which relieved her worst anxiety.

“Sit down,” she said, in English. “Shall we have tea?”

She made tea, and laid out a plate of cakes. It pained her a little to part with them, but she knew her duty as hostess. It was the first time in years that she had
entertained visitors.
The ritual soothed her. The young man was actually nothing like Inge. No one cares, she thought. Nobody cares what I say, so long as I only talk to other fools. The crushing anguish of her loss suddenly pierced her through. To talk about the beloved, this is the great hunger of the bereaved.

They looked around the room. The man stared at her friends-gallery, especially at the sepia image of a young man’s face: a long, rather wistful face with a straggling youthful beard.

“Professor Buonarotti,” said the woman. “My name is Braemar Wilson, this is Johnny Guglioli. We represent an organization called White Queen. You have heard of us, I know. We have tried to contact you. According to the University, you have no office and they don’t hold your private number. You don’t use any of the usual bulletin boards. We have written to you. We’ve had no response. I appreciate that this is a diabolical intrusion. But we believe what you believe—”

Peenemünde shook her head. “Oh no,” she said, in English. “I don’t believe. Mrs. Wilson.”

“Braemar.”

“Braemar. I know. They are not aliens, nor superior beings. It is not logically possible that they should be.” She took up her tea, and a cake. “Consciousness. What is it? It is the inscription in us of the nature of things. What is the nature of things? The virtual particles leap to and fro between existence and nonexistence, the neurons fire up incessantly, for any reason or none. Properly considered, consciousness, like reality itself, is neither a thing nor an event. It is a certain crucial arrangement of information. And that is what cannot vary. Essentially speaking there is nothing in existence that is not an expression of
the conditions of existence.
You have heard the expression, an atom ‘wants’ to achieve a particular state; or that a calculation ‘prefers’ to settle for one of a limited range of results. Why do we say these things?”

“I have no idea,” said Braemar. “But I’m fascinated.”

“Because what we experience as motivation, as desire, is not particular to humanity, or to anthropoid apes, or higher mammals. When a thing becomes more complex it does not change, it only becomes more of itself. The human mind/brain is so large an arrangement, and so indefinite, it is
quantitatively
like the whole universe, much in little. Our awareness is built of the movements of the void, as surely as the stars; as surely as my hand is built of flesh.”

Peenemünde couldn’t teach and her lectures rambled, but she did enjoy having an audience.

“When I say that crystals ‘desire.’ When a like-minded colleague says that a rat feels aggrieved and lonely, this is not anthropomorphism. It is rather a demotion of the human than a promotion of lower creatures; if you must. Men move through life the way their spermatozoa move along a chemical gradient: in a certain sense quantitatively and qualitatively indistinguishable. That is commonplace, yes, but it is my job to see the commonplace with new eyes. The information that we call ‘self-conscious intelligence’ can only be described as general, it cannot be particular, there cannot be two ‘kinds.’ (It cannot be analyzed at all, but that is a truism. All analysis is only defective description). So you see. If we talk of ‘alien intelligence,’ it must come from outside our set of conditions. But logically, there is no way in or out of the sum of our cosmos, so defined.
So,
that settles that. Whatever they can think, we can think. They cannot read minds. Unless we can do so—” she added, trying a touch of humor. “And have not happened to notice it. Whatever they are like, we are like it.”

Peenemünde saw a tiny Inge-like glance exchanged, which hurt her feelings. At that moment she made up her mind to have a small revenge, through these two, on the ungrateful world.

“You don’t dispute that they are actually from another planet?” prompted Braemar.

Peenemünde shrugged. “That’s a question for forensics. Wherever they came from, whatever their physiology—” She drew a breath. “They
did not
travel faster than light. That is clear. That is inherent in my axiom of self-replication.
Only consciousness
can travel faster than light, nothing whatsoever material. So you see, those little space-planes, they give the game away.”

She finished her cake. She knew they were waiting, mimicking attention but “turned off,” to see if she would utter some nonsense that would engage their gracious attention. She had faced plenty of newspeople of this kind. It irked her, all the same.

“Let me explain. A long time ago, before ’04, there was an international space program. There was Mars Mission: things were happening. My funding body decided that the solar system was already consigned to nation and block politics, and that they should spy out the realms beyond. Corporations are different from elected entities. They can think in the decades, in the centuries. You laugh at the idea of FTL: my Corporation did not. Distances in deep space soon become unwieldy for anything that moves, be it matter, visible light, radio waves. This problem must be addressed, sometime. Why not now? The project was on a back-burner when I inherited it. I have been paid to have ideas about materials that might co-exist, through some holes or tunnels or slackness in the weave of the universe, into another place: materials gradiented like the shell of a spaceplane, to be in several states at once. Both hot and cool: both ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere.’ It has been essentially no different from work I have done before, on vat-grown machine tools, very prosaic.”

“And you found it?”

She’d forgotten the young man’s name, but she knew this type of newsperson too. He was looking for romance, for excitement. “A material that will walk through the walls of time? No, I don’t believe we will ever see it. But I have had a minor success. What happens if we have hold of the plenum of information, captured from nature, but without any form whatsoever? In that case we have a thing without a situation, besides that elected by its own will. If it has one.”