White Queen (41 page)

“Please, don’t do it.”

“Do what?” said Braemar. “Johnny’s the one who’s going to change history. One sword must do the deed. And Siegfried must strike the blow! I’m just the decorative sidekick.”

Poor ineffectual Peenemünde looked as if she was about to cry. Her eyes brimmed, the tears fell. Braemar flew into the spasming vacuum, into abstraction piled upon abstraction. She flew through the vast pomegranate halls of the cosmos, skeins of matter holding in a casual hive the rich juicy cells of void, cradling in her hands a drop of salt water, the most precious possession of her life. She saw a pool, a wellspring bubbling up in starlight. Buonarotti was sitting beside it. Clavel was there, that powerful young feminine person with the sad and fearless eyes. The two were talking together. Braemar felt a great ocean of outraged loss open inside her.
You have no right to be here!
she shouted at the alien.
This is ours! We found it!
But the professor lifted a handful of liquid, and Clavel seemed to drink.

She arrived in Aleutia knowing something new, a secret irony she would carry to her death.

It was shocking how completely the gut-deep
uncertainty
returned. How his flesh was not real, how his hands were not his own, how his mind opened and spilled. There were so many fictional accounts of faster than light travel:
only the few can bear it, drugs have to be taken, the undrugged captain screams and dissolves into dancing, tortured pixels as he passes through the cosmic wringer.
Either it was true, or his imagination was forcing him to act out what he thought he knew. Luckily the experience, though disgusting, was easier to handle the second time. On the brink of psychosis, terror receded as he thought,
people will take shots for this.
He was one of the first to endure what would be the commonplace motion-sickness of interplanetary travel. His historic privilege dizzied him more than the effect itself.

They’d tried to script themselves this time. It had worked, pretty well. Johnny had come awake walking in a corridor that actually looked familiar, and the next map-sign told him he was right. He pulled himself into the new situation like someone shrugging on a suit of clothes: and there was Braemar. They found a cupboard, dressed themselves.

“I’m scared to go out there,” whispered Brae, the first time either of them had spoken. “We don’t know what happened last time, only our hallucinations. How much time has passed?”

The previous trip seemed solid to Johnny, the FTL a concrete, technical marvel. There’d be a tiny Einstein effect involved in traveling to the moon in seconds; nothing to worry about.

“Calm down. Last time, we had a real life accident that roused some psychic demons in us. This time, we know about the effect and we can fight it. We were here three weeks ago, we vanished, we’re back. Maybe they have some kind of red alert thing going on, but did you never sneak into somewhere that was trying to keep the media out? It’s dangerous, it’s a danger we know. Think positively. You’re an innocent passerby. Think of Clavel in Fo.”

There were horrors in her eyes, he didn’t know what visions she was seeing. They were lucky that his own sickness was controllable this time: no grisly hyper-associative arousal, no violence. He was Johnny Guglioli, eejay, dodging the authorities in a foreign city. He was taking a trip to normality, in fact, out of the nightmare of the last few years.

They took a bus. It was a quiet time of ship-day; or ship-night. The lights were low, the streets empty. If the motes in the hazy air were picking up signs of intruders, there was nothing to be done. Get on with the job. The wide, irregular plaza outside the comms center was planted with what might be trees; decorated with the municipal bludgeonry that gives sculpture a bad name. The sky was indigo-grey; a sunset blur of dim ruby around the rooftop horizon. An old couple sat nodding companionably, on a bench by the sculpture. Shop windows were shuttered. A group of preteens raced about playing some kind of chasing game. The evening silence was so clear you could hear the kids’ breath across the square.

Clavel in Fo. The autopilot normalizer gets to work, busily feeding you translation that you can understand. Johnny shut his eyes to clear his vision, wanting to
see
the alien, forgetting what a horrible effect that had. He yelped—a ludicrous infantile gasp of fear. Braemar took his arm. They passed, heads down, unremarkable, through the great doorway.

The main hall was huge, vaulted; lit and decorated only by the screens themselves and the glassy boxes of memorabilia. It was empty. They walked about like casual visitors, stopping occasionally to peer at the lives of the famous—depicted in 2D through the same faintly blurry material that Johnny had met before. It was weird to think that these were not the famous
dead.
These were Aleutians who would live again, maybe were living now. There were galleries around the walls, access to other levels. But as Johnny had seen, the working studios were at the far end, opposite the great doors. They strolled up there.

“Hey—” Johnny’s whisper echoed like distant thunder. He broke away from her.
“Look at this!”

There was a new exhibit in the Hall of Remembrance. The form was the same as the others, a boxy single screen tv on a pedestal; a display case beside it. But the video playing on this screen was absolutely riveting.

“Shit!” hissed Johnny. “Now
that
is alien. I can’t think of a city on Earth where people wouldn’t be standing in line around the block!”

So the rape had begun. The adventurers had started to ship back their loot, the first tiny installments. Braemar was filled with horror: as if, like an Aleutian herself, she saw snippets of her own flesh on display. Johnny pored over the case, cheerfully criticizing the aliens’ taste in souvenirs. She didn’t dare to go near.

“But how did they get it out here Brae? Have you heard of any rocket launches from Uji? Maybe we’re wrong and they have a matter transporter after all.”

“For God’s sake. Come away from there!” She swallowed desperation, the horribly familiar situation threatening to engulf her.
Be a good boy-baby.
Do what smiling Mama wants you to do. She fought to keep her feet, in the tumbling breakers of meaning. “We don’t know how much time we’ve got.”

He came away. The studios were closed, the front walls dark. They heard no sound, there were no warning lights. There was a convincing impression that the place was deserted. Doors closed but not locked, and all it takes (Johnny remembered the drill) is a little rub on the pad.

He checked the rows of desks, he walked around, looking without touching. He stood back, frowning intently. “Oooh-kay.” One hand reached to the shoulder of his dun overalls. He looked at it, and laughed softly: embarrassed. “Thought I had my totebag.”

“Well?”

“One can but try. I’ve seen kookier set ups. Not much, not many, but…. Let’s see if we can lock ourselves in.”

He studied the desk nearest the door, identified a row of iconed keys. A split circle, one half light, one dark. He rubbed it. The clear wall between the studios and the big hall darkened. Lighting came on. The icon on the next key was a circle with a notched line down the middle. He rubbed that one.

“Try the doors.”

The glassy stuff had melded, seamlessly, in three bands around head, and knee and waist height. Johnny cackled in delight.

“Open up again, Johnny. I’m going to stay outside.”

Johnny frowned in puzzlement. This moment had not been covered in their script. He wanted her right beside him but he was the eejay, he had the training. Out there in the alien cathedral she might be able to hold off trouble for a few precious moments.

“Johnny, listen, I may not be able to get back to you. When you’re done, or if an alarm sounds:
go home.
The way you came here, by an act of will.”

“Is that what you’re going to do?”

“Yes, of course.”

He’d have liked to stay and crow over the Aleutians, but it wouldn’t be wise. In the heat of the moment he might end up with his throat cut.

“Right,” he said, already lost in his eejay adventure. “Good luck.”

“You too.”

She stood wrapped in impenetrable mystery, alone in her version of Buonarotti’s travel mode. Johnny held out his arms. They embraced. He kissed her face, the unreal flesh, a Braemar replica made of interplanetary plasma. He tasted salt.

“Don’t cry. We’re going to be famous.”

A floor of the Multiphon complex had secretly been given over to handling the mothership material. They were trying to contain this explosive news, by protecting the incoming data from grabbers as far as was humanly possible. It was a hopeless task, since their secret caucus already included the President of the USSA and an undisclosed chain of informants behind her. Plus, one had to suspect, unknown other parties including major Corporations. At least they didn’t have to worry about the general public: the world at large paid little attention to old space science. But they must be prepared. At any moment the silence could be shattered.

They struggled to formulate a response to the explosion, and squabbled about choosing the right moment to take their news to the Multiphon. Everyone knew that the Government of the World would insist on telling the Aleutians their ship had been located: that was inevitable. But then the human world would have to be told too, and humanity might not take the demotion of their angels well. The Aleutian landing party could be in danger; consequences might be dire. The aliens could still have super-weaponry, if they didn’t have super-interstellar transport. Their security arrangements within the Multiphon building had not yet aroused suspicion. There were a lot of secrets at Dusit in those days. Plenty of little groups of people behaving strangely, while they made deals over enclave evacuation, or deliberated on future projects for the Aleutians; some of them involving highly sensitive clean-up problems.

The conspirators had secured first sight of all new forensic information. During one long anxious day, a report arrived from the Abdus Salam institute in Banjul—copied from the Multiphon document office by a member of staff who was in on the secret, and carried “upstairs” by hand—with yet more explosive news. They sat around a table, each reading a different section and passing it on. The coarse texture of instant degradable paper took Ellen back to the raw and desperate times of the ’04—when the whole world pulled together, and courage and virtue were the currency of political life (this wonderful effect paid for by the death of millions). But that wasn’t a true analogy. She felt like a government official in some seventeenth century court crisis—throwing aside the printed books of science, resorting to astrology on animal skin. Abdus Salem was not under Government of the World control. Every word she read had been reviewed by the censors of a major Corporation, as yet unidentified. Possibly every word was false.

“These ‘active cell-complexes” said Chas softly. “D’you think there’s any connection with their body lice?”

No one could answer. No one had paid much attention to the lice, at Uji. It was embarrassing that the superbeings should be verminous: best passed over.

“What happens when humans ingest this ‘living dust?’”

There was silence, while sections were shuffled around and everybody found the reference. The alien artifacts were packed with tiny organisms. The same kind of organisms, on an even smaller scale, had been found in samples of the research lab’s air.

The down to earth hazards of alien contamination had been a side issue, since Uji was closed to visitors, and the Aleutians had been confirmed as benign superbeings. They would never do harm unintentionally: and there was no defense against angelic punishment.

Ellen frowned over the close written pages. “If these ‘cell-complexes’ have something to do with the
function
of their gadgets, I’d like to see a report on one of the machines affected in the ‘mad machine plague.’ Did any of them survive?”

“Not likely,” murmured Dougie. “Everything was incinerated.”

“If I’m reading these figures right, the alien material in the air of the clean room was in vanishingly low concentration, although they’d been taking artifacts apart—”

“So, perhaps it’s okay to have a few Aleutians around,” remarked Martha. “What about a whole bunch of them? What about the settlers?”

We’ll have to abandon coralin, Dougie decided, briskly—as if he really were a ruler of the world, and could order it done, this afternoon. Then he remembered that Carlotta had already begun to do it. He suffered a moment of fugue, staring into the future.

What is going to become of us?

Poonsuk propped her head on both hands.
I was there, she thought. I presided, the night the world was made one.
Impossible not to glory in that memory. But it was an article of faith with Poonsuk that she had been no more present, in the Multiphon, than any one of the billions. The datasphere, the cables, the lightlines, the networks, were the means to the Buddhahood of all humankind, women and men. What if the aliens were to do away with all that? What if they had better technology, that humans would have to use without understanding—?