White Queen (44 page)

Behind him there was a sound like cloth ripping. The studio doors had been forced open. Johnny flung himself at a recording desk, slapped his hand down. It was too late. Somebody, somewhere had pulled the plug on him.

13 
LIEBESTOD

Ellen Kershaw found herself in dialogue with an alien prince, over the fate of the saboteurs. The prince used Lugha as interpreter, at first. “He” watched the demon child closely. After the second interview he took over, and spoke for himself in a stylish aphoristic English. It turned out that the attribute of
namelessness
was not linked with an inability to use articulate language. It was natural to Aleutia. She had felt the prince, marginally more masculine than feminine, taking shape as a presence. She would know him anywhere: but his “name” was a circumstantial label. It changed incessantly, in the course of a conversation.

The dialogue went on for weeks. Things were complicated by the fact that the prince believed he was playing a part in an alien religious ritual, and he wasn’t interested in religion.

“You-we were not of one mind about the attack. You were a house divided.”

“We had found your mothership,” replied Ellen. “We detected it in its hiding place behind our moon. We acknowledge that you-on-our-planet had a right to keep the secret of its position: but you must see that its presence put your arrival on earth in a different light. Braemar Wilson is a brave person, Johnny Guglioli also. We have had no reason to believe that she is capable of extreme violence. No harm came of their gesture, which we do not entirely repudiate.”

It was a terrible strain: to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The prince’s face changed like quicksilver. He wore a robe of deep blue, scattered with gold tassels: this finery, flung over the eternal dun overalls, made him look like a child who’s been at the dressing-up box. He would get up from his couch and fidget about. The way he tossed the open, trailing sleeves behind him spoke volumes, in a language in which Ellen could barely stumble through a sentence.

“Johnny Guglioli merely interfered with some church furniture.”

Ellen agreed, guardedly. Nobody had been allowed access to Guglioli or Wilson. Apparently they had made statements, or what the Aleutians took for statements, when they were arrested, but access to these wasn’t possible either. It seemed likely that the Aleutians didn’t understand the request. Everyone who’d had contact-experience agreed that it would be rash to push it. The only way to save the prisoners was to
behave normally—
in Aleutian terms.

Lugha sat passive: he was not obliged to pay attention to this sort of thing. Ellen tried to peer into the room beyond. The future lay there, the future of two races. In some real sense it hung in the balance. There was a mandatory death sentence for major sabotage: this had been made clear, and in principle accepted. But there must be room for commutation. Life without parole would be fine. The Government of the World
needed
to save the lives of these two humans. It was vital to extract that concession. The Aleutians couldn’t know how important. They didn’t know what mercy meant in earth politics (or did they?). But all the time, as she struggled, she was distracted by the years ahead.

She could see nothing behind the prince and the demon child, only midnight shadows.

“Yet he is the younger, and the true child is parent to the true parent. That’s the way it is in all the stories I know.”

She had no idea what he was getting at: she followed her instinct.

“The Beloved rules the Lover? Yes, we have stories like that too. A famous story concerns a person called Achilles—”

The person whose favorite color is blue settled again on the couch in his private chapel. He lifted a tassel on his sleeve and stroked the gold filament. The person who likes the brightness of gold was arriving at our judgement.

“What turns out to have been a harmless prank didn’t start that way. Someone has to be taught a lesson. Let us return to the land of the living” The person who believes in respect for forms made a gesture: rearranging his sleeves. Ellen saw him replacing his top hat on the church steps, brisk and slightly irritated at the end of a tiresomely long service. The backdrop to the scene changed. The great character shrine appeared briefly, chasing the shadows from Ellen’s screen, and ended the transmission.

The person whose aspect is often an exasperating purity of motive had arrived home. The prince went to meet Clavel in the office of criminal justice, in the city of the sun. There were several interested persons gathered there: obligate scientists, scholars; and notably an artisan, who kept his distance from the Signifiers but seemed very much at home. The person whose purity is actually riddled with abysses of error stared at this artisan. His nasal grew pinched and white-edged.

The doctor from the wilderness First Aid post, who had treated Johnny Guglioli, stood with arms folded, resentful.

stared Clavel. .

The doctor glared in return, and made a speech. “I run a First Aid post,” he said. “People fall in the rocks and hurt themselves. I fetch them in and fix them, and I don’t care what they look like. It is categorically none of my business to get tied up in meaningless bureaucracy.”

. One of the science people asked, mildly, for attention.

.

Some of those present became guiltily excited.

doctor.
My hands are clean. And you can leave my First Aid post alone, but if you
do
invade it, you’ll find not a drop of stranger’s blood.>

No one in Aleutia could take seriously what Braemar had been trying to do. The averted cataclysm had left no scar. There was no sense of outrage against the saboteurs—especially since they had both made statements that, though confused, were certainly penitent. But the incident had come soon after Lugha’s return; it served to bring the whole question of that big planet out there into focus. It was a very long time since the wanderer had left a giant world of its own. Only the most stubbornly conservative minds had preserved any active notion of a goal; of permanent landfall. If it hadn’t been for Johnny and Braemar, Rajath’s invitation would have tempted a few, and left most people unmoved. Now, suddenly, everybody was interested.

The person who is always aware of the attention of the thousands; and the thousands upon thousands who are presently unborn, stroked his sleeve thoughtfully.

mistaken,
so who is it who has stolen his lover?>

Clavel endured this. The person who goads Clavel whenever he gets the chance, of course knew everything. And nothing. No one here at home, nobody at all, had the slightest notion of how things were on earth. He made a speech.

“There are two broods. Braemar is an obligate childbearer, Johnny the other kind. They are at war, but became lovers.”

cried Clavel.

Clavel could not. Not in here; not under oath. He was not sure.

The prince turned to the scientists. not
unless we think of a plausible excuse>.

Clavel stopped trying to keep calm. He flew across the room, in a fanged leap that might have taken the prince’s throat out. But those days were long gone. His people grabbed his sleeves.

The prince sighed.

Ah, Clavel. Always the same Clavel. Pure as driven mud!

Clavel had come to Johnny; joined him in the small clean room.

“So it was your idea, Johnny?”

Johnny didn’t know what was happening, and they wouldn’t let him see Braemar. He gathered that her stunt had failed completely, whereas he’d been caught in the act. He’d resigned himself to spending a long time in this little room. It was ridiculous, but he felt sad to find that in Aleutia there were police cells, and prison guards, and cold machineries of justice. When they let him at an interpreter he could present a case, but he couldn’t accept Clavel as that interpreter.

He shrugged.

She drew herself together, knee and hip joints turning backwards inside her clothes. A gaunt knot of limbs, like a big sick cat. “You sent Braemar to disintegrate the magnetic sheath around the core of our main reactor, while you provided a diversion?”

Johnny took this news. It entered him and filled him until he choked. He blinked.

“Is that what she says we did?”

“Apparently.”

“Then that’s fine by me.”

She relaxed, and said nothing for a while. Now she looked to him like someone lost in contemplation of a tragic drama.

“Your lover is a complicated person.”

“So am I,” said Johnny. “But I’ll get better press. And
la lutte continue.”

The detention cell was perfectly comfortable. Braemar lived in it like an animal: eating, sleeping, keeping herself clean. She knew no one here spoke English, and that she was speaking Aleutian all the time. She knew she must try to survive. Since she couldn’t bring herself to plead innocence she kept silent, and tried to silence her face and body. She was visited once by other residents of the detention. They were concerned, a little priggish. She thought they were probably saying:
Buck up, you’re not in here for a rest cure.
Come and do some occupational therapy.

She ignored them, and they didn’t come again.

At last Clavel came and told her that her plea of undue influence had been accepted, and Johnny had taken full responsibility. She said not a word: and whatever she told Clavel in the Common Tongue, apparently she didn’t change her “plea.” When Clavel was gone she lay tearless like an animal in a cage. She would not cry. The choice was made and she would take no painkillers, not even those distilled from her own blood. She waited, and dreamed of Johnny; immersing herself in sweet memory. She had a persistent fantasy that some kind of rescue was due to arrive when things got really bad. But this was nonsense.

For much of the time Johnny was sure that when the climax came he would wake from his long and complicated dream. He fostered this illusion, because he didn’t want to panic and make a fool of himself. He was more and more certain that
fear
was the root cause of all their problems. He thought of the night in Africa: his craven terror, Braemar with her deadly weapon. The whole story was there. He found himself thinking a great deal about Bella, not as a sore place in his memory but as a living person. He remembered dancing with her in his arms: cavorting round the floor of that cluttered little partition, to some schmaltzy old C&W waltz. He looked down at the two year old face, so lost in bliss. You won’t remember a moment of these years, he thought. It will all be gone, I’ll be an annoying old geezer who never gives you anything but aggravation. But one day you will be dancing in someone’s arms: and you won’t know it but this is what you’ll be looking for. It takes love to make love, sweet baby.

There wasn’t much to choose between the Aleutian and the earthly view, after all.

He thought of Izzy too. Sorry, Izabel. You weren’t the love of my life, nor I yours. But you were a good friend, and I pushed you too fucking hard.

Most of all, he remembered Braemar.
Even now,
the glowworm dress: the amused and delicate arrogance of her step, as she came down into the garden bar at L’Iceberg. She danced, to
musique naturelle,
with David Mungea: and smiled wickedly into Johnny’s dog-hungry eyes. In a watered-silk drawing room she sat with a very straight back, eau-de-nil skirts, bare shoulders, whispering to Larrialde. She glanced at him, where he stood attempting to dissemble his pathetic jealousy: caught his eye and drowned him.

The scent of her hair. Those fabulous transitions, from word-play into naked lust.
I am the place that you come into.
Even now, he was drowning again, though he knew what went on behind the magic. He knew how a lovely creature like his lover was made, he saw the inevitable chain of events that ran from the forces that made her to this desperate predicament. He could taste the poison. Fear and the abuse of power—between human and alien, between men and women. But how could he want to change anything that had ever happened?