White Queen (8 page)

“What is this ‘Self’?” asked Johnny.

The alien spoke, plain English: one stiff intense phrase.

“The self is God.”

She briefly covered her face: Braemar read, obviously, reverence.

Oh, it was for all the world like a serge-wrapped sweating missionary, communing with a wondering savage. Johnny’s wonder, the alien’s amused calm. Is the laughter, laughter? Is evasion, evasion? Is reverence, reverence? Is sexual attraction, attraction? Johnny was still uneasy about the telepathy business (and who could blame him). He approached the subject cautiously.

“Agnès, can you explain to me how do we understand each other? How do you make me understand you? Have you learned my language or am I—uh—doing my own translation somehow?”

Oh, now that worried her. Again, not seriously but socially. The missionary becomes a tourist, a tourist briefly afraid that this attractive bit of local talent is wanting in his wits.

Agnès was puzzled (reported Johnny). Puzzled tone.

On Braemar’s screen the alien suddenly dismissed her doubts and became radiant. (a break in transmission, said Johnny’s notes).

Agnès made no noises, no throat-clearing: none of that mechanical, casual humming and hawing the Deaf have to suppress in social intercourse with the hearing.
They are naturally silent,
Braemar noted; and thought of animal comparisons.

There was a vertigo that could strike Braemar: a kind of horror, when looking at Agnès made her feel herself on the brink of some ultimate dissolution. She was attempting to find meaning, where no meaning of hers could exist. At moments she could taste Johnny’s initial terror, bile in the mouth. When this fugue came she would leave the interview tapes and think of glory: how the outcast eejay and the obsolete housewife were going to astonish the world with their noseless tourist.

They even had an alien artifact. Agnès refused to take Johnny back to the ship with the same firmness as she refused to remove her clothes; but she’d given him a present. It was a piece of rag-paper, grainy and rough, torn from the kind of child’s jotter that you could buy in any street corner supermarket in Fo. An abstract pattern of color covered it. The coloring medium might be ordinary wax crayon, for all Braemar could tell, but in the alien sweeps and dashes she discerned (was this imaginary?), talent and skill. The alien is an artist. The eye attached to the word-filled mind finds it extremely difficult to come to any image “empty”: simply to see. The farther a human artist strays from representation, the more literary a picture becomes, not less. Agnès did not struggle with the paradox. She called this a poem.

The coralin “maker disc,” which held the original record of Braemar’s whole working life (and plenty of room for another few working lifetimes), was actually a cassette of incredibly fine tape, laid with filaments of the Blue Clay. She transferred the reprocessed Agnès interviews to this disk as she studied them, and added Johnny’s audio notes: a rough mix. The whole could be refined into 360 smoothness later. Not over-produced—they’d be careful to preserve the scrubby edges of romance.

Braemar studied Johnny as well. She had some tape of the night at the Devereux fort, and more of him in his room at The Welcome Sight—human interest, the background. Here was Johnny with his pocket Dante, running his finger from the Italian to the English: the picture of wronged innocence, nobly improving himself. The Dante study was a myth. He’d only bought it for the miniature Dore engravings. Shame on you, Mr. Guglioli. They’d laughed over putting that little sequence together. He wouldn’t laugh if he saw her poring over each frame, giving him the same treatment as she gave the alien. But she needed to know Johnny too, and so did other people: at last we’ve caught one of the Chosen Ones. How does he jump? What makes him different? What makes him so attractive?

As soon as the stuff began to flow, Braemar had started sending copies of everything home to her confederates. Had their moment really come? She felt sick at the thought. Let it be a hoax she prayed. A subtly simple hoax that has fooled me and will embarrass me to death. Or let it be a
weird occurrence.
Let “Agnès” vanish, (promising to write), and Johnny and I spend the rest of our lives struggling in vain to prove she really happened. Let this be anything but what it seems. She had been prepared for anything when she came to Africa. Except (she now discovered) for success.

Johnny was surprised that his partner didn’t clamor to meet their alien. She allowed him to think that she was simply scared. Why get complicated, it was the truth. She refused to believe in magic. There must be some other explanation for what Johnny called telepathy. But it would be very stupid for Braemar to take the chance.

ii

It was July 31st. Instead of the customary hot, dull summer drought, London was having a welcome early monsoon. The air was fresh and cool as Ellen took the waterbus, half empty at this hour, down from Brentford; the dawn sky blue and piled with brilliant thunderheads over the eastern horizon. Treatment pans along the river bloomed in purple and gold, putting the miserable little plane tree saplings up on the barrage to shame. There was hardly any smell, though. These latest cultures seemed to have improved that problem. Ellen mused on the EC ruling about urban shit, and its witty reversal of the old adage. Nowadays, civilization is measured by the distance people
don’t
put between themselves and their excrement.

Leaving the bus at the gates of the pedestrian precinct, she tramped through bizarre-shaped dusty vehicles to the street. The people didn’t like it much, when winter’s floods spread that sludge of turd and greedy microbes over their living rooms. But they blamed—illogical creatures—
the storm defenses themselves.
All over the world, river cities had to live with these preparations: eyesores, expensive to maintain; much resented. You could not persuade the public that one catastrophe did not cancel out another. They were frightened of earthquakes and volcanoes now, not the new deluge.
Ah well,
thought Ellen.
It’s all fashion if you ask me: the fashion in disasters. What next, I wonder?

The New European Office was on the site of the old Westminster Hospital, which had been razed after a sick-building incident twenty years ago. She scowled as she approached the round shouldered building with its yellow and blue glass walls. The gaudy naivety of modern architecture offended her. She pined for the serious cityscape of the last century.

“Legoland,” she muttered aloud, enjoying her own tetchiness.” Cars that look like telephones. Daft, I call it.”

The door to her exile had a hand written notice pinned to it: STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE. It was getting mournfully dog-eared.

The World Conference on Women’s Affairs (WOCWOM) had been in session for two solid years. It was physically located in Krung Thep, Thailand. In Krung Thep, Ellen Kershaw and her assistant spent every working day. She was not an eager delegate. Ellen Kershaw, arch-AntiBalkanist, detested the very concept of
Women’s Affairs.
She had made a false move, in a skirmish now forgotten. Her enemies had pounced on her error: Ellen had found herself in video-conference exile. Though her physical presence in the host capital was not required, she might as well be locked up on Mars. Her constituency affairs were being handled by a locum. In the daily life of European politics she could play no part until the conference ended—whenever that might be.

It was a point of principle to stick close to London office hours. She arrived in KT soon after one, leaving ten hours later to return to evening London. She maintained that to time-shift further would damage her young secretary’s health. Outside corporate rule, the status of non-local time work was very low. Ellen was not going have the two of them degraded. They didn’t miss much by logging on late. There wasn’t much to miss.

Robin Lloyd-Price was sitting in deadspace eating his breakfast and reading the
Bangkok Post
on the tv. He was a long thin boy, with slick fair hair and a fresh pink and white face; like a child in a Gainsborough portrait. He reminded Ellen of a highly polished toy, but she smiled when she saw him. Before the disaster she’d only been amused by Lloyd-Price: who, transparently, had hoped a spell as PPS to a stern elderly “socialist-feminist” would take the heat off his active private life. Two years as cell mates will make or break a relationship. To her own surprise the old Socialist had grown fond of this product of ancient evils.

“Something’s happened,” he said, with his mouth full. He had real Public School manners: quite disgusting, Ellen thought them.

“Oh? What?”

“The aliens have landed.”

“Pah. I thought you meant in KT. Might have known better.”

“I do. They touched down first in the USA. They arrived at Bang Khen at six a.m. local time today, in a spaceplane that has since vanished, looking for the government of the world. Poonsuk announced it, about half an hour ago. I have the release here. They hope to talk real estate.”

“Oh, they do, do they?”

“They’re also telepathic.”

“Who says so?”

“The US air force.”

Ellen made a derisive noise.

A tap on the door and the maid came in with Ellen’s tray: one of the little brown mice who run in and out of all the offices of Westminster, regardless of imaginary geography. This mouse had today acquired a white cap with streamers, also a frilled apron that wasn’t part of her uniform.

“They don’t show up on radar. And they have some kind of empathic total control over earthling computers. They landed in the Aleutian islands, they’ve been living in one of the closed towns in Alaska, exercising their hypnotic powers—”

Ellen frowned at Robin, and offered thanks for her coffee and brioche.

“Sarah,” she remarked, as the maid hovered, streamers agog. “Is that cap satirical?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The child bobbed a sly curtsey.

“I’m glad to hear it. You may go.”

Ellen settled at her desk. Among their freebies they had a virtuality set (single) whereby they could “really” walk into the streets of the watery city, and enjoy a range of tourist entertainments. Robin had played with it, Ellen was not interested. She found the Multiphon, the video-conference interactive translation chamber, sufficiently irritating. Maybe only Thailand would have actually built the thing: for show, for fun; in commitment to the curious Thai ideal of libertarian formality. Everyone has a right to their own language, their own funny little ways. It was an attitude that had helped them to hold the world at bay for centuries. But it annoyed Ellen. Reasonable people did business in English. Those who had historical reasons to resent this (e.g., the French), lumped it. All that powerful simultaneous translation hardware was so much proof of the half-baked woolly-hat-anarchist ethos of the WOCWOM.

This was not a virtuality. Ellen’s senses sat in Westminster, looking into an array of tv screens and listening to a headset, while on her monitor she saw the view the tv public saw: herself included, if she looked closely, sitting there in the EU block. But she had no illusion of physical displacement, except maybe a brief moment or so of vertigo at the end of some particularly wearing session. The hall was more populous than usual, more ersatz astral beings and more flesh-and-blood bodies too. Stats running on a subscreen told her that the “press gallery” was packed. That didn’t mean much. The world’s automated newsgatherers browsed this sort of thing automatically, and then threw it all away.

There were no aliens on show. An Australian factory inspector had the dais screen—the floor, as Ellen still termed it internally. He was reeling out statistics of effectual imprisonment, of starvation rationing, of “immorality” (he meant lesbianism) in ex-Japanese production hives:
these enforced convents of deracinated young women and girls.

The immaculate Poonsuk Masdit, convener of the Thai National Women’s Committee, lay tiny on the dais beside the giant face of the Australian. On her couch: it must be a bad day. Ellen searched around the chamber, a maneuver that caused her desk on the monitor to revert to a telltale holding image of an empty chair. Curiosity wasn’t private in the Multiphon. Looking, as it were, over her own shoulder, she saw faces in the USA block, in the desks that had been empty for a long while. Now
that
was interesting. She requested a release on the subject
USA delegation.
It didn’t appear. The Multiphon’s ingenuity was spent in tv effects and language handling, it was not a reliable secretary.

A spokesperson for the hive (speaking from Melbourne) countered the inspector’s information, showing that the young ladies indoors were
healthier
on their restricted diet, more relaxed in their moderate confinement. Maybe it sounded more convincing in Vietnamese.

On her lap below the console Ellen shuffled a pile of papers and multicharges, a tiny sample of the documentation she was supposed to study. Here was something about numbers of young women in service in the UK. Government charts proving that the movement towards “resident domestic work,” and away from “qualified employment” was innocently chaotic, no underlying linear trend. The raw figures, with another story. A report on the fate of “servants” fired for getting pregnant: the children, illiterate and fatherless, penned in nominal “schoolrooms,” while the aging “girls” sweated in the UK’s own little production hives. The nations of the old Third World were indefatigable at generating this sort of stuff, making sure the conference didn’t forget that abuses happen everywhere. Ellen grimaced impatiently. The woman-question was a global scandal. But this talking-shop wasn’t the solution.