The Universe of Things

by Gwyneth Jones

  “You must not ask,” said the indigo woman sleepily. “All this asking questions, that makes problems.”

  She lifted the thing in her hands. As the captain pushed me out of the door, soaking wet with an armful of wet belongings, I glimpsed again the fluid, metallic movement.

  I reached my cabin just in time to throw up. It crossed my mind that David’s vasectomy had failed and I was pregnant. It must be a boy this time, the little alien inside fighting with my inimical chemistry.

  The boat anchored at dawn out in mid-channel, just below a muddy confluence. The halt was for our benefit: it was time for us to leave the great river. Several hours later a small boat came chugging out of the emptiness. Johnny and Brae were in the saloon, studying the garbled “Breifing” we’d all been handed back at the capital. I was on deck with the major.

  Derek jumped up and was at the rail as a vision of military splendor arose: polished cap brim well down over the eyes.

  “Good morning, my name is Simon Krua. I’m looking for the International Expedition to Lake Gerard?”

  My heart sank. The major grew visibly larger as he stuck out his hand. “Derek Whynton, Lieutenant Krua. Major, actually. Well, you’ve found us. Let me introduce — ah — Mrs. Anna Jones: a British lady journalist.”

  The major gave his barking laugh. “There are three of them, I’m afraid. Two ladies, and a young American chap. The media, you know. Don’t worry, I’ll keep them out of your hair.”

  The river boat was silent as we left it. Not a single whore stuck her head out to scream goodbye. We crossed a borderline trimmed with sticks and small branches, from gruel-color to muddy umber, and swept around into the narrower stream. A tiny, ancient steamer was waiting for us, a kind of coelacanth of the swamps. I don’t know what would have happened if the whole party had got this far. It was hard to see how even we four were going to be stowed.

  Johnny cackled. “I think I’m on the wrong trip. Did I book for the dinosaur hunt? I didn’t mean to do that. No wait, is this the fabled Hollywood retro-world? Don’t tell me. Bogart and Hepburn androids are about to come swanning out of the mangroves.”

  Nobody laughed, particularly not Simon Krua. The Major had a lot of heavy black boxes. While they were being stowed by Krua’s soldiers, he turned on us — on the cramped and cluttered afterdeck that was to be our territory. His blue eyes gleamed in triumph.

  “Now listen.”

  We had no choice; there was nowhere to go.

  “There has been a serious infringement of the Peace Accord, and I surely don’t need to tell you what that means. I’m sorry, but whatever wild ideas you may have had, that’s the whole story. My mission is to investigate, and to keep my findings quiet pending a full international inquiry. You’ve been allowed to come along so far because circumstances dictated it, but I’m going to have to confiscate all recordings and take charge of your equipment.”

  There was a deafening silence.

  “From now on, the ladies will not go on shore at all. This is dangerous country; guerilla forces are active. Johnny, may I ask you to use some commonsense? Please pack up and itemize your professional effects. Receipts will be issued, naturally.”

  He disappeared into the deckhouse, shutting the door. Johnny whistled, on a slow note of sour amazement. “The Empire Strikes Back. Now we’ll be sorry for the way we teased the miserable jerk.”

  Braemar stared at a pile of divers’ air bottles, stacked in the stern — for once completely silenced.

  I was shaking with rage. I found a roll of tape and began to seal my forward echoes. There is never any way out when you run up against the bastard military. They have no respect. What seems to us inviolable, like consecrated communion bread in old Christendom, they’ll take and swing and smash its brains out against a wall… It must have been Major Whynton who told the captain of the river boat to give me that warning. Maybe the powers behind him had canceled the cruiser. I would have shared these thoughts with Johnny and Brae, but it would only have made Johnny quite unmanageably provocative. And I still meant to be there, at the end of this trail.

  “What’s your real name, Brae?”

  “Alice in Wonderland. Kali. Jael. James Bond, 007, licensed to kill. I’m in deep cover.”

  “You won’t tell me, will you. It’s childish.”

  “I don’t have a real name, Johnny. I’ve never been identified.”

  The moon had risen; the night was immaculately black and white. The African Queen (the boat didn’t seem to have any other name) was tied up so close to the bank that they’d been able to clamber into the mud-stalking branches and sneak on shore. A tree had fallen; they were sitting on its trunk above the water. They passed a joint of the grass that Braemar had bought on the big boat. When it was done, Brae took out her cigarettes and lit one.

  Johnny removed it from her fingers and snuffed it out. “Destroy yourself on your own time. I don’t want to catch your cancer.”

  Braemar laughed. She loved to be bullied.

  In her cabin on the boat he had moved a small heap of underwear to find out what books she was reading. Like bruised leaves, the scraps of silk released a tender perfume: vanilla and roses, the scent of her flesh. He’d been assaulted by a mad impulse to steal something, to wear it. Something strange was happening to his libido, to be traced no doubt to the combination of poor nourishment, little sleep, and excellent East African blow. He was in a state of quiet sexual frenzy: thoughts of fucking Brae with Anna and the whole First Class looking on, of all three of them setting on Major Derek and forcing gross pleasures on him.

  But to be doing it with this corrupt middle-aged woman was a perverse orgy in itself. Who was the real Braemar? How did one get to meet her? That quest was a canard. The invocation, by means of all the masks, of an essential mystery forever out of reach, was only another routine in the ancient cabaret, which he at once loved and hated: a disturbingly pleasant combination. Is this normality? he wondered. My God, is this how it feels to be a regular guy?

  “Actually, I couldn’t care less. You’re Brae to me, and no other label would get me closer to the inside of that box that doesn’t occupy any normal space. All I want is somewhere where I can fuck you without being at the same time ravaged by foot-long poisonous centipedes or overheard by Major Derek.”

  “We could try the dinghy.”

  “The guy who drove us over from the big boat sleeps in there. And the cook boy sleeps in the rowing boat.”

  Irritably, carelessly, Johnny threw the snuffed cigarette into the water.

  “Shit —” He scrambled out to retrieve it.

  “Johnny, you’re crazy. It’s biodegradable, anyway. What are you? A New Age Hasidim? Don’t you know it is impossible for anyone to keep the whole of the law?”

  He shoved the wet cigarette into his shirt pocket. She was right; the new Torah was as ridiculous as any other set of rules. As if one less cigarette end in the wilderness would save a poisoned planet.

  “Do you feel weird, Brae? Do you have a strange feeling like a kind of psychic travel sickness: brainstem nausea, and it is getting stronger by the day?”

  “I don’t feel anything that isn’t perfectly normal.”

  “I just wondered.”

  “Johnny.” She took his hand, still cool and wet from the river, and laid it along her groin. “That’s otherness. That’s where you meet the alien. If you could always have a breast to suck and an accommodating cunt to hold you, you’d never miss the rest of the world, with or without flying saucers. You are everything that matters Johnny. And I’m the place where you belong.”

  He looked at her, the cool moonlight mysteriously altering his young face, cutting time’s shadows in its rounded outline — and withdrew his hand.

  “Talking dirty again,” he said. “I think I’ll throw you in the river.”

  “You really want them, don’t you.”

  He shrugged. “I’m curious. There are UFOs every day. There’s never before been an official Snark-hunt
like this one. I just want to know.”

  Countless insects chanted. Something much larger suddenly howled out a long dying fall of sound. Johnny was instantly distracted.

  “Hey! A wild animal! I didn’t know there were any of those left.”

  He dropped to the path and hurried along it, heedless of centipedes. Brae followed, until he suddenly stopped dead. There were points of gold in the blackness ahead: a cloud of sentient fireflies, the outline of a mind.

  “What is that?” he breathed, awed.

  “It’s a village, Johnny.”

  “Huh.” He scowled, annoyed at himself. “Those pods are fucking sneaky. It’s probably only pretending to be a village.”

  But the lights in the darkness held him. “When you see that,” he murmured. “Raw, as the cave-people saw it — you know why the stars in the sky had to be people, why stories were made up about them. What else could those steady little fires in the night possibly mean?”

  Braemar touched his arm, turned him to face her. “Johnny, supposing I told you the truth? Supposing I told you I’m a member of a secret international organization, on a vital undercover mission. And I need your help.”

  “My God,” said Johnny. “You’re not joking, are you.”

  She shook her head.

  He felt a new rush of gloriously mingled lust and disorientation. It was another game; more fun. It might even be the truth: why not. Braemar could be anyone.

  “You’re after the Major? Yeah, I worked it out for myself. He wants some dirt: Reds in the swamp. And I reckon our friend Krua’s already made sure he won’t be disappointed. The bastards; they’d take us all to hell with them if they got the chance. What are we going to do about it?”

  Her smile was mocking. “Oh, no Johnny. The truth is better than that.”

  The lake was kidney-shaped, about a kilometer across and five long, the long axis aligned roughly north-south under a natural plateau in the surrounding hills. The landing site was supposed to be somewhere around here. The local war zone was up beyond, cutting off air and road access. The water was completely opaque. It stank. Soldiers had investigated its depths and found nothing; I didn’t envy them the experience.

  There was a well-established camp on shore, out of bounds to us. Derek and Krua vanished into the jungle every day with a line of laden, sweating local squaddies. We were left behind, supposedly under guard. But the soldiers were friendly and venal. There was the dinghy with its outboard and an old rowing boat, Other Ranks, For The Use Of. Taxi rates were soon established.

  I tramped up the winding path, Sackey, the civilian cook, agreeably silent beside me. I was thinking about Braemar, the way she was when I was teaching a Welfare course in media technology, to keep my debts in check through my graduate degree. She was years older than me, but so young: so abject, with her constant childcare hassles and her meanly obstructive husband. I’d became her confidante. She’d told me about her childhood in East Africa: Asian mother, white daddy. Things had gone sour when the family came back to England, a bloody mess of domestic violence. Brae had escaped — and then, casebook style, married a carbon copy of the father. Those two beauties had left her with a bitter shame about her “mixed blood,” which came out in twisted ways. How embarrassing it would be if Johnny guessed her secret — after he’d learned to grin at her dirty jokes. Of course I wasn’t going to give her away. I’m on Brae’s side, I really am. I just hate what the world has made of her.

  We climbed through open woodland to the plateau. The day was hot but not sweltering, the country very beautiful. From above Lake Gerard was peacock green, like a piece of bottle glass stamped down by a hard heel into the plushy treetops. The African Queen was a dozing water beetle. I was worried. Braemar had always deployed her feminine wiles with ruthless skill (and thought I was a fool to have dumped my armaments). But now I felt she’d become doubly artificial: ultrafemininity as a conscious construct. The way she made him laugh at her racist jokes. The way she seemed to watch with satisfaction while my good American experimented with the vicious old games. It scared me, the cold way she set herself up to be at once despised and enjoyed.

  “It’s down here, Mrs. Anna —”

  I clambered after Sackey into the dry bed of a stream. It had dried out very quickly. Crusts of stiffened algae clung to the smooth rocks. The banks were coated, in a narrow swathe on either side, with scum and debris. I saw something shining and picked up what seemed to be half a crumpled can. The metal was a brilliant, translucent blue. I rubbed the bright bloom; it didn’t come off. I put it down. Sackey came up and looked; he delved the pockets of his tattered cut-offs.

  “Look, I found these. You want to buy?” He laughed. “No, only joking. We are selling, both of us. Did you pay your airfare?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Good, excellent. All sheer profit for you.”

  I didn’t get a good look at the things Sackey held out. He stowed them away quickly. Then we came to it. The bed of the boiled-off stream ran into an open depression, wide as a motorway junction and roughly oval. It was bare red and yellow clay, and it had sides about two meters high. There was no sign of burning, nothing charred or withered. Above the rim, all around, flattened trees and bushes were masked in a veil of dried mud.

  “Monsieur Sackey, why would nobody down-river talk to us about what happened?”

  He shrugged. “Jealousy,” he suggested.

  “Where are the aliens now?”

  “Hiding.” He looked sly. “Sightings may be rare.”

  I walked into the center. Sackey stayed where he was. I suppose he thought he’d see enough of the place when the tourists started pouring in. There was a prickling of adrenalin in my uneasy belly. Supposing, after all, something awesome was about to happen to me: a conversion experience? This was the brink. No sane person had ever crossed it.

  I saw a small figure hunkered down and poking at the ground. It was Johnny. He smiled as I came up, a wide stretching mouth made meaningless by the black lenses above. He removed his sunglasses and looked at me quizzically.

  “Hi. It’s Johnny. Johnny Guglioli, remember?”

  “I’m sorry Johnny I was —”

  “Impressed. Mmm.” He rubbed yellow earth between his fingers. “What d’you reckon, Anna? Roadworks?”

  I remembered Major Derek’s version. “Have you a Geiger counter on you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Suddenly I felt very sick. I squatted, my head in my hands.

  “Anna, what’s wrong?”

  “I think I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh, shit. Davey’s snip didn’t take, you mean?” He looked embarrassed. “Um, sorry. Unwarrantable assumption, and none of my business. What are you going to do?”

  I knew what I’d promised. One each is what we’d agreed. There are simply too many people. Why should Bangladeshis give up their children if we wouldn’t?

  “I suppose I’ll have to face up to my marriage vows.”

  The nausea passed. I heaved a sigh.

  “We don’t believe in this thing, do we Johnny?”

  “Not me. You know, it probably is road works. If we carry on over the hill we’ll find the big corral of a Chinese civil engineering plant. We’ve stumbled upon an illicit hardwood logging operation. We’ll all get shot and dumped in the swamp.”

  “And what people saw in the sky?”

  “Aurora.” He put the glasses back on and smiled without his eyes again. “We have no neighbors, Anna. No one here but us chickens. Maybe we’ll set off one day in a relative way and come back and visit ourselves. That’s the only hope.”

  His manner was very odd; I couldn’t make it out.

  “Let’s get back. It makes sense to get home before the Major. Those tantrums aren’t good for the poor guy.”

  At dead of night, Johnny sneaked into the deckhouse. He found the box that Braemar had marked without difficulty, his pencil of light picking out the smudge of Murasaki Rose on a white MOD Supplies doc
ket. She’d had one of the soldiers identify it, by making him want to frighten her, she said. Dangerous little kitten! He suckered a tiny processor that he called his “skeleton key” beside the lock, and in a few seconds it had the combination. Such are the legitimate tools of investigative journalism; for the people have a right to know. Tough luck on the Major if he didn’t understand the rules. All was quiet. Giggling silently, Johnny opened Major Derek’s smart briefcase, raised the sliver of a screen, and loaded a disc that was helpfully labeled (when will they ever learn?) with the dates of the Snark hunt. He glanced at some of the files — the maps and notes — and shook his head over them a little. Then he did things to the disc that were not good for its long-term memory. He checked the rest of the contents of the case. But Braemar had assured him there was no hard copy, no paper written notes. And she seemed to know her business.

  How wonderful to be Johnny Guglioli, rightful heir of the greatest civilization the world has ever known. How wonderful to enjoy all the old adventures, with all the new virtues intact. Out on deck again he stood by the rail and stared at his own hands, which were actually shaking. But only his body was afraid and excited. Johnny’s mind rode above, perfectly cool. He gazed into Africa, in no hurry to get out of sight (I couldn’t sleep): planning the rest of the coup, while tremors of some emotion that his mind did not care to name ran through and through his limbs.

  We were in the kitchen at home. David was trying to get Directory Inquiries to give him the number of some chicken-expert (those tiresome birds and their diseases!). The woman on the phone explained that she couldn’t because of the attack. “What ‘attack’?” asked David. WHAM. Our kitchen windows went white with a blinding, blinding, silent flash. Then it was afterwards. There was a big room in which people were huddled in little family groups. People kept doing stupid things: wanting to open the door, to uncover the windows. I was running around trying to stop them, I was making Jacko hide under some cardboard. I was amazed at myself. I’d always been sure that only an idiot would try to survive the end of the world. All the while, dreaming, I knew that “Nuclear War” was only a label, only the mask of some different catastrophe.