The Green Queen

by Margaret St. Clair

  Leaf appeared to pay no heed to the familiarity, but her face lightened. "Yes, that could be," she said thoughtfully. "I can't see very far into his mind—there is too much power in this place—but I know that he is jealous.

  "Horvendile, you have said many things—very surprising things—about the first Green Queen and how she came here. Do you have any proof for what you have said?"

  "Proof?" answered Horvendile. He had been digging steadily, and by now the hole was about four feet deep and three feet across. It didn't appear that he was expecting to dig up anything very big. He enlarged the sides of the hole with the shovel before he spoke again.

  "Well, Leaf, if you think I'm lying, nothing that I say I saw myself could constitute proof. For example, a friend of mine and I dug up the original Green Queen's ship a couple of weeks ago. I could tell you about all the trouble we had getting it up from where it was and how closely it resembled your cryptaesthetic perception of it and about the fossilized ant we found inside it, and so on. But if you think I'm lying you'd think I made it up.

  "The same thing is true about the readings of radioactivity my friend and I got out in the field last year with 'uncalibrated' instruments he'd smuggled in from earth. I don't particularly enjoy being called a liar, anyhow.

  "But you want proof. Perhaps the fact that you can't find your tree and that your consort doesn't come isn't really much in the way of evidence. The mask might just be wrong on these two points.

  "But be patient a little longer. In the next five minutes or so I'm going to come up with the final evidence, the irrefutable proof."

  Neither Leaf nor Bonnar made any answer. The long grass blew in the wind, and the clods Horvendile tossed up over the side of the hole made a settling noise. In a little more than the five minutes the historian had predicted his spade struck with a clang against metal.

  Bonnar directed an anxious glance at Leaf, but she was not even looking at what Horvendile was doing. She was half turned away, watching the sky for the divine consort who would come.

  Chapter Eight

  "HE LEVERED it up with the shovel," Bonnar said ...

  QUEEN MERAKIS' message beacon was a flattish, gold-colored ellipse, about ten inches long on the larger axis, with a thin spire, forked at the tip, rising from a boss at its center. It seemed to be exceedingly heavy for its size; Horvendile was sweating with exertion when he laid it on the edge of the hole he had dug.

  "The proof," he said. He clambered up out of the hole and sat down beside the object. "The proof. And incidentally—" his manner grew faintly professorial and didactic—"the source of many peculiarities in Viridian social structure and anomalies in Viridian social life."

  "What's that got to do with anything?" demanded Bonnar. The production of the object from the bottom of the hole had not impressed him; he had known, after all, that there must be something there or Horvendile would not have dug; but he was on fire to spike the fellow's guns. "Are you going to sit there and lecture us?"

  Queen Leaf had been looking at the message beacon with remote, dispassionate eyes. Now she turned her gaze on Bonnar. The latter, after a moment, bit his lip. To Horvendile she said, "Go on talking until you are done."

  Horvendile nodded. "Queen Merakis' beacon is the cause—the 'onlie begetter', as the old poet would say, of as consistent and stubborn a group neurosis as one would want to encounter. As with a neurosis, everything is interpreted in terms of the original experience. Or you could call it paranoia—it's an internally consistent, organized, dominant system of delusory ideas." He cleared his throat.

  "What are the psychological realities that underlie Viridian social life?" he continued. "I think you'll agree that they are guilt and punishment for the Lowers and anxiety for the Uppers. And for everybody alike there is, constantly, fear.

  "Evidence which would tend to disprove the necessity for these psychological orientations is disregarded, and everything, even inanimate objects, is forced into the frame. The writhing trees, for example, which are no more sentient than Mimosa pudica on earth is, have been made the subjects of a, logically, quite ridiculous story about human beings who were transformed into trees as a punishment for some unspecified guilt, and the story is widely believed.

  "Again the frame. Guilt. Punishment. Fear."

  He paused. "Prove it," Bonnar said truculently. He had decided on the line he would take: that Horvendile, from A to Z, was lying. "How did you know the beacon was there, if you didn't put it there yourself? Prove the things you've said."

  Horvendile looked angry, but he only sighed. "Will you say that, because Leaf knew the beacon was here, she buried it?" he asked mildly. "After my friend and I dug up the original green queen's ship, I had an inkling of what Leaf had been hunting the first time she left Shalom. I got a fix on the beacon from three different points, and the lines intersected here. I have some ESP myself, you know, though not nearly so much as Leaf has. In this case, it was probably an advantage not to have so much, since I wasn't confused by reverberations from the beacon.

  "But Bonnar will say none of this is really proof. Well...

  He studied the beacon closely for a moment or two. Then he turned a tiny lever that, about two inches up, projected from the shaft of the forked spire. He frowned. After an instant he gave the lever two opposite turns.

  Bonnar had the impression that the sky had suddenly darkened. He looked up, perplexed. No, it was still light, though sunset was approaching. But a darkness almost palpable had descended on him. A cloud of horror wrapped his brain.

  The ground where he stood was dangerous. That was the first of the realities. It was alive with danger; even in his protective suit he could hope to survive only a few hours. He looked at Leaf and Horvendile, naked against the danger, and was astonished to find them blackening and writhing from the upward rain.

  He knew whose fault the danger was. It was the Lowers who had done it. Instead of feeding him, as their duty was, they had condemned him to this horror, this momentary expectation of flayed and blasted death.

  Why did they hate him so? He had never done anything to them but give them their legitimate uses. But their hate was so great that they didn't care in the least what happened to them, so long as he suffered. It was a selfishness he couldn't fathom. He felt like screaming with horror at their hate, their stupidity.

  They'd be punished when—if, if, if—he was rescued. Nothing could be too bad for them then. But the rescue ship must come soon. The danger was sickening. If the ship didn't come soon, he couldn't live.

  He turned his eyes to the sky again, this time looking for rescue. It was empty, there was nothing in the darkening hemisphere that promised hope. He moaned. The ship, the rescue ship—when would it come? Hurry, hurry. Oh, the ship!

  Horvendile had bent over the beacon again. Once more he twisted. Bonnar felt the cloud of horror around him lift.

  He licked his lips. They were salty. Sweat was running down his face. His whole body, inside his protective suit, was soaked with sweat.

  "You see?" said Horvendile. "I stepped up the output of the transmitter a little, that was all. Do you see how that sort of thing, even at a lower power, could have affected Viridian society?

  "Once one becomes aware of the constant psychological pressure from the beacon, many peculiar features in that society become explicable." He twinkled. "Its division into three castes, which correspond to the ant people, their personal attendants, and their cattle. The Uppers' unreasoning belief that the Lowers—who ought, by ant standards, to be supplying them with a sweet nourishing secretion—are somehow failing in their duty. The society's toleration of women who live only for childbearing, as a termite queen lives only to lay eggs. The conservatism, even the backwardness, of Viridian life. And even the rearing of the KGs in their crystal cells has its parallels with other insect societies, though I don't want to overstress this.

  "But the most striking thing, of course, is the fear that everybody on Viridis h
as of radiation damage. That fear, except for a few areas, is quite unjustified at present. But it was fully justified at the time Merakis lived."

  "But—I don't understand." Leaf sounded puzzled. "I could lift the barrier because I was the queen, and people would not be hurt. But radiation damage is real. Many have died from it."

  "They have not," Horvendile contradicted flatly. "Fungus disease has killed a few Lowers. But the radiation lesions have been psychosomatically produced. People have died of fear."

  "I can't believe you," Leaf responded. "Certainly, I felt the emotions of which you spoke when you turned the transmitter up just now. But how does it work?

  "And—you say that I am not the queen. Horvendile, I could kill you as you sit there, just by raising my hand. I don't understand what you have been saying. But I am the Queen."

  Bonnar, despite his recent experience, felt a tremulous hope. If Leaf continued to assert herself, the situation could yet be saved.

  Horvendile laughed. "Of course you could kill me, my dear. I never doubted it. But where does your power come from? From the beacon Queen Merakis had set up.

  "What the beacon is, is a sort of mechanical telepath. It works by inducing, in the recipient, emotions identical to those the sender felt. It is powered, I believe, by uranium salts, which have a long half-life.

  "Now, telepathy—" Horvendile rubbed his nose—"telepathy is something we still don't know too much about. I have been told by specialists that, while it isn't part of the electromagnetic spectrum of energy, it is capable, under suitable conditions, of being translated into that spectrum and back again. You must remember, in listening to my explanation, that I am only a historian.

  "Queen Merakis' message beacon was set up roughly 22,000,000 years ago. The message was never received, for reasons I'll go into a little later, and the rescue ship never came. Merakis and all those with her—consorts, children, body attendants and, ah, lacteal sources—died from radiation. But the message kept on being given out.

  "Why did the ant people make such an improbably durable beacon to transmit a message that would need to be transmitted only a little while? They even equipped it with a flotation device in the bottom to keep it above any possible lava flows. That's why I had to dig down only a few feet to find it, after all those millions of years.

  "It's only a guess, of course, but I imagine they were incapable of building anything that wasn't improbably durable. Their culture was ages old before they were wrecked on Viridis—an old culture, a highly evolved one, and one that had lasted without change for countless millennia. Naturally, anything they built was durable. But that's by the by.

  "As I was saying, the message never got out. It didn't get out because Viridis was surrounded then—and is surrounded now—by a layer of ionized water molecules. It was even thicker in the days of Merakis. And it acted as an almost perfect insulator against the telepathic impulses.

  "All clear so far, Leaf, my dear?"

  The sun had set; the moon-bright radiance was beginning to fill the sky. Leaf said, "Yes, it is an explanation. But look." She held out her hand, and bluish light dripped from it. "Explain that."

  Horvendile nodded, but he seemed a little disturbed. "I hope you don't still think that your consort—" he mumbled. "Well!" He cleared his throat.

  "Ever since the beacon was set up, impulses from it have been retained within the atmosphere of Viridis, in a sort of greenhouse effect. By now there is an enormous amount of telepathic, uhm, energy available. Don't you remember that I said that that energy was translatable into the familiar electro-magnetic spectrum? In the first days of our association, Leaf, you unwittingly produced some telekinetic phenomena. It was possible. What I did, Leaf, was to teach you how to turn some of the energy from the beacon into electrical and radio impulses. A long-dead researcher, Sigmund Freud, said that the psyche is basically electrical. And your 'miracles', Leaf, are at bottom electricity."

  He halted. "I wish I hadn't done it," he said rather plaintively. "Taught you to be the queen, I mean. It seemed to be a good idea at the time. But as our special group within the Apple Pickers used to say, 'There's a serpent in every bushel of apples.' That was an awfully useful slogan for piquing people's curiosity."

  The time had come, Bonnar saw, for him to speak. "You're lying," he said lightly but positively. "You put that contraption there yourself, and it's not a beacon, it's a supersonic wave generator, or perhaps a projector in maskart."

  Horvendile shrugged. He was still sitting on the ground beside the golden ellipse. "Why should I bother to convince you?" he asked.

  "Because," Bonnar retorted, "I have some influence with L—with the Queen.

  "If the projector's as important as you say, shut it off. You say it's been going for millions of years, but even so, shutting it off ought to make some difference.

  "Shut it off. Then Leaf and I can tell whether or not you're lying. Shut it off."

  Horvendile seemed undecided. He put his face down close to the ellipse and studied it. "I don't think they meant it to be shut off easily," he murmured. "They'd be afraid their Lowers ..."

  He fingered the forked tip of the spire thoughtfully. "I wish we had a little more light," he said, "but—" His other hand went out.

  Just before he twisted the spire on its base Leaf cried out. It was a cry of warning, of insight, of sudden fear. "Horvendile! Don't! They meant it to Kill!"

  It was already too late. An intolerably bright light shot out from the top of the spire and bathed Horvendile's body. It was so bright his flesh seemed transparent from it. Bonnar raised his arm to shield his eyes from the light.

  When he put his arm down again, Horvendile's body was sliding slowly forward into the hole he had taken the beacon from. At last the serpent in the bushel of apples had crawled out.

  Chapter Nine

  "IT WAS odd how quiet it felt after he shut the beacon off," Bonnar said. His throat seemed to be getting tired. "They say everyone in Shalom felt it too. It was like a noise stopping that you've been hearing all your life ..."

  LEAF TURNED her head from side to side, looking around her slowly. She seemed to be awakening from a dream. "Horvendile," she said in an uncertain voice, "Oh, Horvendile!" And then, more quickly, "The one who loved me is dead. And the one who loves power goes on living. That's odd."

  For a moment she covered her face with her hands. But when she took them down she seemed, as far as Bonnar could judge in the bright moon-glow, composed and dry-eyed.

  Bonnar said, in a voice that was louder and more self-confident than he felt, "The wrath of heaven smote him, my Queen!"

  Leaf shook her head. "No, it was not heaven. It was a trigger—an arrangement—on the beacon made so that none of the ant-people's servants would dare tamper with it. The servants did not want the rescue ship to come, since their punishment then would be worse than dying on Viridis could be."

  Bonnar let out his breath. "Do you believe all that stuff he told us?" he demanded.

  There was a long pause. Then Leaf answered, "Yes.

  "I am not the queen. I have no consort. What I believed was, all of it, nothing. The myth of the Green Queen was a mask you made up—I am not any queen."

  In a welter of impulses, among which was certainly some altruism, Bonnar started toward her and tried to put his arm around her. She pushed him away.

  "Don't," she said. "You don't want me any more, now that you know I'm not the queen or anyone important. Go on back to Shalom, Bonnar. Take care of your own interests. That's what you want to do."

  He licked his lips. It must be true, because she said it was; and yet the words seemed to have stabbed him in the heart. In the glow from the sky he tried to study her face. It was difficult: she had sunk down in the grass as if she were exhausted, and her head was bent. The halo of light around her had almost completely died away.

  Bonnar swallowed. "But Leaf," he said, "have you considered—I mean, it isn't really hopeless. You may n
ot be the queen, but you can still do the things you used to do. There's still plenty of power for the—the miracles. If we go back to Shalom soon ..."

  Once more he swallowed. He couldn't see her face at all. "I could play the part of your consort," he said, almost diffidently. "If I disguised myself carefully. We could work it, I think."

  Leaf laughed. It was an odd, high sound. "Oh, Bonnar!" she said. Despite her laughter, he had a momentary impression that she was weeping. Then she said, "You know I could not do that."

  There must be something he could say. He couldn't endure her being so wretched. "Yes," he conceded. "But look here, Leaf." He had thought of a good, a splendid, argument. "Suppose you don't go back to Shalom, don't carry on with the role of queen. What will happen? What was on the edge of happening when you went away?

  "The Uppers will seize power again. They are better organized than their opponents, more used to ruling, more intelligent. Everything you got for the Lowers will be swept away. They may even be worse off than they were before, since the Uppers will punish them for having rebelled against their authority.

  "I know you wouldn't masquerade as the queen for your own benefit. But don't you think you owe it to the people who've trusted you, to your followers? Some of them risked a lot to support you. You wouldn't want them to suffer.

  "Go back with me to Shalom. Play the role of the queen a little longer. Help the people of Viridis over a difficult time."

  He looked at her anxiously. Surely it would work, she was so gentle and brave and good. Leaf would never desert people who needed her. He must make her go back with him. He couldn't leave her here.

  She raised her head and was looking at him. "I—yes, you are right. I'll try. I'll go."

  She seemed to have trouble in rising. He started toward her eagerly, ready to help her up. But when he got to her she had sunk back and was sitting with bowed head, as still as a stone.