White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

  His sudden articulate yell panicked the others. As their leader ran back they scurried, confessing their fear and giving up all attempt at passing for normal. They hid behind some sheds on a dirt access road that led down to the big highway. In a short while the captain joined them, spattered with mud from head to foot. Luckily, no one seemed to have noticed the odd behavior of a small group of non-combatants. The others were shamed by the reminder of how quickly the small decencies of life had been muddied out of sight by adversity. That person whose obligation to principled action is unaffected by circumstance hadn’t meant to embarrass anyone. He was embarrassed himself, now; but unrepentant.

  sighed his guardian.

  Those who used fixed names had adopted, near as they could make out, equivalents in the local dialect. It would have been a friendly diplomatic compliment, except that the locals didn’t know. The captain was determined to remain in hiding

 

  It wasn’t really the captain’s fault. The long term effects of the crash were coming to the surface, not only in proliferating practical problems but also in low morale. People were afraid to be left alone. Whenever the person they depended on went foraging a search party would soon follow him, and become a liability. It was a silly situation. But someone had to go and do the shopping, and who else could it be?

  He put his arm around his guardian as they piled into the car, and brandished one of his parcels.

 

  Benoit hugged him.

  What a charming presence it was, though nothing in Agnès’s pleasantly irregular features deserved to be called beauty. The people here had a poetic term for the effect. You’re so sexy when you’re angry. It was a neat observation, the one arousal being physically near the other. Agnès was so often angry. Was it the way the world’s pain drew sparks that made people want to be near this forever youthful soul? Or was it the sexy symptoms—the bright eyes, flushed skin, pouting nasal?

 

  The joke fell rather flat, and not only with those who didn’t understand the Spoken Words. The crew struggled to make out that Benoit was conflating personality with physical appearance, to be funny. Finally they laughed, one after another, an absurd descant. The infection took hold, they all laughed together, for no reason; and felt better. Their captain felt worse.

  Agnès had been eager to starve and wade through swamps. He hadn’t anticipated the grim test of a shipwreck in the company of artisans and merchants. Momentarily exasperated beyond kindness he grumbled something to this effect—and spent the ride back to camp feeling the sting of his own sharp comment far more sharply than said artisans and merchants themselves.

  The expedition hadn’t exactly become a disaster. There had been casualties, and the three parties found themselves widely separated. But the whole venture had been such a leap into the unknown; it was nonsense to complain that things weren’t going to plan. At the landing, knowing that the other two parties had their own problems, Agnès had put a brave face on things. He had ordered the lander salvaged and led them all off to explore, carrying the injured with them and caring for them as best they could.

  Most of their tradegoods were lost, but it’s amazing what people will give for an object whose only attraction is that they’ve never seen anything like it before. The cars had been hired, with unlimited mileage, in exchange for some baby toys. There had been consternation, when, after carrying them for two days, the creatures collapsed in evident need of food. The captain’s guardian had persuaded everyone to see the funny side. But the cost of the liquid feed had curtailed their exploration. For a while now they had been camped in a wooded park, just outside the city of Fo.

  The more assertive members of the crew had represented to Agnès that there were surely plenty of hotels in the city. They were almost penniless, true; but there was nothing wrong with the credit of the other two parties. He had only to approach any significant local character; an arrangement must be possible. Agnès refused to consider the idea. He had not come all this way to sit in a hotel…. They might have known. Their leader went mountaineering for fun at home.

  Agnès was interested in loot and fame, in his own way. But he would never have joined this venture merely for material profit, for show; or even just for the fun of risking his neck. He was a poet. He was determined to go on as he had planned: to explore, quietly and privately, to make as little impact as possible, to see without being seen, to learn without being taught. He was not going to be co-opted into a State Visit, nor a Trade Delegation. He had no particular desire to meet the local people. People are the same anywhere. He had come to stare, simply to stare… To store his mind with new sensibilities, new perceptions.

  The camp’s position was a compromise. It was buried deep in the park, so Agnès could get on with his famous staring, but at least the very presence of trees, grass, shrubs, assured them that civilized habitation couldn’t be far away.

  They spent the rest of that day calmly. Fairly large weapons occasionally stirred in the undergrowth. None of them seemed armed for serious damage, but a weapon without provenance was an eerie thing. They didn’t attempt any form of retaliation. They had decided it was better to ignore all signs of hostility, unless absolutely forced into self defense.

  The master at arms, a person with a strong sense of justice, still brooded on the liquid feed hustle, and the perfidy of car hire firms.

  “Unlimited mileage!” he snarled, at intervals. “The shameless devils!”

  Agnès visited the sick and then went off by himself, taking care to remain in sight. He sat between the roots of a huge tree. The wooden fans made a house around him. He laid his own hand next to the hand of a fallen leaf. Even to the stubby fifth leaflet the shape was an echo, an echo of home; an echo of Self. To give and to receive the Self makes open palms. He shook hands with the fallen leaf, wondering what tiny far away contact the local people felt. Perhaps none. Perhaps they were not obliged to perceive him at all. He tasted the populated air, but none of its tiny messengers carried news for Agnès.

  The isolation was dizzying. He took out his sketchpad and began to compose. There, the shape and texture of loneliness, and in loneliness unity: the unity inescapable of the WorldSelf.

  I came here to find the new, but there is nothing new. There is only the WorldSelf, perceiving itself. Any shelter out of which I look is that of my own body. Any leaf is my hand. I cannot escape; I can never leave home.

  He was nagged by that angry exclamation. The person whose obligation was to security and vigilance (who was also the beloved partner of Agnès’s guardian), did not take to Spoken Words easily. That repeated outburst about the car-feed signaled growing concern about the future. Their lander was still providing shelter, but there was no one left who could repair it or even halt its decay. There were other daily needs, like food and clean underwear, equally beyond the skill of anyone left alive. Those who could bear to use local supplies did so: but soon there’d be no choice.

  From the skin of Agnes’s bare hands and wrists, from his face and throat, tiny particles sifted away; floating on the almost nonexistent breeze, bringing the chemical touch of Agnès, to the others in the clearing. The captain had a fleeting notion of how frighteningly few his little wanderers were, in the vast alien crowd. He quashed it hurriedly: and luckily no one had noticed his half-remark. The idea had no hold on him: it winked out of existence. In commonsense, as in poetry, this world seemed so like home.

  Gradually he fell into another round of his dispute with distant “Guillaume,” leader of one of the other two parties. No one could quarrel with “Eustache”: the third captain never worried about anything but practicalities. Between the other two there was friction. One reason why Agnès was obstinately camped in th
e park was that he couldn’t bear to be beholden to that shameless materialist for his mess bills. He was going to have to give in soon… The thought didn’t sweeten his temper; and of course Guillaume was crowing. Fortunately (as his guardian would often observe) they considered each other’s worst insults to be compliments: which often made for a kind of peace.

  There were other thoughts, so much more pleasant. Agnes slipped away into stillness, luxury and delight.

 

  Now that person currently known as Guillaume, whose aspect is bold action, was shocked. In such a dangerous, even a desperate fix, how could the Poet sink into one of his hedonistic fugues! The Pure One, supposed to be such a goodie-goodie, so concerned for his people’s wellbeing! You’re a disgrace!

  Agnès only chuckled.

  He drifted further.

  At nightfall they changed their clothes and danced, all but the sick, and the Expedition’s baby. Agnès and his guardian handed each other through the figures, everyone stooped as they passed him to include the baby, who sat clapping hands on the sidelines. The sounds of feet scuffing on a dance-floor of mud and leaves, the feel of branches snagging hair, had everyone giggling as usual. The rite was taken seriously, nevertheless. What can’t be conveyed by normal means of communication must be put into words. What is too deep for words is expressed in Dance. The other crews, far away, were dancing too. Briefly, the three parties were peacefully united.

  The baby, whose guardian was also Benoit, fell asleep: after tearfully exhorted promises that nobody would sell anything else that he loved while he was unconscious. The adults sat and chatted. They would have watched tape, but that was another loss: the sacred equipment had been injured beyond recovery. Agnès’s chaplain was grieved and anxious. The captain teasingly begged him not to wallow in superstition. No one would collapse and die if separated from their narrative for a while. Although the locals seemed to believe otherwise….

  “They live surrounded by ghosts,” he explained. “The other world, the land of the dead, is on show everywhere. I don’t know if they have any more rational knowledge of God.”

  Most of his audience, unused to abstract description, didn’t quite understand. They laughed, to be on the safe side, and were comforted. It was worth something to be in the company of a great poet, even if it was all a little above one’s head.

  Agnès sat with knees reversed in a relaxed posture, one hand cupped over his nasal against the chilly evening air. He argued with Guillaume, about that episode in the workshop yard.

 

  With Agnes, Guillaume replied, pity was like a disease. Which attitude would Agnès himself prefer, from visiting strangers? Would he enjoy being pelted with Improving Tracts? Agnès admitted, with a grin, that he would far prefer to be cheated.

  Agnès’s guardian, the person who can always find something to smile about, came over to combed wanderers from the captain’s hair. The beloved leader, dear child, turned with a blind, nestling movement to bury his face in the other’s lap. How sadly sweet it was to feel him there: little grub, lost forever.

  “What is your formal name here? I keep forgetting.”

  “Benoit—at least, that’s the nearest I can get.”

  “If I win nothing else out of this life,” said Agnès, his voice muffled by his guardian’s clothes “At least you and I will always be connected, in memory of the Great Expedition.”

  Endless speeches! This was one of the trials and fascinations of being so close to Agnès. Benoit hugged his grown-up ward, and they discussed in more commonplace fashion the difficulties ahead. The accommodation with Guillaume was inevitable, an interest-free loan unlikely. The value of this crew’s share in the adventure must take a fall.

  pointed out Benoit.

  Rueful, smothered giggles from the poet. Agnès’s lax grip on material success was notorious, proverbial.

 

  Agnès uncurled, pulling faces.

 

  Guillaume, the wilful one, had always wanted to announce himself and everyone else to the locals. Agnès had fought and won on this point before they left home. The tables would be turned if the Poet had to fling himself on the other’s mercy…. But the self-styled “Benoit” noted a last remark—informally expressed, quickly retracted; only someone who knew Agnès intimately would have caught it. There: a message that had to be a misunderstanding.

 

 

  In that night, another of the injured died. Agnès’s physician had died in the crash. Anyone who had been seriously hurt was as it were still trapped in the wreckage: little could be done for them. It was no surprise. Anyone who had volunteered for this expedition must, by definition, have a tendency to court early and maybe violent death. But another deathbed brought their plight home to them once again. Agnès assisted his chaplain at the making of the person’s last record, and then retired with his sketchpad and a lamp to the fan rooted tree. He did not return to his poem, but he stayed out there for hours, copying carefully, from memory, certain odd patterns of lines and dots and curves. He was even more determined to hold onto his independence, not only for his own sake, but for the sake of those who had chosen to depend on him, in this life and all the lives to come. Guillaume had put all his efforts into making a big impression. Agnès knew that there were things about this new world that the Wilful One had not noticed, or had entirely misunderstood. Agnes would not come to their meeting, when it was eventually forced on him, completely empty-handed.

  iii

  L’Iceberg was one of those monster hotels left abandoned all over the globe by the collapse of long haul tourism. Its yellowed tower rose up from the French-planned New City center, forlorn marker of the high point of a far-retreated tide. In fact the air of decay was an illusion. L’Iceberg (officially the St Maurice) survived very well. Johnny would not dare try to enter its front doors, but there was a garden bar at the back called The Planter’s, which was less intimidating; the watering hole for every foreigner in town.

  The Planter’s was on Johnny’s regular circuit in his search for the mystery girl. He’d never caught her in here yet, but there had to be a first time. Besides, his pocket money was burning a hole in his pocket. Greasy notes were not generally current in L’Iceberg, but the barstaff were friendly. Johnny bought a beer and carried it himself to a red plush island.

  The glass wall to the garden was dark, the bar a gloomy cool cavern washed in the hiss of rain. On his screen talking heads around the Pacific Rim discussed gravely, with ill-concealed schadenfreude the demise of the New York Stock Exchange. He tuned it out, without touching the keypad. By the bar a party of white South Africans arranged tours with their holiday guide. Two Fo bourgeois, a man and a woman, talked urgently and sadly in a tiny alcove. A group of Nigerian businessmen passed by, going out to eat, clapping each other across the back, talking loud and showing big teeth. It was the dead time of the afternoon. Johnny nursed his beer, wondering how long before he got the bum’s rush.

  A white woman came down the stairs from the hotel, wearing a small-waisted, short-skirted dark dress with an effect somewhere between petals and armor. Between the segments of the skirt a cool green ripple of chemical glow came and went. Johnny registered the dress as Big World high fashion. He was thinking that for a whore she looked too exp
ensive for Fo, when he realized with horror that he recognized this person.

  She saw him. She came over to his island with a false and meaningless smile on her face.

  “It’s Johnny Guglioli isn’t it. D’you remember, we net—”

  The talking heads now surrounded a centerpiece illustration of Times Square. Thousands of bodies swirled to and fro under a wild, rapidly changing airwriting of charged slogans. These rhetoric-parties had become a feature of New York life apparently. Like a dance craze.

  The truth was, Johnny didn’t give a shit for the revolution. The Hisps and the Blacks duking it out with the Wasps and the Jews and so what. Nothing in it for Johnny, he was still dead meat. A plague upon both your houses.

  The falsely smiling woman was called Braemar Wilson. She was British. European foreign correspondents, engineer-journalists, worked for their national governments or the media giants, just like Johnny. Wilson was either not good enough to be anyone’s employee, or didn’t have the right background. She was no journalist, just a glorified presenter. She did cod-intellectual “developments” on topical concerns: sold her stuff to packagers, scheduled tv, the Brit net-tabloids. Johnny had networked with her on a couple of gigs, never met her in the flesh. Never wanted to. She made her living by telling the people what they liked to hear. Close the dome. Chute the poor. It’s not your responsibility. The Big Machines, (or Mother Nature, as in the Youro version) will decide who sinks, who swims.

  It was the height of ill luck for anyone from the past to turn up here. Maybe he was glad it was an unsympathetic stranger.

  “I heard about what happened. How awful for you, I’m so sorry. May I sit down?”

  She sat beside him.

  “What a swell party they’re having,” she remarked, with an edge of provocative scorn. “Next July we collide with Mars, but who cares about trifles? You’re well out of the whole fracas, in my opinion.”