White Queen
Page 4
“Why midnight, for heaven’s sake?”
“Maybe your friend doesn’t know what darkness means.”
“Ms. Wilson—?”
“Braemar. A nom de guerre, Johnny, same as your Seimwa. Do you know, by the way, why she adopted one? Is she a feminist?”
“I hardly think so. She does tend to split the world the way they do, into human and subhuman. But not along the gender line.”
No hit, Ms. Wilson. I don’t mind in the least bad-mouthing my ex-boss, on the record.
He felt her smile.
“Braemar, what d’you really think’s going to happen tonight?”
“You’re going to meet your friend. And if it’s possible, we’re going to follow her home. Are you game for that?”
Even her absurd Brit jungle kit was sexified, cinched waist and breeches like second skin. He would save her up and use her for imagery. It wasn’t true about Izzy. Fo was full of gorgeous women with whose ephemerides he’d shared intense, sticky fisted experiences: slick clefts between supple thighs he’d penetrated, mulberry nipples sucked and bitten. There was a special savor to this one. She talked to him and looked at him and smelled of the lost world. He didn’t know what he’d been complaining about.
“I’m game.”
“What about you? What do you expect?”
Johnny hunkered over the ache in his groin and picked at moonlit pebbles.
“For a long time it’s been part of my calculations that the visitors would turn up one day. Some people buy lottery tickets, some believe in God, I’ve been waiting for the aliens. I’ve imagined them as humanoid and more or less intelligible. Not because I think it’s likely but because otherwise it’s not such a fun game. I’ve made a study of the field and found nothing but nonsense. That didn’t bother me. Weirdly, it had the effect of making me feel, something like: so many fakes, statistically, the real one has to be coming along soon. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but I’m still rational. If you hooked me up to a lie detector it’d certainly tell you that even here tonight I don’t believe…. This hobby long predates my run in with the NIH, by the way. But then lately—which doesn’t predate my problem but doesn’t seem to me to be connected—lately I’ve begun to prefer one popular scenario above the others.”
“The one where they touch down quietly, and mingle for a while—”
“Yeah. That one.”
“And this preference would be because, over the past year—”
“Not that long,” corrected Johnny.
“Why did you come to Fo?”
“Well, I started getting these dreams.” Johnny laughed “No, seriously. No dreams. There was a UFO report from the Asa warzone, some months ago. I presume you know about that. It was probably a robot fighter blowing itself to quarks, the way the poor critters are trained to do nowadays so they won’t rat on the bastards who supply them. However, the obscure ones are the ones I prefer, and besides I can’t get to Arizona anymore. So I came here.”
“And found you had a funny-looking friend. More?”
He looked at her quizzically. “I think you’ve heard this story before, Braemar.”
“Brae. My friends call me Brae. Is there more?”
“Only that I have a plan. You see….” He had a heap of stones by now, and was trying patiently to build a little tower.” I did not fuck with any machine, as you so crudely and ludicrously put it. It’s true I’ve been to space. I saw the Quarantine Zone. But no one who was up there with me, including the monitoring systems, can think of or demonstrate how I could have got near to being infected. And I was not propositioned by so much as an electric can opener. I swear. I have never been in contact with contaminated organic nanotechnology.”
“Have you had a European test?”
The tower was six pebbles high. It wavered. Johnny corrected the second level with precise fingertips. “I’ve had a whole lot of NIH excluded tests. Inconclusive: verdict, I should refer to the system with the greatest expertise, which is the NIH. Unhelpfully circular advice.”
“A Catch 22.”
“What?”
“It’s from an old drama movie. A shorthand term for situations like yours.”
He was annoyed. He considered himself cultured, but if she was going to start spiking the dialogue with crumblie fictional allusion—”I don’t rate them. Why watch actors working up a storm of pretend emotions, when you can plug into subscriber soap? If you like that kind of exhibitionism. The point is, I know I’m clean. I have to persuade my boss to get the case reopened. Even in the middle of this revolution, I believe she can do it. I plan to offer her the aliens, see if we can trade.”
Seimwa would like that, he thought. She delighted in barefaced insolence.
“What about the way you feel? Have you had any symptoms?”
Her timing was vicious.
“I feel terrible, wouldn’t you? In a year or so I’ll start going senile and then they can bury me and feel justified. Braemar, I didn’t ask you to join me on this trip. I don’t expect you to drink out of the same cup. But just take your risk and keep quiet about it, okay?”
“One more question.”
“One. And harmless, or I’m going to get mad.”
“Why the construction work?”
“Oh.”
He flicked the tower with his thumbnail, scattering it.
“Just a nervous twitch. Mama wanted me to be a regular engineer.”
Johnny entered the fort alone. The floor was earth, the air dank. He was in a tomb. He touched off his flashlight and the silver-ribbed sky appeared in a circle overhead. There were two ways in, the one he’d just used and a black hole with broken steps that led to the underground storage space. He stood where he could watch them both.
He was naked without a cam, without even a wire. But it would be crazy to break the rules of US quarantine, in the very act of trying to win back his good name. He was actually frightened, too. He’d forgotten how this felt: the real/unreal danger of an eejay’s life. The artificial stunts, the occasional genuine firefight. He had known both. It was dangerously difficult, once embarked, to remember which was which. This must be fake, however, or Braemar Wilson surely wouldn’t be here. Spiking the dialogue, what a kid’s trick. Sneering at his country too. It was nothing internal that had brought the USA down. It was the ’04 and its complex reverberations. And the rise of the European mega-slave-state, gross industrial malpractice and economic warfare. Not that Braemar would care. She probably had a whole family of illiterate Romanians with rotten teeth cleaning her toilets. Plug into a horrorfeelie. How he despised that kind of retro-slang.
Even if he did use it himself, all the time.
If it hadn’t been for her he’d have found some reason to ignore the note. The game was to seek, not to find. To stretch out the interest over slow pedantic days, like an old convict building something pointless out of matchsticks. Was Braemar so naive that she thought this could be real? The “alien” was a birth-defected rich kid in hiding, recovering from disastrous gene-therapy. Rich enough so the locals knew better than to answer questions…
He heard a scrabbling sound, thrust the light at it and saw a dark shape wriggling in one of the crumbled slit windows. She dropped to the ground. Dim light welled like blood between her fingers, from a short, red, glowing dumbbell. She came towards him, then stood and gazed for a long time. The strangeness of her face began to melt. The split lip and concave nose became as invisible as the features, the beauty even, of a face loved and familiar. Maybe, he thought, she was trying to see him as human too.
“Hi. I’m John Francis Guglioli, late of New York city. Who are you?”
“I am you.”
She didn’t have a cleft palate, then. She didn’t make sense but her speech was normal, only slightly nasal. She was very young. Translate the measure any way you like she was fifteen at the outside, this alien. The way she looked at him, shy and daring and doubtful, made her seem irresistibly like a high school Juliet. She though
t it would be so romantic to meet in the broken tower at midnight: now she wasn’t so sure.
“What do you want from me? Why did you ask me to meet you here? Who is it you’re afraid of?”
She pushed her torch into a loop on her sleeve, to free her hands. She reached out to him.
Her whole body was shaking. Her sweet eyes had filled with tears.
Johnny yelled, suddenly terrified. She wasn’t speaking English! The words were in his mind. He dropped his flashlight, groveled to retrieve it. Crouching, he brandished it at her.
“What are you talking about—! My daughter’s in New York.”
She seemed to get a shock, then came back fighting. She did not speak his language, not any language: he understood every word.
Johnny was suffering some kind of psychic invasion.
“No!” he shouted. “You’re crazy! It’s not true! Get out of my mind!”
She heard something from outside. Her head jerked to the sound Johnny hadn’t caught.
She dropped to her hands and…feet. Like a bear. She was wearing a loose khaki colored jumpsuit, cuffed close at the wrists and ankles, with lots of loops. It was what she always wore, it made her look like a theatre nurse, or a waste disposal worker: formal but ready to get dirty. Her legs inside the trousers moved around, the joints turning upside down. It was obvious that the girl was doing this, it wasn’t just happening; but hardly consciously. She was a wolf, a baboon with a semi-human face. She was above him, seeming much bigger than her real size, the way a big dog does when it gets too close. She howled something, and leapt up the wall.
Johnny couldn’t jump like that. He rushed out of the fort.
His flashlight, lost under the glow of the sky, caught a loping shadow. He heard a sharp intake of breath close by. It wasn’t Braemar. The alien girl’s enemies were around him. They either didn’t see him or they didn’t care. They ran and piled—several figures—into a big dark car. It rolled away, Johnny ran after it. Outside the gates the convertible was waiting. He jumped in. Braemar had something else wrapped around her head besides the 360: a nightsight visor. She’d switched to the car’s powerpack, which wasn’t going to carry this juggernaut very far over rough roads: but never mind, for the moment they could follow the quarry lightless and practically silent.
“What happened, Johnny? Is she real?”
He had recovered some semblance of cool. “I don’t know. She heard them, whoever they are, and panicked before we got anything going.”
“They were at the convertible. I went back for…to fetch something, and they were crawling over it like traffic wardens. Gave me a proper turn. They ran off when they heard me.”
About a mile beyond the last suburban lights the burr of a gashog engine left the Macmillan. Braemar turned after it onto a suicide track that had never been paved. The big car jounced and bounced along ruts deep as streambeds, Johnny could see nothing of Braemar’s view.
“We’re going to roll over,” she grumbled. “I wonder what would happen if I tried to put the wheels away at this speed….”
“That’s what I saw,” said Johnny. “She put her wheels away.”
He couldn’t hear the other engine anymore.
“Lost them,” muttered Brae. “Pulled off the road. Damn.”
They hadn’t pulled off the road, they’d pulled across it. Braemar gasped and thumped the brakes. The convertible’s lights leapt out automatically, a safety routine. Dark figures appeared transfixed, one of them four footed, big as a wolfhound at the shoulder. Braemar grabbed something and jumped out. It was a rifle. Johnny gaped in disbelief.
“Get out of the car, Johnny! Dear God, get out! It’s tampered!”
He couldn’t move. One of the aliens walked down the lights. It was a? a man? The man-form held out its hands, making a soothing, sort of Christlike gesture. Johnny felt the car respond. The machine moaned, chugged. Its wheels retracted, it tried to put down its track. It closed its big white eyes and nestled down to sleep.
The aliens piled into their own car, and drove away.
Johnny had begun to feel very sick. Saliva burst into his mouth, bile rose in his throat. He fell out of the convertible, staggered through wet grass that clung to his knees and fell against something, the bole of a tree. He felt unbelievably sick. A warm stream of piss poured down his thigh. Equal and terrible forces tried to drag him from the tree and mash him into its bark. So sick he couldn’t move or breathe, must be dying….
He woke up in somebody’s front parlor. He was lying on a mattress on a concrete floor, under a brown and grey goats hair blanket and wearing some stranger’s pajamas. The concrete was very clean, the mattress thin as cardboard. At the foot of his bed a chunky CRT monoscreen tv stood blankfaced on a plastic crate, on top of it a Christmas centerpiece of holly and christmas roses. There was dawnish light coming through unglazed windows, and the muddy resmelted roofing.
He closed his eyes, recalling the second unscripted wilderness experience of his life. He and Braemar Wilson must have fallen in about fifteen rivers, climbed in and out of hundreds of thorny ditches, before they found their way to this suburban street. Reports of Mother Nature’s demise have been exaggerated. He didn’t care to think about what had gone before. He felt a complete fool. At least he didn’t seem to have woken up in a spaceship. That would have been unbearably banal.
When he opened his eyes again Braemar was there, going through his personal effects surrounded by a mess of children. The monoscreen was blaring away, two African grown-ups in country clothes were watching it, sitting on the floor. Braemar had just managed to open Robert’s mobile home. Robert flopped out. She yelled, the children shrieked with laughter.
“Hey! That roach is under my protection, Ms. Wilson!”
If she was embarrassed she brazened it out pretty well.
“Put the box down.”
Johnny leaned out of bed and rapped on the concrete with his knuckle. “Everything’s okay, Robert. You go home.”
The big roach tasted the air in Johnny’s direction, then crept obediently back into its den.
“Smarter than your average orthopteron.” She came over. The way she looked at him was a lot too knowing for comfort. “My friend, the cockroach. Oh, Johnny. Why don’t you let them do their own dirty work?”
“He’s a souvenir,” explained Johnny. “We were in hospital together once. One day the world will be ready for cute roaches. Then I press the self-replicate button and restore my ruined fortunes. What d’you think?”
“Too many legs.”
“What happened to my clothes?”
“They’re being washed.”
“I pissed myself, didn’t I. How disgusting. Thank you for looking after me: I was totally helpless.”
“It’s called culture shock.” Her face was still painted, but barely. Beautiful women have to do it. Surely paint was better than the never-ending surgery, or the newer kind of cosmetic treatment that could go so horribly wrong.” Have you ever had anyone close to you die, Johnny? I have. It’s strange. It’s like, Africa. There are parts of ourselves that we can keep at bay, the way we fend off, where we live, the parasites and bugs that own this continent. If it breaks through, or if we go to find it, Africa is what it always was: inimical paradise, that made us but God knows how…. When you run into a big unevolved emotional nexus, such as death of a spouse, such as meeting an alien, you fall back into Eden. Doesn’t matter how sophisticated your conscious responses: things get strange.”
“You didn’t collapse.”
“I wasn’t in the car when it came alive. And I didn’t meet that friend of yours,
she didn’t talk to me.”
Johnny sat bolt upright, appalled.
“Bella!”
“Oh shit. Johnny, it’s all right. I called your wife. Your little girl is home and safe.”
“I told you?”
“Yes, you told me. You came out of whatever happened in the fort thinking the aliens had kidnapped your daughter. It’s just fugue, Johnny. Come on, you know all about it. Remember the scenarios. You’ve been drip-fed those scenes since you could sit up unaided.” She pulled her phone from her bag. “I’ll try to get through again. You could listen.”
He could not speak to his daughter. Izzy wouldn’t allow it. She said she had to protect the child. The thought that Braemar Wilson knew this stung him so that it took him a moment to read the full implication of her offer.
“You have my ex-wife’s phone number.”
She nodded.
He gave her a long, thoughtful look. He didn’t keep phone numbers in his pockets. He held the ones that still had meaning in his head. What else did she know? How deep did she get? No point in protesting. A US quarantine subject becomes a ward of the state, as far as data protection is concerned. Johnny had absconded, so he didn’t even have that meager protection. There was nothing he could do, no legal or practical recourse. Anyone who chose could delve into his private places.
“Nah, don’t bother. It’s the middle of the night. Too late for fairystories.”
Braemar nodded, and put the phone away. It was a fine, economical communication, that little nod. It accepted his unspoken contempt, almost with humility. She went on looking at him, giving him this humility like a present. Her eyes were brown: the iris not striated with grey or green as in most brown eyes, but opaque, glowing chestnut. In fascination he kept on returning her stare until it was like the preamble to a cat fight. One of them had to back away or else they had to fall on each other, clawing and grappling like maniacs.
She stood up.
“I’m old enough to be your mother.”
Their hostess had gone away and come back. She put a tray of coffee and porridge down beside Johnny and bent over him, looking concerned.