White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  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 a
nd 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.

  If there were factory girls running riot in the alleys of Liverpool, I suppose I’d be more enthusiastic, thought Ellen cynically. There’d be votes in KT attendance, then.

  But the riots were in Karachi, Lagos, Jakarta, New Delhi—in monstrous outback glasshouses with names like Black Stump and Lizard’s Knee. (Though why on earth they should be frightening? Such tiny sticks of flailing arms, all hampered in tattered mummy-cloths. Such shrill and feeble defiance). Ellen sighed. An army of mice can be alarming, just because it seems so unnatural. The WOCWOM annoyed her because, lifelong feminist as she was, she knew how that sexual-politics label obscures the real issues. This was basically a conference about global labor conditions—which the so-called liberal nations did not feel obliged to attend. You could see it at a glance. The crowded blocks belonged to India, Pakistan, the Middle East and Federated Europe; Oz and Africa. The real powers in the world: China, the Pacific Rim, the Corporations, the Russian Feds and the EU, didn’t bother. They could have as much influence on this affair as they wanted to have, through the ‘protected economies’; partners in energy audit trade-offs. Today, as usual, Ellen was all alone in the EU block.

  At least you couldn’t blame the Americans. They were busy with their internal affairs. Or they had been. She tried for her release again: nothing available.

  Funny how things turn out, thought Ellen. The ’04 was supposed to be the great catastrophe, God’s punishment for all out misdeeds, to make us change our ways. Thirty years on and it was plain to see, the really significant thing was that China and Japan became one. And my goodness, didn’t the world feel it. The world of power, that is. Surprisingly little had changed as far as the powerless were concerned.

  She pushed aside the butterfly wings of cosmic order, mangled into nonsense by the Office of Statistics. “Innocently chaotic, indeed! Robin, my lad, I can’t be bothered with this. From now on, don’t take anything out of the hopper. You watch. Give it a year or two and every reform fought for in the great Krung Thep Wigwam will be down the toilet. Nothing left but a few scraps of legislation so obvious and minor they were passed without a murmur.”

  Pity for the mouse-army pierced her. Thoughts of her own people, lost generations, beaten down in the service of King Cotton. She heard the cynicism in her own voice: it depressed her.

  She straightened her shoulders.” Women are the poor of the world. The last working-class. They’re causing a ruckus now because they’re a little stronger. We can’t help them at all, nature must take its course. You can’t stop struggling, Robin. But while you’re at it you have to remember you’re only a symptom, not a cure. Politically imposed progress is never worthwhile.”

  “Then what is?” grumbled Robin gently.

  “My revenge. Let’s have the horoscope.”

  “Plan your day with care,” Robin read aloud, tackling the Bangkok Post’s post-English with aplomb. “This could be a disturb week, so you will need to think carefully about what you want to do. It could be easy to be saddle with a bad bargain. Also, you may believe rumors that are unfounded. Stick to routine jobs if you can.”

  Now that was what Ellen called proper international communication: disrespectful, casual, perfectly intelligible.” Good. The techs over there will make sure we have a quiet session. Hand me some real work.”

  Robin did as he was told. He was accustomed to Ellen’s blunt manner. She meant no offence. He watched her, a dumpy old lady with more than a passing resemblance to the late Queen Elizabeth II: the same crumpled jowls, the same unchanging hairstyle (defiantly dark, in Ellen’s case). Robin’s friends pitied his plight. He took the sympathy, finding it useful. But loyalty to Ellen had been a calculated decision. He was young, he had time to spare. From now on he was well in the black in a certain system of credit. He was the boy who was safe to have behind you in a foxhole: these things matter. There were less tangible benefits. Ellen is my Hermit, thought Robin, a passionate Gamesplayer if he ever had the time. To earn what she’s got cost her too much, she’s off the board. But in her service I’ll gain Enlightenment, without being battered to bits in the process.

  The “Autonomists” who had maneuvered Ellen into jail were up to their usual tricks. Ellen began a hostile perusal of certain documents in the private files of a prominent Little Englander. She knew the boy found her lawless tactics highly entertaining, and ignored his silent, amused attention for as long as she could.

  “Well, what’s up with you?”

  “Don’t you want to know about the aliens?”

  “What aliens?”

  “The ones I was telling you about. They’ve been taken to see the Queen, Poonsuk said. No one in the chamber knows what to make of it, but I don’t believe Poonsuk ever plays the fool. No blague, ma’am. I think they’re here.”

  “If this is a wind-up, you young monkey—”

  She returned to KT…. Revenge is musk and amber, but she liked to be teased by Robin. There was a stir in the chamber. Empty chairs sprouted as video-conferencers searched for better camera-angles. Realtime bodies pressed to the aisles. A troop of girl-soldiers, beautifully turned out, entered Ellen’s view. In their midst there were several people in light brown coveralls. They marched towards the dais, and towards their own image on the screen behind. Censorship was breaking down all round. Odd figures scurried, machinery and trailing cables became visible. In Westminster Ellen’s headset roared like the sea in a shell: Babel reborn. The techs were probably planning to sue the stargazer of the Bangkok Post.

  “…in the interim, all Aleutian visitors will speak from the USSA.” quacked the Multiphon, suddenly reduced to the blatting tone of a novelty domestic appliance.

  Ellen’s request finally came back, in
print on one of her subscreens. Delegation Name Change. The release you have requested—

  Mainscreen view swooped to the ci-devant USA. More brown coveralls winked into existence there. Faces. For the first time, she saw what the fuss was about.

  “Apparently there were three landings,” said Robin, demurely, from his own desk. “One in a little country near the Cameroon, I’ve forgotten the name. One in formerly Burma, I mean Karen, up beyond Chiangmai. One in Alaska. The Alaskan group seems to be in charge.”

  My dear, you look very odd. Good heavens, what have you done with your underwear?

  Ellen clutched her ear as if an insect had bitten her. Aliens! Suddenly there was nothing available but a close up of the dais. She saw a senseless heap of brightly packaged objects. Lace trimmed handkerchiefs. Velvet jewel cases, tvs with global translator facility and zapback, a group virtuality set, suits curled like crisp black pupae around the desk; a blanket of vatgrown sable. All kinds of expensive and nasty giftables.

  “Beads for the natives,” said Robin’s voice in her headset.” What d’you suppose they want in return? Hawaii?”

  Ellen muttered and slapped keys, to no effect.” Get out and switch on the telly, Robin. You’ll probably find out more that way.”

  But the Multiphon pulled itself together. The chamber reappeared, the Convener on the dais and a slender elderly gentleman in a black kimono, seated beside her couch.

  “The government of the world.” said Poonsuk.

  Ellen’s mail box was flashing merrily. Naturally. She was the only active EU delegate. Conscientious from the habit of a lifetime, she had often been the only delegate in the chamber from the whole White North. She watched the flashing from the corner of her eye, the signal taking on delightful meaning. Now there were empty desks, dishevelment. Some delegates seemed in a state of emotional collapse. Scraps of précis wrote themselves up. The old man in the kimono was the visitors’ go-between. He was a Mr. Kaoru, retired businessman living on a private estate in the tiny State of Karen (not to be confused with Karen State, next door in Reformed Federal Burma). He had been acting as host to one of the groups of aliens. The Aleutians (the Multiphon appeared to have decided that Aleutia was the name of the alien planet) had just agreed they would all accept his extended offer of hospitality.