The classic, racist, Wednesday evening whinge.
“I think you’re a damaged human being, Brae.”
“The White Queen,” she said, “is a character invented by Charles Dodgson, a nineteenth century mathematician who was intrigued by nonsense-theory. You may have seen an anime. The White Queen’s special characteristic is that she screams before she’s hurt. To save time.”
“Thanks. I’m familiar with the works of Lewis Carroll.”
He leaned back, expansive and aggressive. “You’re up to your neck in this vile reactionary business, aren’t you Brae. Letterbombs and all.”
She nodded.
It’s always a shock when a major suspicion is finally confirmed.
She broke in on the silence, before he could decide what to do next. “I’m not a terrorist, Johnny. But our response to the Aleutians is dangerous. It’s sleepwalking, it’s mass hysteria. It is madness for us to treat them like gods. They’re few and we’re many. I think they hoaxed us quite unintentionally at first. Now they’re simply playing up to our fantasies.”
“Oh, sure.”
“They aren’t telepathic. They just think they are.”
Johnny choked, spraying nature-identical coffee.
“Brae, I think you’re on drugs.”
She poked a seedy dishcloth at him. Johnny pushed it down wind and mopped himself with the sleeve of his jacket. She returned to the attack, fired up.
“Listen to me. Babies don’t learn to talk so they can communicate. They don’t need words, they get on perfectly well without words, as long as they’re with people who know them. Am I right?”
“Uh—”
“When you say you ‘know what someone is thinking’; and you’re right, is that telepathy? Gesture, body language: when you know someone well, an educated guess. That’s what the Aleutians have. Imagine living in a silent movie. You know how silent movies work Johnny,”
There had been a vogue for them a few years ago. He knew.
“The pictures tell a story. The plot’s a simple tale, which everyone can follow without much help, because everybody knows it already. There’s a lot of emotional detail, sheep’s eyes and visual gags: and occasionally a title, a few words carefully framed for emphasis. That’s how the Aleutians communicate.”
“Doesn’t make sense. They’d keep on fucking up all the time.”
She was ready for that. “You know, people used to look at gibbons swinging through the trees and think: how amazing, what perfect acrobats; how is it they never fall? Then one day some spoil-sport did a survey of gibbon skeletons, and found bones that had been broken and mended, over and over again. They fall all the time. It’s simply that, statistically, swinging works well enough to make sense. The Aleutians have been here for—how long?—and they’re still convinced we operate just the same way as they do. Does that sound like ‘real’ telepathy to you?”
“The truth is, their theory that we’re linked by this ‘Common Tongue’ of theirs has only worked once. And it was with you. Do you see what that means? You and Clavel together, you could change the nature of this meeting of worlds!”
Johnny had found out nothing new about his own situation, by hanging around Braemar. He still didn’t know what to believe about the invitation to the Barbican, or the false passport. But he kept on coming here. Perhaps, in a twisted way, he was even drawn to White Queen. He’d caught himself,—alarmingly—wondering if he could sign up with reservations, with a get out clause or observer status. It was the old, vanquished need to be part of the main event.
She was overstating the case. There’d been reports of other humans who heard the alien voices in their heads: as far back as Alaska, and sporadically ever since. Johnny was unique and vitally important because he was within Braemar’s reach.
A single lamp stood on the table, echoing summer twilight. Braemar’s arms and throat glowed through layered muslin. How beautiful she looks when she’s lying, he thought. He put aside the dregs of his coffee.
“I still love the way you talk.”
“Thanks. But I’m trying to recruit you, hadn’t you noticed? What do you say?”
The babylistener function on the housebox sighed and muttered: Billy was restless. Kamla’s shrine glowed. On the screen at the other end of the room someone was walking around an expanse of grass in Argentina: the first enclave was being readied.
“Why didn’t you try to recruit me in Africa?”
She groped in the litter on the table for her cigarettes, good excuse not to look him in the eye. “Does it matter? I’m being as honest as I know how, here and now. To you the aliens look like saviors. Maybe you’re right and maybe I’m wrong. Fine. But you must agree that we need to know them, to make real contact. And you, with your training, are possibly the only man for the job.”
She grinned at him. “What’s the verdict. Will you join up or turn me in? You could try telling the White Van Man outside, for a start. Habeas corpus delicti, it used to be the rule. I keep throwing corpses at him. But you know what? It’s almost as if there’s a conspiracy to keep White Queen out of the public eye. They won’t arrest me. They don’t want to take us on.”
Johnny was frowning. “You were at Uji, that day when Sarah Brown died.”
Braemar sensed danger, but couldn’t see how to avert it. “I was there.”
“The attempt to steal tissue was a White Queen stunt. I’m right, aren’t I? Has anyone else made the connection? Your friend outside, does he know that?”
She took refuge in messing with her cigarettes. “No one’s ‘made the connection’: it was before our time, the Westminster government still gets the blame. I was supposed to cause a distraction. The idea was that I acted hostile and Sarah acted demure. When she accidentally pricked an alien with her darning needle, I’d be throwing some kind of wobbly on the other side of the room. It didn’t work quite like that. It was a stupid stunt.”
“Yeah. I’m glad you admit it. In effect, you killed that kid.”
“We didn’t know they’d kill her. We had no reason—”
Johnny shook his head. “No good, Brae. There is no excuse, and you know it. Anyone who takes up terrorist action of any kind accepts that their life is forfeit.”
She stared at him, silenced: abruptly pulled away from the grip of his eyes.
“But we got the goods”
She hated to think of it. That squirming thing in her mouth. No idea what it might do to her.
“What? Don’t try and tell me you took something out of Uji.”
“We did. A bug. Remember, in Africa, Clavel was covered in them. We have one of those things. It’s not a louse. It’s a mobile scavenger colony, their way of keeping hygenic.”
“Are you making this up?”
“The decontamination was rushed that day. No one asked me to open my mouth. I hid it in my First Aid kit, in a glob of wound-dressing jelly. Got it back to London in perfect condition. Our scientist was over the moon. So much better than blood, she said. The telepaths didn’t notice a thing. It was easy as shoplifting.”
Johnny said nothing, staring at her.
“You see, they aren’t angels and we can prove it. We have a sample of Aleutian tissue under analysis.” She took a breath. “I suspect they shed living cells, like that thing only much smaller, and maybe somehow ‘conscious,’ into the air around them, constantly. I had studied the Agnès tapes endlessly, I knew it wasn’t telepathy. After Uji, I was convinced that I was right. It’s a kind of very intimately informed guesswork. You and I can speak Aleutian Johnny: we humans speak to each other all the time in their ‘Common Tongue.’ But the physical difference makes them able to trust their guesses, while we can’t trust ours.”
She finally lit her cigarette.
“People will tell you Duality was invented by a chap called Rene Descartes. It’s nonsense, we were always like it. We have our persistent fantasies that everything is one, man. But our experience has never borne that out, never. I look at you, you loo
k at me. Something passes from my eyes to yours: well, that can’t happen, because the space between is ‘empty.’ No action at a distance. That’s our predicament. We’re all alone. When we speak or touch each other separation remains what we believe in, it’s our default state. If we lived as I think the Aleutians live, in a kind of soup of tiny emissaries of ourselves, then where would we have fixed the borderline?”
Still he didn’t speak.
“Our old tapes are nearly useless, they’d simply look faked in this climate. But if you and Clavel could do it once, you could do it again. I don’t know…. The mad scientist says their basic chemistry is very like ours. Call it convergent evolution, the anthropic principle, or what you will. Maybe a few of us are somatically, semantically nearer to them, and you’re at the top of the scale. What you have is precious Johnny. A piece of this enormous story belongs to you by right.”
He didn’t say a word, didn’t move a muscle of his face.
“You could learn so much. And she wants to talk to you. Why d’you think she sent you a passport, of all things? She wants you to come to her.”
Not being an Aleutian, she didn’t know how much trouble she was in.
His silence could mean anything.
“You killed that kid,” said Johnny. He slammed his hands down on the table. “I thought you were in this for the money. I knew you were into alien-bashing, even the letterbombs. I thought it was a cynical career move. I never dreamed you were serious. You are sick. You were trying to get evidence that they have poisonous blood or whatever racist nonsense: and in effect, you caused all the deaths after that incident. You are crazy!”
She tried to keep calm.
“Whatever we did had to be invasive. No one was going to get away with ‘accidentally’ taking a rubbing of Aleutian skin. We’d been told they were good and gentle people, Johnny. We believed that. We only wanted—openness.”
Johnny stood up. His hands were shaking. he stuffed them in his pockets.
“Oh no. You don’t catch me with the same bait twice, Ms. Wilson.” Outrage made him reckless. “I’m supposed to be a sucker for exotic sex, so you want me to fuck the alien for you, pick up some dirt from her pillow talk. Thanks very much. But no thanks. Those aliens are the people who could save my life, clear my name. I don’t expect you to rate that. But the world’s starving. London’s packed like drawers in a plague mortuary. The planet’s bubbling with toxic waste. We need their help.” He stabbed a finger at Kamla’s shrine. “At least your idiot niece is trying.”
She had been close to them. Locked in her crazy obsession she had not been touched. Braemar was the one who was unreachable, unable to conceive a truth obvious to everyone.
“What a bunch of mindless fascists. Do you realize what could fucking happen, to all of us, if they find out what you’ve done? Just because your life is so dirty it is not worth living. You suicidal, murdering whore, you hate them. You hate everyone.”
He stormed out, blundering over Trixie on the way.
He emerged from the tantrum several blocks away, outside the neighborhood incinerator. It was after midnight. He’d be lucky to find a taxi at all. He felt a fool, and almost turned back to apologies: but no, he would not. White Queen was far more sinister than he had guessed. There was something ugly, deeply ugly going on, and he didn’t want any part of it. A false idyll was over.
iii
The Aleutian Affairs office in Ruam Rudi was about to close. Martha and Robin were hanging around the lobby, talking quietly. They would be going out together as soon as the access light went off. Ellen sat at the duty officer’s desk. Robin’s rosy Gainsborough fairness beside the glacial American blonde jarred on her a little: a poor color combination. But their association, however far it went, (she did not inquire) kept the boy out of worse trouble. Chutima brought the last freight mail delivery. There were always presents for the aliens: clothes, food, music and home movies; long and rambling handwritten letters. Robin and Martha followed her in, idly curious. It was Robin who identified the suspect package. They were off guard at Ruam Rudi. The terrorists usually preferred to bomb the Corporations, whose public offices were traditionally fair game.
“Quick. Put it in a bucket of water,” he joked.
He made to toss the packet into one of the fat earthenware pots that flanked the office door, where Ellen’s treasured blue lotus bloomed. (Please, said a polite notice, in English, remember the flower and the jar are real here). A chemical tag ripped. A big glistening bubble leapt into existence, and flowed swiftly into the center of livespace. Inside it, a fisheye street scene. Glimpses of bygone fashions, curvaceous old motor cars and wide, sprawling boulevards. Music. Fading. “It’s May the tenth, 1940,” the bomber’s disguised voice told them. “Whitehall, London. The Panzers have cut through the French cavalry at Dinant—” A silhouette. A bulky figure stood looking out of a tall window, into the unseasonal heat and dust on Horse Guards Parade. “I hope it is not too late,” muttered Churchill, chewing on an emblematic cigar. “I very much fear that it is.”
He turned around. “Remember ‘holosell’?” he rumbled. “Rip the tab for your free gift, and suddenly there’s a walk-round image of a three piece suite filling your front hall. How vulgar! Everybody wanted that kind of advert outlawed. So we were told. When it was put to the polls, everybody turned out to be the bourgeois. Ordinary people loved holosell.” The Churchill cutout grinned like a schoolboy. “Until it died a natural death…. The letterbomb lives on, because the people want to know. They understand that this is the only way that outlaws like me can reach them. Invading a public, recorded space with the news that no one else dares to tell.”
He appeared to touch the bubble skin. “Clever, isn’t it. A hollow sphere with a boundary of rearranged air, the molecules arrayed to form a reflective surface: 360 camcorder technology is a wonderful thing. It’s a pity no one will ever know. The Aleutians don’t like our media gadgets. The whole electromagnetic spectrum is dismissed to their sidelines; they’re not interested in anything we’ve learned. No one will remember this incredible age. The pathways will close, the limbs of our science and art will atrophy. I wonder, will relics ever be found by a new human civilization, on the other side? We can only hope so.”
The mournfully pompous tone of this gibberish enraged Ellen so that she could hardly speak. But speak she must. In public hours this office was routinely tracked by every news agency on Earth. She must assume this scene was already on tv somewhere: soon it would be all over the place. A letterbomb cannot enter into dialogue. The tactic was to challenge the ghost, disarming a potent illusion.
“Mr. Churchill, you greatly underestimate the intelligence of the modern public. ‘Ordinary people’ are well aware that our visitors are aliens. We understand very little about each other as yet. SETI informs us that it will be generations before—”
Churchill became a woman, a famous personality dead just long enough to have entered the public domain. “Once upon a time we had a thing called ‘Collective Ideology.’ It protected us, kept us from understanding things we didn’t want to understand. You people have SETI. You’re afraid to get close to the aliens. So SETI tells you to keep away. You’re afraid to refuse their demands, so SETI tells you to do whatever you’re told.” The embodiment of well-groomed female authority paused. “Frankly, you’re losing your grip. In my day, an expert system was a reference tool, not a pagan idol.”
The bubble collapsed just as the access light went out.
“Sorry,” said Ellen. “I walked into that one.”
Martha snapped gloves on and dropped the remains of the packet into an evidence bag. The mechanism was already melting. It wouldn’t tell them much. They could identify the private studio that produced the bomb, but it would be booby-trapped to hell, a police raid a pointless gift of more publicity coverage for the bad guys. She stared at the place where the bubble had been, psychic habit having turned that patch of space into a blank screen.
“The White Qu
een has an eejay in the band now.” She scratched her armpit, ruminatively. Her white-blonde looks went with the mannerisms of a hoodlum street child.
“You mean Johnny Guglioli,” said Ellen. “The young man who made an appearance at one of the gigs on the European tour.”
“Yeah. He’s good, I remember him. That looked like his work.”
No one yet knew how Johnny Guglioli had hacked the guest list for the Barbican reception; what it was that had been delivered to him there; or who had sent it. The aliens’ minders had been fully occupied trying to keep tabs on their wayward superbeings.
“One of old Seimwa’s artistes, with an imaginary disease. And an aging meeja courtesan. No great loss to their families.” Martha locked hands and pointed an imaginary pistol. “We should take them out. Applied with care, assassination works.”
“I never know when you’re joking,” said Robin, admiringly.
The Thai Secret Service woman and Ellen Kershaw eyed each other.
“How can she be so sure?” murmured Ellen.
Braemar Wilson had been a founder member of the anti-Aleutian group “White Queen.” The accepted rationale was that the “media courtesan” had been traumatized, radicalized when she witnessed the death of Sarah Brown. But Ellen remembered an adamant hostility, coming off the woman in waves before anything went wrong. It was eerie. Of course there were risks, there were fears. It was frightening, sometimes, to realize how much they were forced to take on trust. But what did Wilson know? What was the secret horror that everyone else had missed?
8
PARSIFAL
i
Clavel left the SS Asabo at Liverpool, and made his way to London. He didn’t know what had gone wrong. He had waited and waited, but Johnny didn’t come to the Devereux fort. He had not worried about his appearance, the last time he was in Fo. He was Clavel; and people either knew that, or why should they be interested in the shape of his features? But he had learned to be a stranger now. He could not stop naming himself a stranger with every breath. People would notice, they would look, and they would see one of the famous Aleutians. So he wore a facemask. No one wondered at that, it was a common gesture.
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