White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  Aditya had given him some jewelry to sell, fair exchange for the delight of at least a minor scene with Rajath. He discovered that the value of Aleutian artifacts had soared: which in itself should give everyone something to think about. Rajath’s real-estate scam was more than ever just pure greed.

  It was a long way to London and the traffic cripplingly slow. In the dark he pulled out of it to rest, along with many other travelers. He lay in his car, too fiery to sleep, his body crawling with excitement. He stared into awesome distances. That vast ocean, vast sky; the tiny stars that had never seemed so far away. He thought about all the starry banners in the locals’ assembly hall.

  He had tried to have a conversation once with Douglas, the Dark River, (in the Common Tongue, Aleutians named him sad one) about local formal names: Ellen, which meant Shining; and her truechild Bright. All those stars, so many people who were seen as forms of light…what did it mean? But the Sad One didn’t want to talk about it.

  At the city perimeter he left the car and walked. He walked around for days, surrounded by the two nations. Clavel had believed they must be defending separate territories in most places: coming together only to parley in elaborate ceremony. That was how it looked in the dead world, and it fitted what he remembered of the conditions of shooting war. But in this city the enemies lived together, just as in Fo. He hoped for their sake the fighting wouldn’t reach them. It would be dreadful: hand to hand in every house, every street.

  His escape from Uji had been easy enough to organize, using the resources of the dead Mr. Kaoru, but he was very much on his own here. Nobody had any helpful suggestions, except the strong one that he should not sell anything more. He ate the food that other people left on their plates; and slept where he tired. He asked everyone he met if they knew where to find Johnny Guglioli. There might be more efficient ways of tracing an individual, but he didn’t want any fuss: and time is cheap. He only realized after several days that he was becoming terribly, terribly sad. He had no reason to be unhappy. He was an invisible explorer again, and he would soon be with Johnny. Yet a pall of grief filled his air, crept into his pores.

  At night Clavel ran four-footed. Once he curled up in a dusty doorway, out of the wind, and heard a few people singing dolorously.

  Were you there when we crucified our lord

  Were you there when we crucified our lord

  Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble

  Were you there when we crucified our lord…

  He did not catch all the words but the meaning flowed through him like water: shame and loss and never-ending sorrow. It was as if every story in the shrine of the singers had been mutilated in the same way, cut off forever at a nadir of misery and defeat. Clavel found himself weeping helplessly, but the tears were mysteriously sweet. He didn’t want to stop, he wanted to go on weeping forever.

  He found a system of tunnels, guarded by the dead. The dead trains alarmed him more than Kaoru’s jetplane. But there were maps on the walls and written signs everywhere, this made life a lot easier. He began to cover the map, methodically.

  The tunnels were randomly dark and bright, packed and deserted. The mask became unnecessary. The people who rubbed against him, jostled him or hurried by accepted him as one of themselves. Some liked him, some didn’t, some gave vent to irrational bursts of hostility. Nothing was strange. He went into a canteen and walked around the tables. He ate a dish of rice, sopping it with reddish bitter sauce that he found on another plate; finished up with a kind of cake. It was no particular hour outside on the platform. There was a ghostly half light over everything. A heap of clothes shambled by, and called to him hoarsely.

  “You’re low, you are!”

  Clavel suddenly realized why this tunnel world was so reassuring. But he couldn’t refuse. He and the ragged man sat down.

  “I need to eat and I can’t afford to pay.”

  “It’s low. Bins, I’ve done dustbins. But not straight off someone’s plate.”

  He patted Clavel’s thigh. “You’ve got a’ watch that. You stop worrying about what people think of you, and it’s the downward path. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Clavel. “I’m not going mad.”

  Something started a rush on the transport and bodies began to sweep by them. So many faces, all of them drawn and sad. This grief had been all around him in Fo; and at Uji, whenever the locals came to visit. He had not been able to feel it until now.

  “Can you read?” asked the ragged man.

  Lugha had worked hard to assimilate the written language. It had been no struggle for Clavel. He had learned once that everybody dreams, but only those who use language can describe the state to themselves. “If you’re a poet,” he said. “You don’t just remember dreams, you remember how dreaming works. You can do it in the daytime: mapping from one set of states of affairs to another, so that there arises this thing called ‘meaning.’ I couldn’t tell you ‘how,’ no more than I could tell you straight off exactly how I put one foot in front of another. You don’t ‘how’ it, you just do it. You can do it with suggestive abstract patterns as easily as with shaped sound. In fact, you can’t stop. It’s because you and I are addicted to the thing called ‘meaning’ that we use Spoken Words, and have responsibilities, and people who depend on us.”

  “Ah. What’s it say, up there then.”

  “Marble Arch.”

  “Ah. D’you believe in God, Miss? We’re all part of God, did you know that. Every man and woman, part of one great whole. This life is a moment, a tiny step on the way. We’re animals in our bodies. We don’t matter, except for the little spark of something that carries on. Something divine. ‘Scuse me, Miss. I’m on the wrong line.”

  He gathered himself up and headed for the stairs. Clavel followed, but he was soon lost in the crowd. Clavel was moved, profoundly, by the confirmation that these people were no different flesh. Sorrow was the missing link. That bottomless sorrow to which he had no clue held these people together. It stood for them in the place of living wanderers. He walked on, stirred and elated: singing softly.

  Were you there when we crucified our lord…?

  Johnny went a little mad after he ran out on Braemar. He knew she didn’t deserve the dirty names. Or if she did, then not from Johnny. He couldn’t claim she’d tried to entrap him. It was nobody’s fault but his own that he’d fallen in love. He wanted to go back and explain. But she didn’t want to know: and in fact the whole can of worms opened by her suggestion about Clavel did not bear explanation. So he went crazy instead.

  Assailed by homesickness, he sat in his room watching rewired Sesame Street; and fretted uselessly at the bowdlerization of Oscar the Grouch. He would actively seek out Carlotta and the parrot, and yell advice and comment into his one-way tv remote. He told her to make friends with the aliens. They were telepaths, he would remind her. They’d met a few dippy East Asians and a few paranoid Youros: they thought that got through to everyone. Remind them we exist, he shouted. Ask them in, invite them back.

  He cleared his room of the anti-Aleutian debris he’d picked up: personally carried a heap of paper and charged plastic down to the incinerator and saw it fried to vapor. He felt better when he’d done that. How could he expect Clavel to come and save him, if the ether around him was poisoned with blatant hostility?

  He would wake up in the night feeling slimy, filthy…. This used to happen in the American hospital in Amsterdam, when he was trying to get a clean test. His therapist talked to him about the connection between his different losses: communion with the machinery, sexual intercourse, social intercourse. The doctor had advised frequent masturbation. Johnny would have to learn to enjoy self-love; and fight the self-hatred that might lead to violent behavior. If he was going that way, he’d be put on permanent medication. They were not easy on you in that place. In principle, they believed in noncommittal quarantine. In principle they even believed in Johnny’s innocence. But the responsibility was awful
, and they let you know it.

  He began to dream about the future. It was a good place. It was like a big, big ecocyclic mall, very safe and full of pretty greenery. Kids with ridiculous make-up raced around. There were some nice little babies, welcome and much loved, not stealing anything from anyone. He would wake from one of these dreams feeling peaceful and reassured. He knew that none of the people in the dream mall were exactly human, but he felt okay about that.

  The end of August was hot and grey and windy: fever weather. He had less work to do because people were not buying red meat; and therefore less money, but he wasn’t going to starve. Idleness was more of a problem. It was a dull day in early September when he hallucinated for the first time. The alien looked at him out of the entrance to Holborn Tube.

  He crossed the street and found a newsagent dispenser, shouting headlines at the rush-hour traffic. He inspected the machine all over: screen, masthead menupad, grinning delivery drawer. He had to buy a paper before he was convinced it was real. It was the experience that he’d had in Fo, uncannily mimicked. Far too exact a copy to be anything but fake.

  He went for his six week medical, and said nothing about his problems; suffered the objective sampling with the stoicism of despair. There was nothing wrong, according to Jatinder. Johnny had always known the man was a careless crook. He didn’t need a doctor to tell him what was happening. The QV disease, which he had almost forgotten, had caught up with him after all. His mind had begun to rot.

  Johnny’s room had a window. It looked into the air well between his building and a buried nineteenth century facade. There was another window opposite, barely a meter away, grimy glass intact under a lintel of blurred stone flowers. It was closed off inside by a partition wall. There was a trompe l’oeil effect: Johnny’s lit room being reflected there at an oddly convincing angle. He had often caught himself thinking he had a neighbor. When he started hallucinating he kept moving his bedscreen over, so he wouldn’t imagine an alien in the reflected room. Mrs. Frame’s girl, who considered Johnny’s view of the air well a magnificent amenity, kept moving it away again.

  The rains started early that year. Everyone was pleased. The cycle of feast and famine had already become traditional: no water for months, then gulp it until you choke. The old native English felt cozy about it, dreamed they were lording over the plains of India again. My God, the heat, Carruthers…. Johnny had absorbed something of this feeling. The night the Monsoon broke in earnest, he felt calmer. He lay in bed listening to the storm, thinking of great London steaming gently as it drowned. Londoners would have to resign themselves soon: become amphibians or get away from that tidal river.

  Braemar claimed that the way people reacted to the Aleutians was a meaningless hangover from ’04. People had believed that the disaster was a “punishment.” The Aleutians were interpreted the same way: it was nonsense, mass hysteria.

  She was wrong. The punishment was real, and ongoing: poison seeping into the Pacific, teeming artificial cities in desert places; too much for the world to bear. He was being punished himself, for the wild excesses of twentieth century technology. That’s why the alien swam up in his rotting brain. He closed his eyes, sick and miserable. He had always known, deep in his heart, that no one could corrupt the NIH. If the Big Machinery said so, he was infected, never mind how. How long would this foreplay last? You get confused, can’t tell the difference between two years ago and yesterday. First you forget what you had for breakfast, then you forget what the word “breakfast” means. How does a person cope with the onset of premature dementia?

 

  The voice was so convincing that he went to have a look. The alien was out there in the wet dark, clinging to the other windowsill. “I can’t!” he shouted. “This window doesn’t open!”

  It fumbled in its clothes, then leaned and reached out with one clawed hand across the air well. The glass melted. There was a pungent smell. The alien clambered, joints all wrong like giant bat, and tumbled into his room. It was Clavel.

  she said.

  “Yeah, there’s a fault. We’re trying to fix it, but it’s kind of endemic.”

  He was naked. “Excuse me.” He pulled on his jeans. He brought out a towel and handed it to her. She buried her face, scrubbed vigorously at her hair.

  He reviewed the new situation, feeling drunk with relief.

  “You’re real, aren’t you, Clavel.”

  She dropped the towel. The dust-mask she must have worn for disguise hung under her chin, sopping. The dark center of her face didn’t look so bad in real life. He was kneeling in front of her, she reached out and grasped his upper arms and stared. What a gaze! He was grateful for her understanding.

  “You have to travel incognito now you’re famous, I can guess. Thank you, Clavel. I don’t know why you’re here, but thank you for being real.”

  She turned her joints the human way round again, dripping onto Mrs. Frame’s turf-effect rug. “You didn’t come,” she explained. “So I came to you.”

  Johnny was entranced. He gazed at the creature from another star, staggered by the impossible abyss that lay between them. The wonder of her presence was far greater than it had been in Fo, because she was accredited now. Not a fake or a figment of his eejay’s imagination. She was genuine. He reached out a tentative hand. Immediately, she grasped it. He felt the weird texture of her skin, saw the trimmed claws, counted the fingers, stroked the thick horny pads that would make her fist into the foot of a running beast.

  Clavel, her dark epicanthic eyes fixed on his, bore the handling without protest. She drew a deep, shaken breath. He realized he might be distressing her. He laid her hand down gently, and went to fetch the passport.

  “Why did you send me this? You sent it, didn’t you?”

  She lifted her shoulders: the gesture that reached her eyes, much more like a smile than her bared teeth. “Jivanamukta made it for me. One of Lugha’s people. Oh, I’ve been begging borrowing and stealing to get us back together. Most of my own artisans died, you know. Why didn’t you come, Johnny?”

  The easy spoken English startled, and almost disappointed him. She was dressed in Karen street clothes, dark embroidered breeches and a batwinged linen blouse; a sash wound around her muscular waist. The clothes were deeply grimy as if they’d seen months of wear. She was carrying a small daypack, ASEAN make.

  “Never mind. I came to you, there’s no difference.”

  She shrugged out of the wet straps, and produced a bottle of clear brown liquid without a label. “It’s whiskey. We copied it. Three of your months old, I promise. I wanted to bring you something.” She looked up at him very solemnly, the nasal space pinched in and a corner of a sharp white tooth chewing at her lower lip.

  Mesmerized, Johnny fetched two beakers: dispenser cups that he rinsed out and reused until they split. Mrs. Frame’s precious crockery always went back to the kitchen. He was in the game again! Stuff Krung Thep, Johnny Guglioli’s on stream. He thought of Carlotta: of home and freedom.

  “Shit, I can’t make a record.”

  Clavel showed teeth. “I ought to tell you, Johnny. I should have told you before. I don’t reckon much to organized religion.”

  “Neither do I.” He could understand her English, but he didn’t know what she meant. He’d have invited her inside his head, if he knew how. “Will it be okay if we have a recorded session later?”

 

  He grinned. “Great. Thank you.”

  She poured the whiskey and they drank.

  Clavel swallowed the spirit carefully. He had taught himself to manage open beakers, dipping his face and tipping his head quickly back. The false warmth running through and through him couldn’t stop the shivers. He felt the intimacy of the quarrel within himself: Clavel had as much Rajath in him as anyone, still as keen on the loot. But things would get dangerous, and things would get ugly: he could see it all laid out. It was Cla
vel’s curse and blessing, this capacity to be frightened at a distance. What harms us ever, harms us now. What harms any part of our self, is injury to us all. And sure as Johnny is my self, this world is part of us.

  “I want to tell you everything. No more kidding around.”

  Clavel’s teeth were chattering so he could hardly speak, not from cold but from excitement. How to proceed? It must be true, after all. He truly had never been in love before, because he’d never felt like this. How do people manage to lie down together in this state? (No! He really—go away! — Did not need any advice). He laughed, showing his violently trembling hands.

 

  “Oh, of course.”

  Johnny brought another towel and Clavel stripped to his underwear. Johnny’s eyes followed every move, with a candor that burned. The selfishness of love burns clear through the body. My claw is in your flesh. I will lie down with myself. Now, they thought, Clavel and his lover, half out of their single mind with lust and pure spiritual joy. Now and here, myself and I—

  Johnny knew Thai “Mekong” whiskey: brewed in a fortnight, but civilized stuff, not much stronger than beer. He was half-way through his drink before he realized he’d been fooled by the universal translator gadget. This was not Mekong. It was something very soft and very potent. Johnny wasn’t much of a drinker. He looked into the beaker ruefully. At least it wasn’t eating the plastic. He was in Fo again, taking unknown risks. But the kid wouldn’t harm him. He’d always been sure of that. She’d gone very quiet. He was afraid he’d offended her modesty by staring at that breastless torso, the weird dropped shoulders; great V of sliding muscle wrapped where her ribs should show. Her damp and scanty dun undersuit showed every detail.