White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Yes, okay, I know. It’s not my usual line. But I want you to be clear about this.” Braemar sighed. “Clavel’s in love with you, Johnny. Remember she called you ‘Daddy,’ back in Africa? They believe in reincarnation. A ‘Clavel,’ might be born in every generation. It’s their big romantic quest, to find another edition of your self: your ‘true’ parent or your ‘true’ child. I should have told you, but I didn’t know how you’d take it.”

  “Thanks. That helps a lot.”

  She couldn’t tell if he’d taken in a word, but his tone was bitter.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to say how much I wish it hadn’t happened…” She frowned. “I think you saved me from making a very stupid mistake, back there. A denouncement like that could have backfired badly. May I offer you a bed for the night?”

  He didn’t answer. He was looking at the house.

  “Is your housebox bust again, or did you leave all those lights on, on purpose?”

  The doorman had become a pale mess of shapeless plastic, spreading down the wall. It must have started on its anti-intruder routines before it died, that’s why the lights were on. The front door opened at a touch. They retreated.

  “My God,” whispered Johnny. “She wasn’t alone. They were close by, watching. I thought that part was a hallucination.”

  “How many were there?”

  “I don’t know. Four, five. They’d come looking for Clavel. I don’t know…. I don’t know if I saw them in my room, or if Clavel just knew they were near.” He stared at the house. “We call the police,” he decided. “And wait in the car.”

  “They won’t come,” said Braemar. “And I have people in there.”

  The silent hallway was empty. Trixie lay at the foot of the stairs. Braemar whimpered faintly, and dropped to her knees. But the antisense lifted its head and struggled groggily upright.

  “Good dog,” whispered Brae. “No licking! Bad girl!”

  Johnny took her by the shoulders, and put her and the dog aside. “They’re still here, I’m sure of it. I’m going to try and get my rifle. Stay back, but stay close.”

  Up to the first floor and still not a sign. The drawing room door was open, the tv running its decor loop. The rifle was where they had left it.

  “Got to check the children.”

  She hurried to the stairs, the antisense silent beside her, Johnny behind. The aliens came out of the nursery. The landing was brilliantly lit, toys strewn about: the figures imposed on it seemed like anime. Their presence here, out in the human world, was so far from context they didn’t register as substantial. One of them was shouldering Kamla’s box-headed, inert body.

  “Ah,” said this one. “Clavel?”

  There were four of them. The other three were carrying long-barreled bulky firearms: human weapons. “We are unarmed.” said Braemar quickly. “Drop it, Johnny.”

  The rifle clattered.

  “He’s not here. We don’t mean him any harm. You have no need to take a hostage.”

  The one who was carrying Kamla put her down. “Unarmed,” he said. It must be another of the Uji talkers. Braemar couldn’t remember their names. “What’s that then?”

  Suddenly they made a rush, animal silent. Braemar dropped her hand from Trixie’s collar.

  “Roll over, baby—”

  Trixie flew, teeth bared, making that horrible low noise of a big dog that means business. Johnny’s rifle had made no impression, but now the aliens all screamed. One of them fired, yelled louder as if panicked by the noise and fired again Whoosh! Heat flared, Trixie crumpled and fell. The aliens swept past the humans, one of them still yelling like a banshee. They ran out of the front door and slammed it behind them.

  The little boy had started to cry but he was barely half awake, he was soon comforted. They put Kamla back to bed, still peacefully boxed.

  Outside, the street was quiet. Braemar went with a torch to the Marmune quarters, and managed to knock up Ionela’s aged uncle: who claimed to have heard nothing and was nasty about being disturbed. They cleared up Trixie’s remains, and went back to the drawing room. Rain was blowing in through a window, which no longer had any glass. Braemar stepped over debris to her cocktail cabinet.

  “No one will have heard. This is a soundproof neighborhood. Drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  She sat beside him, with the whisky decanter and a glass. Her business suit was filthy. There hadn’t been much blood involved in bagging up Trixie’s seared body, but what there was had joined the smears of rain and dirt. The watered silk of the chaise longue, she noticed, was ruined beyond repair.

  “I am truly sorry about all this mess.”

  “Some art must disintegrate.” She giggled. “Hey. Shall we phone the police now, and claim that aliens smashed the place up?”

  Johnny started. “Oh, shit, the taxi. I came in a taxi. I think. I don’t believe I paid the guy.”

  Braemar looked him over. “Don’t worry about it. I expect he’s feeling grateful to be alive.”

  “Are you really sixty three years old?”

  She nodded, lightheaded with relief.

  He calculated. “Kamla is your granddaughter.”

  “She is.”

  Johnny choked. “Do you know, she made a heavy pass at me.”

  “Of course she did.”

  It was hard to remember that the aliens had not personally wrecked this room. The devastation was so clearly the wake of their passage: an unintended blow, entirely without malice. Braemar gazed, counting casualties: and last of all Johnny—wild-eyed, shaking, grinning with adrenalin, but somewhere inside how deeply, ominously excited.

  “You’re ready to sign up now, aren’t you Johnny.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. You bet I am.”

  The vengeful grin broke. He couldn’t hold it. “Brae, I feel so—” He did not know how to start telling her. “When you told me you’d got stolen tissue, I was so fucking terrified. And then Clavel came. I thought it—she—oh, God. I thought it was cleansing me of the QV.”

  So many layers of shameful revelation: waking up sticky-wet in the night, burning those papers. Uncontrollable bodily functions, scared kid who talks big but never could stand up to Authority. Believing in the Big Machines because he knew they could punish, believing abjectly in the aliens because he hoped they could save. The revolting experience he’d just had was no more than he deserved. Everything about Johnny Guglioli was small, stupid, unclean.

  “I wish I was dead—”

  “Oh, no,” said Braemar. She put her arms round him, hugged hard. Johnny went rigid for a moment, then piled into the hug fervently. He pulled back, looked her in the eye with lingering suspicion.

  “What’s this? First Aid?”

  “No—”

  They kissed. He had kissed her before, but never been sure of the meaning. He’d been hypocritically shocked and secretly glad that such good sex didn’t mean what it ought to, in young Johnny’s simple philosophy. But context is everything. They kissed for a long time, the spark that crosses the gap. Came to rest finally still upright on the sofa but plastered against each other, in a desperate pose that frankly admitted far more than lust.

  “Why the fuck did you leave me like that in Fo?”

  She pushed her face into the front of his sodden jacket, thumped at him with one fist, the other hand still clinging as if he was saving her from drowning.

  “Anstandigkeit. Shit, I did not mean to do this.”

  “Well, it’s done now,” said Johnny complacently. “What is anstan-digkeit? Not that I care, so long as you promise never to touch the stuff again.”

  She attempted to recover some composure, prised herself free. “Decent behavior. I didn’t want to get you involved with the Red Hand gang, so I wanted you to think badly of me. Anyway.” She shrugged, offhand. “There was the age thing.”

  “You can forget that. Don’t ever mention that.”

  Braemar smiled. “I won’t have to, it will mention itself. But I’m
serious, listen to me. I don’t blame the Aleutians. What wrong did they do tonight? They had a right to kill Trixie. They saw exactly what she was: a weapon, nothing more. I don’t blame them for anything, Johnny. I only refuse to see certain lovely things destroyed, lost and meaningless forever, if I can by any means keep them alive.” She was embarrassing herself. “Let me give you an example, dear cousin. I think the American Constitution is a truly, truly remarkable document. The Aleutians will not. They won’t value it at all. I’ve no doubt they have their own, equally touching notions. I don’t mean we’re better than they are, in any sense. I wouldn’t hazard a guess, either way. But if they stay, and things go on the way they are now, the Constitution goes down into the dust. Forever. Do you understand? I want you to help me to fight them, but that’s the only reason why. Well?”

  He studied her earnest face, fascinated. “I’m allowed to sign up as an anti-Aleutian terrorist, but only if I do it for purely aesthetic reasons?”

  She nodded.

  What had happened to the cynical promoter of the status quo, the venal demi-mondaine? Where’d she go? She was here. Braemar didn’t become any less Braemar, for revealing that she had principles of a kind: a weird and oblique morality.

  Johnny laughed. He shook his head. “These sentiments appall me. Can’t I just go out and git some gooks, and be sorry afterwards?” He glanced at the tv panel, still playing its chaste river sequence. “Do you by any chance have a record of Jessye Norman on top of Mount Rushmore, singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic?”

  “Did she do that?”

  “I haven’t a clue. It’s an image I have, seems to suit the tone of the conversation.”

  It was very cold in the room now. Braemar looked around. “Did you see my cigarettes? I suppose you’d like that shower.” She hesitated. “I don’t know what happened, and I’m not asking for details. But if you didn’t want it, it wasn’t sex, whatever your involuntary reaction. It was common assault. She beat you up: forget about it.”

  He was touched. She didn’t need to be so careful. He had fallen into the firefight, into the zone he’d once visited like a second home. When the world is bursting into flame around you, you don’t agonies over what happened hours, or even minutes ago. You grab what the moment offers.

  He had settled in London because it was where Braemar lived. She was his enemy, but all the same: the idea that he might bump into her one day had done a lot to make life bearable.

  “I’ve thought about you so much.” He touched her hand. The profound rightness of being allowed to touch her again warmed him all through, like the onset of a very strong and gentle medicine. “In my lonely little room.”

  Braemar took his hand and held it to the peacock blue khamiz, hard against the live movement of her heart. The vitality of that beat against his palm, through the silk, seemed to slow the whole world. He remembered the unbearable pauses of sex with Braemar, pools of exquisite suspense deep in the riot.

  “Tell me,” she said. “I want to know every detail, and then act it out. Do you think that’s a tacky idea?”

  “Awful. Let’s do it.”

  Trixie? The synthetic Doberman had joined the spirit world. Her claws would rattle along the halls for a while, her smooth head would be an absence that the hand reached for. She would fade away: fade with the house in Nairobi, with steps and doorways of the past, ghosts that surround the body, layer upon layer. Braemar listened. The fantasy still clung to her: the disorienting thrill of having entered, informed, the erotic puppet that was herself in his mind. Johnny was deeply asleep. She got up quietly, pulled on the grey kurta that she used as a house robe. She had unloaded his rifle before they came to bed. She didn’t trust her ability to comfort that much. If he woke his adrenalin-fuelled bravado would most likely have deserted him, and there might be hell to pay. Where was the gun now? She couldn’t find it in the dark. In the morning she would be back where she had been in Africa, but with a Johnny older and wiser (and so much more loveable). He might be recovered enough to be suspicious about the way she’d let him off the rape exposé. She’d never been tender with his feelings before. She’d been trying to pick a fight for so long. Why not insist on having this chance? She hoped he’d be too smart to ask. She did not want to spell out the answer.

  You don’t pick a public fight that you can’t win. You wait, and husband what advantages you may have, for covert action.

  She crept down the stairs. Her drawing room looked horrible. Wrecked bijoux reproached her like abandoned toys. Since she was awake and prey to depressing thoughts she might as well clear up a little. She moved into the room, picking up fragments. The Aleutian was crouching on the floor by the open window, so still, so empty of presence it might have been made of wet stone. It lifted its head.

  Clavel lifted her head. Braemar stared at the alien.

  The moment might never be recorded in the annals of human/Aleutian relations: but this night had changed something forever…. “Clavel,” she said. “Your friends were here, looking for you.” A glance and suppressed gesture took in the wreckage. “Please go. I don’t want them back.”

  “It’s okay. We know where I am.”

  Braemar had studied the scientist’s wild results, the African tapes, and the stuff that Uji made public until her mind ached. She had begun to have visions, flaring from the discipline she didn’t know to one she had made her own. That use of the first person plural gave her pause. In Aleutia, she wondered, did “we” dig holes in the road? Did “we” put up the gasbills, and predict the weather? Undoubtedly, yes. Ellen Kershaw would be thrilled.

  Clavel noticed the wall panel, and recoiled like an atheist in church.

  “It was a chapel. I am so sorry. Johnny was very upset.”

  Her petty impulse to palm the mess off as the work of Clavel’s friends collapsed. You couldn’t lie to an Aleutian about other Aleutians’ actions. Was it possible that Clavel had had time enough to get to know all “three to five millions”? Some of them at least she knew so well that she needed no script, no louse-mediated updates to follow the story. They are born again, she thought. They are born again and again, until everything in them has been developed to the uttermost: and nothing can happen that isn’t expected and understood.

  Braemar gazed, mesmerized, into eyes that had opened upon Eden before the Fall.

  The human race is not so stupid. It doesn’t go down on its concerted knees for nothing.

  In Braemar’s world, it was widely accepted as proven that the brain-chemistry and the individual were one and the same. But that Universe is its own fastest simulator. The whole mapping would never be known, the nature of the link maybe never pinned down. How does the genome and its attendant factors “be” a person?

  “Is it true,” she asked. “Do you remember being alive before? Are you consciously the same person, forever and ever?”

  Clavel made a cracked noise in her throat.

  “Why is that funny? No, don’t tell me, let me guess. There are schools of thought like the layered cities of the Indus, failing to decide that question.” She was being cruel. The immortal superbeing, presently a desolate teenager, couldn’t guess why she was getting this philosophical taunting. She probably didn’t know in what relation Braemar stood to Johnny. Telepathy’s no different from other means of understanding. It loses sensitivity under stress.

  Clavel’s dark nasal crumpled.

  “Are you a woman? I thought I knew what that meant, so far as it matters. But the worst thing was I tried to treat him like a woman. What does that mean?”

  Touché.

  Suddenly she was filled with pity. How does it feel to be a devout telepath, and discover in the midst of passion that your faith is empty, that the beloved has received none of your sending, that the world is not what you supposed. How does it feel to rape someone you love? She saw the horror in Clavel’s alien eyes, and wanted to tell her how time seals over these terrible caesura; how life goes on. Clavel still crouched, motionless. She
was probably saying she knew all about the healing power of time, thank you. Nothing reached Braemar. Telepathy does not exist. But to be immortal, and feminine, and unmutilated by the secret fear…

  She struggled with bitter envy, and with awe. These perceptions belong to me, she told herself. I’m imagining all this. She’s alien, that’s all. Equal but different!

  “I want to tell you everything,” said Clavel humbly. “All about the ways we’ve fooled you. I meant to tell Johnny. That’s what I meant to do. Are you a priest? I think you must be. Will you make a record?”

  Clavel is still dancing by the stone-age fire, still painting on the cave walls. Still leading, by an aeons-past chance fall of the tumbling dice, her half-beast siblings in the hunt.

  “No,” said Braemar. “I don’t want your confession. There’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t know already. Go away.”

  Clavel knelt a moment longer. She stood, she nodded sadly, and slipped out into the dark.

  Johnny had a TENS bracelet on his wrist, an electronic sedative he’d accepted under protest. He woke up anyway, to the sound of crying. He tugged the bracelet off, groped and found the switch on a bedside lamp. Braemar’s room was shades of straw, cornhusk, dove grey: softly swathed old fashioned decor; little furniture. She was sitting at her dressing table, naked, head down among the armaments, she wasn’t making much noise. He felt absolutely an intruder. But he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t woken.

  She looked up when he was halfway across the room; the tears stopped abruptly.

  “What’s wrong, Brae?”

  She shook her head.

  So Henny-Penny, Cockie-Lockie, and Chicken-Licken set off together to tell the king the sky was falling. No one paid any attention. They all knew Henny Penny was a silly vain female trying to make herself important.

  She wiped her face on a handful of ecru tissue, looking away from him. “I feel so old,” she whispered. “I look the way I do. But I feel as old, at sixty three, as I ever thought I would.” She stared into the mirror. “I am worse than old. I am dead. I am something that ought to be dead.”