Johnny squatted at her side and kissed her, gently. “I won’t let them get you.”
“Oh, Johnny. That’s just what Trixie used to say to me.”
She pushed her fingers into his hair and pulled his face close against her small, soft breasts. “I feel naked like an animal in a zoo. I think Aleutians are watching us. Let’s get back into bed, hide our heads.”
She had changed, since Africa. He found her body as greedy but somehow less accessible, a more difficult study. Loving Braemar was going to be more work than being humored by the lady in red; and the rewards less simple. But infinitely greater.
9
THE FIFTH FORCE
i
At Uji, the house and the stone garden were protected from the hill country cool season by an invisible mist of warmth. The Aleutians sat on the outer verandah, poking fingers through the veil into chill air. Kumbva, Rajath, Aditya were reliving their adventure. Rajath’s master at arms was calmer, but wore an air of quiet alarm. It had been unwise, scary, pleasurable and shameful. They couldn’t leave it alone. The spectacle of themselves, brandishing those barbaric firearms!
Undoubtedly Aditya had saved all their lives, by dealing with the terrifying weapon the householders had.
It had all been unnecessary. The truant Clavel had been safe all the time, and the house his “rescuers” had broken into had been the home of a friend. The households of the bold band did their best to soothe and calm, aware that raw embarrassment was keeping the recount going, as much as anything. It would play itself out, the irritation would fade. There would remain a nugget of fresh awareness. Since Kaoru’s death they had traveled all round this planet with their local guides, meeting significant characters, and everywhere the usual hordes of clerics. Still they had failed to grasp the scale of this place; or of its dangers. Their recent escapade had been a salutary experience.
The sterile weapons were back in the locker in Kaoru’s cottage, where they had found them. Aditya’s eyes gleamed.
Rajath groaned in disgust.
Kumbva put his cowrie bag on his head for fun and ran through the dusk up to Kaoru’s cottage. He danced in the wet, warm grass, spreading his arms in a purely feminine delight in ownership. Though their sponsor had chosen to die after the terrifying days of the ultimatum, they remained in many ways under his protection. He had willed the manor to them, with all its resources: a magnificent gift. They had added some touches to the shrine; moved Kaoru’s favorite possessions in here. The tape Clavel had made of their benefactor played all the time.
They presumed the proper record was elsewhere. This was a meaningless fragment, but it seemed a nice gesture to display it.
Clavel was kneeling, stiffly, in front of the case that held the Itchiku kimono. His chaplain was with him: but poor Clavel wasn’t going to be able to make full confession on this planet, the clerics had no resources. Kumbva rubbed the poet’s shoulders. He spoke of the horrible moment when Clavel had realized the truth. Johnny’s awe, and hunger, and terror—the perfect simulacrum of abject physical passion—all meant not for Clavel personally, but directed at the whole expedition! Kumbva, who was never embarrassed by anything to do with lying down, considered this lesson about the locals curiously: measured it against incidents and remarks, and was enlightened. He dropped the topic, under the onslaught of Clavel’s enfeebled fury.
Clavel had behaved badly—persisting, a long time after his only course was to make his excuses and leave. Dangerously, too, considering the locals’ heated reaction to Sarah’s death. Supposing Clavel’s unwilling partner had kicked up a public fuss! The cool understanding of Johnny’s friend, the priest Braemar, had saved a potentially explosive situation.
He made a speech. “You did no lasting harm. The notion of lasting harm is a childish fear. I’d stay away from him for the rest of this life, if I were you. Save your abject apologies until next time round. But you will forget how you feel now, you know. Ask yourself, why not forget now? Unless you plan to grieve forever, remorse is nonsense.”
Kumbva left him.
Clavel knelt with closed eyes and saw the lights in the dark: orange and red and sulphur yellow, in serried ranks. You stare at them and stare, convinced that a phenomenon so huge and so regular can have no human meaning. Then you see that some of the tiniest orange lights are moving steadily. You are watching a procession of vehicles, far away but still deep in the city’s heart. So vast. The others had followed him, knowing he was in trouble. On the night of the big storm, they’d been in London, with their flier hidden in the back of their stolen car. Lugh had found Johnny’s address in a local government written record. When Clavel escaped them they’d followed Johnny, waited until Johnny and the priest left the house empty: and broke in to take a preemptive hostage. On the grounds that, after what had happened, the locals were bound to be demanding Clavel’s hide. It had made perfect sense to the four maniacs.
Clavel had wanted to die, but instead he’d joined his friends. The flier unfurled in the black dark, in a park close to Braemar’s house, they didn’t care that they were revealing secrets. It was dark, so dark in spite of all the lights; the air almost unbreathably moist and cold. Clavel wanted the people of London to rush into the park so he could die fighting. But no one came. London slept. The two nations refused to recognize what was happening. They had stayed at home. They wanted grief, always more grief so they could go on weeping forever.
He left the cottage. If Kumbva only knew…. But he could not be told. Around Clavel, the voices: whispering, shouting, grumbling, humming in quiet contentment; panting hard and fast in the greedy scuffle of lying down together. He walked in a cloud of witnesses, a slurry of other presences, thick enough to chew. Always there. There’d never been need or reason to describe to himself the way they were there. Tonight he could feel them the way they would seem to a—to Johnny. He was haunted, forever.
Everyone was gathered in the “tennis court” a large underground room where Kumbva and Lugha’s artisans were busy altering and refitting a new, different breed of flier.
It was the first time that Clavel had heard the local formal word “human” used in that way. Nobody else remarked on it. He felt, with dread, how confident they’d all become in handling the outward appearances of this strange world. Meanwhile, Clavel had been wasting his time learning the inwardness. What he knew was so much more important. But it was useless.
Everyone understood why Kaoru had destroyed the landers. It had been a wise precaution, but now they needed more bodies. The locals were almost ready to hand over the real estate, and it looked suspicious to have so few settlers.
Clavel joined Kumbva and the trickster.
Rajath shrugged.
Clavel stared at him bleakly.
But Rajath was far in the ascendant now. He made a speech.
“The mood at home has changed. As a nation, we were alarmed when we first found this planet, distrustful of success after so long without it. But planetfall and plunder was supposed to be the object of the exercise. Everyone’s had time to remember that. There are plenty of takers now, eager for a piece of the action.”
Wrong, thought Clavel. We outgrew the false quest. We became the Aleutians: wanderers, islanders, surviving cleverly on the bounty of a cold and ungenerous ocean. It had dawned on us that there can’t be a world for people, without a people to whom it is home.
Nobody paid attention to the poet, least of all himself. He didn’t have the heart to insist, to exert his influence; unfurl that secret banner and employ the backwards-pulling power. He told himself it was too late. He reminded himself that the notion of lasting harm is a childish fear.
Maitri hugged his gloomy ward.
“Are you real?” said Clavel. “Or just a ghost in my head?”
Maitri was baffled.
They returned to Gray’s Inn Road, where Johnny used the lobby phone to send a note to the Hargoods, saying that he was taking a break as the work was so slack. They went up to his room, under the evil and fascinated old eye of the concierge. It had only been three days, there was plenty of rent left on Johnny’s key. The room had been tidied. The window was taped up with brown paper, that strange smell of cold-melted glass still hung in the air.
Johnny fetched out Robert the Roach. The cockroach was huddled in the farthest corner of his plastic home, moping. The box was as clean as it had ever been. Johnny brooded over the life of this creature: barely eating, never “sleeping”; built to survive indefinitely in a range of fearsome conditions. Robert was one of the forerunners. If the earth got rich again his descendants might be yet be galactic explorers, chitinous remote sensors for the humans who would never get there any other way. But without FTL, he’d never be more than a sideshow. Hey, isn’t it two hundred years since anyone had a peep? Let’s go smell out where Rob the Roach’s ship is at.
The orthopteron scurried and clung to Johnny’s finger, tasting him eagerly. It was supposed to have about the intelligence of a normal-type mouse. Johnny shuddered, remembering Clavel. You have no wanderers, she said. Why don’t you?
“Do you have to bring that?” asked Brae. “Couldn’t we flush it down the toilet?”
“He might start budding down there, and then there’d be trouble. Rob and I go back too far. Love me, love my roach.”
He put the box in his pocket. He didn’t need much else. His books, a few clothes. He was making a crossing, from Manland to Womanland, the river a convenient symbol in between. It seemed more of a transition than the day he’d married Izzy, and left his parents’ home. Basically, he didn’t care what happened next. He didn’t care if she went on servicing her patrons, to pay the rent or to further White Queen’s interests. He’d vowed to himself that he would never inquire. It would be a long time, further than he could imagine, before his needs went beyond the deep, emotional imperative to get naked with her and fuck, at every possible opportunity.
The narrow bed of his fantasies reminded him of Fo. Maybe to make love here would wipe out what had happened with the alien. The smell of melted glass poisoned a sudden rush of arousal, and for a moment he wanted a specific violence, to fuck her without touching her. He could run out and buy one of those all-over disposables, favored by perverts and hygiene maniacs. Force her to strip: break her open. He’d be sealed off, uncontaminated.
He sat down on the bed trembling, but hardly with lust. It was impossible to tell the people of Earth the truth about their precious aliens. The truth was too vile. Things had crawled, alive inside him. It was the filthiest nightmare, and it was real. He was afraid he would never again be free of this awareness of squirming life: on every surface, inner, outer, everything he touched.
Braemar saw that he was fighting horrors. She moved towards him, checked the impulse; picked her way around the miserable sticks of furniture to the other side of the room.
“Do you still have that card of mine, I gave you in the Barbican? I bet you kept it.”
He attempted a sneer. “I bet I did not. I’m no sentimental fool.”
She found his bumbag on the floor, where it had lain untouched by Mrs. Frame’s staunchly honest girl: rummaged in its depths and brought out the slip of green.
“You really don’t read Italian, do you.”
The leather case of books lay open on the table where Johnny used to eat his toast. She extracted his pocket Dante: gave it to him open, her card marking a verse.
“Men che dramma
di sangue m’e rimasa che non tremi
conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma—”
He read the crib. Not a drop of blood remains in me that does not tremble. I know the traces of the ancient flame…. “I’d been telling myself for so long that my fantasy had nothing to do with the real Johnny Guglioli. That if I saw you again I wouldn’t even know you. But there you were, exactly my Johnny.” She smiled, sad and humble. “I knew you wouldn’t get it. Anstandigkeit was safe.”
He wanted a naked body, she casually handed him a naked soul. What could you do with a gift like that? Except take it. And vow useless revenge, on a world that gave this beautiful woman such a poor notion of her self that she’d hand it over like a bandaid.
She wore the Annie Mah dress and took him to the opera, to see Young Girls Are Vulnerable, a black comedy set in the eighties, in this famous production: in which Sharon bets Tracy that she can, with the greatest of ease, transform their two “New Man” boyfriends into heartless chauvinist pigs. Braemar thought it was very funny. Johnny found the farce painfully sad and the music ridiculously mannered, but he laughed too. She planned to go to Germany, to track down Peenemünde Buonarotti. She wanted Johnny to come.
They discussed this project in the park on top of Telegraph Hill, while Billy played in the sandpit, and two feral wallabies hopped and peered from behind stands of blazing autumn leaves. Mortuary London lay spread below. Ninety six percent of the British population lives in the cities, Johnny recalled. People piled on people piled on people. The rest is National Forest, roads, food production. A mood of smug self-denial barely keeps the packed islanders sane. It was a poverty different from Africa’s, but no less piteous.
“I imagine it was Clavel,” said Braemar, “who thought up the revenge of the machines. Remember how she used to feel about market trucks?”
Johnny nodded. “She’s important. What is she to them, do you know?”
“A poet. One of the unacknowledged legislators.”
Johnny had been to Dr. Jatinder. The news that Johnny had engaged in unprotected sex, and thought he might have picked up an infection, didn’t shock him. He took it for granted, the criminal bastard, that Johnny’s partner or partners were not to be traced. It was a relief that the doctor had found nothing weird. But Johnny still felt polluted. He thought of Braemar deliberately keeping one of those squirming things in her mouth, and her ruthless courage awed him.
The reaction to rape faded mechanically, like a bruise changing color, and he was still in mourning for the Santa Maria’s cabin girl. The Aleutians that should have been.
“I guess I ruined your best shot, Brae. I don’t think we’re going to do that interview.”
Brae avoided his eyes. “Mm. I don’t believe she’ll be back.”
Johnny filled the red and blue dustcart with damp sand and trundled it up and down for Bill.
“D’you still think of Bella?”
“Yes.” He began to shape a sand tower. “It doesn’t go away, does it.”
She had lost a child herself. She took the alien-m
ade passport from her purse.
“We can use this.” She’d had it checked over by a White Queen mechanic. “There’s no reason a stripe-scanner wouldn’t accept it.”
“What if we run into a human being?” The morning after his consciousness-raising experience with Clavel, he’d have stormed Uji with a bowie-knife between his teeth. He had calmed down. He had no intention of being left behind on this trip: but the QV raised its ugly head. “I’m still a mad dog. They can shoot me on sight if they catch me out of Greater London without the proper paperwork. Or lock me up for life in a ward full of chemo-refusenik child-molesters.”
Braemar grinned. “I have a plan. I’m going to take you to the Red Queen. S/he’ll fix you up so the NIH itself wouldn’t know you. You’ve started to feel constructive again, that’s good.”
Johnny poked windows into his creation with the stem of a dead leaf. “Guglioli,” he said. “A little spire, see? I’m not totally uneducated.” He looked up at her, quizzically. “So I’m gonna be introduced to one of the gang, for real. Does this mean we’re going steady?”
The Red Queen operated in Folkestone, in the French enclave: commonly known as E2:500, its notional distance from Paris. The native seaside resort was now ten miles or so inland, recreated under cover. The Queen lived, apparently, in a classy old Victorian hotel-block right on the cliffs. Expensive looking joint. Johnny wondered about this White Queen bio-hacker. He detested her profession, but he liked the idea of another fabulously beautiful, loose-moraled Ancient Brit. If she was rich, and she had those skills, she could write her own face. And body.
They went round to a side entrance, where the concierge was a machine. Braemar handed him an optical pass. “But be quiet. The domestics aren’t supposed to have visitors.”
The hotel basement stone passages, peeling paintwork; a smell of brine. Something, the sea or the plumbing, whooshed and gurgled. In the service garage someone was directing robotics under a piece of Italian exotica. The mechanic came out, pulling off a hear-and-do wire. The Red Queen was small and wiry in greasy overalls, with a big nose and goblinish mouth, much silvered straight black hair and narrow, slavic-looking green eyes. Age, indeterminate: not young, not old.
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