Braemar introduced them. “Clem Stewart, Queen of Bohemia; Johnny Guglioli—”
“Clem,” said the Queen. She held his hand too long. She had cop’s eyes, if not worse. “I suppose you really are John Francis Guglioli? I remember you, bright baby out of the Letat vat.”
She had a slight Eastern accent.
“And I suppose you really are the Queen of Bohemia?”
“Of course. To call me Red is just a joke. Come into the alchemist’s den.”
The den was behind a false wall at the back of the garage; not all that secret. Probably one or two of the residents upstairs made use of the illegal facilities. Johnny could name some of the equipment, which meant it was years old, but it all looked to be in working order. There were photos on the walls, the kind they have to display in Brit pharmacies and cosmetic clinics, to warn people what over-the-counter “gene therapy” can do. They seemed to be up there for fun. Johnny had seen the rise of this new criminal industry in New York. A new means of threat, traceless murder. New faces, weird babies, horrible thrills. He felt a little sick.
The troglodyte chuckled. “My grandfather worked for the government, my father too. He came to England after the ’89 revolution, reverted to an old family name. Now I live as you see. Bad blood will out.” She preened, stroking her silvery hair. “I could have any post, anywhere. Public or private sector, if you understand me. I prefer this life. It suits me. I’m my own mistress.”
She walked with a shamble, like a cowboy off his horse, into a den within the den. Beside an armchair with an embroidered linen headrest a glass case stood on a table. It held a sword with an engraved blade, and a display of rotting beige documents. She posed beside this set-up, waiting for Johnny’s admiring curiosity.
“Clem’s a direct descendant of Elizabeth of Bohemia,” explained Braemar, gravely. “Who was the daughter of—um, James the First and Sixth. James Stuart, or Stewart; like the movie actor. But shorter. It was her idea that we should be queens. It’s classy, don’t you think.”
The hacker smirked.
“You’ve never thought of reclaiming the throne?”
She was delighted with this sally. “Yes, yes! A Royal Secret-Policeman, Queen in Praha. That would be a good joke, the kind that we Czechs appreciate. But let’s forget about me.”
Her tone gave Johnny to understand that she knew this wouldn’t be easy.
“You are a recruit, I understand, and you need a new face, short term. So you tell me about your allergies, and your bad genes.”
“I think you know about my bad genes.”
“A political disease is irrelevant. If things are otherwise, you can still trust me. I will not wake any demons.”
She led him from the furnished nook. Braemar stayed behind.
“Sit here, Mr. Guglioli.”
The foam of the chair had a bloom of age on it, a crumbling lichen. It folded around him. Clem donned eyeprotectors and dipped her hands and face in a spray tank. She yawned to spread the film over her mouth, then moved in. She took a scrape from inside his cheek, probed his cheekbones, eyesockets and jaw, like a blind woman: getting closer than was strictly necessary. He felt her breasts, nudging slyly through the overalls, something off about the whole thing. He imagined grubby underwear.
“Any dentistry?”
“Nngh.”
The headrest guided his face forwards into a black-mouthed funnel. Tiny fingers that he could not feel were inching his deathmask. “Keep still now, for me to take your picture. You can open your eyes. What do you see in there?”
He saw a mirror, virtually imposed on the darkness. As he watched the cheeks of the image bunched up, the bridge of the nose spread a little; the space between eyelid and brow narrowed. The chin grew thicker and square. Maybe this was Francis.
“It’s not you, is it. Quite unlike anyone you’ve ever met. We concentrate on the eye area, where most can be done to disrupt identity, with least risk of ill effects. You don’t want me to meddle too much with your bones, it’s not safe.”
She read him his rights. “You realize, Mr. Guglioli, that in gene therapy the most minor treatment can have unforeseen and serious side effects, which may not be reversible.”
“Yeah,” said Johnny, feeling a frisson of terror. “Yeah, yeah.”
“What do you prefer? Eyedrops, inhaler, paper-flowers?”
“Paper-flowers.”
The alchemist’s box of tricks went to work. Clem folded her arms and gazed at her client.
“So, tell me,” he said, not to be intimidated. “How did it all start?”
She laughed, ha ha ha, as if she was reading from a cue.
“It was a game, Mr. Guglioli. A fantasy game of strategy. Who knows why we played together: some common feeling that the people around us were aliens, and out to get us. I was a founder. I started the royal character names, of course, that appealed to me. Braemar brought in the Lewis Carroll references. We have been around for much longer than any wire-tapper knows. We collected real information for our game, and so we discovered the hypnotized Alaskans. There was a network meeting, then, of a few players who believed this was the real thing. We exchanged real names, we made solemn vows. We decided to play on the big board, and see if we could prove what we suspected. Our game was called The Aliens Have Landed— very simple. One could play it any style. After the first announcement from Krung Thep, we became ‘White Queen,’ and chose the preemptive resistance scenario. Oh, and it was not a fantasy anymore. That’s the whole story.”
“What’s your total numbers?”
“The technique of slipping in a casual, impossible question. Of course, I won’t tell you. But I will disclose this for free: we’ll have many more recruits soon.”
“Do you do a lot of your kind of work for White Queen?”
Her mouth stretched under the film. “Personalized ‘explosives’? Sick buildings? Traceless poison? I never touch baby-making, it’s a dirty trade.” She shook her head. “No, Mr. Guglioli. This is the first false nose I have provided.”
“So what do you do?”
“Mainly I experiment with alien tissue. I have studied their analog of genetic material and discovered things that would terrify you.” She watched him with those bad-cop eyes. “You don’t like me Mr. Guglioli. You wish you never got mixed up in this. But here you are, the good people: and you don’t want me but you need me. It’s like old times.”
The plant began to bleep. “Ah.” Clem retrieved a sealed dropper tube. “Your prescription, gracious Sir. ‘Take two at bedtime.’ Coming down, I warn you there’ll be subcutaneous hemorrhage. You and Braemar will make up something unconvincing about doorknobs.”
She dipped her face and hands in the tank, popped out the eye protectors: tugged at her brow and cheeks. Braemar appeared.
“All finished? Thanks, Clem.”
The two women embraced. Johnny saw that Braemar returned the hug with enthusiasm, but didn’t relish it. Clem squeezed his knuckles.
“Be careful, fellow traveler. Don’t hurt my crazy friend. Even if she seems to enjoy it, eh?”
So it had been a game. A Big Board game: lunatics out on the streets, creeping round invisible obstacles, heads locked in some frantically exciting unreality. The Cooper slotted into a midlane of the E2. The Europeans had slashed their road systems, and ran punitive fuel rationing, but the freeways that were left were always packed. The addicts could always get a fix from somewhere, for this filthy habit. Johnny couldn’t feel superior. He was about to drive to Prussia, and Brae wasn’t going to do that on her official 16.5 liters a month. The Queen of Bohemia was right, he wished he’d never got involved with these weird, cryptofascist losers.
They had to drive. It would be too risky to try and get Johnny on a plane or a ferry, the road tunnel was the best option—and Braemar hadn’t set foot on a train since the Frogs bought out National Rail. “You’re the White Queen: she’s the Red Queen, who’s the White King?”
“Clem takes care of that conn
ection.”
“Okay, so I’m not to know…. The Red King?”
“Pierre, of course.” It was a nasty answer. The image of monkey-eyed Larrialde, furtively hiding a bloodstained handkerchief—
She glanced at him.
“What were you expecting, Johnny? You know how it goes. When the wonderful white folk come along, they are as gods, and all the decent people are thrilled. It’s only the mean, twisted old witchdoctor who plots against them, along with maybe good chief Mbongo’s treacherous discarded wife. The proverbial minority of troublemakers.”
“Sorry. But your hacker gave me the creeps. I hate hackers. How can you trust the woman?”
Braemar smiled sourly. “Clem is not a woman. She’s a man.”
So that’s what had felt wrong. Ouch. He apologized for himself—
“She’s a transexual?”
Brae laughed at the prim tone of his correction.
“No, s/he’s a man. Clem isn’t a woman trapped in a man’s body, s/he’s not suffering, s/he has no plans to go all the way. Clem likes having two sets of equipment.” Braemar glowered at the traffic. “Men wearing frocks, men with tits. Maybe menstruating next: Clem’s weird enough to try it. Makes me sick. You couldn’t any of you stand the real thing for long.”
The venom surprised him. But Braemar was such a consummate female, maybe it figured.
There was no break in the conurbation between Cinqcents and London. Mortuary towers heaved by. Johnny waited until he reckoned the irritable fit was over. “Brae. Don’t get mad: but is it true? Do you really honest to God have some alien tissue?”
“Honest to God.” She sighed, frowned. “The trouble is: you’ve met Clem. I trust hir as a hacker. Implicitly. You can use hir stuff without a qualm. When it comes to what she says about the aliens, I’ve seen nothing real. Genes. How would I know real from fake, on that scale? What is there that you can see, or touch? I don’t know whether to believe a word s/he says.”
Clementina settled in hir armchair, still shedding tatters of biodegradable skinshield. S/he donned a headmask with a trailing lead, and watched alien molecules that were building themselves, delicate as snowflakes, from the outside in. Such beauty and such potential! Some day soon S/he would destroy all the work, and the records. Roll on the new Dark Age.
S/he found it perversely, deeply satisfying that nobody in White Queen knew what to make of Clem the mad scientist. They had no idea what astonishing work s/he had done, in unraveling the alien chemistry. But oh yes, it was all true. Soon enough, (and far too late) people would begin to understand the implications. S/he gazed at the glass case, at that tarnished sword, thinking of a day that was most certainly coming. Hir goblin mouth puckered wisely. S/he fully expected to die, sooner or later, while fighting for the resistance. Fighting for the human race, which had no place, had only distaste, for the person Clem Stewart was.
“New recruits. Plenty of recruits! But which cause is just?
Which cause is mine? Ah, who can ever know?”
ii
Peenemünde was in Quarantine. Or rather, in the English phrase that better covered the situation, she had been Sent To Coventry. The University would not dismiss her, because of the scandal, but they’d taken her work away from her. Also the teaching—though that was no loss to anyone, she was a terrible teacher. She missed her project. She missed even more the human warmth: a tiny trickle of input she had not noticed until it stopped coming.
No one would talk to her. Literally no one. They would barely nod. Since Peenemünde had scarcely ever in her life initiated a social conversation, her loss was a strange one. She kept to her few well-trodden paths as before, sublimely unreactive: but most improbably nothing ever bumped into her. She ate in the canteen, alone, took the air at random hours; fed the ducks in the duck pond. No one came near. She could understand that her neighbors, down to the campus cleaners, would wish to avoid contact with her views on a certain subject. But they did not have to broach that subject, did they? Perhaps they did. All around her it was aliens this and aliens that.
If the superbeings were so wonderful, Peene thought, it was surprising that they would bear such a grudge against the silly notions of a mere earthling. But university people judge everyone by their own standards.
In the early days she had been notorious. There was a graduate student, a beautiful young woman, who had became wild eyed and hollow-cheeked in that period when the aliens sermonized from Krung Thep, turned robotics into monsters, threatened to vaporize millions. She developed a crush on Peenemünde, to the extent of wanting to take her to bed. Peenemünde had no sexual orientation to speak of. She’d been quite helpless to refuse, and it had been a horrible failure, of course. The young woman could have no true affection or desire for a fat and tongue-tied professor: and Peenemünde did not know how one was supposed to behave in “casual sex” situations.
Afterwards this woman became a fervent alien-lover. But her eyes remained the eyes of someone who sees terrible visions, painted everywhere on the empty air.
Peene ate in the canteen, overlapping the narrow bench. She had not yet lost weight on account of her troubles. It was around 2 am local time. Because of the present timetable of her covert use of the Cannon space telescope, she was far astray from normal day and night. It didn’t matter, no one noticed. She saw a couple of strangers among the non-time people, a well-preserved middle-aged woman and a young man who did not look like her, and was maybe not her son but some kind of gigolo. Throughout Federated Europe and the European Union, budget travelers used the universities like the monasteries of old Christendom. It was someone’s romantic fancy that had by chance survived. In theory they must prove themselves legitimate pilgrims of learning, but the service was not overburdened, so no one bothered much.
Like most unsociable people, Peene possessed reserves of idle curiosity. She speculated about the couple, until she realized that they were watching her. Especially the young man. She froze up inside. The terrible vision painted on her air was of herself crouched on Inge’s bed, quilt scrabbled around a mountain of flesh that seemed to have appeared from nowhere: the body that she never considered important. Inge’s beautiful golden face gone sullen-angry, herself babbling plaintively. “Don’t be upset, please. Maybe we could watch some erotic television?”
Peene left the canteen in a hurry. They followed her: she broke into a trot. There was no one in sight. Nor watching: campus security was at all times a farce. Her own self-image didn’t help, either. She knew she was not able to “deal with situations.” At the entrance to her building she waited, panting. “Gehen Sie doch weg,” she said. “You don’t want to talk to me. I am an idiot. Idiotica: I am a private person. Go and look at the synthetic crystal show. Go to see the stained glass in the chapel. You will like that.”
She spoke in German, to confuse them, but she saw that the woman understood every word
“My friend speaks only English,” said the woman. She had put her hand, straight-armed, right across the keyslot. Her eyes were brutal.
“You believe the Aleutians are faking. Professor Buonarotti. So do we. We should talk.”
To get indoors Peenemünde was going to have to wrestle with this slight, well-dressed woman with the eyes of iron. She could not do that.
“Can you write? Go away and write to me. It’s true I don’t like the phone, but I read my freight mail…. I may answer!”
Peene gulped on the last words, embarrassed by her own lie. The pudgy faced young man looked angry, perhaps because he couldn’t understand German. The brutal woman shook her head.
“No. We’re not going away. We have to talk. Face to face.”
She had to let them come up to her room, or things with her neighbors would have become even worse. They stared at her little “launch pad” but they obviously didn’t know what it was; which relieved her worst anxiety.
“Sit down,” she said, in English. “Shall we have tea?”
She made tea, and laid out a plate of cak
es. It pained her a little to part with them, but she knew her duty as hostess. It was the first time in years that she had entertained visitors. The ritual soothed her. The young man was actually nothing like Inge. No one cares, she thought. Nobody cares what I say, so long as I only talk to other fools. The crushing anguish of her loss suddenly pierced her through. To talk about the beloved, this is the great hunger of the bereaved.
They looked around the room. The man stared at her friends-gallery, especially at the sepia image of a young man’s face: a long, rather wistful face with a straggling youthful beard.
“Professor Buonarotti,” said the woman. “My name is Braemar Wilson, this is Johnny Guglioli. We represent an organization called White Queen. You have heard of us, I know. We have tried to contact you. According to the University, you have no office and they don’t hold your private number. You don’t use any of the usual bulletin boards. We have written to you. We’ve had no response. I appreciate that this is a diabolical intrusion. But we believe what you believe—”
Peenemünde shook her head. “Oh no,” she said, in English. “I don’t believe. Mrs. Wilson.”
“Braemar.”
“Braemar. I know. They are not aliens, nor superior beings. It is not logically possible that they should be.” She took up her tea, and a cake. “Consciousness. What is it? It is the inscription in us of the nature of things. What is the nature of things? The virtual particles leap to and fro between existence and nonexistence, the neurons fire up incessantly, for any reason or none. Properly considered, consciousness, like reality itself, is neither a thing nor an event. It is a certain crucial arrangement of information. And that is what cannot vary. Essentially speaking there is nothing in existence that is not an expression of the conditions of existence. You have heard the expression, an atom ‘wants’ to achieve a particular state; or that a calculation ‘prefers’ to settle for one of a limited range of results. Why do we say these things?”
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