White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  Suddenly, they were both giggling. “Supposing we’re dreaming. Supposing we’ve gone into fugue?” They began to walk back, Braemar hugging Johnny’s arm. He could feel her shiver. “Listen Johnny. If the timeostat goes on the blink. If you lie down on that couch, and wake up in your own bed yesterday. There’s a pub called The Back of the North Wind, on Kingsway, the corner of Parker Street. I’ll meet you there, eight p.m. London time, two weeks from tonight.”

  “Who goes first?” asked Buonarotti.

  They wanted to toss for it. Neither of them had a coin.

  “Age before beauty,” said Braemar: and lay down.

  “We leave her.” The professor drew Johnny away, into the next room.

  As soon as she lay down she suddenly, all at once, understood why she and Johnny had been so knocked off balance by Professor Buonarotti’s far-fetched tale. Simply this: it sounded like being dead. It sounded like dying. How else does on reach the other world, how else attain a body made for eternity.

  oh.

  Peenemünde was wondering about Ms. Wilson’s clothes. She herself traveled naked. But she’d judged that if she told them to strip they’d have dug their heels in: sure it was a practical joke. Well, one would discover something new. Mr. Guglioli’s black eyes were in full flower. He stared angrily at her friends-gallery.

  “That’s a fake, surely you know?”

  Peenemünde shrugged. “It’s only a picture.”

  “You shouldn’t need any persuasion to join White Queen. All these saint are human beings, aren’t they? Do you want them to be forgotten?”

  That was the media for you. Human beings? These people never, ever listen. She took refuge in futile banalities “Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword, Mr. Guglioli.”

  Johnny stared out of bloodshot eyes. The cell-like little room was charged with meaning. The day and night that he had just spent with Braemar refused to order themselves in memory.

  “Have you done this before? Sent one person after another?”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to, her face gave it away.

  Death. In the unmeasurable pause before extinction, Braemar heard voices. The Mini Cooper bucketing along, with its inimitable bone-cracking fervor: Johnny waxing lyrical beside her on the perils of Continental travel. E. coli big as cats, threshing around the sewers of abandoned Lyons. Giant Friesians. The fabled carnivorous superbright cows that roam the lonely heaths of Belgium, preying on benighted travelers. Johnny loved it all. He loved being in an adventure again, as long as there wasn’t too much contact with slimy creeps like Clem. She would almost have taken them down to the Zone-E, to amuse him; except they’d have looked such damn fools when they were picked up. She heard herself explaining her different feeling: how touching it seemed, this contaminated old world. How she loved the cheery way people managed to carry on, regardless.

  Her husband was dead. She had tried hard to capture and keep another male, simply because she was afraid to walk down the street, to go into a room alone. She had to have one of them, to protect her from the rest. The hire-price wasn’t painful, the choice was wide. It was quite simple, ought to be easy. Walked into the bathroom once and found the hired man handling her little boy’s prick, while uncomprehending baby hands held onto his erection. OUT, she said. GET OUT NOW. Without rancor, almost laughing. What else can you expect, when cynically trawling for a mate? Contamination exists, therefore one learns to live with it.

  She really hadn’t blamed the bloke. She had recently, a fairy gift, become immune to injury. She had been rescued from the victim’s role forever.

  She opened her eyes. She was sitting upright with her back against a smooth, slightly warm surface. She was naked. She had the mental aftertaste of a long and complex dream: her whole life had passed before her, no doubt. No sign of Johnny. Her back was against a wall but her body was hanging forward, unsupported, in the air. She was in a tube, there was no perceptible gravity. The light spread, diffuse like daylight through a skylight, from a blue band along the curved wall. The air seemed normal. The walls were knobbly in patches, with an irregular series of covered hatches that had an industrial look. She began to move along the tube briskly, hand over hand. When she came to hatches that were open, hooked-up to concertina ducting, she ducked under or clambered over. There were no people but she thought things moved in the knobbly patches on the walls; she never caught them at it. A much bigger hatch stood open. She saw a row of things like sleds, hanging from, or held down, near (orientation switched, sickeningly) the floor of a yard. The little cabs were hooked-up to big spools of fine wire or maybe yarn. She could see no drivers, but she had the weirdest impression that the trucks themselves were staring at her.

  She averted her eyes and dived past.

  A door opened just before she bumped onto it. A small room. A section of wall faced her with shelves in it, small tools captured in containers; dangling harness. The configuration looked familiar at the corner of her eye: she saw fixed desk furniture, keyboard, screen, printing machine. When she looked at it straight it became meaningless extrusions. An office. She pushed herself inward: lost control and hit the far wall. It opened. It was a deep cupboard, it held transparent floating bags, filled with folds of dun clothing.

  It was then that the reality hit her—where she was, what had happened.

  She held on to the cupboard door with one hand and groped her way into a fetal ball. She took deep breaths. Shortly, she embarked on the struggle of dressing herself. No one interrupted her. She hurried back into the tube, clinging and grappling. Soon, she felt she was no longer clinging but hanging. The pull became stronger. Soon after that, she was walking, and her way forward was blocked. Between hand and shoulder height, beside the closed panel, there was a sunken pad in the wall, marked with a simple icon. She pressed, poked, laid her palm. Nothing happened. I have no wanderers. In desperation she rubbed it like the genie’s lamp. The door swept aside. Braemar stared at her potent fingertip, and began to giggle.

  She’d left the industrial estate (where gravity didn’t matter a damn) and there were people about. People everywhere, litter and flowerbeds, long transports like buses; short ones like private cars. The noise was almost human. There was a haze in the air that made her cough. Nobody had noticed her arrival. She put her head down, and moved briskly through the crowds.

  Johnny held out his hands, and examined them. “It’s a virtuality!” He laughed. He had been terrified, just briefly. When a biophysicist, who is totally world class, tells you she’s going to make you one with the eternal quintessence of being, and she seems to mean it, you have to wonder. Johnny was a sucker for that kind of thing, it was his secret vice, aside from aliens. Lucky Brae. It probably hadn’t crossed her mind that they ran a miniscule risk of finding themselves looking into the no-fooling face of God.

  So this is faster than light travel. Science moves out another notch, and the supernatural retreats once more to some decently impossible realm! He didn’t believe it. The place felt like a game, the inside of a game. He didn’t know this simulacrum-body effect. But it was a long time since he’d been into anything. Maybe it wasn’t even new.

  His heart suddenly jolted. He had let himself be plugged into a virtuality game, undoubtedly coralin based or it couldn’t be this good. He had broken Quarantine!

  The reflex passed. There are no rules, he thought. I’ve crossed the river. I’m not a QV victim. I’m a freedom fighter.

  And anyway, this isn’t real: none of it. I am dreaming.

  The dim and narrow passage had bulkheads in the sides. They slid aside as he came level, weight triggered, revealing ducting and cable knotted together in an inextricable, organic tangle. One of the closets held a row of hanging pupae cases which, when handled, disgorged the Aleutian uniform. He dressed. Further along, at a crossroads, he found a diagram on the wall, which was evidently a local map. The maze of colored lines was not painted or printed but integral with the metallic skin of the wall. It loo
ked fresh and bright. Johnny studied it closely. He had arrived, by luck or omniscient judgement, somewhere behind the scenes of this game-world, dream-world. He decided he was in a system of maintenance tunnels. Eventually, without meeting any one, he reached a dead end: a round, pod-like room with an extruded workstation and chair.

  The workstation had a keypad of sorts, and it was live. Johnny started to play with it. He discovered that he had to rub, not press or tap. Nothing in this environment was completely rigid: it was uncannily and not too pleasantly like stroking flesh. But never mind. He discovered that he was symbolically literate, and began to explore. You are in the lymph system of the world, the screen told him. In one of many observation chambers, sensory cells. You may not have worked here before. You may be merely curious. You may be a child. Here is information.

  Here is the world.

  The icons cleared, revealing a two dimensional picture. The quality was poor, about that of single layer video tape. He touched and found that the screen was not glass, but an almost-rigid jelly. There was a rocklike lump, hanging in the bright darkness of space. A dumpy oblate sphere, a blackened aubergine; looking as if it had been knocked into space-faring shape by Mother Nature herself. Against a steady curtain of stars small bright points tracked in slow motion busy-ness. He couldn’t get any idea of the dimensions. He remembered Clavel had told him: yes, we have moons, but only little ones. He was looking in at the blob from one of its little moons, then he was looking out, from the surface. The viewpoint tracked slowly. (If at real-time speed, the aubergine was enormous: but he thought not). He was staring at a white and grey, pockmarked giant’s cheek. It filled a third of the screen. It was lunar day for Aleutia.

  Farside…he breathed. D’you see that, Brae? The far side of the moon. His teaching screen didn’t give him a choice of viewpoints. He could not angle the eyes out there to find that one star that must be burning close by: white light, white heat in the blackness.

  More?

  More icons. He stroked one.

  Here is the planet, our wandering home, in section.

  More jelly-video. He flipped back and forth. Here is food production and a lot of other stuff, carried out in zero gravity by eccentric looking robots: no Aleutians visible. Here, on the other hand, is a city square where children play beside a funny little mound: a park, a lake, and gardens. Layers of living spaces, concentric shells of them. Here is the proportion, of living space, production; and the gravity-gradient deserts that we don’t use for anything much.

  Clavel had told him all about it. The cities are enclosed. No one lives out of doors, in the artificial outdoors, which is actually inside. Just as on your planet, there’s a lot of wilderness, “out” there, which we don’t use. Telepaths don’t lie, they translate their terms. Aleutia is a space ship.

  Johnny began to understand that he was looking at the truth. He had taken a trip, of some wild kind, a quarter million miles through space: and he stood in Aleutia. He felt sad, and cheated, and exultant. Brae had been right, all along.

  He tried to get the control pad to give him alien coordinates that someone on Earth could pin down. The machine would only go on with its set routines.

  Some adventurous souls go out into the skeletal supports of the cavernous shell to prove their courage or to look for God; or merely to have an adventurous picnic.

  More?

  The inside of a big, big hall like a museum. There were cases of artifacts, which he couldn’t make out too clearly. Next to each case, a tv screen, some of them elaborately mounted, showing live action movie-drama, frankly unreal animation, and everything in between. He couldn’t get a closer look at any of the shows, but he was fascinated to note at one end of the hall what looked like a recording studio: glassed off, people in there moving around. His tour lingered, the values of light and angle telling that this was supposed to be important. He was supposed to feel reverence.

  “What is this place?” he whispered.

  The icons were derived from a humanoid body. In icon the ship itself was a forked animal, not a hollow rock: blood, lymph, nerves and guts standing for the various essential systems. He had been moved on from the “mountaineering” to the “tv hall” by rubbing a big rayed eye. That was weirdly easy to interpret. The Eye. The “I.” He remembered Clavel, suddenly and intensely: covering her broken face in that gesture of deep respect. The Self is God.

  Oh, it was eerie!

  He was being shown their temple, an alien cathedral.

  Television had a supernatural significance for the Aleutians. He knew that. What happens behind the screen happens in “the land of the dead.” They kept video-records about themselves in a place apart at Uji. No one understood why, not even his favorite authority on Alien Culture, (or if she did she wasn’t saying). That wasn’t a communications center, it was a church of “Self.” But here he stood, using a tourist information desk. The radio-room, if he found it, couldn’t be that whacky.

  “What about those moons?” murmured Johnny.

  He found them, by trial and error. Here are our satellites. Here is a gap in the default configuration. One of our satellites is missing. No, it has gone walkabout, an eye on a stalk to peep around the big moon.

  “Oh, hey—”

  No one had ever caught the Aleutians making or receiving a transmission. But there it was, the proof. In an emergency, the landing party “telepaths” could phone home. Was he awake or dreaming? He couldn’t tell. But a brilliant plan slipped into shape. He could hack their coms. He could hijack that eye on a stalk and break their cover. Absolutely. This was the key. Here it was (the fuzzy air brushed across his face). Power over the aliens!

  Guiltily, he became aware of Braemar; of the way she was standing there quietly letting him have all the fun. She seemed to like him to take the lead. And he felt he could do anything while she was around: that tender, enabling presence. He remembered the ruthless way she’d made herself seem obnoxious, in Fo, to save him from moral danger. (Or something like that, some esoteric Braemar reasoning that he’d never understand).

  Why was she so rough on herself?

  There was a fantasy, it almost seemed her favorite, where she would say no, and please, Johnny, no; and softly fight him, all around the room. She’d introduced this in Africa: a close-quarters reversal of the teasing come-on she’d given him before. It was horribly exciting, so completely against all the rules. It worked for her, too. She would be frantic, teetering on the brink when he had her down, when he forced her. It was a game they hadn’t played again, and never would, not since the Clavel incident. But the thought of it started to give him an erection.

  Getting hyper-associative. His idea was sexual, inevitably: it was about doing it to the alien. This hyper effect (not only in terms of sex) was a hazard of computer gaming; one reason why he’d never been crazy about virtuality. Smart people only used this drugless drug for business meetings.

  He stood back. “You have a turn,” he said, like a child.

  Of course, she wasn’t there.

  A brisk march down the spooky, off-real corridor restored him. He wondered if Brae was here at all, and how he could possibly find her. Things had changed while he was in the pod-room. There were scrabbling noises, odd shadows. Things watching him, and following. He should have nothing to fear from Aleutian security cams, because there wouldn’t be any. But reason breaks down, addicted gamers become classically paranoid, and they must have some kind of analog. He bumped into a yielding panel, backed off, rubbed the icon and was plunged into a city street. He did a swift U turn. Something grabbed him: he opened his mouth to yell, but it was Braemar.

  He hugged her exuberantly.

  “I’ve been finding things out. And you?”

  She shook her head. She seemed overwhelmed, her eyes stared as if blinded. He hugged her again. “Isn’t this terrific! We’ve got them, Brae.”

  The passersby weren’t taking any notice. He flashed on Clavel’s experience in Fo. It’s easy being an alien
. Keeping his arm around Braemar he drew her into the corridor he’d left.

  “I’ve figured out a plan. Have you seen any maps? We’re in the hub here. We’re going to climb out into the scaffolding. We’ll climb in again at a different level. The exit we want is two floors up, I mean out, closer to the equator.”

  “How do we get there?”

  “Simple. We take a bus.”

  The bus set them down at its terminus, by which time they were the only passengers. The transition from living-space to wilderness was oddly natural. Behind them, the walled city. Ahead, the edge of the wilderness, overgrown with bushes like giant clubmoss, very dark green. A kind of turf; several different flowering plants. There was nobody about. They stood, heads tilted, peering. It was chilly out here, even so close to human habitation. A dizzying landscape, impossible geology of struts and spars, sprang out and down through the dark air, with no visible limits. You could see how venturesome young Aleutians would come to test themselves, and maybe break their silly necks.

  Johnny told her about his symbolic literacy, and read her all the information provided at the bus stop. They could have used public transport (which seemed to be free) for the whole journey, but somebody would surely have spotted them. Safer this way.

  Braemar was very quiet. He had the impression she’d spent her time alone wandering vaguely in a state of shock.

  “‘Down’ is out, remember,” said Johnny. “Out to the shells. We don’t want to get too far, just crawl around the outside of the living-space and find ourselves another bus stop.”

  They climbed into the rock web. Perception and perspective shifted. It became possible to see that they were crawling in a mess of irregular bracing between two roughly concentric spheres, under a convex curved surface, and above a concave far away “floor.”

  Goblin claws scratched at Braemar’s attention. She looked around and around: nasty things slithered away unseen. She clambered through an algal bloom of memory, the air was full of fragments of her past, fragments of meaning. She’d gathered all the information she needed, she’d had enough of Aleutia, but Johnny must have his own adventure. She was afraid to cross him, although he was such a baby. She was afraid at every step that she would fall out of this precarious reality, into a spasming void where anger was the rock, fear the air, shame and guilt the space that held her. They followed waymarks, integral like the maps. The rock-like metal or metallic rock was well worn. Mountaineering might be a minority sport, but they were using a popular path.