White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Johnny? Do you think this is real?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” he called back. “It’s bloody good fun, though. Lemme think. Down is out: We have to turn here.” He closed his eyes, trying to orient himself by inner-ear balance: and instantly wailed, fell to his hands and knees.

  “Wow. Don’t try that.”

  “I didn’t get any video of the engine room,” called Johnny. “But I think they must be using the sun for power. That has to be it. Some kind of massive harvesting of the solar wind; of the energy-skirts of each star as they pass through its domain. They’re lost, you know. They must be lost. No one would have come out to this godforsaken neck of a spiral arm on purpose.”

  The whole primitive operation grieved him. Somewhere in Johnny the vision of Planet Aleutia had survived. Pure waters, rolling meadows, lovely eco-malls scattered like dewdrops.

  “They’re no better than us, they’re in the same fix themselves. How useless.”

  He had to keep parleying all the time with hyper-associative Johnny. Who was anxious for excuses, because he wanted to shaft the aliens in the worst way. The aliens had become somehow entangled with Braemar. Get down, you stupid animal. The battle in his mind/body was eerie and horrible. Brae mustn’t know what was going on. She’d be terrified.

  “On the contrary,” corrected Braemar, softly. “They’ve learned to run a world the way our world needs to be run. They’re what we need.”

  She touched the deep worn treads: hand and footholds. So old a race of wanderers. So ancient and single an organism. I want that ship, she had said, and here it was. But where was the proof of Aleutian equality? That was all she asked. Not that they be inferior. She only wanted them to be equals. Why couldn’t they be equals? Why did she always have to be afraid?

  Goblins crept.

  “One consolation,” Johnny called, cheerfully. “This is a spaceship. When we start climbing, technically there’s a slight gravity gradient: we’ll be doing less work—”

  Then he fell.

  He fell away from her, a blur of movement. She yelled and clung to the rock. He was lying below, about thirty meters under her feet, caught in the fork of two rocky branches. Frightened, but not yet terrified, she scrambled down. Johnny rolled over. He was not unconscious, he had not broken his back. He was clutching, two-handed, at a red spring that rose from the dun cloth; from his inner thigh. Nicked the femoral artery.

  “Can’t…stop it…”

  “Yes I can!”

  She stripped off her Aleutian suit. It wouldn’t tear, she wadded the whole thing: rammed it against the flow. The dun colored underwear, pocket in the crotch for their sanitary pad hung off her hips and cramped her shoulders.

  Oh God, someone help me—

  “Stay calm, breath shallow. Don’t move.”

  We do not wake up, why don’t we wake up. People have been known to die in virtualities. Known as the Huxley effect, it can happen quite easily, if shock and a vulnerable mental state combine. Until this moment she’d been half convinced she was really dead, all this a dream of the collapsing neurons. It was only a vision: hallucination, wish-fulfillment. But she couldn’t wake herself. Her heart was pounding. Johnny lay back, breathing shallow, watching her from under half-closed lids with a faint apologetic smile. He was unconscious, but he was still here. Aleutia remained solid and the blood kept coming.

  Something moved above her. She didn’t turn her head. It scratched around in front, a little creature with a segmented body and clawed legs. Its head was marked like a face, eye-patched like a caterpillar. It had a human face.

  Something landed with a meaty plop. It hopped on a single rear limb like a coiled spring. It had a row of eyes, human eyes: two pairs of little baby hands. More of them came, none larger than a squirrel. Some were very small. Go away! she sobbed, her hands fixed rigid in the welter of Johnny’s blood. But the goblin creatures came up close. They were all over her and Johnny, taking emergency measures, before the Aleutian arrived.

  Having made the injured intruder as comfortable as possible, the doctor returned. Braemar sat crouched against the wall in the lobby of the First Aid station, half naked and bloody. The doctor folded himself down near her. He reached out a hand. The skin of his fingertips crept, living dust motes danced in the air. No action at a distance in Aleutia. A trolley came up. He took a blanket, and patted the trolley: a magnified sign, Aleutian kindness to animals, of the endless chemical caresses that kept everything going. The doctor wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. It was alive too—not to Braemar’s perception but she knew its status from the way he touched it. Everything was alive. Rock, metal, food, tools. All crawling with the infection of Aleutia: a world of flesh, infested with the life of its people.

  He made a short speech, in the unknown Aleutian language. He probably said. “How did you get here?”

  She shook her head. No answer.

  The doctor began to explain something. The dumbshow he used, the grotesque half-alive tools he showed, conveyed nothing. They didn’t have to. She was inside the Aleutian paradigm. She already knew what he was bound to say. She knew the story. Your friend needs blood. It must be yours, our blood would kill him.

  She shook her head, desperately negative.

  He’d expected this reaction. Stealing tissue is an act of war. He covered his face, the gesture of reverence. He tried hard to convince the stranger, not of his brood, that he wouldn’t dream of taking advantage. He explained, perhaps, that he had made a vow: I swear by Apollo.

  “No.”

 

  No answer.

  The doctor was patient, puzzled, but only mildly curious. Aleutia was such a small place. He’d surely heard about the expedition, was aware that there was a habitable and inhabited new world on his doorstep. The arrival of a pair of alien intelligences in his own voyaging home left him unmoved. He wasn’t even very interested in knowing how they’d got here The unknown had no chill for him, no thrill, no numen. On a counter there were things growing in dishes: his house-plants, his pets, his children. Some had eyes that seemed nearly conscious.

  Braemar had to explain. It wasn’t hard, he was a doctor.

  she told him, in the Common Tongue.

  She hoped he realized it was supposed to be a secret, and that he’d keep it from Johnny. He gave her another suit. He looked over her still filthy and bloodied body with bemused distaste, but she was too tired to try and explain she had no wanderers. She would have asked for water, but they didn’t wash with water, he probably didn’t have any significant water supply. He sent her into the little ward behind his surgery, to tell Johnny what was going on.

  Johnny’s face was waxy. A living coverlet was tucked to his chin, a thing clinging through it to his thigh, and another to his arm. Perhaps he had guessed what she had to say long ago. His eyes were closed, he was gone. Where’s Johnny? Johnny’s gone. She had quarreled with her husband, one day when he was dying. She had left the hospital telling herself that she would make it up tomorrow. But “tomorrow” he’d fallen into the last decline, and never knew her again.

  “I want to do right,” whispered Braemar. Aleutia was real as death. The knowledge that she’d gained while she was alone was hard and solid. She must get home and put it to use. But she wished it could all end here, that she was the one lying there dying. She wanted to tell Johnny the truth, but she was too frightened.

  His eyes opened. “I need a transfusion. Do they understand? Brae, your blood’s the same group as mine. I saw it on your passport. D’you remember, in Fo?”

  He made a bare attempt to lift his head. “My blood kit’s in my bag. Where did we leave our bags?”

  He had forgotten where they were, and why, and how. He was in Africa, or some other of Earth’s many desolations: dying because he’d taken a stupid risk to get a story. There were no chairs. She knelt on the floor by the pallet bed.

  “The doctor’s going to take a blood sa
mple from you, and copy it. They can do that here, but he needs your consent.”

  “Why? Why can’t they take your blood?”

  He didn’t want anybody’s help but hers, he didn’t trust the aliens.

  “I’m sick,” she whispered. “I have HIV, AIDS.”

  Braemar began to tremble. Johnny sat up. His eyes, a moment ago sunken and vague, were suddenly blazing. He swung at her open-handed, he slapped her around the head. “You bitch!” She tried to fend him off, he punched at her breasts, her face. He was on his feet, the injury forgotten.

  “You told me you weren’t afraid of the QV. You took me in. That was the most beautiful moment of my life, you filthy cheating bitch—”

  She cowered, he grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her upright, slammed her down. He punched and kicked in a frenzy.

  “No, Johnny,” Braemar whimpered.” Johnny, please don’t.”

  She scrabbled at her clothes, trying to show willing. Everything fell away.

  10

  THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND

  A wet evening in London. The tiny alleyways of Holborn were packed, the gutters running and chuckling, the meager little stalls canopied with waterproof sheeting: which was more degradable than it ought to be and melting in shards over the goods. From a bar doorway came the strains of somebody singing, over Bing Crosby’s backing-group, I’m dreaming of a wet Christmas. The stalls sold blue and silver filigree raindrop garlands, comical cards showing families Christmas-dinnering on the rooftree in a waste of water. The three month orgy had begun.

  In the suburbs people would still be spraying frost on their lawns in late December, when Holborn was a mangrove swamp. In a country where everything good is always in the past, it’s the urban poor who make fashion.

  Johnny walked in the crowd, head down, fists in his pockets. Singing garlands, karaoke, headboxes, kids with talking clothes. It was hard to believe the traffic noise level could have been worse fifty years ago. The Back of the North Wind was a gracious retro oasis. It had a traditional painted sign, showing a big tree against blue sky, some quiet children sitting in the branches. Presumably that meant something, to the British or some subset thereof. People were talking softly, at tables; along the bar. Brass glistened, the carpet was deep red, there were, quantities of dark polished wood. The unstoppable ooze of meta-Christmas had been kept at bay. No garlands. Indoors, the FTL afterburn was still almost unmanageable. He could have waded through the tables, he could almost see through the walls.

  Braemar was sitting alone, her chin on her hand. He studied her face—the hollowed temples, brooding eyes, lips set fine and hard as a knife blade. Her snow-deep pallor, without a trace of English rose to warm it, seemed mythical, inhuman. She looked like what she had been to him: the lovely embodiment of Misfortune, Ruin, Grief. Braemar Wilson, not the virus, had wrecked his life. He could have lived with the QV, imagining himself innocent.

  The mask had worn very thin. Neither white, nor a queen: she wore the ironic title like an essential shadow of the truth. A woman can be a female impersonator. A smart Asian matron (he wondered what the real mix was; something more complex, certainly) can spend her life assiduously, subliminally, passing for white. But peel away the masks, and she was so like himself—crazy, timid, stubborn: forever throwing out a shell of smart ideas and fast talk to hide the terrified worm inside. Johnny smiled without knowing it. He’d lost the lady in red, and found his lost child. And he consigned Bella, the little girl he didn’t remember, to someone else’s care at last.

  They hadn’t parted on the best of terms. He was afraid to face her, afraid to meet that mysterious look of humility that had so intrigued him. He knew where it came from now: guilty eyes of a beaten animal.

  Braemar watched him coming.

  “You aren’t limping, Johnny.”

  “Not a trace. They do mighty fine First Aid, in Aleutia.”

  He sat down. He looked at her, and looked at her.

  “He used to hit you, didn’t he?”

  “What?”

  “Your husband, I surmise. The guy who gave you HIV.”

  She looked at him, and away: down the years. Johnny felt like an intruder.

  “You’re right. I was a virtuous wife. I didn’t know any better. And yes, he used to hit me. Bourgeois Asians have mixed feelings about mixed race. He married me because I was fair-skinned and had a little education. I married him because I wanted a house, and children. He wasn’t a very secure person, or very clever. He came to resent—various things. He would call me a white nigger and beat me up, and then make love to me; and I liked that. I got to like the combination. He would fuck other women, phone me from hotel-rooms berating me for making him feel guilty. That wasn’t such fun. But the whole thing was addictive. It is sickeningly pleasant to be always the injured party. To have someone perpetually calling himself names and begging your forgiveness. You can’t know if you haven’t tried it.”

  “One day I made up my mind I would make him take an HIV test, mostly to humiliate him. It has always seemed as though I killed him, because he was perfectly healthy, and then in a year he was dead. Krishna died when he was five, of full-blown AIDS. My daughter has escaped. I’ve lived with it, HIV positive, symptomless AIDS as they say now, for decades. It’s not as hard as you’d think to keep it quiet. Back then, there were barely any Notifiable Disease regulations, but there were awful ideas about how infectious you were. It was natural to keep it secret. I take care. I never have unprotected sex, I have never infected anyone, as far as I know. I haven’t been ill, so I just never surfaced. There’s my pharmacist, some medical records, that’s all. I doubt if anybody but my immediate family knows, for sure.”

  The AIDS virus protects against QV. HIV carriers can’t catch or carry the mutated, distant descendant of the disease. It had been a dirty joke in the Amsterdam clinic. If you want it badly enough, Johnny: if you can get it up for a burnt-out leper, the AIDS ward is thataway.

  “One day, I was going to Africa for White Queen. We kept tabs on alien-chasers so we had a file on you, the eejay with the QV. I knew Johnny Guglioli was ahead of me; I came prepared to make myself interesting. When I found out what was happening to you, I used myself as a counter-attraction, to keep you from getting hypnotized. That’s the way we were thinking. The QV couldn’t hurt me. What can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time. The story broke, we thought that was the end of your significance. I left. I stayed away from you, until fate beat me down.”

  Her face crumpled, briefly. “When you reappeared there wasn’t going to be any sex between us, because there’d been a change of plan and I had you marked for Clavel. You think I betrayed something that night in Africa, Johnny. That was only the start. I’ve always been ready to use you. To do whatever was necessary for the cause. The one thing I tried hard not to do—after Fo—was to use you and fuck you at the same time. Because I do love you.”

  She shuddered. “I always did, or very soon. The lightning strike was real. I knew it was, and went on lying to you. I’m a ruthless person, Johnny.”

  He smiled. “Cruel and sentimental, like James Bond. You did warn me.”

  “Well, you know the truth. Has it set you free?”

  “Never.”

  He took her hands. “Brae, I’m the one who should be groveling. I don’t know what happened to me out there. You can’t ever forgive—”

  “Don’t.” She pulled away. “I lied to you, Johnny. In a language that we might as well call Aleutian, since we haven’t a word of our own. It’s not the words, its not the signs, it’s something between. I did a horrible thing. Not only that first night but again and again.”

  “Then I lied too. In that same language. I’m not clean. Well, shit, maybe I am: but I’ve never believed it. The outraged innocence has always been a sham.”

  He reached across the table. She looked at their clasped hands, sighed a long shuddering note of relief. “Okay.”

  The physical link grounded them, made it possibl
e to talk about what had happened.

  “Johnny, tell me. What do you remember?”

  He attempted to pull himself together.

  “I remember that you lay down, and when I next looked you were gone. At that moment… I can’t recapture the state of mind I was in, but at that moment I seriously believed you were hiding behind the door, or in some stage magician’s cabinet. It seemed like—okay, we agreed to humor her. So I lay down, fearing nothing. Then I was on a big spaceship, your multi-generational hulk, and exciting things happened that seemed normal enough, if you know what I mean. Then.”

  They had been where only the dead go. The nakedness of that experience was still near, a strain on his humanity. As soon as he let himself think of it, he was flung back into a state where everything that had happened was so true it could never be forgotten or denied. The corruption at the heart of their love, the violence and treachery, was as vital as the love itself.

  He did not forgive her. What he felt was too immediate, too intimate: it was nothing like forgiveness. Nothing like shame. He would never leave the moment of mutual betrayal. He would live in it, wrapped in her arms, never want anything more.

  He looked her dead in the eye, trembling. “Then there was some psychodrama. And I remember all of it, but I don’t know how it ended. The return, I don’t remember at all. It’s as if…” He shuddered. “Shit. I can reconstruct. I could tell you we came back from Germany together in a car. But that’s not what it’s like. It’s as if I walked from that First Aid place into this pub.”