White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  Relax. If the pundits are around to tear you to shreds, it will be because something worked.

  A small price to pay.

  She put the Mini Cooper into auto and let the ratrun traffic carry her home, while she sat there deliberately recalling the Uji tapes, the faces and voices of baboon-individuals as human as herself. Johnny’s confidence in the power of his eejay stunt was touching. How far did he really, deep down believe in it? She wasn’t going to ask him. She’d got by without being able to trust anyone, not completely, for a very long time. She wasn’t going to change that now.

  Johnny’s plan was simple. Not easy, but simple. He was going to hijack an Aleutian coms center, and send a signal to some earthling scientific hardware: to one of the functioning satellites (there were a few left) that faced up and out instead of down and in. Once he had the hardware’s attention he’d get it to relay his signal to Earth. He didn’t know what he’d be able to transmit. Ideally, he’d end up talking to someone in a Space Research station on Earth, in English from Aleutia. Unlikely, and it didn’t matter. He didn’t have to identify himself, or say anything. He only had to be there. A radio source where none should be, wildly close at hand, and displaying all the signs SETI was supposed to recognize. Whoever picked him up should be able to work out the rest.

  Some of those agencies might not be trustworthy. SETI itself, for instance, was in the hands of the hypnotized alien-lovers. The Corps, too, clearly had a secret policy on Aleutia. But there were others. Amateurs, hams, grabbers. Got to assume White Queen isn’t alone. Can’t be. Where there are secrets, there are people trying to find them out. There was a pack closing in on that ship: he could sense them, now that he knew what was going on. People who already knew, or guessed, the truth; or part of it. He could feel the breath of their pursuit, but he was confident. He had the edge over the competition (and what an edge!). He would be the first. Little Johnny would be the one who broke the story. He would bring the people the news.

  He’d spent hours on mental experiments with White Queen agents, discussing hypothetical alien tech. More hours getting himself up to speed on current satellite-ham lore. Most of this stuff would be useless, but you do the research to push yourself into in the frame of mind, the prepared mind that fortune favors. He had also tried, of course, to find out more about White Queen. They wouldn’t talk, they loved their secrets: but he had the feeling of a touchingly minute “organization.” What would they do with themselves when the charade was over, the aliens’ cover blown?

  Find another conspiracy to expose, of course.

  Finally, he tired of studying someone’s maniacally detailed diagrams of an alternate universe radio station. He snapped off his gloves, scrumpled them in one fist: looked at them and laughed. He was keeping the QV rules: it seemed like breaking the habit would be bad luck. He wandered the kitchen; peered at the festering greenery on the windowsills; found a glass-fronted cabinet with a shelf of old cookery books. Opening one at random, he read the name of the owner neatly inscribed on the inside cover. C.M. Wilson. The paper gold-tinged with age, ready to crumble at a touch. He went up to the workroom to wait for Braemar. The drawing room was being restored. The decorators had gone home, leaving a litter of spray-on protective sheeting, ladders, discarded takeaway cartons. She’d decided to go for a whole new look.

  It was getting late. The house was cold and gloomy. The bone-gnawing damp chill of British winter easily penetrated the meager heating London allowed them. Kamla and Billy were asleep upstairs, but the house felt empty. Parsifal’s cradle conjured vague terrors. He checked to see what Brae been watching before she went out. Wagner, Eech. He grimaced in disgust and began to channel hop. He was idly watching a debate on the Energy Crisis, when his attention was caught by a question from the audience. He knew that aged, wandering voice, hesitant but persistent as the Ancient Mariner. He knew that face: it was the White Knight.

  Johnny thumbed the info button and the screen tagged the speaker with a name that meant nothing, and a short bio. Hm. So this high ranking member of the gang had been a High Energy Physics researcher, in some past life. No details Well, well. Good idea to have one of those guys on the team, if you’re playing out an old-fashioned B movie scenario about alien invaders.

  He heard Braemar coming up the stairs. For no reason he could fathom, he swiftly hopped back to the Valkyrie.

  “As bad as that? Not even Patti Smith? I thought you didn’t like Wagner.”

  “I don’t. Just killing time.”

  He was sitting on the floor. She sat behind him on the couch so he couldn’t see her face; but he could feel her mood. It might be simple fear, because they had to do that FTL trick again, but she’d been gloomy since they made peace at The Back of the North Wind.

  “I was watching an Energy Crisis thing just now. I spotted our old friend the White Knight, making a citizenly contribution. Want to see if it’s still on?”

  “Augh. No. I’m not in the mood for ‘slowdown’ hypocrisy.”

  Johnny killed the opera, and they were left with a blank screen. The afterburn of their trip to Aleutia had a lasting bite. Whenever you think you’ve gotten to the bottom of heterosexual guilt, another crevasse opens. He wondered what was wrong now. Specifically.

  He turned, and laid his arm across her knees. “What’s ‘C M’ stand for?”

  “So you’ve been prying? Not telling you. A girl has to have some mystery.”

  “D’you want to talk about the psychodrama yet?”

  “No.” She twisted the braid of eel-brown hair around her fist. “I’m not in the mood and I never will be.” Her fingers traced the shape of his skull, sealed box of secrets under the pelt of a warm animal. “It’s not worth worrying about, all that sludge down there. Everybody’s made the same.”

  Johnny got up with her on the couch, and took over half the blanket. “The prospect of another psychic acid bath is not appealing, but I’m ready as I’ll ever be. What are we waiting for?” She slipped her cold hands inside his clothes, exquisite shock.

  “Have I been making excuses? I’m sorry. It’s just that I hate to leave my drawing room at the mercy of the decorators.”

  It could be the truth. She had such an appetite for possessions, and maybe she’d never see her treasures again. He knew there was more, something dark and deep, but he hadn’t the courage to go after it. He hugged her instead, abandoning himself to those wise hands.

  The next day, they set out for Prussia.

  It was black night in Krung Thep: one of the Buddhist Days of Atonement when everything closed down, services were cut to minimum and people stayed at home to pray for the planet. The killing time, the hot season, was closing in. There would be the usual epidemics here in the City of Angels. People would die: the old, weakly children, controlled cancers and Notifiables first, because the overstretched medical services wouldn’t try to save them. Their relatives would thank them tenderly for dying, in the rites of every major religion.

  It was the same the world over, with varying degrees of hypocrisy.

  Don’t block the exit.

  A buzz at the door, a face on the entry phone. Ellen, watching tv and nursing a half-empty glass, was slow to respond. The bugging of Uji manor had worked very smoothly: the results were disappointing. Her necklace hadn’t caught anybody’s fancy. Instead of wandering around the aliens’ private space, it had lain with other rejected gifts on a table in the main hall. It recorded Aleutians behaving as they had always done. It transmitted lovely images of the “hox boxes,” but couldn’t penetrate their mysteries. There was, needless to say, little dialogue.

  Then suddenly, nothing.

  It had been five days now. Not a sign from the Aleutians, not a spark of life from the device. For those who were in on the secret, these had been five days and nights of worse tension than in the legendary days of the Ultimatum. Ellen tried to blame the gadgetry. She had wanted something as simple as possible, but she’d been overruled. Every Peter Rabbit was a mass of mi
nute sensors, backed a supercomputer’s worth of nano-circuitry. No coralin, of course. Of course something had gone wrong, and now it was too late she recollected that the work had been done by a Korean firm, which was wholly owned by ex-Japanese. Kaoru was protecting his aliens from beyond the grave!

  Conspiracy theory gone mad.

  Her entry phone, in despair, took a large bite out of the tv picture and put Robin’s face in there: at last she opened the door. He was somewhat informally dressed in a grey singlet, and floppy black shorts, his slick blond hair dark with sweat. A bulky garland of jasmine buds and mauve orchids hung around his neck.

  “Come on,” he coaxed, with a big sloppy grin. Most unlike Robin. “Celebrate the Atonement. A few of us are getting together. Come and party.”

  There were two garlands. He peeled one off and held it out.

  Ellen stared at him, questioning. Robin only grinned more widely. She waved the garland away. “You’ll make me look like a dog’s dinner. Oh, all right.”

  Their tuktuk cruised into a city not entirely dedicated to penitence. Ellen sat back and blessed the coolness of the moving air, as they nudged through the barely-lit traffic. She was thinking of Sarah Brown. She hoped there would be no general reprisals this time. She hoped she’d convinced the aliens that the tampered present was purely her own idea—

  The culprit would be handed over cheerfully, Aleutian notions of fair play and personal responsibility should contain the damage.

  She didn’t ask a single question. Robin admired his boss’s cool, and fought the churning tension griping in his insides. He knew that Ellen assumed she was going to her death, maybe not at the end of this ride, but very soon. She might be right.

  They crossed the river to Thonburi, to an area of whimsical fin de siècle fun-chitecture. The Ephemeral House “Sweet BeachBums,” their destination, shared a monstrous building in the shape of a water buffalo with a jazz club, some games studios; a small, select shopping mall. The buffalo’s legs were built for flooding. Lifts and stairs passed through airlock sealed bulkheads, there were rescue platforms at the beast’s knobbly knees. The jazz club was in the belly. HamYon, the private club section, was on the same level, a little further south.

  The belly street had a transparent floor. Shapes moved blurrily below, as if the city down there were already under water. Since it was an Atonement Day, the girl who greeted them in the antechamber was really present, to save power. She offered, confusingly, to “switch herself off” when Robin and Ellen arrived. Recliners, covered with pretty imitation handweaving, scattered the floor in a private party-room. Poonsuk was there, Douglas Milne, Martha Ledern, Vu Nyung Hong; and Tavit Burapachaisri, from the Multiphon technical executive. The President of the USSA was also with them. Tavit was in the conspirators’ confidence. Carlotta’s presence was so unexpected that Ellen, for a moment, thought her friends were merely watching tv.

  Robin removed his flowers and set them on the floor. He adopted a languid oriental pose in which he was obviously uncomfortable. Ellen measured the room’s emotion. Martha knew something, the others didn’t. The air was thick with excitement and bewilderment. But not terror.

  “I don’t think much of your choice of rendezvous,” said Carlotta, peering out of the screen. “I may demand a change of venue before I speak.”

  The ephemerides, beyond a notional window that filled one wall, strolled and posed in a pretty scene that no longer existed, somewhere on the filthy, city-swallowed coastline of the Gulf of Siam. Occasionally one of them would seem to notice the audience, and smile.

  “Carlotta, none of those toys are human beings or ever were. They are fancy computer graphics, that’s all. Boys and girls who sell themselves as avatars to an Ephemeral House lose absolutely nothing, in the opinion of this culture.”

  “Hmph. There’s no such thing as safe porn, Dougie. Nor is here any such thing as cultural diversity on moral issues. That’s an exploded theory.”

  Pirate let out a wild shriek, as if she’d pinched him. She probably had, someway.

  “Sure, the ghost-whores are respected. I suppose Saowapua and little Sumanta are in the can somewhere, piling up their fees for the World Wildlife Fund.”

  Saowapua and Sumanta were the royal princesses.

  “We respect your reservations, Madam President.” Poonsuk was having a benign interlude. Despite the effort that this adventure had entailed, she looked stronger than usual. The non-Thai members of the group eyed her nervously, though there was nothing but cool politeness in her tone or face. “However, an Ephemeral House is an unusually private place. No brothel could be allowed to be so private, for the safety of its staff.”

  “If anyone has moved in with us,” added Martha, “the Day of Atonement will smoke them out.” Martha had a pocket organizer sliver-screen unfolded. She was reading the relevant pages of Thonburi infra, from the Citizen Information Base. Normally, a hundred, a thousand malware spies and grabhooks would have been buried in the teeming palimpsest of data and energy; but the woods were well thinned tonight. She looked across at Ellen. “The President called me up. As soon as I realized what she wanted to talk about, I fixed a private meeting.”

  They’d used Sweet Beach before. “We’re safe as we can be, in here, Ma’am.”

  Carlotta still looked antsy. “I thought the guys we’re afraid of have unusual means—?”

  “Telepathy? Oh, that’s not worth worrying about—” The President recoiled; Vu Nyung Hong’s cheerful dismissal raised a wry smile among his Uji teammates.

  Outsiders were fools about the telepathy. If the aliens were omniscient, there was no protection, but they didn’t seem to be.

  “We have no evidence that they are truly ‘telepathic,’ except among themselves.”

  “Okay,” said Carlotta, resignedly. “Let’s get to it. I have a message for you people—” She slowly grinned. “Well, now. That got you going. Just wait, let me tell the story my own way.”

  One of the girls on the beach spread a towel and lay down, in her tennis dress and eyeshade. Another ephemeride began to give her a massage. She slipped her hand inside the white panties under the frill of skirt, and turned to smile. Carlotta scowled. “Can’t you turn that damn thing off?”

  “With difficulty, Madam President. It’s advertising.”

  Robin and Martha dragged a couple of recliners, and propped them over the offending area.

  “I suppose that’s better.” Pirate muttered a little. “As you know, there’s still a partly functioning USSA Space Station in orbit. No one’s been there since the revolution, and I doubt if we’ll be back for a while. But some of the equipment functions. Signals get picked up.”

  In the glory days there had been a debate about destroying the station. But there were fears of some kind of QV virus fallout, if fragments breached the atmosphere, and of political problems with former Space Exploration partner-powers. Even some leaders of the revolution had a sneaking reluctance to blow up the last, tainted US presence on the High Frontier. So the station had stayed: but it had not, in fact, been the immediate source of the information Carlotta was about to relay. Nor had the SETI installation in California come up with the goods. The news had emerged from the routine monitoring of could-be dangerous fanatics—but she was damned if she was going to share the image of noseless cultists with homemade backyard dishes, clustered in worship.

  Carlotta thought people who held “secret” meetings should be barred from public office as being of unsound mind. She’d given up believing in privacy about the same time as she lost faith in Santa Claus. She’d dressed for this meeting in Mom-and-apple-pie tee-shirt and denims; the shirt carrying the cancelled rocket motif, and that favorite anti-space logo SOMETIMES GOD SAYS NO. It was a fine line, between shocking the anti-space lobby and revealing the humiliating nature of this leak. But this was still an exciting position to be in.

  The USSA wanted an entry into the Aleutian affair. They’d wanted one for a long time, but had to pretend otherwise bec
ause a tour was out of the question.

  “Before we go on, you should know that the source of the material you are about to see will not be revealed. That’s not negotiable, as a issue of national security.”

  The idiots had believed they were seeing scenes on an alien planet, the other side of the galaxy. They didn’t grasp that if you could pick up tv pictures from that distance, they had to be seeing Aleutia twenty thousand years ago, or something. She would ask the questions. A simple ploy, but it usually worked. Her searching glance roamed around the room.

  “Who’s bright idea was it, to bell the cat?”

  Pirate shrieked, at the sound of his favorite hate-word.

  The Alien-watchers were horrified. How the hell? The electronic web that wrapped the world was a haunted place. Mis-routed from Uji out to the space station; and back again to be picked up by the US military? It was terrible luck, but it stranger things had happened. I knew it, Ellen groaned to herself. It was over-powered! The use of excessive force is always wrong.

  The prospect of death retreated, but not very far.

  “Mine,” she said firmly. “Our kind of surveillance means nothing to them. I decided it was a mistake to leave them entirely alone. I, personally, took a device and had it installed at Uji.”

  Carlotta looked cynical. “At Uji? That’s interesting, Ms. Kershaw. But I don’t think you understand. Let me show you some home-movies. The production values aren’t that great, but—”

  Ellen’s first thought was that an Aleutian had slipped out of Uji, for some reason taking the doped necklace, and was, or had been, on board a submarine. Which made no sense at all. The necklace was being worn, presumably. The point of view moved smoothly from a small corridor into a wide bright passageway: the submarine became an indoor street. There were people, crowds of people. They were not human. They were completely unknown Aleutians.