The picture lost color, distorted, reformed. Now the necklace was in a vast hall. Another Aleutian crowd, facing a dais. Lugha was there: the demon child. He was dancing. Behind him, a row of Aleutians reclined. They wore, the first time anyone had seen such variation, colored robes over their dun overalls. There was a delicate, stately music in the air, otherwise all was silent.
Carlotta appeared, in a corner of the picture.
“We’ve traced the signal. We knew it must be a bug, because they’ve obviously no desire for us to know where they are. They say they don’t have a mothership. They base a lot of their effect on that, and what it implies. But this alien ceremony is happening in our own back yard.”
“Madam President,” Douglas could barely control his voice. “We know you didn’t grab these pictures from SETI. Does that mean the Military are involved?”
“Dougie, I’m surprised at you.” She was puzzled at their response, the level of consternation. “We have no ‘Military,’ not the way it was. No unaccountable, out of control secret powers. Our soldiers and their staff are just people who happen to be prepared to give up their lives. They don’t waste their time watching High Frontier tv.”
She grinned. “So now we know what you’ve been up to. I have the location. I can give you the dimensions of the mothership, if you need them; and some emission details that are highly revealing about its probable motive power. Congratulations, comrades. I don’t know how you did it, but we may be on our way to a different view of the Aleutian situation.”
Robin rose and crossed the room, taking an orchid and jasmine garland with him. He offered it with a courtly bow, and a brilliant smile. This time, Ellen didn’t refuse.
12
EAST OF THE SUN AND WEST OF THE MOON
The minutely tailored and targeted alteration to Johnny’s chemistry had once more begun to fade by the time they reached the reception desk; where they must register as pilgrims. He’d failed to overcome his resistance to the eye-dropping operation. The bruising made him nervous as well as making his face sore. He lurked in the background while a porter checked short-term service codes onto Braemar’s card.
He recognized them, and was curious.
“You are here again?”
“Yes,” she said, with a charming smile. “It’s a game. We’re playing Thirty Years of War. We’re Swedish spies, pursued by General Wallenstein’s agents. But I shouldn’t be telling you.”
“Ah, ‘Big Board’ spiel!” The man nodded, with respect. Only the rich played the big board games on such a scale. One could hope something would rub off, if one entered into the spirit. He returned the lady’s card with a flourish.
“Good hunting! No, good hiding!” He beamed, and added in gruff English. “I never saw you.”
Gamers. The magic word. You could do anything, under that explanation. But your enemies could use the same excuse. They’d been allotted two single rooms in a nondescript block of student accommodation. The interior had the drab functional nakedness of a provincial airport in the last decades of the twentieth century, the high basic, as it was labeled by art historians, and with the old-fashioned design, some of the puritanism of the old divide survived. The unmarried couple had been separated, Braemar in a female students’ corridor; Johnny two floors away in a male. They foregathered in Braemar’s room. It held a narrow bed, with a quilt covered in dull orange, a workstation that doubled as a tv, a capsule bathroom, a rudimentary food and drink dispenser; and a wall screen for rules, service bulletins, and emergency announcements. This screen said, in German, English and Arabic: Dear visitor, please leave this room as you found it. It cleared and said the same thing in French, Spanish and Hungarian. That was its whole repertoire. A window looked out over three rubbish skips, some rusty, half dead conifer bushes, and further bleak buildings across grey turf. Dusk was falling. The cold, inside the room, was intense.
Buonarotti wasn’t accepting calls, but she’d left them a message. They were to come to her room at 3 am local time.
Johnny peered suspiciously at the service screen.
“D’you think anybody’s watching?”
“Wise up kid.” She sat on the bed beside him. “Remember when they tried to sell subscriber soap in the New Germany, back in the day? Ces gens ici, they have a pathological fear of having their neighbors minding their business. I don’t see any signs saying, CCTV for your protection.” She touched her naked temples; touched her wrist. “Remember that night at the Devereux fort?”
They were in livespace.
He heaved a sigh. “D’you think you’ll get your maker back?”
“No chance. I’ll buy a new one, out of my fees for how we blew the whistle on the so-called magic bug-eyed baboons. Out of my share, I mean. Sixty forty, net, wasn’t it? I wouldn’t rob you.”
“I’m suddenly convinced it’s a trap.” Johnny’s mood inclined to gallows’ humor. “She’s going to get us into our Kirlian state, catch us in a vacuum tube and turn us in.”
“It’s a risk.” Braemar began to laugh. “But how would she manage it, without bringing down on herself the horrible fate of premature publication?”
“Actually, I want to give up the whole idea. I want to stay here with you. Here in this fucking cell of a room, why not. We’ve a food dispenser box and a toilet. They won’t let us die. We’ll be a tourist attraction. Is the door locked? I’ll seal it with my pocket flamethrower. Gimme your card, let me snap it.”
He acted the cliché of the reluctant hero: Braemar responded in the same mode.
“Johnny, my dearest love, you know better than that. The way we feel about each other is fun, it is exciting, but it isn’t the meaning of the universe. There’s a job that no one else can do, and we can’t walk away. Our weltanschauung needs us.”
He held her hands. “I’m the best audience you’ll ever have. I’m all the audience you’ll ever need.” They fell from the imaginary stage into a long silence.
“I was in love with you once,” said Johnny. “In my lucid moments, I would realize that I was done for, but most of the time it was play. We were separated by impassible barriers of politics and beliefs and so on. I could be hurting for you as passionately as I liked, feel all that terrific sexy pain, without any actual danger to life, to futurity. I’m not in love anymore. I just love you, it will never end. But there’s the QV. You can live with symptomless AIDS: there are no controls for my disease. If the virus is really there, I don’t have much future. Unless the Aleutians—”
He broke off, gazing helplessly. How beautiful he looks when he is lying, thought Braemar. She saw reflected, in the wordless candor of his eyes, the images of an old woman, dying of an old disease, and a brilliant young eejay with all the worlds of Earth and Aleutia before him.
“You still believe they’re going to save you.”
“Save us. I don’t believe. But I hope so. When we meet them face to face, as equals, Earth and Aleutia will be friends. I hope for that.”
There was room enough to make love on the narrow bed, not enough for easy sleeping. Johnny lay awake with his bruised face, the warmth of her body and an arctic margin of cold that crept along his side. He watched the wall screen flipping to and fro, and wondered why Spanish, why Hungarian? Something to do with horses? Maybe there’d been a conference of Hungarian game builders, plotting to get Germany addicted to virtuality bullfighting. There must be an explanation. Always an explanation, for every knot and nodule of difference in the texture of the data world. It might be right down in the hardware, the part that grows like a coral: except that unlike a coral it does not die when conditions change, it continually redesigns and cannibalizes itself. He drifted into the coral world.
Braemar dreamed she was carrying a child to hospital. The warm round bundle in her arms was covered in cuts and bruises and sores. She could feel that some of its bones were broken, she could guess the freight of blood weeping into the body’s cavities from internal injuries. Someone was trying to take the child from her
and she kept crying leave me alone we’ll be all right, leave me alone we’ll be all right.
It was a nightmare, not the truth. She refused to dream it.
She was cutting a new letterbomb, designed with Ellen Kershaw in mind. One needs a focus. For Braemar the bombing campaign had been a personal duel, triggered by that one encounter with Kershaw at Uji. She inserted images meanly calculated to press buttons the old battleaxe hated but couldn’t disconnect, and liked to think that Kershaw knew what was going on. This one opened blandly with the resurrection of Eastern Europe. Voice of the West, from forty years ago, wailing in horror. It’s like walking into Auschwitz. The scene changed. Filthy smog, dire rotting factories, dead trees and grey faced coughing children were washed away. The children went running and laughing, through summer flowers, to the bank of a majestic shining river. A young woman, maybe the children’s teacher, knelt by the water. Slavic features, sloe-eyed, gently serious: a generic FE cosmumerproductpresenter, the image a little pixelated in case it bore too strong a resemblance to some real advertising actress. She held clear water in her cupped hands. “This river is called the Danube. This would have killed me, thirty years ago.”
Reverent, sacramental swallow, pious smile “With God’s help we have saved our mother, water of life; and ourselves.”
Nyah. So much for the purity of Uji’s insignificant stream!
(Soft-centered lies! She could almost hear Ellen gibbering.)
The viewpoint followed the river (it became a different river) to a shingle shore. Braemar had taken it there, in control. Gulls called: a wild, free sound. Strike up the Henry Wood Fantasia. “Anchors Aweigh.” (Come on, Ellen, you sentimental old thing, confess. When you were a little girl it was stories of The War that stirred you, long before the flag was Red and the fight for social justice. Those sickening old tunes of glory still get to you when you’re drunk). The child came around the blunt end of an upturned boat and found two men. They wore long soft boots, padded doublets, dark beards. They had the seamed faces and startling bright eyes of seamen. One wore a pearl earring. They sat at ease, but full of energy. “Are we ready?” asked the man with the earring.
“Ware an’ wakin,’ capten!”
Along the shore there began the sound of someone beating a little drum, rataplan rataplan.
Churchill, Drake, Raleigh. Davy Crockett, Robert the Bruce, William Tell, Prince Diponegoro, Rama of Ayodhya. Braemar, shameless, would enlist them all. When she’d finished teasing Ellen Kershaw, she could move onto Johnny’s gallery. How about a skinny bald lawyer in a dhoti? Quit India! (Arrogant, lecherous old bastard.) In the frankness of her dream, Braemar smiled. Real life heroes share this characteristic, Ellen. They are always the product of real life shitty situations. Corrupt and dirty damaged human beings, one and all.
Something went wrong. Too much conscious reflection had hurt her control, but instead of breaking up the dream slipped out of her hands. The long dead pirate, gallant defender of his island home, turned to the child with a living face that had no center.
She woke in tears, the beat of the little drum still sounding.
Buonarotti was nervous. Johnny had assured her that no harm would come to the Aleutians. Nothing was going to happen, just a harmless media exposure. She was going to let them use her device again, but she obviously wasn’t happy. Johnny wasn’t happy either. This room, weirdly familiar, forced him to recall that he could not sort out their actual return. The events were in his memory, he could feel their presence: but lost, like the last moments before a concussing blow. Unattached panic haloed Buonarotti’s furniture, making the whole thing seem psychic again. There was no ship, he and Brae had never left Earth.
“Is there something you haven’t told us?” he demanded. “Try to explain. I’d like to have the process clearer in my mind before we go out again.”
Peenemünde’s soft bulk contracted under the eyes of the saints. She twisted her hands between her knees. She hadn’t offered them any refreshments this time.
“In your mind? Try thinking of this. Your mind, which is apparently contained in the box of your skull, and within the limits of your physical body, has almost no space inside it. Or else almost no time. When you attempt to isolate a thought, a single thought, from the matrix of allthought: to delimit a position for it, when or where, you find this is impossible. Breakfast, fear, a past joy, the solution to a mathematical problem: it is all contiguous. This is where we replicate the whole of all, the void and all its inhabitants; the macrocosm, which is also ‘contained,’ in a certain sense….”
Johnny glanced at Braemar, who shrugged eloquently.
“Look, I’m trying to change the course of history here. I’d welcome a little support and reassurance. What happened when we came back to this room?”
Braemar noticed how blue the big fat woman’s eyes were: and the pure gold of that massy sheaf of hair, done up in a drooping coil. She tried to re-imagine the genius as a statuesque Aryan beauty. No, those mild indeterminate features, lost in the big pale face, could never have been lovely. Peenemünde was staring at her: an irritating dumb reproach. The woman noticed Brae’s attention, the blue eyes recoiled in fright.
“You came back. Frau Wilson first, then yourself. There is an infinitesimal drag: I said almost no time. A tiny difference is enough, it becomes magnified. One is in no risk of reappearing before one has left. I think you had uncomfortable subjective reactions?”
“You could put it like that.”
“Yes, it is an effect. It’s important to remain calm, and to remember what you are doing. Emotional turmoil is dangerous.”
She looked petrified, and Johnny wondered what they’d done. In what state the two of them had “reappeared.” Abruptly, he lost interest. He would bet Professor Buonarotti knew all about the evil side effects of faster than light travel. Her parents were Nazis and she had a rotten childhood. She must have suffered her own horrors. She’d claimed she couldn’t imagine any commercial application. At the time that had sounded like a transparent get-out, what she really meant was that the discovery didn’t work, or didn’t exist. But maybe she was damn right.
“Okay, let’s go.”
He left first, this time. Braemar lay on Buonarotti’s couch. The genius looked down sadly.
“Please, don’t do it.”
“Do what?” said Braemar. “Johnny’s the one who’s going to change history. One sword must do the deed. And Siegfried must strike the blow! I’m just the decorative sidekick.”
Poor ineffectual Peenemünde looked as if she was about to cry. Her eyes brimmed, the tears fell. Braemar flew into the spasming vacuum, into abstraction piled upon abstraction. She flew through the vast pomegranate halls of the cosmos, skeins of matter holding in a casual hive the rich juicy cells of void, cradling in her hands a drop of salt water, the most precious possession of her life. She saw a pool, a wellspring bubbling up in starlight. Buonarotti was sitting beside it. Clavel was there, that powerful young feminine person with the sad and fearless eyes. The two were talking together. Braemar felt a great ocean of outraged loss open inside her. You have no right to be here! she shouted at the alien. This is ours! We found it! But the professor lifted a handful of liquid, and Clavel seemed to drink.
She arrived in Aleutia knowing something new, a secret irony she would carry to her death.
It was shocking how completely the gut-deep uncertainty returned. How his flesh was not real, how his hands were not his own, how his mind opened and spilled. There were so many fictional accounts of faster than light travel: only the few can bear it, drugs have to be taken, the undrugged captain screams and dissolves into dancing, tortured pixels as he passes through the cosmic wringer. Either it was true, or his imagination was forcing him to act out what he thought he knew. Luckily the experience, though disgusting, was easier to handle the second time. On the brink of psychosis, terror receded as he thought, people will take shots for this. He was one of the first to endure what would be the commonplace m
otion-sickness of interplanetary travel. His historic privilege dizzied him more than the effect itself.
They’d tried to script themselves this time. It had worked, pretty well. Johnny had come awake walking in a corridor that actually looked familiar, and the next map-sign told him he was right. He pulled himself into the new situation like someone shrugging on a suit of clothes: and there was Braemar. They found a cupboard, dressed themselves.
“I’m scared to go out there,” whispered Brae, the first time either of them had spoken. “We don’t know what happened last time, only our hallucinations. How much time has passed?”
The previous trip seemed solid to Johnny, the FTL a concrete, technical marvel. There’d be a tiny Einstein effect involved in traveling to the moon in seconds; nothing to worry about.
“Calm down. Last time, we had a real life accident that roused some psychic demons in us. This time, we know about the effect and we can fight it. We were here three weeks ago, we vanished, we’re back. Maybe they have some kind of red alert thing going on, but did you never sneak into somewhere that was trying to keep the media out? It’s dangerous, it’s a danger we know. Think positively. You’re an innocent passerby. Think of Clavel in Fo.”
There were horrors in her eyes, he didn’t know what visions she was seeing. They were lucky that his own sickness was controllable this time: no grisly hyper-associative arousal, no violence. He was Johnny Guglioli, eejay, dodging the authorities in a foreign city. He was taking a trip to normality, in fact, out of the nightmare of the last few years.
They took a bus. It was a quiet time of ship-day; or ship-night. The lights were low, the streets empty. If the motes in the hazy air were picking up signs of intruders, there was nothing to be done. Get on with the job. The wide, irregular plaza outside the comms center was planted with what might be trees; decorated with the municipal bludgeonry that gives sculpture a bad name. The sky was indigo-grey; a sunset blur of dim ruby around the rooftop horizon. An old couple sat nodding companionably, on a bench by the sculpture. Shop windows were shuttered. A group of preteens raced about playing some kind of chasing game. The evening silence was so clear you could hear the kids’ breath across the square.
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