White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  Getting close, by the symbols, to the reactor chamber, and still nobody challenged her. If quiet footsteps approached (the silence of Aleutia!) she had time to duck into a doorway, or another passage. She found her way barred, an icon that wouldn’t open the door, no matter how she rubbed it. Then she noticed the closet, which opened at a rub, and there were helmets, gauntlets, suits. Protective clothing at last. A gauntleted fingertip opened the locked door.

  What can one take out of a virtuality? Information. What can one carry back? She had given the White Knight the information, he had given her the tools to plunge Aleutia into utter chaos. The looking-glass parallels continued: Everything that we are not, they are. Everything that we can’t do, they can. But the seal between the viewer and the reflection is not complete, a trickle seeps through. Aleutia lives on the edge of all our possibilities. She heard the White Knight’s slow words; her fate. What you saw sounds very like a fusion reactor. We can make something of that kind: it’s called a ‘spheromak.’ But for us, the beast will not behave: we can’t tame it.

  They have an analogy for everything. Gender identity, metaphysics, even death. The immortals had never known the crushing weight of mortality. But they too, surrounded by their own life everywhere, recognized a realm that was unreachable, the domain of incalculable powers. They entered this realm to commune with their past selves, protected by what humans call religion. In other circumstances, those awesome powers were the same in Aleutia as anywhere in the cosmos. Force, energy: the stuff that makes the wheels go round, fuels the processing.

  She was alone in a corridor that circled the reactor’s core. There was a great cylinder of the thick blurry glass. She saw what she had glimpsed the last time she dreamed this dream, when she’d got as far as the doors to this antechamber, then the doors had opened and she’d had to run away. Run away half-blinded, believing herself asleep or dead; fled in horror from a nightmare impulse. But she had carried the information with her, knowing before she spoke to the White Knight the fatal discovery she’d made. Now she was back.

  The sun in a cage: a fearsome captive, held in a state of anomalous stability. A state that ought not to be possible. On Earth it wasn’t possible to hold this creature, not for any useful length of time. The White Knight thought the Aleutians must have some way of doping super-hard metal to keep it from weakening under neutron bombardment. How the mini sun had been manufactured or captured in the first place he couldn’t fathom.

  All Braemar had to do was to increase the pressure; squeeze the bars of the cage. This must be possible, for the anomalous state of the blue sun had to be constantly shifting, constantly being corrected. She didn’t have to alter the super-metal. The vital component of this cage wasn’t material. Through the glass, the blue sun. It was unbearably bright, despite the dark visor of her helmet, so bright she couldn’t imagine how her sight had survived, the last time. The light roared like a million silent furnaces. The fuzzy blue sphere had all the aspect of a ferocious animal, struggling in the irregular coils of metal between which it hung, enchained.

  The Aleutians on earth, the landing party, had made themselves look big because they were afraid. As far as they knew they were among equals, and all they had behind them was this vulnerable wandering home. They took advantage of the hopelessly impressionable locals, how very human of them. If only the aliens had been what they honestly believed themselves to be: just folks, just people, completely unremarkable.

  But they were not. They were what the landing party had pretended to be, superbeings with magical powers. They would not mean any harm. At full expression they were still very few, if Clem was right. But those “three to five million” would soon rule, and change utterly, the miserable savages they’d stumbled upon. How could they help it?

  It will all be gone. Everything we ever did, everything we ever made: dead and worse than dead, meaningless….

  She stood in front of a panel of simple iconic controls. So far, every button she or Johnny had tried had responded. It might be different here. Perhaps only the live chemistry of a certain touch could change anything. There were eyeless, baggy things, like the alien camcorders at Uji, clinging to the walls. They crept about, but they weren’t watching the control panel. The Aleutians weren’t afraid of each other. If one of their own went mad, mad enough to want to tamper here, it would be known long before they got anywhere near the reactor. If she actually managed to change the conditions inside the blue sun’s chamber, presumably she’d have company pretty quickly.

  Leave the door of the sun’s cage ajar. Run to Johnny. Flee with him back to Prussia. He’ll never know what I did. A terrible coincidence….

  He’ll know, but he’ll forgive me. Live happily ever after.

  I am mad. I am mad and dead.

  The little drum went on beating. Tears filled her eyes and fell inside the mask. How horrible, to kill because of something generations in the future. How could anyone be so certain? But she was certain. The cold equations of history would not be denied.

  In Krung Thep the Government of the World had been plunged into secrecy, as into the hot darkness of a midnight power cut. The press gallery was going crazy, demanding to know who’d pulled the plug on them. The Multiphon delegates had just been told the news. There is a mothership, we have a surveillance device on board.

  We have discovered human saboteurs out there. What is to be done?

  Poonsuk had abandoned the dais, and taken a seat in the ASEAN ranks. Not many people realized that this had happened, it was only clear that the speaker’s screen was changing hands with indecent speed and informality. No one remembered that this was a closed, secret session. These professional performers harangued a nonexistent global audience: struck attitudes and turned profiles. Who had authorized surveillance of the Aleutians? Is this a faster-than-light starship? Who had authorized the sabotage? Had Uji been informed? Is this story not obviously misinformation, fed to us by a ruthless, faceless giant Corporation?

  Can we please take it as fact, demanded Martha Ledern, that the physical location of our surveillance device is confirmed. The ship is really out there. We have some information about its technical specifications, enough to be certain it’s nothing as exotic as “FTL.” We can discuss those issues later. The issue now is potential terrorist sabotage. It’s urgent.

  No, Uji doesn’t know anything. So far as we’re aware.

  Martha’s speech cleared up some of the confusion, and revealed the existence of an inner circle, mysteriously well informed. Before outrage could break out (cynical, practiced outrage: the Multiphon was riddled with inner circles) the delegates suddenly grasped just what they were being asked to decide. The uproar diminished considerably.

  Martha asked for a vote. Taking into account that we’ll have to reveal that we’ve discovered their ship. Taking into account their maybe hostile reaction, and that they may not believe that the saboteurs are acting on their own. And the fact that though they don’t have an FTL ship, they may still have devastating weaponry. Taking everything into account: shall we inform the Aleutians?

  Ellen and Poonsuk had insisted on this question, the framing of it, the vote in full session. They’d won their point in the inner circle, and then Ellen had been terrified that events would overtake them. Telling the Multiphon anything was inviting Babel, and meanwhile there was a psychotic terrorist on the loose in an innocent and peculiarly vulnerable community.

  It was still less than an hour since Johnny had been spotted. No time at all, a long time in politics. Normal service is restored. If not angels, then enemies…. What if Wilson was out there planting a letterbomb on the Aleutians? But Ellen’s inner vision painted the horror that was still commonplace, in so much of the world. Scattered limbs, bloody chaos and shattered glass in some alien indoor street. The families in tears. She must be mad, she must be having a breakdown, to feel this inexplicable longing that the Multiphon would say no, don’t tell, and Wilson would succeed in blowing Aleutia away.

&nbs
p; Nothing would make her vote that way herself. Must vote. Now, I have voted.

  Her eyes were screwed shut: a roar went up, she dared to check the tally on her desktop and saw the result. She was saved. The Aleutian effect had triumphed. Partly out of fear of reprisal, and partly from a genuine sense of honor: the Government of Earth had voted to protect the visitors and betray the terrorist. Poonsuk returned to the dais screen, and made a short speech.

  Uji was contacted immediately. Predictably, Rajath and his people made no fuss at all about their blown cover. Just took it in their stride, and did whatever they needed to do, to deal with the immediate problem.

  She was a little girl again in that great land of heat and birth, sweating in a scratchy uniform from far away. She stood in ranks with other little children, and sang the war-songs of a cold small island; poured her heart out. Wrong skin, wrong sex, wrong culture: the need to belong was stronger than self-respect. She had wanted to have adventures, to be brave, to be the hero of her own life. She felt a weight on her shoulders, the armor and the crown. As a champion she entered the lists, a woman with the heart and stomach of a man.

  And a white man, at that. What shameful nonsense.

  She rubbed the icon that announced its perilous meaning in the Common Tongue. Ice blue filaments snaked from the fuzzy sphere. Its light became even more intense.

  No one sane could do this. She felt meaning shift again, further still from reason, and did not try to pull it back. She was Mother, she was Queen. The immortal Self of earth’s brood of conscious beings had become a mortal woman to do battle with the invader. Mother must do this, take the responsibility, be the one to blame. I don’t believe my cause is just, no cause is just. But I must fight you. Please understand, it’s an obligation.

  She had no idea how to return to Prussia. She had never intended to return. No sane adult becomes a terrorist without accepting that their life is forfeit. Johnny said that. But when things started to break up he would escape, she knew he would go.

  She hoped he didn’t know what she was doing.

  Ah, to have a lover instead of a child. Too late.

  The blue sun had become an ellipse. It burned deepest violet.

  Obligation. For your sake, baby—

  The chamber doors opened. The Aleutians came in. Livid light played over their helmeted heads, flickered on eyeless visors, blank and dark. Four of them flew at her, two more fell on the control panel, caressing it desperately. No one spoke.

  Ideally, modern telecommunication worked with chemistry and modulated light, coralin and the lightlines. In practice, technically obsolete electronics continued to thrive: in tv networks, in state bureaucracies, in Braemar’s abused housebox. The Developed World, in all its nodes and enclaves, had a cat’s cradle of transition mechanisms, out of one spectrum, into the other and back again. In the wilderness outside, an eejay like Johnny Guglioli was the living link: the guy who could coax the most ancient devices into talking to the new systems. That wouldn’t be the problem here. By everything anyone had learned, Aleutian telecoms must run on chemistry and light.

  But how to get in?

  He didn’t know what was recorded here, what was transmitted; or for what purpose. He saw smooth bulky consoles, desks at his hand height. Above every double a roughly rectangular blank screen, in front of each a pair of seats. The screens were probably covered with some kind of chemical processing film, modulated by light, or sound. The desks under them had mixing bars, feedback indicators? A host of glowing colored keys or buttons, anyway. In front of each right hand seat there was a hand-shaped dimple in the desktop. He was reminded of a driving instruction simulator. One seat for you and one for the instructor: but there was no heads-up. The desk by the door was the only one with rub-a-dub buttons. He hadn’t the slightest idea what to do.

  He was terrified that Aleutians, alerted by a chemical tinge of alien panic in their air, would come rushing in. He reasoned with himself, pointing out that this was unlikely. If you don’t know how to decode it, any signal is mere noise. The Aleutians read each other’s chemical messages; that didn’t mean they could read the human version.

  This plan had begun as a wild dream that some brilliant technical fix would be possible, allowing him to force the aliens’ own emergency contact with their landing party to squirt earthling binary code at a Lagrange node. Or even straight into the Earth’s comsat network. He must have been crazy, no way he could achieve that. But he must be able to do something.

  Boldly, he sat down and stuck his hand on a dimple.

  “I want to—”

  The dimple warmed faintly. A wash of colored movement flooded the lozenges: a face swam up in the screen: his own. Johnny leapt backwards. He recovered quickly. Well, he said to himself. Monkey found the on-switch. He didn’t have to hack one of their “tiny moons.” He didn’t have to understand their tech. There must be an extraordinarily powerful transmitter somewhere around here. He only had to find the right button, then talk to the monitor screen like a dumb presenter. His video transmission, spilling out into the void, would compel the Lagrange to bombard a comsat with high quality signals: Johnny Guglioli would burst in on global tv like a hijacker. The Lagrange sats were dual system, futuristic marvels in their day. They were constantly pumping stuff back to Earth, and the news agencies sampled routinely, though they didn’t expect anything interesting. If Johnny did end up on tv, he might even get paid for it.

  What if he was blocked by alien-loving censorship? It didn’t matter. There were the hams, the hackers, the marginal science researchers still tuned to the lost frontier. Enough of them to ensure that somebody took notice, and that was all he needed.

  Johnny’s weird signal would be passed around, and grabbed, and it would check out: and then, too bad for those who wanted to keep the aliens’ secret.

  So, back to these keys, these buttons. There was one that looked like the Aleutian equivalent of an emergency siren: concentric broken circles, a stick figure in the middle. Abandon ship? It could be. Or it could be All Aboard, About To Cast Off! Whatever, his intuition swore it was worth trying. A reckless confidence returned to him. He would assault everything that looked hopeful and talk to the world. Maybe it would work, why not? He remembered the aliens, big-eyed with surprise on the tv: but naturally we understand your “computers.” What’s to understand?

  Time to turn that around.

  Try and stop me, alien scum.

  He still didn’t feel solid. He was dreaming, his body lay in a coma in Germany. The uncertainty was a constant strain. It was like the QV: there and not there. Once, a therapist at Amsterdam had told him the infection was real, but he’d infected himself. “The QV is analogous to your political activities. You have created it out of your need to break open the citadel.”

  It was crazy to talk like that about a designer-virus.

  First thing he’d do, when he was back on Earth—after the victory parade—would be to demand that Carlotta investigate the whole QV story. He’d be cleared. He could go back to work, with this stunt in his bag and the Aleutians no longer a problem. The prospect was bliss.

  He’d better hurry, Braemar would be getting scared.

  As soon as he thought that, he realized that he knew she was not waiting outside. Braemar had been alone in Aleutia for quite a while, on their first trip. She’d been behaving suspiciously the last few days in London. He’d had a psychic, Aleutian feeling that she was up to something. Something that involved the White Knight, the old guy who used to be one of those free-lunch fusion wizards…. But he didn’t want to think about what she might be doing.

  If he knew, he might have to go after her and stop her.

  Trouble was, as soon as he started transmitting he was sure to trigger some kind of alarm, even in this easy-going set up. He looked at the console that had responded to his touch.

  “Hi, I’m Johnny Guglioli, late of New York City—”

  He knew why he was recognized. A rush of fury swept through him. He
was contaminated. Clavel had known it from the start. The petrovirus was the link, the taint. He hated the idea of being close to her in any way. He remembered the hideous humiliation of the rape, the abject fear that he’d been made to live with since that first night in Africa, at the Deveraux fort. The image of Braemar, being slapped around and learning to like it…. No, that’s never going to be me. I’m not going to eat shit. I won’t live like that, subject to them, in their world. Not at any price.

  If this was real life he’d have to set off the alarms here, and stop Brae. You can’t let yourself be ruled by anger, you can’t take stuff out on the innocent. Luckily, this was only a dream. If Brae did something terrible, in the dream, it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know, he wasn’t to blame.

  Behind him there was a sound like cloth ripping. The studio doors had been forced open. Johnny flung himself at a recording desk, slapped his hand down. It was too late. Somebody, somewhere had pulled the plug on him.

  13

  LIEBESTOD

  Ellen Kershaw found herself in dialogue with an alien prince, over the fate of the saboteurs. The prince used Lugha as interpreter, at first. “He” watched the demon child closely. After the second interview he took over, and spoke for himself in a stylish aphoristic English. It turned out that the attribute of namelessness was not linked with an inability to use articulate language. It was natural to Aleutia. She had felt the prince, marginally more masculine than feminine, taking shape as a presence. She would know him anywhere: but his “name” was a circumstantial label. It changed incessantly, in the course of a conversation.

  The dialogue went on for weeks. Things were complicated by the fact that the prince believed he was playing a part in an alien religious ritual, and he wasn’t interested in religion.

  “You-we were not of one mind about the attack. You were a house divided.”