White Queen

by Gwyneth Jones

  “We had found your mothership,” replied Ellen. “We detected it in its hiding place behind our moon. We acknowledge that you-on-our-planet had a right to keep the secret of its position: but you must see that its presence put your arrival on earth in a different light. Braemar Wilson is a brave person, Johnny Guglioli also. We have had no reason to believe that she is capable of extreme violence. No harm came of their gesture, which we do not entirely repudiate.”

  It was a terrible strain: to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The prince’s face changed like quicksilver. He wore a robe of deep blue, scattered with gold tassels: this finery, flung over the eternal dun overalls, made him look like a child who’s been at the dressing-up box. He would get up from his couch and fidget about. The way he tossed the open, trailing sleeves behind him spoke volumes, in a language in which Ellen could barely stumble through a sentence.

  “Johnny Guglioli merely interfered with some church furniture.”

  Ellen agreed, guardedly. Nobody had been allowed access to Guglioli or Wilson. Apparently they had made statements, or what the Aleutians took for statements, when they were arrested, but access to these wasn’t possible either. It seemed likely that the Aleutians didn’t understand the request. Everyone who’d had contact-experience agreed that it would be rash to push it. The only way to save the prisoners was to behave normally—in Aleutian terms.

  Lugha sat passive: he was not obliged to pay attention to this sort of thing. Ellen tried to peer into the room beyond. The future lay there, the future of two races. In some real sense it hung in the balance. There was a mandatory death sentence for major sabotage: this had been made clear, and in principle accepted. But there must be room for commutation. Life without parole would be fine. The Government of the World needed to save the lives of these two humans. It was vital to extract that concession. The Aleutians couldn’t know how important. They didn’t know what mercy meant in earth politics (or did they?). But all the time, as she struggled, she was distracted by the years ahead.

  She could see nothing behind the prince and the demon child, only midnight shadows.

  “Yet he is the younger, and the true child is parent to the true parent. That’s the way it is in all the stories I know.”

  She had no idea what he was getting at: she followed her instinct.

  “The Beloved rules the Lover? Yes, we have stories like that too. A famous story concerns a person called Achilles—”

  The person whose favorite color is blue settled again on the couch in his private chapel. He lifted a tassel on his sleeve and stroked the gold filament. The person who likes the brightness of gold was arriving at our judgement.

  “What turns out to have been a harmless prank didn’t start that way. Someone has to be taught a lesson. Let us return to the land of the living” The person who believes in respect for forms made a gesture: rearranging his sleeves. Ellen saw him replacing his top hat on the church steps, brisk and slightly irritated at the end of a tiresomely long service. The backdrop to the scene changed. The great character shrine appeared briefly, chasing the shadows from Ellen’s screen, and ended the transmission.

  The person whose aspect is often an exasperating purity of motive had arrived home. The prince went to meet Clavel in the office of criminal justice, in the city of the sun. There were several interested persons gathered there: obligate scientists, scholars; and notably an artisan, who kept his distance from the Signifiers but seemed very much at home. The person whose purity is actually riddled with abysses of error stared at this artisan. His nasal grew pinched and white-edged.

  The doctor from the wilderness First Aid post, who had treated Johnny Guglioli, stood with arms folded, resentful.

  stared Clavel. .

  The doctor glared in return, and made a speech. “I run a First Aid post,” he said. “People fall in the rocks and hurt themselves. I fetch them in and fix them, and I don’t care what they look like. It is categorically none of my business to get tied up in meaningless bureaucracy.”

  . One of the science people asked, mildly, for attention.

  .

  Some of those present became guiltily excited.

 

 

  No one in Aleutia could take seriously what Braemar had been trying to do. The averted cataclysm had left no scar. There was no sense of outrage against the saboteurs—especially since they had both made statements that, though confused, were certainly penitent. But the incident had come soon after Lugha’s return; it served to bring the whole question of that big planet out there into focus. It was a very long time since the wanderer had left a giant world of its own. Only the most stubbornly conservative minds had preserved any active notion of a goal; of permanent landfall. If it hadn’t been for Johnny and Braemar, Rajath’s invitation would have tempted a few, and left most people unmoved. Now, suddenly, everybody was interested.

  The person who is always aware of the attention of the thousands; and the thousands upon thousands who are presently unborn, stroked his sleeve thoughtfully.

 

  Clavel endured this. The person who goads Clavel whenever he gets the chance, of course knew everything. And nothing. No one here at home, nobody at all, had the slightest notion of how things were on earth. He made a speech.

  “There are two broods. Braemar is an obligate childbearer, Johnny the other kind. They are at war, but became lovers.”

 

  cried Clavel.

 

  Clavel could not. Not in here; not under oath. He was not sure.

  The prince turned to the scientists. .

  Clavel stopped trying to keep calm. He flew across the room, in a fanged leap that might have taken the prince’s throat out. But those days were long gone. His people grabbed his sleeves.

  The prince sighed.

  Ah, Clavel. Always the same Clavel. Pure as driven mud!

  Clavel had come to Johnny; joined him in the small clean room.

  “So it was your idea, Johnny?”

  Johnny didn’t know what was happening, and they wouldn’t let him see Braemar. He gathered that her stunt had failed completely, whereas he’d been caught in the act. He’d resigned himself to spending a long time in this little room. It was ridiculous, but he felt sad to find that in Aleutia there were police cells, and prison guards, and cold machineries of justice. When they let him at an interpreter he could present a case, but he couldn’t accept Clavel as that interpreter.

  He shrugged.

  She drew herself together, knee and hip joints turning backwards inside her clothes. A
gaunt knot of limbs, like a big sick cat. “You sent Braemar to disintegrate the magnetic sheath around the core of our main reactor, while you provided a diversion?”

  Johnny took this news. It entered him and filled him until he choked. He blinked.

  “Is that what she says we did?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Then that’s fine by me.”

  She relaxed, and said nothing for a while. Now she looked to him like someone lost in contemplation of a tragic drama.

  “Your lover is a complicated person.”

  “So am I,” said Johnny. “But I’ll get better press. And la lutte continue.”

  The detention cell was perfectly comfortable. Braemar lived in it like an animal: eating, sleeping, keeping herself clean. She knew no one here spoke English, and that she was speaking Aleutian all the time. She knew she must try to survive. Since she couldn’t bring herself to plead innocence she kept silent, and tried to silence her face and body. She was visited once by other residents of the detention. They were concerned, a little priggish. She thought they were probably saying: Buck up, you’re not in here for a rest cure. Come and do some occupational therapy.

  She ignored them, and they didn’t come again.

  At last Clavel came and told her that her plea of undue influence had been accepted, and Johnny had taken full responsibility. She said not a word: and whatever she told Clavel in the Common Tongue, apparently she didn’t change her “plea.” When Clavel was gone she lay tearless like an animal in a cage. She would not cry. The choice was made and she would take no painkillers, not even those distilled from her own blood. She waited, and dreamed of Johnny; immersing herself in sweet memory. She had a persistent fantasy that some kind of rescue was due to arrive when things got really bad. But this was nonsense.

  For much of the time Johnny was sure that when the climax came he would wake from his long and complicated dream. He fostered this illusion, because he didn’t want to panic and make a fool of himself. He was more and more certain that fear was the root cause of all their problems. He thought of the night in Africa: his craven terror, Braemar with her deadly weapon. The whole story was there. He found himself thinking a great deal about Bella, not as a sore place in his memory but as a living person. He remembered dancing with her in his arms: cavorting round the floor of that cluttered little partition, to some schmaltzy old C&W waltz. He looked down at the two year old face, so lost in bliss. You won’t remember a moment of these years, he thought. It will all be gone, I’ll be an annoying old geezer who never gives you anything but aggravation. But one day you will be dancing in someone’s arms: and you won’t know it but this is what you’ll be looking for. It takes love to make love, sweet baby.

  There wasn’t much to choose between the Aleutian and the earthly view, after all.

  He thought of Izzy too. Sorry, Izabel. You weren’t the love of my life, nor I yours. But you were a good friend, and I pushed you too fucking hard.

  Most of all, he remembered Braemar. Even now, the glowworm dress: the amused and delicate arrogance of her step, as she came down into the garden bar at L’Iceberg. She danced, to musique naturelle, with David Mungea: and smiled wickedly into Johnny’s dog-hungry eyes. In a watered-silk drawing room she sat with a very straight back, eau-de-nil skirts, bare shoulders, whispering to Larrialde. She glanced at him, where he stood attempting to dissemble his pathetic jealousy: caught his eye and drowned him.

  The scent of her hair. Those fabulous transitions, from word-play into naked lust. I am the place that you come into. Even now, he was drowning again, though he knew what went on behind the magic. He knew how a lovely creature like his lover was made, he saw the inevitable chain of events that ran from the forces that made her to this desperate predicament. He could taste the poison. Fear and the abuse of power—between human and alien, between men and women. But how could he want to change anything that had ever happened?

  No one asked him how they’d reached Aleutia. He was hazy about the details himself, it didn’t seem to matter much. He was glad the White Queen spacers had got clean away.

  Johnny walked into the shrine, flanked by detention-center people. The executioner had been to the cell and introduced himself earlier; he came up and they walked together. Johnny was composed. As he stepped onto the open floor, he stopped dead.

  “Is this being recorded?”

  A sizeable crowd had gathered, around the dancing floor and between the ranks of character shrines. The outburst of Spoken Words bewildered Johnny’s guards, but almost immediately his request was understood, in a flurry of embarrassment. By some extraordinary oversight, no religious arrangements had been made.

  “I want to see the cam,” said Johnny stubbornly. He looked likely to avail himself of the sentenced criminal’s immemorial right to fight or flight; to make things difficult. They hurried to reassure him. Shortly, the executioner was able to prove to the prisoner that his death would be recorded. Across the floor, the other prisoner smiled. Evidently Johnny felt that touch. His eyes were seen to scan the crowd, and meet the eyes of his partner.

  As soon as she saw him, she remembered everything.

  “Johnny!” she shouted, leaping forwards, electrified. “Johnny, it doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to die! Fly away! Vanish!”

  The disturbance was contained. The person whose aspect is often comfort of the defeated hurried over there.

  “I want to make a speech,” announced the prisoner.

  The person who is always aware that spilled blood can spatter, metaphorically, and leave a stain, was not presiding. His people made it known that this was perfectly in order.

  “I know that I don’t have to be here.”

  Johnny’s speech was clear in the Common Tongue, but his physical attention was so focused that not many Aleutians could make out what he was saying. It didn’t matter, he wasn’t speaking to them. “I’m here of my own choice. I know what we meant to do and I know my life is forfeit. This is my real situation. I don’t want to change it. I would not change an instant,” he said. “I would not change one measly virtual particle in the sum of things that made you.”

  Clavel was with Braemar. He had persuaded the guards to stand back and give the prisoner space. He stayed close, quelling the grief and pain that could only seem a meaningless intrusion.

 

  Braemar shook his head.

  Now. The knife-edge. The fountain of life.

  Braemar seemed to take the stroke in his own body. He would have fallen, but Clavel held him up. “Go to Johnny,” he whispered, urgently. “You must. The newly dead remember: so he will know you when you two wake again—”

  She ran across the dancing floor, and dropped onto her knees. She pulled him up and held him. She tried to wake, to be rescued, to plunge into the void. But they had stayed too long and the dream had come true. There was only Johnny, warm and lax in her arms; and heavier than usual, like a sleeping child. She laid her cheek against his hair, she closed her eyes. No one disturbed them, for what seemed a blessedly long while.

  14

  ENVOI: BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART

  Braemar Wilson came back to earth in an Aleutian spaceplane, with Johnny Guglioli’s body and the record of his death. It had been proposed that she would serve the UN mandatory life sentence for peacetime terrorism in an English prison. Nothing came of that: no appeals, no public debate. She escaped from police custody on her way home from Thailand, and was never recaptured. The mystery of how Johnny and Braemar had reached Aleutia was investigated with zeal, for the record: and then, along with active pursuit of Braemar, quietly abandoned. This was not a time when the Government of the World wanted to find itself uncovering a massively resourced anti-Aleutian conspiracy, involving Earth’s space-capable governments and the super-rich.

  The White Queen group continued its activities under the name “Oroonoko,” on a smaller scale. Braemar did not contact any of her old associates, she
never returned to London or to the house in New Cross. Eighteen months after Johnny’s death she surfaced as a face in the front line at an Eve-riot in Leipzig. Once a terrorist, always a terrorist. Nobody who knew anything about Wilson believed she had turned feminist. It was feared that the White Queen was gathering new allies for her own cause; adepts in guerrilla violence.

  But there was no need to worry about Braemar Wilson anymore. She surfaced again, at the registration desk of a large public hospice in an English city a few months later. By swift and devious means, this news reached tv screens around the world before it reached the police or the Aleutian Office. To the global audience Braemar was of minor interest; they’d forgotten about the sabotage drama. Enough interest was generated, however, to hold the forces of law and order at bay for long enough.

  Braemar remained a symptomless carrier of the deadly virus to the end. Her problem was lung cancer, a hazard of nicotine addiction. She’d waited too long before surfacing, it was too late for any treatment. She was sixty six years old.

  She lay under the white sheet, a thinking egg balanced on top of the ruin inside her skin. She’d refused a flotation tank. The bed approximated a narrow hospital cot of another age, for her reassurance, but it kept her miraculously comfortable. So long as you have enough money, you’re in good favor when you’re dying. People feel grateful.

  The Aleutians will stack us in arcologies, she thought, because that’s what they know. And we will thank them for it. How ridiculous. Considering the Japan Sea Factor, the cancer rate, and all the rest of it, by the end of this century, the last thing we should be worrying about is over-population. She was making tape, still Braemar Wilson, New Things: a mildly controversial topical opinion on any subject, any time. She lifted her hand, the one not braceleted with the pain-blocker. It still looked human. Could be quite well and whole, really. Could be waking with a bad hangover, or out of one of those thick cloying dreams that weighs on the heart like stone.