Sometimes she remembered lying down on the couch in Buonarotti’s cell; she remembered that fall into the void as if she was still waiting to return. But the FTL trip was incredible. It couldn’t have happened, her memory must be a delusion. Human beings cannot pass through the gates of death and live. Naked souls cannot commit terrorist acts.
Sometimes she thought, and it seemed logical, that this was why she and Johnny had failed. She had been in such a strange state then, when she condemned herself to live and go on trying to kill Aleutians; and condemned Johnny to die. There’s no way back to civilization from here. She had always been so set on protecting his innocence. When your mind’s unraveling, you cling to the few ideas that remain with crazy devotion. She often thought of his last words. Did he understand what he was saying? She liked to think so. He had died on his own feet, for his own reasons, but she would never look into his sweet eyes and see a racist killer.
She would have laughed if she’d the strength. How perversely it had all turned out. But to love one’s enemy, to heal the divided self, is not simple. Compound that struggle with the cosmic shock of first contact, and what can two poor humans do but cry: this is the world of our love. Rotten to the core maybe but I wouldn’t change a word of it.
I’m still glad we tried. I’m desperately grateful that we failed, but fuck it, I’m glad we tried. You and me, together.
It was a pity to give up the work, still a lot that could be done in damage limitation. At least she was freed from the company of those dreadful women.
Johnny?
She laid her hand down, with the impression that she had been writing something on the air. An epitaph for the old world? Exoriare aliqis nostris ex ossibus ultor? No. She closed her eyes. In a moment she would wake. Fail again. Fail better.
“I like that,” she murmured. “I’ll have that.”
It was getting on for five in the afternoon. At this hour, in the warm, broken light of a monsoon sky, the fort was at its best. Palms nodded their graceful heads in the shadow of its walls. In the crumbling holes made for cannon, ferns and flowers were shining after the rain. The West African Office of Aleutian Affairs was next door. Its gardens joined the public grounds of the monument; its white painted front verandah looked across a sweep of smooth green lawn to the old stronghold.
Ellen sat out on the verandah to watch the road. She was expecting a visitor, and she had nothing else to do. The Asabaland office was the quietest of their locations, little more than a rest house for Aleutian travelers. There were a few of those now: the curious, the thoughtful, the adventurous. She helped them with quarantine regulations, and sorted out their collisions with local custom. Not many people understood why Ellen had taken this post. She had access to the Multiphon, and was often consulted by the main office in Krung Thep, but effectively she had abandoned what could have been a prestigious third career. Ellen just told anyone who hinted at puzzlement that she was feeling old. It was time to slow down.
The last local bus of the day came struggling along the granderoute Macmillan. It was an open-backed truck, one of those near-immortal African machines, a makeshift conversion of an old gashog somewhere in the mess. It stopped. A passenger got down. The driver came round to collect his fare, and met a ferocious harangue: he backed away as if from a physical force. The battered capot went up, the passenger pointed to something in the dreadful depths of the poor brute’s engine, and made cutting, sarcastic suggestions.
All this could be read from gesture.
Ellen saw no reason to intervene. Soon enough the bus was on its way again, the driver uncowed. It would take more than the indignation of a few tourists to inculcate kindness to machinery in the stony hearts of humanity’s poor.
Clavel was wearing a dark business suit, the lightweight and well cut jacket open over a DONT BLOCK THE EXIT tee-shirt. This was a shock. Ellen had not seen the person they used to call “the poet princess” for over a year. She’d heard that Clavel had “joined a Corporation,” and wondered what that meant. She hadn’t expected to see the alien actually wearing the uniform.
“You’ve seen the news?” said Clavel. “There wasn’t much in the way of services. I was surprised.”
The story of Clavel and Johnny and Braemar was legend back in the mothership. That tragic collision of loyalties, the “self” who finds the “other self” in the wrong camp: it was the very stuff of Aleutian romance. It would be difficult to convince Clavel that the death of Braemar Wilson didn’t mean much to the earthling global audience. He tried, but he was still obliged to assume that the human race was a single entity. As far as Clavel was concerned all of this multiple creature (the brood-selves of Earth) had shared almost as closely as he in that drama—the chamber-tragedy acted out behind the tumultuous headlines of the past three years.
There was no use in fighting these assumptions. The Aleutians wouldn’t change. Humans just had to find ways around the obstacles. Wasn’t it always so, in the dialogue between a native culture and their far-come conquerors?
“Come inside,” she said, aware that she had been speaking in her pidgin Aleutian; and had probably given offence. She was not in control of that language, never would be. Sometimes she tried hard. Sometimes she didn’t care.
They went inside. Ellen made tea. They sat in the cool of Ellen’s living space, the Aleutian curled on the floor; the human woman preserving her dignity on a rattan sofa. They spoke of Robin, who was currently living in the mothership, teaching English to adventurous young Signifiers who planned to visit Earth. They spoke of Clavel’s decision, briefly. The alien’s determination to enter the service of humanity’s God (as Clavel saw it) was intimately connected with his tragic love for Johnny. Ellen understood that, but she didn’t want to discuss it.
Clavel was reading Marx as part of her studies: and was enthralled. She produced an antique paperback from her daypack: Aleutians dislike to carry “deadworld” gadgets around with them. They hadn’t yet come to terms with e-books, personal organizers, eye-wraps, headboxes: things that both had no live-chemistry, and also carried messages from the dead world. There would be artisans who would convert these Earthling toys, but for the moment Aleutia rejected them.
“It’s hard going. But oh, listen to this, Ellen. ‘Along with the tool, the skill of the worker in handling it passes over to the machine. The capabilities of the tool are emancipated from the restraints inseparable from human labor power. This destroys the technical foundation on which division of labor.’ You see what that means. So do I! I learned it long ago. Self is both tool and hand. Division of one from the other is one of the basic lies that allow us to function.”
Clavel was not aware that he had broken off his mangled quotation in midsentence. Whatever the Aleutian did to serve as “reading,” it didn’t work like the human version. Perhaps his eyes sent out little motes to reconstruct, chemically, the ur-hieroglyphs of mental construct behind the letters. Something mind-boggling like that. Their physiology, especially the neurological part, was still a bizarre mystery.
“Ah,” said Ellen. “That reminds me.” She went into an inner room, and returned with a curious padded tabard, which she pulled over her head. It was dun colored and quilted, shaped into two exaggerated breasts before; two jutting buttocks behind.
“I had forgotten to put on my uniform.”
The Aleutians could not get the “war between the two broods” out of their heads. It was the first thing they’d learned to see, and they couldn’t unlearn it. They were certain that the Eve-riots, and the festering problem they represented, formed the most important factor in earthling politics. No amount of official denial could convince them otherwise. Clavel was mortified. He sat back sharply, hips twisting into an animal crouch. If he’d been human he’d have been blushing scarlet.
“Now then.” Ellen saw no harm in letting Clavel know how she felt. She advanced, the alien recoiled before a blast of fury. “What’s all this about ‘cupmen’ and ‘clawmen?’”
�
�It won’t last.” Clavel bared his teeth, and shrugged placatingly. “There are some total idiots. They reckon that if we don’t know the difference between one brood and the other, we’ll always be getting into the firing line by accident. Don’t worry, Ellen. They are just trying it on.”
The idiom made Ellen smile in spite of herself.
“I don’t worry. I stopped worrying about you people one hot winter’s day in Thailand, about two years ago. What will be, will be. Just don’t ask me to like it.”
“I’m sorry.”
There was a silence. For both the immortal alien and the old warhorse of human politics, that silly tabard opened vistas of all the harm that might be done, in generations ahead.
Clavel sighed. “You people still see our Signifiers, users of formal language, as rulers.” His nasal puckered, thoughtful. “We don’t have rulers. We are, I think, an anarchy—from the greek an, arche. No rules. Each of us works out things for himself.”
“Hmph.”
Clavel shrugged, accepting Ellen’s skepticism. “Oh, well, of course: there are people who are naturally inclined to look big, and have followers. But that’s different. To use language doesn’t mean you have power, it means something else. I think you should call us the consciousness of Aleutia. Ask yourself, as a human being. Does that mean we are in control?”
He rearranged his limbs, recovering composure.
“But I came to cheer you up. You must believe me, Ellen. Johnny is not dead. Johnny is not gone forever, nor is our friend Braemar. Your friends are not lost, you should not grieve. What they did was beautiful and tragic, and right. They will be welcomed as heroes when they come again.”
No one at Uji would help when Ellen was begging them to intervene. Later, Aleutians had learned of the horrific belief in permanent death, and humans had learned that Aleutians genuinely were, in a sense, immortal. The execution had been a grim misunderstanding. Aleutia had had no notion of what they were doing to Johnny. The official Aleutian reaction was typical. They simply refused to believe in permanent death. But Clavel had called Ellen up and told her everything: the first meeting here, the sweet courtship (as Clavel had imagined it). The rape, the raid on Braemar’s house; Clavel’s belated understanding.
Ellen had taken the job of defense lawyer partly from a sense of guilty complicity. By the end of that ordeal she’d known more than she ever wanted to know about the two terrorists, and her grudging sympathy had become real. She had never liked Braemar Wilson. She had considered the pair her enemies. But the fate of those lovers would haunt her for the rest of her life. Scenes from the execution record still recurred to her on the edge of sleep. Braemar and Johnny, separated by the alien crowd: their complicated human love and desperate gallantry. The witness of that scene was so powerful that it had never been allowed near the global audience.
Clavel gazed earnestly.
“You let her escape.”
Ellen frowned. “Anyone with any sense knows that.”
“Of course. I meant: you did the sensible thing. But you could not stop them. Don’t blame yourself, they were doomed. Ellen, that business of the cupmen and the clawmen is so wrong. I started it, but I know better now. I don’t pretend to be able to prove it with science, but you are all one brood. Johnny and Braemar were true lovers, I’m convinced of that: and self can only love self. In reality, you know, that’s why they were driven to suicide. They believed they were incestuous lovers, committing exogamy.”
“Exogamy,” Ellen noticed, had been a sin that had not worried Clavel, when he fell for Johnny. The alien was a proper little Jesuit with his own religion, twisting it any way he liked. But that was typical too. Whenever you fell into thinking of them as magic savages, trapped in feudalism by their biology, they’d show you another face—no more bound by their obligate chemistry than any bourgeois-individualist earthling.
Clavel lowered his eyes, nasal flaring.
“I have joined the Corporation to learn. I am an adventurer, trade is my obligation. But I had to come to earth to find a world where trade is a vision of the whole: of the WorldSelf. Where it could mean something great. You have healed something like a division, deep in me. And I have done you an injury. I was in love, I was confused by new ideas: that’s my fate, to know what’s right and still go on doing wrong. But for Johnny’s sake I will do all I can, in this life and for all the lives to come, to make amends.”
Ellen took off the tabard and went to put it away. When she came back Clavel was sitting out on the verandah, ready to leave: in an unguarded pose of great loneliness. She sighed. In certain lights, she could still see a young girl with a face like a flame, the ardent purity of a teenage idealist.
If the talkers are consciousness, she thought, then you are conscience itself. She wondered how many like Clavel there were. Very few, she guessed, sardonically, even at “full expression.” It was irony on irony that Clavel’s status in Aleutia was the same as the status of the “voice of conscience” in humanity. A necessary evil, shall we say. A respected nuisance. Humans and Aleutians were so alike. They were two almost identical surfaces, at first glance seamlessly meeting: at a closer look hopelessly just out of sync, in every tiny cog of detail.
“I will go now. May I call on you sometimes?”
“I’d like that. Please do.”
Clavel walked away across the lawns. The cut of the dark jacket straightened the line of his shoulders and covered the lumpy oversized hip joints. His seaweed hair had been coaxed into a skinny pigtail that flopped on his shoulder. He’d forgotten to put Das Capital back in his pack, the book bulged in his jacket pocket. Ellen frowned, and wanted to rub her eyes.
She had asked Rajath about the love story once, when she understood something of the way Aleutians recognized identity. Those dun overalls signaled that physical feature wasn’t important. The nameless, thousand-named presence resided elsewhere.
“And Clavel’s fantastic mistake? Were they alike? You’ve seen records of Johnny Guglioli.”
“Actually, yes.” Rajath screwed his shoulders up to his ears, eyes sparkling. His bumptious personality overspilled the screen. He would always be her favorite. Talk loudly and carry a little stick! Rajath liked to say that. He thought he’d stolen this fine aphorism, and admired it greatly. Ellen didn’t correct him. She preferred the alien’s version. “Like as two pees in a pot. Damndest thing I ever saw.”
Clavel stopped, and stared at the Devereux fort. The swift tropic dusk was falling. He walked on, down to the road, and joined a few Africans who were waiting by the unmarked bus and taxi stop, for a ride back into Fo. From indoors came the quiet chatter of the satellite news. The Eve-riots, big problems surfacing between the ex-Japanese and their various hosts. The Americas war was that was still trying to happen, the Indonesian Empire in bloody eruption. The West Africa Federation was pulling itself into shape, looking set to become a major power.
For so much of the human earth the Government of the World in Thailand was still a sideshow, and the aliens an exciting curiosity.
Sometimes she felt like a stranded time traveler, trapped in a world that didn’t exist yet. A kind of relic of a future that she would not live to see.
In Earth’s terms, it could be that both Aleutian “immortality” and their “telepathy” were cultural artifacts: shaped by their exotic physiology. Obligate illusions. But that was logic-chopping. Aleutians remained, in their own reckoning, telepathic immortals. Where could they go from there? They couldn’t be better protected from alien influence. But humanity would change. Ellen foresaw the working out of Clavel’s amends: the third sex that would develop, schooled to alien ways. The devaluation of the masses who failed that standard. Earth would give up the use of coralin for fear of alien contamination, would give up all biochemical technology because the aliens could achieve the same effects so easily. In a couple of hundred years, if faint traces of another version of this meeting were discovered in old texts, neither the “superior” nor the “inferior” rac
e would believe their eyes.
So it would go on. The unconsummated wedding, the irremediable almost-matching of two worlds. There was a powerful minority in the mothership that said they should continue the journey: leave this soft and fascinating landfall, prefer the dark ocean and the stars. But the aliens would stay. And it would be Clavel, more than anyone, who would keep them here. Clavel, with his intuitive grasp of the alien culture; his poetry, and his earnest desire to do good.
No, she would not give way to self-pity. The human race had made a nest of horrors for itself, and the Aleutians were still saviors, no matter what. Strange things happen: and the strangest is that things happen (that was Buonarotti). The two races might be good for each other, in the long run. Some kind of fruitful union might be achieved.
Good luck to Clavel. No language matches another, no language models the world. But almost, almost…and between the dropped and the caught stitches of that immaterial, impossible weaving, somehow: the meaning comes.
But I’m too old a dog to learn new tricks.
Clavel was still at the bus stop. The Africans were puzzled, bemused by the rich tourist’s eccentric slumming.
I must tell her about that tee-shirt, she thought. It’s not very tactful
Clavel rocked in the back of the truck, dreaming of Uji. The manor house, almost deserted now, the gardens overgrown. Nearly everyone had gone home or moved on. The sound of the rain, the sound of the river: pouring away, pouring away. He slept in the main hall: woke in the night with tears filling his eyes, and wondered how long grief could continue to be so poignant. The river rushed on, eddies spilling around the sunken timbers, shining faintly out until they vanished into the stream. A door would open one day into another world: how far away or how near to this one he could not know. He would see Johnny again, and go to him and cry Daddy, baby, don’t you know me: This time it would come true. It would not come true. Johnny belonged to someone else, and Clavel had no right to dream of him. But he would cling to the lovely fiction, knowing it false.
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