He was learning. He knew at last why people flee from doubt, he understood what it means to call something a “necessary lie.” So much that was painful! This is good, thought Clavel. I will learn this, I will make it mine. And the lesson of humanity, the unappeasable sorrow, passed through him into Aleutia: sinking into the depths and spilling outward.
The river. Dark water in starlight. Sorrow is real.
Over Neubrandenburg, the summer night sky was a grey canvas roof of unbroken cloud. Peenemünde climbed heavily to her secret laboratory, a huge empty water tank on the roof of her building. She had moved everything up here. There was business to be done with the aliens these days. Professor Buonarotti was back at work, her little cell no longer invisible. She sat, puffed out, at the foot of the last iron ladder, and looked up at the murk that hid the beautiful land, the dark and bright plains of time. No one would ever know what she had done. The facts of earthling limitation didn’t yet penetrate far enough into the Aleutian mind for them to realize there was a mystery. They thought an illicit spaceshuttle could be crumpled up and stuffed in the nearest waste chute. The governments of earth, never mind the Government of the World, didn’t wonder how it had been done because everybody suspected everybody else, and nobody wanted to know the secret truth.
“And so,” muttered Peene, “the legend will lie fallow, one day to give rise to fairystories, tales of mystical earthling-magic. Pah.”
She clambered again. Human beings cannot use faster than light travel. Every time she lay down, Peenemünde knew the risk. So easily, one can become confused, mislay one’s return ticket, even if one has a life as placid as porridge, as neat as silicon circuitry. She descended into the chill, echoing interior of the tank, and began to ready herself. In her own bed, every time she looked up the eyes of her friends reproached her. Stupid Peenemünde! There must have been another way. If she had been the kind of person who can speak out, a person with some moral fiber. The beautiful lady with the iron eyes and that romantic boy would have been convinced by gentle and invincible argument to give up their plan.
She’d known they were going to be in no state to harm anyone. She just had not foreseen the consequences. She was stupid about “situations,” always.
We carry nothing into the world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out of it.
Peenemünde had noticed that this mournful warning quite possibly did not apply to the aliens. Those space-planes of theirs, as it were budded from their own living selves. What of them? Weren’t they conscious, infected with their owners’ consciousness? It could be that Buonarotti could give them what they’d pretended was theirs already: the freedom of the stars.
The couch wrapped itself around her. Temptation was sometimes painful, but she could do this much for Braemar and Johnny. She could keep silent. Someone else would stumble over the Buonarotti discovery soon: doesn’t that always happen in science? Let someone else tell.
“Time’s cheap. Don’t they say that? Let them wait.”
She was gone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you Storm Constantine for the use of her post-gendered pronouns. Sam Daniels for a discussion of the petrovirus, Dr A J Power for the blue sun. Richard Jones for a patriotic sentiment. Ruth Sinclair-Jones for vetting KT 2583. Peter Gwilliam for support, advice, criticism and not least for the paradise slices. Aleutians Comms Tech reviewed by D&P, thank you.
Thank you also (a short bibliography): Chuck Jones for What’s Opera, Doc?; Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and others for their West African novels; Louise Gerard for The Golden Centipede, the book that distantly started it all; and the chickenpox virus. Thank you Susako Endo, Murasaki Shikibu, and Sayko Komatsu for the brilliant Japan Sinks. Ian Stewart for Does God Play Dice. Gaston Bachelard for The Poetics Of Space. Powys Mather, the translator and Chauras the orginal composer of the poem known in English as Black Marigolds
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Gwyneth Jones, writer and critic of science fiction and fantasy, is the author of many novels for teenagers, mostly using the name Ann Halam, and several genre novels for adults, often addressing feminist, popular culture and gender issues. Her critical essays and reviews are collected in Deconstructing the Starships,, 1999, and Imagination/Space, 2009 . Recent honors include the P. K. Dick award for Life, published by Aqueduct Press, and the Pilgrim award for science fiction criticism. She’s done some extreme tourism in her time, and enjoys mountain walking, playing with her websites, and watching old movies. Her latest novel is Spirit, or The Princess of Bois Dormant (Gollancz UK). She lives in Brighton UK.
Table of Contents
1 BIRD DOG
2 THE ALEUTIANS
3 TO DETECT AND CONFIRM THE REALITY
4 UJI
5 THE END OF THE HONEYMOON
6 MR. KAORU DISPOSES
7 AT THE GATES OF SAMARIA
8 PARSIFAL
9 THE FIFTH FORCE
10 THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND
11 BELLING THE CAT
12 EAST OF THE SUN AND WEST OF THE MOON
13 LIEBESTOD
14 ENVOI: BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
White Queen Page 37