White Queen (16 page)

Douglas was excited. The Aleutians made no sense on this subject, the few bodyscans that had surfaced were blurred by layers of clothing. Inevitable practice was to hail them as male/neuter, though one or two (“beautiful girl”; “the poet princess”) were universally regarded as feminine.

“You have sex with children?”

But the nameless had lost interest.

Robin had been told to watch Braemar Wilson. He saw her approached by Clavel, the one they called “the poet-princess,” and stopped worrying. She’d be a convert. No visitor had been known to resist sustained contact with a talker. He assumed a casual pose in one of Kaoru’s priceless, spidery antique Hepplewhite armchairs (no easy task), and took in the bigger picture. There was an
atmosphere
this session. The nameless were eyeing each other, shiftily, like teenage boys expecting a rumble. It might be just one of their games. It might be an attack of Uji-paranoia on his part, but he rather wished that Sarah wasn’t here.

He saw Braemar emerging from the gallery with Ellen and the pirate; he’d missed her exit. Good, he thought. That’s under control. But a sense of danger remained.

Rajath sat Braemar down with him on a fine Louis Seize daybed. He stared at her 360, avidly, like a monkey about to reach out and grab, and made a long arm after Ellen, who was moving away.

“Sorry little sofa. Do you mind three?”

They were devout animists. They talked to furniture, they treated their soft-gadgets like pet animals. Reincarnation, animism; their strange response to certain technologies. Wilson was right. SETI rated it statistically probable that the Aleutians were not in charge: that these were subjects, servants, and the real superbeings, source of the FTL maybe not so cute and harmless, had yet to reveal themselves. This wasn’t a judgement the alien-watchers were ready to share. Ellen sat down uneasily. The pirate captain was up to something.

Braemar leaned forward, across the alien, with a teasing grin at Ellen.

“Mr. Rajath, do you
really
know everything we’re thinking?”

The alien scrumpled his nosehole. He twinkled like an old queen enjoying some obscure double entendre. “When a stranger leaves the room, he disappears.”

Johnny’s alien crossed the room in front of them, like a sulky enchanted princess, like a baboon infanta.

“What about Clavel? Can you read Clavel’s mind for me?”

The knowing look vanished. Their eyes were dark, the browbone above rimmed not with hair but some other kind of dead tissue: dark scale. There was an epicanthic fold: dark brown, almost black, iris; slivers of whitish cornea. They were human eyes.

You could say the same of an octopus. Eyes are defined by the behavior of light. A hole opened in a lump of jelly.

“They that have power,” he said, “to hurt and will do none. Who do not do the thing most do show. Who moving others are themselves as stone. Unmoving cold and to temptation slow. They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces…”

Passion came roaring through the stiff enunciation, a blast like physical heat. Admiring, bewildered, hating his own admiration, he spoke the words of Shakespearean poetry
brilliantly:
as if he’d thought of them then and there. She was transfixed.

Ellen was jealous, downright jealous. The building tension, in Rajath and all around, barely penetrated her resentment.

Sarah had quietly taken out her workbag, like a good little Neo-Victorian skivvy: and the crazy thing was, it looked natural to all these rich fuckers. Bastards. The journalists and the corporates, the pampered society ladies with their “careers.” They’d forgotten there was ever a different world What else would a servant-girl do, when she’s meeting creatures from outer space in the flesh, but sit sewing up other peoples’ underwear? You’re not supposed to be a person. They don’t know that you have a life, a wild life, netting with strangers who know the real you, not the one in the
ironic
uniform. Stitch, stitch, stitch, her hand dipped neatly in and out.

Braemar Wilson had never glanced at Ellen Kershaw’s maid, through the briefing and the journey. Why should she? Maybe she didn’t want to be associated. After all, she was a hanger-on herself; scrounged this trip from someone more powerful, same as Sarah. Rajath had now placed her where she could hardly miss the girl. Sarah was busy with her mending. The plum alien beside her seemed fascinated by this ancient earthling craft.

said Maitri to Sarah.

It didn’t make sense to keep on sitting here. He felt like an idiot. But every time he tried to make a move Rajath hissed at him

The bold dictator insisted there was no actual danger and he was probably right. But it was easy enough for him to say. He noticed gloomily that his ward was in public with no underwear again.

Sarah disliked darning. But Kershaw hated throwing things away, and you had to respect that. Most of the rich fuckers she’d met were total hypocrites on the Green issues. Kershaw wasn’t a bad old cunt. What you called
a real lady,
in the jokey cant that went with Victorian costume and curtsies. I can do it, she told herself, eyes down, needle whipping. I can do it. They won’t hurt me. They’re harmless. She’d been told nothing would happen to her, it was no different from acting innocent in front of a bunch of MPs, and listening to them talk for Ellen’s benefit. It’ll cause a big stink of course, and poor old Kershaw will be in the shit. But there’s no such thing as telepathy.

The monster stroked her arm, and heaved a sigh.

A louse had crawled out from the collar of Rajath’s suit: a red bug about half the size of a matchhead. Braemar had a sudden intuition, this was the moment. She stroked him back. They’d been shown how to groom, in case anybody dared. She felt bone and muscle arranged with unpleasant wrongness. The alien arced his throat like a cat. He was almost purring. She grasped the bug: that wasn’t in the briefing! It had no legs, it oozed between her plastic coated fingertips.

Outrage erupted! Braemar was so tense it was seconds before she realized she was not the center of the explosion. The sulky infanta shot across the room, changing shape in flight. She was wolf by the time she reached the sudden melee of nameless around the other couch, and pulled out of it the earthling servant girl.

Someone screamed, loud and human.

“I didn’t do nothing!” wailed Sarah. “It was an accident!”

“No,” said Clavel.

Plump Maitri stood dumbly there, sucking his wrist.

The group around Mr. Kaoru turned their faces, stunned, caught in a moment of paralysis. A sliding door opened. A small figure entered, wearing only a dun-colored quilted leotard. Its arms, legs and face were bare, but covered in tiny wriggling spots of color. It reached the center of the room and performed a slow pirouette. Changing color in brilliant patterns rippled over its eyes and mouth. Another human screamed, furniture tumbled. Douglas Milne spoke quietly to his assistant.

“Martha, will you go and see about lunch.”

“Yes, sir.”

When Ledern slipped outside, the Karen girls were nowhere to be seen. She hurried away from the main block. The naked sky frightened her, she had seen little of it in her life. She had to bite on a back tooth, to send the message.
Help! Trouble! Get us out!
Only Dougie knew she carried this alarm, but dammit it was insane to have no recourse at all. She was trying to blank her mind. An alien appeared from nowhere, one of the nameless. He folded her in his arms, from behind: he was immensely strong. Another forced her jaws, thrusting a rubbery gag between them. Shrugging apologetically, they ushered her back indoors.

The aliens took charge, silently. Sarah’s needle was clean, apparently she’d wiped it in her panic. They eviscerated the maid’s workbag and found the other needle, which was hollow and filled with Maitri’s blood. It looked red enough to be human.

The media people, corralled by Aleutian nameless, muttered in terrified amazement. Confronted with evidence that her maid had planned the theft of Aleutian tissue, Ellen protested wildly that the little girl probably just wanted a souvenir. Helpless, frantic, she found room for fury that Braemar Wilson, of all people, was witnessing this catastrophe, probably one of the fools still trying to record the show, much good it would do them—

Kaoru and his small audience still hadn’t moved a muscle. Ellen’s common sense told her it was useless to appeal to the ex-Japanese.

“Robin, look after Sarah. I’ll talk to Rajath.”

The pirate captain had retreated to the fountain, where he was surrounded by the group you might call his “household.” Ellen blustered and pleaded. Rajath bared his teeth nervously, folded his arms in embarrassment: such human signs. It was no use. The Aleutians were going by a rule book that only they could read, and there was no appeal.

Robin Lloyd-Price whispered. “Don’t be frightened, Sarah. We’ll get you out of this.” He could have strangled the kid with his bare hands. Was it
possible
that Ellen had planned this trick without telling him? He couldn’t believe it. It didn’t matter, nothing mattered. The two of them were ruined. Uji was finished.

It was worse than that.
The honeymoon’s over.
He saw terrible consequences flowing, and realized he’d been talking but he had no idea what he’d been saying, making soothing noises while the kid’s skinny brown hands clung to his. The aliens moved like colored glass in a kaleidoscope, making patterns, adamant resolution: a ritual sequence moving to an inevitable conclusion.

They moved like one thing. Douglas remembered the day in Krung Thep. He felt again the first naked dismay, when he realized the aliens were not only vastly superior to humankind but…but
alien.
They had taken little Sarah from Robin.

Robin heard Clavel saying.

“She’s thirteen years old!”
he cried.

Maitri’s lover, master at arms, brought in a long flat box. The humans had never seen it before. Its contents were not mysterious or alien at all. They saw him select a narrow-bladed knife. Maitri and Clavel held Sarah at the shoulders, two nameless spread a sheet of some translucent material. The master at arms ran his hands over Sarah’s breast, chose his entry. The knife went in so cleanly there was little bleeding. Sarah tumbled. The master at arms showed his clean hands. Silent as Aleutians themselves, none of the humans moved. Clavel laid the wrapped body down gently, and stepped away, showing his clean hands. Maitri made a speech.

“He had other things to do in this life, but his obligation was stronger.”

ii

At such an extremely awkward moment, it was natural to take refuge in dance. They danced “The Bones Of The City,” just as they were, without changing clothes. After the first figure Rosalie and Chas took hands and walked the next. Then Dougie came around to the singers and joined them softly. Finally even Ellen and Robin made some attempt, though at the best of times Ellen was a barely passable dancer.

The local party left after that. Mr. Kaoru saw them off and came back to the hall.

“You may need advice,” he said. “Please call on me for anything.”

He bowed and left them.

Lugha came in, a rather sulky Lugha, decently dressed once more. The cosmetic wanderers were his tradegoods, an ingenious notion since they took up no space and he could replenish supplies indefinitely. Cosmetics were so short-lived that people were always wanting more. He had confirmed his suspicions, but he wasn’t pleased. Going by the locals’ reaction to his demonstration, he was not going to make his fortune.

There was a burst of slightly hysterical laughter.

Atha’s demand was absurd. Lugha could not learn to be other than Lugha. But a child’s guardian was often the last to accept that. They had a story about it here, the “hen” who rears the “duckling.” More laughter: but everyone was terribly uneasy.

Obviously the locals had imagined they could get away with murder, because Sarah wasn’t personally known to any of the Aleutians. In fact, they’d spotted what was planned at once. The weapon-thief, the usual kind of tearaway, blazing with bravado, had given himself away. They had decided, more or less unanimously, to pretend they didn’t know what was happening. An insult like attempted tissue theft was just the excuse Rajath needed for his plans. To cover them against claims of malicious inaction, gentle-mannered Maitri had been detailed to try, informally, to dissuade the local hero. With the inevitable result of spurring him on to greatness.

It wasn’t the sort of thing you expected at a clerical reception, but nobody blamed the locals. An attempt to steal tissue is a nasty trick: but it was an equally nasty trick to lead them on, knowingly, until the deed was actually done. In such a situation no one can claim moral advantage, and the
tactical
advantage could go to either side. If that second needle hadn’t turned up, the Aleutians would have been the ones looking very stupid.