White Queen (17 page)

Everything had seemed fine; it had seemed like a lucky turn of events. But the aftermath had been alarming. They had replied to Sarah’s crime with conventional, bargaining-counter “expressions of deep outrage” But the locals had not responded in kind, formally or informally. They didn’t accept Sarah’s death as fair, they refused to admit their dirty dealing. They had become openly hostile, angry and disgusted. There had been no formal announcement of reprisal, but it was going to be a rough one when it came.

What did they expect? If you bring tissue theft into play, then people will die. It’s hardly the end of the world.

The meeting was a free for all. Points were noted in a random jumble, out of which a course of action would have to emerge.

The friend of Clavel’s local lover had been the least able liar in the hall. Clavel wanted Braemar’s generous admissions struck out of the evidence. He was overruled. Braemar’s own people must know he was congenitally honest. If they didn’t want advantage to be taken, they should have kept him away from Uji.

Kumbva wanted to know (again).

explained someone.

In the new mood, everything that was odd about the locals looked suspicious.

The Aleutians found the local obsession with this pop-psychology duality a huge joke. The funniest thing about it was that the locals at Uji (and in Alaska, and in Fo) seemed as oblivious to the masculine to feminine “difference” in themselves as the most rational Aleutian. Who could imagine Ellen or Dougie having their duality profile worked out? But sometimes, informally, it seemed they could talk about nothing else!

explained the poet, bored.

People remembered. Long buried memories were coming back to everyone.

Clavel shrugged unkindly.

The avowedly masculine element in the gathering fell on him with catcalls. Clavel, much amused, refused to retract.

A feud between parasites and childbearers was another peculiarity, to add to the local obsession with religion, their promiscuous mingling of formal and informal language, their horrid food. But the variation of human traits at home was equally wild and wide. It wasn’t for nothing that an executioner searched each body before he struck, to find how this particular heart was placed. Kumbva put their collective opinion into Spoken Words.

“It takes all sorts to make a world!”

For once it was Rajath who brooded, unable to join in the byplay. He could talk of nothing but the main concern: this frightening abyss that had opened between them and their trading partners. It must be turned into opportunity. But how? He had been delighted to find when he arrived on this planet that his talent for foreign formal languages, after long disuse, was still intact. It annoyed him that he couldn’t get hold of the inflection as well as Clavel, but he was in control. Still, these locals cheated.

Rajath hurriedly retracted, shrugging placatingly, before the majority of his friends and dependents could start beating him around the head.

Everyone jeered. Rajath’s talent for creative interpretation was a tolerated scandal.

The captain was unabashed.

Atha had been uncomfortable since the locals left. he confessed sadly.

Lugha hugged his guardian, and glared at everyone.

Lugha was told to moderate his language. What happens when people lie down together is not to be mentioned: Clavel’s love songs were bad enough, but a poet couldn’t help himself. The small mind, that can only hold knowledge, was under no congenital obligation to talk dirty.

Rajath prepared to speak. His eyes darkened, his whole face glowed. Rajath the beautiful was never so lovely as when he was deep in greedy mischief.

This was agreed to be proven. Only Brhamari, Kumbva’s physician, refused to be convinced. , he slapped the polished floor, Brhamari nodded, ineffably pleased with himself.

His point wasn’t taken. they all agreed, with varying degrees of tact. The doctor bristled and withdrew into a huff.

Kumbva was intrigued. Out loud, he added: “Do you remember my warning?”

Rajath dropped from Kaoru’s chair, where he’d been squatting. He made his speech.

“I have a plan. Okay, we went too far with our expression of outrage. We can’t take it back, so we’d better frighten them before they start thinking of revenge. They are
angry?
We must be twice as angry. Their lack of wanderers is a card up our sleeve. Our artisans have proved how easy it is to convert their machines to our service. I will need help from Lugha and Clavel and Mr. Kaoru. Meanwhile, there’ll be no more visitors. We’re going to get down to business.”

Clavel had opened a sliding wall and sat propped against it staring into the evening sunlight, his legs gracelessly asprawl. He considered the character shrine, and the room that held the dead: both of them stuffed with hoarded tradegoods. In the evenside and in the dawn wing, the other captains’ quarters were cluttered with more small luxuries from home. He reviewed his own remaining possessions and those of his crew, and admitted defeat. A few scraps of souvenirs, and a carton of baby things that had once been a locker in the cabin of the lander.

So that was that. Conversation became desultory.

Samhukti, Rajath’s chaplain, pondered the revelation that Mr. Kaoru believed himself to be part of their nation: and rejected it.

Rajath’s young partner, Aditya, recalled the time in Alaska when the locals had tried to force him to betray his rich lover. He longed for another taste of adventure.

sighed Rajath.

The next moment, he was puzzling over his latest scheme.

Maitri, extremely glad to have seen the contents of that hollow needle secured, began to relax. He wondered mildly:

Kumbva fetched a laptop computer and pored over it with some of his people. Clavel glimpsed the calculations: like thickly textured cloth, shifting in and out of detail. Kumbva’s signals master kept track of faraway deadware, by occult means only he and the engineers understood.

Clavel was depressed. Everybody had noticed, even those who had least use for words, that he’d refrained from making a speech, and therefore was certainly reserving his options in some way. They heard him withholding agreement. They tolerated, accepted, imposed no sanctions. The Rajath mood had prevailed over the Clavel mood, in Clavel as much as anyone. And yet people were anxious, anxiety gone underground. Aditya expects drama, Kumbva gets ready for an emergency. He considered the status of the Spoken Word among his own people, a meaning that made him a kind of holy fool and Rajath a fascinating troublemaker. What did words
mean
to the locals, who all seemed to use them so freely? Nobody cared. Nobody else but Lugha wondered what the locals were made of. And Lugha didn’t really
care.
protested his companions < Why worry about the nature of the raw stuff, if you can put it in the vat and it comes out food?>. Maybe they were right.

But the river spoke to Clavel of Johnny. There’d been a lot of grumbling about the locals’ dishonesty. How long could Clavel go on deceiving his other self?

It was late in the evening. The meal had been prepared and served and the kitchen made tidy. Lugha was in the character shrine with the other children, learning to be himself: learning (as far as Lugha could learn) to know his companions: the meaning of a certain person’s gestures, the consequence of an enmity, the myriad tiny lessons of history. Atha slipped into the
other
shrine, and covered his face. He knelt in front of the images. Feminine people, according to the lore of Atha’s kind, are the people who’d rather work all night in the dark than call someone who can fix the light. The kind of people who chatter when they’re exhausted and go to sleep when they’re happy. The kind of people who can’t live without being needed but hate to need anything from anyone. Masculine people, on the other hand, can never leave well enough alone, break things by way of improving them, and will do absolutely anything for a kiss and a kind word….

One could go on: but it was hard to imagine what such an idle gossipy game could have to do with what he saw in this screen. Atha had assisted at the more conventional local religious services, in Kaoru’s character shrine. He had attended
Tampopo, Diamonds Are Forever, The NBC Serial of Genji Monogatari.
He knew, therefore, that these were people just like himself. He accepted that most of his companions didn’t believe in magic. But Atha wasn’t one to scoff. He had seen some strange things, in his time. He could try at least to give solace to the dying, to comfort the grief. The cook closed his eyes. His skin wept, invisibly. Go, little Athas. Hurry to this place, where those people are lying in pain, wherever it is in the real world, and do what you can.

iii

Karen city. The premier hotel had the kind of defective aircon that is infinitely worse than sweat and a fan. The chap from the BBC didn’t know that “five star” generally means nothing good in a grubby industrial town of the South: he wasn’t much of a traveler. It wasn’t Braemar’s place to tell him. She lay in a long cane chair, gazing out at the lights of waste plant that churned on through the night; lights of boat-bars and floating markets that bobbed on the waters of the Kok river. The stuffy room stank of incinerated chemicals.

The alien child aswarm with colored lice had been bustled out of sight pretty swiftly. How thoughtless of the kid to burst in on an execution like that! She wanted to think about that weird little apparition: what did the bugs mean? But she was afraid to think of anything that had happened at Uji…. The chair was vat-grown rattan, quite a nice piece. The room’s furnishings were surprisingly good and up to date. One should always notice the pleasant things.

She felt as if she was suffocating.

“What will happen?” she wondered aloud.

“I haven’t the faintest idea. Maybe it will all blow over. After all, one little
kaffir
servant girl. We can’t expect them to share our notions about the sanctity of individual human life.” Her meal ticket was nervous, his tongue unguarded.

“Um, lemme see. One can trust Kershaw and Lloyd-Price. And the Viets. Absolutely heroic, the way they joined in the cabaret. Could be they saved all our lives. I worry about those pinko Americans. A covert panic button, my God, damned idiots. Then there’s Kaoru, whatever his bloody game is. And your lot, Braemar. You could have the
glob-pop
up in arms, baying for a shock and awe response. Can you resist that?”

“If I had anything to show—”