White Queen (18 page)

She tipped her head back. “What an irony. Mr. Kaoru disposes! Frankly, I wish the Nips were still in charge in East Asia. If they were, I believe I’d be able to replace my maker without remortgaging my house…. D’you think they can make the confiscation stick?”

“Want to bet?”

Braemar stared at the lights on the dark water. How contented the Aleutians had been in that little valley. They didn’t miss the wide open spaces of freedom: not at all. Kaoru’s chopper pilots were fairly tightlipped, but there had been a giggling reference to incontinence pads.
Containment,
yes; of all kinds. They were habituated to containment. But what was the use in stringing telltales together. People would go on gazing at the Emperor’s new clothes.

Kaoru had sealed Uji. The innate prejudices of the Women’s Affairs Conference had worked for him: not to mention that cretinous Californian AI outfit. No interference! As a matter of etiquette, we mustn’t take so much as a flake of dandruff. No one said it was
serious,
everyone told you the aliens wouldn’t hurt a fly. Well, now we know. If we touch a hair of them, they’ll kill. That had been the unspoken truth behind all the sweetness and light up there, all along.

Think about something else.

What about Clavel? Johnny’s alien. Who embodied the “Purity” sonnet, who drove her chief wild with reluctant admiration. She noticed herself surrendering to the attribution of gender, maybe just from weakness. It means something, generally, when a young woman is reluctant to pronounce the name of a young male acquaintance. About the same as when she can’t stop repeating it…. Think about her, think. A bad thing happened to a kid. Forget it. Remorse does no good.

The meaning of actions. Physical assault: to draw blood. To draw blood is an act of war. The meaning of words. They use the spoken word like decoration, the icing on the cake. They don’t need it. Read minds? Not in the traditional sense. But what they do instead must take some fancy wiring. Maybe they really are superior. Not in any comicbook way but insidiously, hopelessly. Stop that. You know that trap.

On the hotel room tv, an Uji archive tape played. Lugha the demon child sat on the polished teak floor at Uji, with Douglas Milne. Douglas tossed a coin: a small disc as near to the notional
fair coin
as could be honed from metal. “Heads. Tails, Heads, Heads, Tails, Tails, Tails, Heads, Tails, Heads.” Lugha’s voice was a faint sound. He giggled, just like a child. He’s not psychic, he simply
sees, because he’s watching,
how the coin will land. What did he use for the connection between eye and brain? A cubic mile of coralin? She wished she dared tell Arthur to switch it off.

“I sense you’re not smitten?” said the Englishman, uneasily jovial. “It was a nasty incident: but personally I still foresee great things between us and the Aleutians.”

And who is “us”? If you let him, Arthur would soon convince you in a hundred subtle ways that whites, especially the men, are inevitably better, brighter. They just are.

Sometimes, just sometimes, there was a kind of satisfaction in the clairvoyance that haunted Braemar. Somebody passed below, singing: a Japanese folksong that had been a global hit about ten years ago.
“The crows have wakened me/By cawing at the moon/ I pray that I shall not think of him…”
The single voice was reedy and uncertain.

I pray so intently
That he begins to fill my whole mind
This is getting on my nerves
I wonder if there is any of that wine left?

“Shall we go to bed?”

In the confusion and panic of getting out of Uji the forms had been observed, more or less. Her skin was sore from the decontamination. The itch of loneliness was stronger. She let him handle her breasts, but put a finger to his lips.

“Ssh, don’t say a word. I want to pretend you’re somebody else, do you mind?”

A pound of flesh, yes. Brae always paid her way. But not one drop of blood.

6 
MR. KAORU DISPOSES

Rajath and Clavel visited Mr. Kaoru’s cottage.

Its single room was strikingly different from anything in the main house. The floor was square tiled in slick grey, the lighting was fiercely white. There were photographs on the walls: flat, monotone images of a kind the Aleutians had seen nowhere else. In an alcove stood deadware machinery, which was also strangely styled. The screens carried columns of squiggle, no figurative images; and nothing was moving there. Neither of them had been inside the cottage before. They sensed that they had entered a very solemn shrine; knelt and covered their faces.

Kaoru had been about to rise to greet his guests. He remained, half seated and half kneeling behind his low desk, the dark full sleeves of his housecoat sweeping the floor. Kaoru’s face was very old, the skin crumpled and reamed by a thousand lines of decay. None of them were the sort of people who knew much about old age, but maybe it was because his physical features were so closely written that they felt at ease in his company. They could read the old, impacted grief in that face, as if it was being acted out on tape; and the wildness that was so reminiscent of Rajath. They could imagine encompassing the person within alongside their certain knowledge of each other.

Rajath explained the plan. He demanded, in compensation for Sarah’s heinous crime, several tracts of real estate, which must be evacuated and the deeds handed over. They hoped that Mr. Kaoru, who was in no way to blame for what had happened, would help them to draw up the documents.

Clavel converted this into correctly inflected speech, while Kaoru listened, head bent and nodding occasionally. At the end of it he looked up, and his quiet amusement was eloquent.

“And will the invasion force now arrive?”

Kaoru drew aside the polished cover of his desk, opened an atlas, and turned to a projection of the globe. He handed Rajath a light pen.

“Perhaps you’d like to mark the areas. I would suggest you favor the temperate latitudes, between thirty and forty degrees. Avoid volcanic regions, but give yourself plenty of coastline. Conurbation would present problems in the long term—”

“But for maximum irritation—” murmured Clavel.

“Quite. Also, you’ll find it hard to avoid them.”

Rajath drew a square on the southern half of America, another near the tip of Africa, a circle on West Africa for Clavel’s sake. He kept the marks small. He didn’t know the exact scale of this simulation, but he had a vague idea. He didn’t want to appear greedy.

In the end he settled on six portions: one in each of the Americas, two in Africa, a piece of New Zealand, a piece of Western Europe and a piece of somewhere between Europe and China. He sat back on his heels. Kaoru enhanced each area and brooded over tiny hologram detail that meant nothing to his visitors. He was moved to justify the ragged corrals, but on reflection restored Rajath’s original lines. He smiled, looking past the ebullient Rajath.

“You could call them ‘treaty ports.’ Or some such name.”

Clavel’s joints crept, urgently desiring flight. Scribbling over a planet like that, it was certainly funny. Why not laugh?

He had felt close to Kaoru in their quiet talks: the old man reminiscing about all those weary years in business, his mind dying all the time. When he had learned Kaoru’s secret, his instant reaction had been delight. Of course! his heart had cried. That proves it. That explains how I can be the same person as Johnny! The story was undoubtedly nonsense, Kumbva and Lugha had immediately told him so. It still appealed to the lover. But the steely sense of family that Kaoru had expressed, along with that odd little formal speech, made Clavel’s blood run cold. The disaster that Johnny’s friend had described had no doubt been
done to
Kaoru’s household: such things don’t just happen. Even so, Kaoru’s attitude, after so many years, was alarming. Did all of them on this planet treasure injury like this? It was a worrying thought.

He realized there was no question of “breaking Kaoru’s bubble.” If it had been expedient to explain that nobody remembered anything about a secret spaceship: how would they dare?

Rajath admired the dangerous future in his own scribble, quite unmoved by Kaoru’s horrible hints. They were still very alike!

Kaoru printed SPOT sheets. “These won’t be up to date,” he apologized. “That’s the price one pays for genuine isolation. But a matter of weeks makes little difference, unless some natural catastrophe intervenes. This planet is like a mouth of old teeth, all the tinkering does no more than just rearrange the damage.”

“Oh, I know exactly what you mean!”

Rajath did not. How could teeth be “old”? He was making a joke.

The ex-Japanese smiled.

“Mr. Kaoru,” cried Clavel. “Revenge is so embarrassing, afterward. Your good times will come again, and then you’ll feel so stupid. Maybe it was nobody’s fault Why don’t you wait. Everything will turn out right.”

The old gentleman rustled around to the front of the desk, on his knees. to present the sheets, beautifully bound and sealed in clear plastic. He patted the air near Clavel’s cheek, as if petting a favorite grandchild.

“Little American.”

“Why have you lived on so long, so alone? Old age is hateful.”

Kaoru retreated. His eyes twinkled.

“On the contrary, I find it’s like coming out of prison. An old person like me can do.” He paused, savoring,” just about anything he likes.” He considered. “You are aware, I presume, that your trading partners consider
themselves
to have been seriously injured in their turn, and may be uncooperative. Have you made plans to cover that aspect of the situation?”

They shrugged: of course.

Kaoru smiled. “I wonder how you will justify your actions.”

“Self-defense,” answered Clavel promptly. “We have been attacked by the very people we trusted. We are few and vulnerable, it’s natural we should make a show of strength.” His nasal contracted wryly. “There are always justifications. We assume they’ll have their own moves.”

“Quite so. But it is often better to reply first. Will you be needing transport?”

Since Clavel’s idea about “faster than light travel” had come into play, Kumbva had declared the landers must vanish. The engineer said that anyone with talent like his own would be able to see exactly what they were.

“Yes, please.”

They retrieved their shoes from Kaoru’s tiny porch. Clavel helped the door to close. It would have closed itself, the gesture was mere good taste. Rajath forgot to be irritated by this poetical over-sensitivity. He acknowledged that he couldn’t have managed the interview alone. The garden was hot and bright and still. Clavel screwed up his eyes and thrust his fists to his temples.

Rajath regarded him with amused sympathy.

Rajath shrugged agreement.

He followed Rajath back to the house, stepping in his faint prints over the laminate emerald turf. If the world were to fall apart, one would know it had never been whole in the first place. But it does not. An atom is the smallest material unit of Self. False: the division is unreal, a necessary fiction. The world remains indivisible, though we can only think of it in pieces. Therefore the wise among us, those we call our dependents, spend as little time as possible playing the nonsense game of finished thought, of formal language.

Clavel felt like someone trying to look into his own eyes: pull them out on wet strings and turn them to face each other. The image was sufficiently painful.

The sunlight touched his hair, the feathery plantings called “bamboo” whispered. The plaited fiber of doorframe and door spoke faintly, faintly of human affect. Nothing awake out here: every blade of grass was lifeless, separate, empty. How did they
do
that? Up ahead, Rajath laughed. It was impossible to alienate him or disgust him, how ever hard they both tried to dislike each other. It is one’s own mind that one argues with, grumbles at, reproaches. The whole is inescapable.

Inescapable,
he promised.
Indivisible.
And shivered.

They left the valley in one of the supply helicopters, and transferred in the hills above to the pride of Kaoru’s fleet. It delivered them, in the middle of the night, to a very cold airstrip that seemed folded in solid darkness. This was called Butan, the tilt pilot told them. Mr. Kaoru had once kept a house here for the young people, who enjoyed the winter sports. The Aleutians wore borrowed great coats. The pilot of the jet brought out a tripod, set it up and stood back.

“I am sorry about the cold,” said Kaoru, from the land of the dead. “Another penalty of retirement: this is my only long haul plane. To purchase another, or to bring this one to Uji, must have caused comment.”

They bowed. Clavel had schooled Rajath and Lugha. “We humbly thank you for your honorable support!”

Kaoru vanished. The pilot bowed to the box, wrapped it in black silk and tucked it inside his jacket. He folded the tripod.

“There are mountains behind you,” he said, “six thousand meters high.”

Rajath and Clavel nodded. They might have known there would be mountains. Deep: they heard, not high. Lugha went to the jet, reached up and tapped its metal flank.

“It seems very…dead.” His teeth were chattering.

“Get inside, you dangerous character. We have a lot to do.”

The Uji-watchers sat around in deadspace in the proudly named Conference Facility of their hotel in Karen, staring at Kaoru’s exquisitely presented document. The team from that fateful day had stayed up here, waiting. KT had achieved, so far, media-silence on the Sarah Brown disaster. Poonsuk had been furious at being dragged into an affair of confiscated material, silenced journalists, but she’d held the line.

“This doesn’t go near the net,” said Ellen Kershaw briskly. “I’ll talk to Rajath. Kaoru has misunderstood him—” She saw Kaoru as the villain. They all did. The crazy old spider had been manipulating events for his own ends, all along.

Someone ran in from the studio next door.

“Come quickly! The pirate’s in the Multiphon!”

Each of them flew to a desk, all of them selecting English because Thai was the only other option. The chamber must have been half empty when this started. It was bursting out in faces: but there was only one voice. Rajath spoke from the Multiphon taboo-room at Uji. He had blown the Sarah Brown story already. Printed précis ran up their subscreens.

They were bewildered. Aleutians didn’t understand the Multiphon, hated it; wouldn’t go near it. But Rajath was handling the screen like a veteran. His personality leapt out at them, entirely present.

“No! Don’t imagine you can apologies and forget it. You have pretended to trust us. You trust no one. You are all of you liars, cheats, thieves. Do you think we don’t know this? We know the truth about each of you, about all your kind. None better. You declare war while pretending peace, building weapons in secret when you know it is against the law. Why do you only speak to each other through the dead? Why else but because you fear to be found out in your lies. All right, if that’s the way you want it. In ten days from now those areas we have designated must be handed over, evacuated and sterilized for our use. Remember, we have undreamed of powers. We shall punish cruelty, and reward obedience!”

His figure seemed to grow, dominating the whole chamber. The idealized turning globe, which closed a major speech, struggled under his outstretched hands. The dais screen went blank.

“That’s Kaoru, Kaoru put him up to that,” muttered Ellen. Her voice was shaking.

There were no scheduled flights to the USSA from Thailand. It took Douglas Milne five days to get to Washington, painfully guilty all the way. He belonged to the generation that had abandoned jet transport. He had traveled to KT by boat, under clean solar power and sail. He felt he was sinking back into the filth.

The geophysical catastrophe of ’04, that had wiped the Japanese islands from the sea, had also marked the point for the USA where the slide from unlimited prosperity to decline turned into an avalanche. Japanese enclaves had sprung up all over the world, but the China with Japan effect was a phenomenon or a different order. Japan and China became one, an entity with no great friendship for the US; and the hungry giant began to call in some debts. Economic and environmental disasters had worked together Not instantly, but in a couple of decades. Johnny Guglioli, the Petrovirus scapegoat, was just one of the many, post holocaust babies, who had no conception of the horrified loss that benumbed his elders. He had lived in a walled citadel, and accepted the badlands outside as natural. He’d worked for a limited good, a better deal from his feudal lady, without beginning to imagine rebirthing a nation. There’d been others, with bigger ideas.