White Queen (31 page)

Touché.

Suddenly she was filled with pity. How does it feel to be a devout telepath, and discover in the midst of passion that your faith is empty, that the beloved has received none of your sending, that the world is not what you supposed. How does it feel to rape someone you love? She saw the horror in Clavel’s alien eyes, and wanted to tell her how time seals over these terrible caesura; how life goes on. Clavel still crouched, motionless. She was probably saying she knew all about the healing power of time, thank you. Nothing reached Braemar. Telepathy does not exist. But to be immortal, and feminine, and unmutilated by the secret fear…

She struggled with bitter envy, and with awe. These perceptions belong to me, she told herself. I’m imagining all this. She’s alien, that’s all. Equal but different!

“I want to tell you everything,” said Clavel humbly. “All about the ways we’ve fooled you. I meant to tell Johnny. That’s what I
meant
to do. Are you a priest? I think you must be. Will you make a record?”

Clavel is still dancing by the stone-age fire, still painting on the cave walls. Still leading, by an aeons-past chance fall of the tumbling dice, her half-beast siblings in the hunt.

“No,” said Braemar. “I don’t want your confession. There’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t know already. Go away.”

Clavel knelt a moment longer. She stood, she nodded sadly, and slipped out into the dark.

Johnny had a TENS bracelet on his wrist, an electronic sedative he’d accepted under protest. He woke up anyway, to the sound of crying. He tugged the bracelet off, groped and found the switch on a bedside lamp. Braemar’s room was shades of straw, cornhusk, dove grey: softly swathed old fashioned decor; little furniture. She was sitting at her dressing table, naked, head down among the armaments, she wasn’t making much noise. He felt absolutely an intruder. But he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t woken.

She looked up when he was halfway across the room; the tears stopped abruptly.

“What’s wrong, Brae?”

She shook her head.

So Henny-Penny, Cockie-Lockie, and Chicken-Licken set off together to tell the king the sky was falling. No one paid any attention. They all knew Henny Penny was a silly vain female trying to make herself important.

She wiped her face on a handful of ecru tissue, looking away from him. “I feel so old,” she whispered. “I look the way I do. But I feel as old, at sixty three, as I ever thought I would.” She stared into the mirror. “I am worse than old. I am dead. I am something that ought to be dead.”

Johnny squatted at her side and kissed her, gently. “I won’t let them get you.”

“Oh, Johnny. That’s just what Trixie used to say to me.”

She pushed her fingers into his hair and pulled his face close against her small, soft breasts. “I feel naked like an animal in a zoo. I think Aleutians are watching us. Let’s get back into bed, hide our heads.”

She had changed, since Africa. He found her body as greedy but somehow less accessible, a more difficult study. Loving Braemar was going to be more work than being humored by the lady in red; and the rewards less simple. But infinitely greater.

9 
THE FIFTH FORCE

i

At Uji, the house and the stone garden were protected from the hill country cool season by an invisible mist of warmth. The Aleutians sat on the outer verandah, poking fingers through the veil into chill air. Kumbva, Rajath, Aditya were reliving their adventure. Rajath’s master at arms was calmer, but wore an air of quiet alarm. It had been unwise, scary, pleasurable and shameful. They couldn’t leave it alone. The spectacle of themselves, brandishing those barbaric firearms!

cried Kumbva, with enormous relish.

marveled Aditya.

Undoubtedly Aditya had saved all their lives, by dealing with the terrifying weapon the householders had.

Rajath groaned. He lay informally curled, a scarf wrapped around his head. He pushed at the lovely one with a feeble, invalidish gesture.

It had all been unnecessary. The truant Clavel had been safe all the time, and the house his “rescuers” had broken into had been the home of a friend. The households of the bold band did their best to soothe and calm, aware that raw embarrassment was keeping the recount going, as much as anything. It would play itself out, the irritation would fade. There would remain a nugget of fresh awareness. Since Kaoru’s death they had traveled all round this planet with their local guides, meeting significant characters, and everywhere the usual hordes of clerics. Still they had failed to grasp the scale of this place; or of its dangers. Their recent escapade had been a salutary experience.

Aditya was still crackling.

The sterile weapons were back in the locker in Kaoru’s cottage, where they had found them. Aditya’s eyes gleamed.

Rajath groaned in disgust.

Kumbva put his cowrie bag on his head for fun and ran through the dusk up to Kaoru’s cottage. He danced in the wet, warm grass, spreading his arms in a purely feminine delight in ownership. Though their sponsor had chosen to die after the terrifying days of the ultimatum, they remained in many ways under his protection. He had willed the manor to them, with all its resources: a magnificent gift. They had added some touches to the shrine; moved Kaoru’s favorite possessions in here. The tape Clavel had made of their benefactor played all the time.

They presumed the proper record was elsewhere. This was a meaningless fragment, but it seemed a nice gesture to display it.

Clavel was kneeling, stiffly, in front of the case that held the Itchiku kimono. His chaplain was with him: but poor Clavel wasn’t going to be able to make full confession on this planet, the clerics had no resources. Kumbva rubbed the poet’s shoulders. He spoke of the horrible moment when Clavel had realized the truth. Johnny’s awe, and hunger, and terror—the perfect simulacrum of abject physical passion—all meant not for Clavel personally, but directed at the whole expedition! Kumbva, who was never embarrassed by anything to do with lying down, considered this lesson about the locals curiously: measured it against incidents and remarks, and was enlightened. He dropped the topic, under the onslaught of Clavel’s enfeebled fury.

.

Clavel had behaved badly—persisting, a long time after his only course was to make his excuses and leave. Dangerously, too, considering the locals’ heated reaction to Sarah’s death. Supposing Clavel’s unwilling partner had kicked up a public fuss! The cool understanding of Johnny’s friend, the priest Braemar, had saved a potentially explosive situation.

(Kumbva suppressed amusement).

He made a speech. “You did no lasting harm. The notion of lasting harm is a childish fear. I’d stay away from him for the rest of this life, if I were you. Save your abject apologies until next time round. But you
will
forget how you feel now, you know. Ask yourself, why not forget now? Unless you plan to grieve forever, remorse is nonsense.”

Kumbva left him.

Clavel knelt with closed eyes and saw the lights in the dark: orange and red and sulphur yellow, in serried ranks. You stare at them and stare, convinced that a phenomenon so huge and so regular can have no human meaning. Then you see that some of the tiniest orange lights are moving steadily. You are watching a procession of vehicles, far away but still deep in the city’s heart. So vast. The others had followed him, knowing he was in trouble. On the night of the big storm, they’d been in London, with their flier hidden in the back of their stolen car. Lugh had found Johnny’s address in a local government written record. When Clavel escaped them they’d followed Johnny, waited until Johnny and the priest left the house empty: and broke in to take a preemptive hostage. On the grounds that, after what had happened, the locals were bound to be demanding Clavel’s hide. It had made perfect sense to the four maniacs.

Clavel had wanted to die, but instead he’d joined his friends. The flier unfurled in the black dark, in a park close to Braemar’s house, they didn’t care that they were revealing secrets. It was dark, so dark in spite of all the lights; the air almost unbreathably moist and cold. Clavel wanted the people of London to rush into the park so he could die fighting. But no one came. London slept. The two nations refused to recognize what was happening. They had stayed at home. They
wanted
grief, always more grief so they could go on weeping forever.

He left the cottage. If Kumbva only knew…. But he could not be told. Around Clavel, the voices: whispering, shouting, grumbling, humming in quiet contentment; panting hard and fast in the greedy scuffle of lying down together. He walked in a cloud of witnesses, a slurry of other presences, thick enough to chew. Always there. There’d never been need or reason to describe to himself the way they were there. Tonight he could feel them the way they would seem to a—to Johnny. He was haunted, forever.

Everyone was gathered in the “tennis court” a large underground room where Kumbva and Lugha’s artisans were busy altering and refitting a new, different breed of flier.

announced Kumbva.

It was the first time that Clavel had heard the local formal word “human” used in that way. Nobody else remarked on it. He felt, with dread, how confident they’d all become in handling the outward appearances of this strange world. Meanwhile, Clavel had been wasting his time learning the inwardness.
What he knew
was so much more important. But it was useless.

Everyone understood why Kaoru had destroyed the landers. It had been a wise precaution, but now they needed more bodies. The locals were almost ready to hand over the real estate, and it looked suspicious to have so few settlers.

Clavel joined Kumbva and the trickster.

Rajath shrugged.

Clavel stared at him bleakly.

.

But Rajath was far in the ascendant now. He made a speech.

“The mood at home has changed. As a nation, we were alarmed when we first found this planet, distrustful of success after so long without it. But planetfall and plunder was supposed to be the object of the exercise. Everyone’s had time to remember that. There are plenty of takers now, eager for a piece of the action.”

Wrong, thought Clavel. We outgrew the false quest. We became
the Aleutians:
wanderers, islanders, surviving cleverly on the bounty of a cold and ungenerous ocean. It had dawned on us that there can’t be a world for people, without a people to whom it is home.

Nobody paid attention to the poet, least of all himself. He didn’t have the heart to insist, to exert his influence; unfurl that secret banner and employ the backwards-pulling power. He told himself it was too late. He reminded himself that the notion of lasting harm is a childish fear.

Maitri hugged his gloomy ward.

“Are you real?” said Clavel. “Or just a ghost in my head?”

Maitri was baffled.

They returned to Gray’s Inn Road, where Johnny used the lobby phone to send a note to the Hargoods, saying that he was taking a break as the work was so slack. They went up to his room, under the evil and fascinated old eye of the concierge. It had only been three days, there was plenty of rent left on Johnny’s key. The room had been tidied. The window was taped up with brown paper, that strange smell of cold-melted glass still hung in the air.

Johnny fetched out Robert the Roach. The cockroach was huddled in the farthest corner of his plastic home, moping. The box was as clean as it had ever been. Johnny brooded over the life of this creature: barely eating, never “sleeping”; built to survive indefinitely in a range of fearsome conditions. Robert was one of the forerunners. If the earth got rich again his descendants might be yet be galactic explorers, chitinous remote sensors for the humans who would never get there any other way. But without FTL, he’d never be more than a sideshow. Hey, isn’t it two hundred years since anyone had a peep? Let’s go smell out where Rob the Roach’s ship is at.

The orthopteron scurried and clung to Johnny’s finger, tasting him eagerly. It was supposed to have about the intelligence of a normal-type mouse. Johnny shuddered, remembering Clavel.
You have no wanderers,
she said.
Why don’t you?

“Do you have to bring that?” asked Brae. “Couldn’t we flush it down the toilet?”

“He might start budding down there, and then there’d be trouble. Rob and I go back too far. Love me, love my roach.”

He put the box in his pocket. He didn’t need much else. His books, a few clothes. He was making a crossing, from Manland to Womanland, the river a convenient symbol in between. It seemed more of a transition than the day he’d married Izzy, and left his parents’ home. Basically, he didn’t care what happened next. He didn’t care if she went on servicing her patrons, to pay the rent or to further White Queen’s interests. He’d vowed to himself that he would never inquire. It would be a long time, further than he could imagine, before his needs went beyond the deep, emotional imperative to get naked with her and fuck, at every possible opportunity.

The narrow bed of his fantasies reminded him of Fo. Maybe to make love here would wipe out what had happened with the alien. The smell of melted glass poisoned a sudden rush of arousal, and for a moment he wanted a specific violence, to fuck her without touching her. He could run out and buy one of those all-over disposables, favored by perverts and hygiene maniacs. Force her to strip: break her open. He’d be sealed off, uncontaminated.

He sat down on the bed trembling, but hardly with lust. It was impossible to tell the people of Earth the truth about their precious aliens. The truth was too vile. Things had crawled, alive inside him. It was the filthiest nightmare, and it was real. He was afraid he would never again be free of this awareness of squirming life: on every surface, inner, outer, everything he touched.

Braemar saw that he was fighting horrors. She moved towards him, checked the impulse; picked her way around the miserable sticks of furniture to the other side of the room.

“Do you still have that card of mine, I gave you in the Barbican? I bet you kept it.”

He attempted a sneer. “I bet I did not. I’m no sentimental fool.”

She found his bumbag on the floor, where it had lain untouched by Mrs. Frame’s staunchly honest girl: rummaged in its depths and brought out the slip of green.

“You really don’t read Italian, do you.”

The leather case of books lay open on the table where Johnny used to eat his toast. She extracted his pocket Dante: gave it to him open, her card marking a verse.

“Men che dramma

di sangue m’e rimasa che non tremi

conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma—”

He read the crib. Not a drop of blood remains in me that does not tremble. I know the traces of the ancient flame…. “I’d been telling myself for so long that my fantasy had nothing to do with the real Johnny Guglioli. That if I saw you again I wouldn’t even know you. But there you were, exactly my Johnny.” She smiled, sad and humble. “I knew you wouldn’t get it.
Anstandigkeit
was safe.”

He wanted a naked body, she casually handed him a naked soul. What could you do with a gift like that? Except take it. And vow useless revenge, on a world that gave this beautiful woman such a poor notion of
her self
that she’d hand it over like a bandaid.