White Queen (34 page)

She paused for effect, but her guests just looked blank.

“Unfortunately, I was not ready to publish when the Aleutians arrived. I could see no applications, and therefore I was reluctant to expose myself. One cannot have science without application.” She scowled. According to that axiom, at present Peenemünde Buonarotti did not exist. She stood up. “Let me show you.”

They looked at each other warily; they followed like lambs.

“There,” said Peenemünde. “My prototype.”

The couch, the workstation, her lightbox…. She handed a sheaf of FOC photographs to the young man: and the Cannon’s greater gift, faint brocades recovered from within the spectra of a handful of main sequence stars. These were the jewels that Peenemünde, and Peenemünde alone, knew beyond doubt to be the signatures of viable planetary atmosphere.

The woman, Braemar, she positioned before the workstation screen, and set it to deliver pretty pictures that could do no one any good at all. She didn’t trust the woman. She had met (discovered afterwards, with chagrin, that she had met) industrial spies with the same smell.

“The set of all possible situations is indefinite, regardless of scale, but the calculations for a small domain are increasingly difficult. The difficulties of ‘traveling faster than light’ to the next room would be insurmountable. The solar system, as we know, is not hospitable. So I have been wandering far afield, from the very start. Everyone knows there are planetary systems, detected by the perturbation method, scattered throughout our local area. Now these absorption lines.” She pointed, quickly, giving him no time to study the images “This, this and this, are traces of atmospheres, earthlike or nearly earthlike. I have reason to be sure.”

She took the photos back, and shuffled them together. The young man was looking too interested; the woman had left the pretty pictures and was peering at the couch.

“Is your operation expensive?”

She realized that they had no idea, and she could lie: but social incompetence defeated her.” I use quite a lot of power, and machine time. There’s a non-time Corporate project in a block down the way. I take what I need from there. DuPont/Farben can afford it.”

Then Braemar Wilson spoke the words that won the scientist’s heart.

“You must really hate them.”

“The Aleutians?” The half-lie came easily, since she knew it ought to be the whole-truth. “No! It was the luck of the game. But now, will you try? Then we would be three, who know.”

That was funny, to see their faces. Really funny.

“If you were to make the experiment,” she explained slowly. “Then I would feel able to make a public statement. Already things aren’t good, if I do that I may lose my place here. It would be a serious step. I am prepared to take it, if you will first show your good faith in me.”

The young man, she thought, might spoil everything. But the woman, Wilson, was ready.

“What exactly happens?” she asked. “And where’s the rest of your lab?”

“This is all you two need to see, and I have told you all you need to know. To
you
what happens is that you lie down. Sensors, positioned in the foam, take a kind of snapshot of your body. You have heard of Kirlian photography? The couch takes the photograph savages fear. It captures your embodied soul. You say to yourself:
I will go,
to a specific situation in time and space that you have in mind. As if in a dream, the dream of early morning when you dream that you have wakened, you stand up. You have arrived at that state of affairs, not as a ghost but in the body that is yours in eternity.”

“A new body? Made of what?”

Peene shrugged. “Plasma. Which is built into ‘the mixture as before.’ Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon; a little iron, other traces. I have never noticed any missing parts.”

“And then?”

“You stay as long as you can, as long as you dare. Quite long, after some practice. You get frightened and you are ‘home’ again. None of this room’s time has passed.”

“But you have to aim yourself at an exact location, in time and space. How do you do that?”

Peenemünde knew this was her weak point. She didn’t like confessing to suicidal recklessness. “Remarkably precise space-time coordinates can be recovered, by my methods, from the Cannon’s data. But this is not the precise way it happens. It may be you run through the sum of all possibilities. There is plenty of time for that, where time does not run away. Or it may be that for some immeasurable moment there is nothing that you do not know, and you choose.” She remembered a detail.
“But
you must clear your minds of everything extraneous before you lie down. Be still and calm. The soul must not carry excess baggage when makes these journeys.”

“This is criminal,” said the young man.

Peenemünde blinked.

He’d found the cable taped to her windowsill. She’d had to drill out a chunk of the metal frame to sneak it through. “Look at the
diameter
of this. You’re stealing on a grand scale, aren’t you? I bet you’re siphoning off a small city’s worth of juice—”

“My colleague and I have to talk,” said Wilson.

The young man was glaring at both women with indiscriminate and mysterious fury. Peenemünde noticed for the first time that he seemed to be sporting two blossoming black eyes.

“By all means. Please. But at five a.m. German time, the DuPont project goes to sleep. You need to make up your minds before that.” She hurried to her kitchenette and came back with a soiled paper bag. “Feed the ducks. That always helps me to think.”

Braemar Wilson turned back at the door.

“If the aliens didn’t use your patent method, how do you imagine they got here?”

“It’s simple. They have a multigeneration ship. It is roundish and dark, and shielded with a layer of water, I think, tens at least of meters thick; held between rigid mineral shells. They came into our system off the plane of the ecliptic, so that most of our hardware wasn’t looking the right way, and they are hiding somewhere close in a parking orbit. They’re probably behind the moon.”

The duck pond was something less than five hundred meters away; surrounded by shrubbery, and a few trees. A non-time block, quietly blazing across the grey turf, drowned the dim globes that lined the campus paths. The ducks were wide awake, they came purposefully across the water as the two humans approached. It was very cold, the sky was sooty. There was a bleak east wind.

“What went wrong, Johnny?”

He sat on the stone rim, absently tearing up stale bread.

“Did you see the picture gallery over her bed? Mahatma Gandhi was up there, Chico Mendes. The Chipko woman; Gaura Devi. Teresa of Lisieux. Teresa of Avila. The wispy-beard guy in the middle was the face from the Turin shroud—”

Braemar considered him, eyebrows raised. “That’s some obscure recognition for a young newshound. I didn’t know you were a Catholic, Johnny.”

He shrugged. “It’s an Italian name, isn’t it. What did you think I was, a bloody Commie?”

Braemar sat down, immaculately rich lady-tourist in loden-green jacket and breeches, moleskin stockings; a flash of amethyst silk at her high collar. They had been traveling for days, the elegant lady and the young man who did not behave like her son. It had been glorious: spiced by the excitement of Johnny’s disguise. Taking risks together; and the moment of waking; and feeling so beautiful when people stared, and wondered what was going on. Braemar wondered how she should set about preparing herself for star-travel. For the idyll (which would end soon enough) was built on lies, and she did not feel calm at all. One would have to be mad to ask for anything different. The quiet mind, like reality itself, is a fiction.

She looked at the water.

“Femme je suis, pourette et encienne—”

“What? Fucks’ sake—”

“Sorry.”

A woman old and poor am I
Who knows nothing, I could never read
I see in my parish church
Paradise painted, where are harps and lutes
And a hell where the damned are boiled
the one frightens me, the other brings joy and mirth…

“Villon. He was a poet, a mediaeval loser. Talented boy, but he came from the wrong side of the tracks and he never did learn to behave. I’m no Christian, nor Hindu. But I wish to do right, in my own terms; and I’m afraid, in my own terms, of what will happen to me if I do wrong.”

Johnny looked at her, at last nodded.

“Yeah. Exactly. I don’t know if I understand, but yeah.”

He touched his sore eye sockets. He had under-dosed and was coming down too soon. His anger had been absurd. Big science and religion are one and the same, they fit the same space. He’d often argued that point with self-deluded “rationalists.” Our God-Given systems, the void-powered Data-God behind them. It’s all the same, dumb awe and naive paranoia. Only fools ignore that dimension: no one gets much further than a mediaeval peasant.

He wondered if he would ever again have control of his emotions. He saw his own turmoil as a fractal of the response of humanity, confronted with alien intelligence. All the world’s billions: in tears, in lust, panicking, flying into rages

“Why’d she give me drops? I hate putting drops in my eyes.”

“You must have asked for something else.”

“Huh?”

“It’s the way Clem works. Looking glass logic. I’m sorry, I should have warned you.”

In the cold light of daytime half a world away they hunched their shoulders against the wind that drove across the Prussian plains, uneasily silent. Buonarotti didn’t seem to realize it, but her story supported the aliens. If her employers had been researching FTL for years (and it sounded so likely), maybe Braemar and Johnny had stumbled on the reason why the world’s real powers had been and remained so hands-off about Uji. Careful, everyone. They’re quite possibly the real thing.

They’d traveled a long way, to find only bewildering verbiage wrapped around hints that the world was right and White Queen was wrong.

“Okay…” said Braemar. “Forget the implications, let’s get to market. She’s an amateur astronomer, we knew that. She’s a double Nobel laureate, which means she’s probably hot shit as an amateur anything. Both times she tried to boycott the ceremony and refuse the money—since you can’t turn a Nobel down. On the grounds that the award system is corrupt. But her Corporation wouldn’t have it.”

“I knew there was something weird.”

“A touch priggish, perhaps. Those are the bright sparks who gave Henry Kissinger the Peace prize.”

“Who he?”

The bread was finished, Johnny tore up the bag and scattered it. Ducks eagerly gobbled the fragments. He thought of the grotesque economics of last century’s particle-hunting, and wondered what the otherworldly Professor Buonarotti was doing, single-handedly, to Germany’s energy audit.

“The woman’s a criminal. We ought to turn her in.”

“For siphoning a little power from a DuPont subsid?”

“A
lot
of power, Brae. Okay. We won’t grass her up to the Environment Police, because her parents were Nazis and she had a horrid childhood. But what do we get out of trying this trick? A foot-shooting, useless public statement from the Nutty Professor?”

“I don’t know, but I know we either take her offer or go home with nothing. Buonarotti is an eccentric, known for it. She’s probably just making friends. Probably she’ll cave in when we call her bluff, and decide we don’t deserve a trip to Betelgeuse. The point is, we need her. She’s a genius, and kooky too. People will love her. It doesn’t matter if it’s nonsense. We want to reach the masses, and they don’t listen very hard. It’s non-Aleutian, and, and a powerful idea….”

How easily, how silently Peenemünde had traded “time” for “space.” Situations, not locations. The universe is a four dimensional landscape. Braemar saw her young self marching along behind the buggy, face a ludicrous grim mask, her daughter’s wrist in a vice-like grip. The toddler whining, the three year old sobbing outright. There was no bus-fare money because she was saving it scrap by miserable scrap, for her secret escape fund. There comes a moment when all at once the gentle cajoling ceases, and a mother’s real feeling bursts out in ugly savagery. The children are astonished, and no wonder. They scream and scream. They resist more than ever, with the obstinacy of despair. You know what will happen, but oh, the delicious release of that first instant. Grab her.
Make
her come along…

I never hit them, she remembered. I never wanted to, except the times when I’d have killed them. The baby was gone where nothing could harm him. But still she dragged on that little girl’s arm, taking vicious pleasure as the little feet stumbled to keep up. My daughter hates me, thought Braemar. If there was
ever,
in any possible world, a way to get back there and undo—

Buonarotti had shaken them both. Lucky Johnny, his life was so blameless he didn’t have to take the “implications” personally. She sighed. It was so obvious that they had to play along. But this baby, as he had once helpfully pointed out, was a deal too big to be physically intimidated.