White Queen (19 page)

In ’24 a Hispano-African lady called Maria-Jesus, a motel cleaner, took one of the rich to court for “illegal domestic surveillance.” She didn’t do it on her own. The image of this poor woman, neither young nor pretty, being spied on as she brushed her teeth or changed her sanitary tampon in her miserable little rooms, was supposed to push buttons. She did.

“Illegal” surveillance was an accepted fact of life, and an irrational sticking-point for a nation addicted to subscriber soap. No matter. The case grew, until there were millions out on the streets shouting for Maria-Jesus. There was a lot of flailing around at the end, when things finally got violent. Ironically, relatively, the final flipover had been a right-wing coup. But that piece of trivia was already lost. Socialism (of an American kind) had triumphed.

It would have been the story of the century, if the aliens had not arrived.

Rajath’s speech devastated everyone who heard it. The superbeing had spoken at last,
de haut en bas,
as they had been longing for him to do. He opened up vast pits of guilt and fear. Robin Lloyd-Price recorded that he remembered the feeling from prep-school. The relief at having been found out, the desperate longing to be punished. By the time Douglas Milne reached the President, most of the world had seen the pirate’s speech, and the punishment had begun.

The first thing he saw when he walked into the Oval Office was a huge painting, in oils, of Daniel Ortega on his white horse. Carlotta stood beneath it. She was heavier than when he’d last seen her,
much woman
in a ribbed maroon silk suit and magisterial heels. Her dark hair was combed back, held at the nape with a clasp of silver. The parrot perched on her shoulder, she was feeding it with sunflower seeds.

“What’s that? Some kind of
memento mori?”

“If you like. Can you live with it?”

She was the age that people are when they stop being young and before they hit the wall, so long as they can afford healthcare. Impossible to say closer than that. He remembered her differently: young in anger, old in poverty.

“No,” she said. “I will not be looking for excuses, in a few years’ time, to put the gilt braid on my cap and groom my grandchildren for stardom. I begin as I mean to be remembered: a colorful figurehead. Don’t you know, Douglas, the successful revolution (she pronounced it the European way, soft in the middle) is when afterwards everything is almost the same as before. Only a little notch better.”

She touched the parrot’s feet: it waddled down her arm.

“Pirate, put the shells in the bin, please.”

“Okay, sister. Anything to oblige my sweetheart.”

Douglas hated that bird. It made him (he was aware of the subtext) feel redundant. Carlotta walked around the desk and he sat—collapsed—facing her.

“What’s going on?” he asked, piteously. “Is there a, a body count? I’ve seen nothing, only the tabloids on the plane: obviously doctored stuff, horror movies.”

Carlotta looked at him wryly. “I wouldn’t be too sure. No, there’s no body count. The thing’s too random, too many panic reports.”

Three days after Rajath’s speech there had been an accident in the UK, on infill work beside one of the old freeways—a minor news item snatched by the tabloids and blown up as a horrific freak occurrence. It was juicy stuff, delicious cuts of rampaging bulldozers, earthmovers with bloody teeth; mangled human limbs. The world’s lowest form of newslife used no human sources. They grabbed health-and-safety records of bloody accidents, police incident reports; they doctored brawls and accidents and turned them into horror-shorts. This was well known. It was twelve hours, perhaps, a long time, anyway, before the world understood that the tabloids were showing unenhanced reality…and connected it with the alien’s promise of retribution.

In England, a team of smart civil engineering machines turned on their supervisors, and hapless bystanders. In France, there was mayhem in one wing of a large modern hospital. In Pakistan, a refrigerator factory had come to life and killed its whole complement of machine minders.
That
one was recognized as perhaps the first outbreak, it had been happening as Rajath spoke. Others came to light; and it was still going on. Mainly in South Asia, but, as Carlotta said, it was difficult to sort out a clear pattern.

The incidents themselves were nothing, in terms of the numbers of dead. Nothing, to the mortal dread they inspired.

“You had to come back in person?”

“I’m not a telepath. Rajath convinced me not to rely for long on any kind of communication Aleutians don’t like. So I came home.”

“Well, you were wrong. The videophones are still working. So far it looks as if we’re clean, this side of the ocean.”

Douglas put his face in his hands and groaned.

“Coralin!”

On the day (as they later discovered) that the aliens had announced themselves in Alaska, there’d been mysterious failures in USAF information systems. The collapse traced back to the Francistown base. The timing of the damage was such that its extent would never be known. A lot of data had been destroyed, mangled or mislaid in those last most turbulent days of revolution. Plus, the failure involved coralin, so it had been treated with special secrecy. No party in the struggle wanted a new QV-infection stink. It was after things calmed down, that people had realized the obvious connection with the aliens.

In the nascent USSA the Aleutians were widely regarded as real, supernatural angels, and the Big Machines were revered with an intense religiosity. The revolutionaries, when they understood their dilemma, had taken a calculated risk. The story they’d allowed to escape was that the “genius child” alien had understood in an instant how to use an earthling computer terminal. Nothing about a trail of damage. There had been no
proof.

“This is our baby, Carlotta. We knew what they could do, and we said nothing—”

“We said nothing because we knew there was nothing to be done. Did you hear about the French hospital? Seems the Aleutians don’t like sick people anymore than they like tv.”

She examined an imaginary blemish on one wine-dark nail.

“Maybe they can fuck with anything. Maybe transistors will die screaming, maybe not a screwdriver is safe. But I tell you this as a friend, Dougie. If you have money in the Blue Clay, in my country, get it out now.”

They can turn the machines against us. What
are
we without intelligent machines? Douglas knew what kind of hospital it had been. Gene therapy, longevity and fertility. Robotics and refrigerators. The aliens were attacking the sham of the slowdown. They were attacking the fakery that was still destroying the living world, despite the most hellish of warnings.

He thought of something that had happened when the Alaskans and the Africans arrived at Uji. They had casualties with them, injured in the crossing. They were put in a room by themselves. Medical aid was declined. No one saw them again. Milne had been foremost among the non-interventionists. “If they know how to die,” he remembered telling the team, “I hope they can teach us.” So now the teaching had begun. He shuddered.

Stop that.

“If we could cut through the panic,” Carlotta was saying. “The smarts for the English road-plant were newly air-freighted from South China, a short jet-plane ride from Thailand.”

Doug grimaced.
Air-freighted robotics.
There it was again, crime and punishment.

Carlotta scowled at him. “Oh, come on, Dougie. This isn’t deathrays from the Overmind. They got out of Uji and they
did
something. If we could trace a South East Asian connection for all the, you know, the metastasizing, at least we might cut them down to size.”

“Oh, God. What are we going to do?”

“Douglas, how would I know? You tell me.”

She stared at him. “Do you know we’re about to go to war?” Her hands with their blood red nails spread on the desk top, a gesture of strength. In her eyes a sweet, bleak tenderness: mother to the world. “It’s going to be ugly, ugly. I am proud of that. I am proud to know that the boys of our United Socialist States will make
terrible
soldiers. They can’t cope with that role, they hate it.”

The fast editing didn’t repulse him. He admired her. Most likely nobody would lift the room’s record of this hour, most likely the war with Canada didn’t mean a thing anymore. But she would go on until the end: honing her phrases, polishing her gestures, her whole internal life one speech-writing session; one eye always on the monitor in her head. Good for Carlotta, if she could die in harness, governing from under the red light. The people get to watch us, we don’t get to watch them. That was the right way.

The last time he’d been in this room there’d been sleeping bags scuffed about, a microwave on the floor surrounded by spilling cartons of food debris. Things had changed. He noticed suddenly that most signs of Big Machine presence had departed along with the frost. That had been one of their aims: to slacken off an unhealthy obsession. They’d had so many other good purposes. It had been working, too. Beginning to work. But he had given it all up gladly to go to Uji. Regret, regret, such a feeling of
loss.
If Carlotta could read his mind right now, she’d think he was crazy. Or hypnotized, possessed.

She recalled him to the present.” So what was worth the plane fares, Dougie?”

He was recovering. He’d been on the verge of fugue all the way from Krung Thep

“Rajath is not their leader. He’s a…a hat, as the Japs used to say. There
is
a leader in there, you can forget Kershaw’s egalitarian fantasies. He may not be on Earth.”

“Or she.”

“They don’t have ‘shes.’ But we can do business with Rajath. We can say, okay, call it off, what do you want? It’s as simple as that. Give him a blank check, claw it all back in the negotiation process.”

Carlotta sighed at him, and he knew why she seemed so calm. She’d given up.

“When there was time,” she said. “You stupid bastards didn’t tell us you were in trouble. Now there is no time. Read this.”

She gave him some paper and went to the kitchenette. “Are you hungry? Coffee? I could make you a sandwich?”

“Mortadella!” shouted Pirate, and jumped from the keypad with a great rattling of chainmail grey wings. Douglas read the fax, and felt the blood drain from his face.

“Where’d you get this from?”

“Beijing. Isolated line. They’ve recognized us, you know.”

She returned, leaned over his shoulder. “When Mr. Rajath gave the orders about his real estate, he seemed to think we’d all be listening. He doesn’t know everything, does he? But there’s somebody up there at Uji a little more public-spirited than you or Martha.”

“Kaoru”

“Of course. Beijing couldn’t keep something like this from their clients. Pakistan—a nuclear state, you’ll recall—, doesn’t care much for this suggestion just here. Or that word the alien used in his big speech: ‘sterilized.’”

Douglas whispered.
“The nest must be burned out.
Oh my God.”

She laughed at his expression. “That’s not me speaking, Tonto. That’s the wrath of Islam. The Chinese seem to think it’s worth a try. I don’t, but I’m only the President of the USSA. Who am I to tell people what to do?”

She handed him coffee. “I can’t help you. I’m sorry. Your mercy mission has failed.”

She was so calm. “No,” said Douglas. “That’s not why I’m here. I want you to do something, and I felt I had to ask you face to face. The Aleutians, you see: they
know
us. We have a chance to make a deal. We’re the only hope. We have to have the right to deal with them.”

The President was silent for a few seconds. She blinked, twice: then smiled for all her public. “Ah, I understand.” She laughed. “What the hell. Oh Dougie, those damned aliens. This is not the way I planned to go down in history.”

Ellen tried to work. The summer rains had begun, the damp air smelled of jasmine, and rot, and methane/alcohol.

These beings are bipedal, they are marginally lighter (at 1g) than humans of similar size, have less body fat; marginally cooler body temperature. Possible air sacs against the spine, a bowl of belly between the hips that might contain a longer gut than ours. Stereoscopic vision, omnivorous dentation: what looks like our tooth enamel, a rooted tongue. They find our “hard” food distasteful, but at some very recent time (in evolutionary terms) they ate much the same way as we do. But they are not naked chimpanzees. The hair isn’t hair. It handles like—chitin? Like brittlestar tentacles, or the legs of a dead spider. (They were wary of human touch, but someone had managed to collect that vivid impression: it was faithfully simulated for Ellen’s fingertips.)

Something marine, a tang of the cold seashore in that weed-bundle hair, pumice skin, those lumpy, rocklike joints. They could be spiritual cousins of the original Aleuts, the Amerindian tribe that gave its name to those cold islands.

What about sex? Douglas’s fantasy about the Aleutians as obligate pedophiles was nonsense. But the Multiphon chamber had mostly been populated by single sex female delegations, alongside about thirty percent middle-aged men. Not many youngsters Look at the demographic, if you could call it that, of the chosen. It was so simple. Aleutian pairing crosses a generation. The Aleutians had picked out the few normal-looking
couples
they could see. This explanation had leapt out at them when they’d got together on Dougie’s breakthrough. In emergency session, before the ultimatum, when it had seemed that the Uji project could be saved.