White Queen (22 page)

Johnny stood among them with his free glass of nasty champagnoise, watching Carlotta and that parrot: and wishing the President of the USSA didn’t look so much like a novelty cabaret act. He didn’t know what he was doing here, except that to stay away would have been like insulting Mrs. Frame’s girl. He saw Braemar (she didn’t see him). She was wearing
shalwar khamiz,
Asian ethnic costume of matching pants and loose tunic; in silver, lime green and mauve. Her hair, still that dark mulberry red, gleamed through a misty veil. He hadn’t been able to check the guest-list, he didn’t have those facilities, but he’d known she’d be here. He hadn’t been prepared for a sudden, excruciating intuition. No one knew that Johnny Guglioli had done the first ever alien interview. Someone had wangled him this invitation, it must have been Braemar.

Fool! What the hell had be been thinking? That his name had come up in a lottery?

He retreated to the bar, where he couldn’t buy a drink because he should handle a cashcard with gloves and in this place he was too embarrassed. So much for the new Johnny. He could smell the soft, wet heat of night in West Africa. He felt an awful nostalgia for the sheer high-strung misery of that time.

Braemar came in: saw him and did a swift u turn.

A heavy Brit in royal blue slumped down on the stool beside him.

“Bit of a crush, eh?”

BBC, it said so on his button. Old fashioned political journalist, by the look of him, and the age. The kind who thought he ought to have a support team, thought knowing about the mechanics was beneath him. Johnny used to detest those guys, and let them know it. Thankfully this on was a total stranger. He was also
very
toxed.

“Let me buy you a beer, uh, Johnny?”

The man flipped open his wallet and waved it at the barman, who removed a card and reached over impassively to swipe it through the customer’s side of the cash register. So that’s how you do it. Johnny grinned wryly, but took the beer.

“Polish?”

“Good guess. I’m American.”

The sarcasm went way over this guy’s head.

“Aha. The USSA. That explains the fancy dress.”

“I suppose it does.”

“I see you’re interested in our Samaritan.”

Braemar had been trapped before she could get out of sight. She had her back to him, he hadn’t realized it but he was staring—

The drunk jerked his head.
“Barearse Wislon—”

“I thought she was British.”

Mr. BBC laughed. “I thought you Americans read the Bible. Our Samaritan, she doesn’t quite worship on the right mountain, but she’s not ashamed to pick up the crumbs, and she’s generous when a chap’s in need. You’ll be all right there.”

The drunk winked roguishly.
“Une demi-mondaine toute complete.”

“You saying she’s a whore?”

“Of course she is!” The man rolled his eyes. “Money doesn’t change hands but what else would she be? They all are. Career women,
professional
women. Public women. Always needing favors. She’s careful, mind. No penetration, condom or no condom. All good clean fun.”

This was painful, if flattering. Johnny could only shrug, and wish he hadn’t taken the man’s booze. The drunk downed his whisky, and shuddered.

“They scare me shitless. Sorry to bother you, uh, Johnny. I was there, you know. I saw them kill that little girl. And we all we did nothing, our minds were controlled. Now everybody’s like it. They’re in the air, they’re everywhere. You ask Barearse.”

BBC pushed himself off and lumbered away. Johnny moved too, before another lunatic could appear. He was surprised there were any people left who felt like that about the Aleutians. A waiter stood in his way, proffering a tray that held neither glasses nor canapés.

“Mr. Guglioli?”

Another white packet. It was heavier than the first. He opened it, and found he’d been sent a message that he could not read.

“What is this? What am I to do with this?”

“I don’t know,” said the waiter, interested and fearful. “I was just told to deliver it.”

“Who told you—?”

“Well, uh, one of them.”

The man became even more uneasy, and melted away.

Johnny wanted to know what was going on. He sent cringing caution to the winds, put the envelope inside his jacket and headed, with determination, for the guests of honor.

“Johnny.”

Now Braemar was in front of him. He stared at her. The changed costume, different manner, had a strange effect. All these other people thought Braemar Wilson was beautiful in some conventional way: regular features, good skin, slinky body. They were wrong. The thing that was beautiful was
Braemar
(good grief, what a discovery), looking out of, defining, whatever disguise she chose to affect.

“It’s good to see you,” she said.

“Oh? I don’t know why. You found your way into the dressing room without my help. Don’t waste your time with a loser Brae. The other whores will be turning all the good tricks.”

She nodded, accepting his rage with the sad, humble look that he remembered so clearly. He stood there, shaken beyond bearing by her eyes, her breathing presence.

“Did
you
get me invited here? Or what? What’s this all about?”

“The party? I think it was arranged for you, Johnny.”

Johnny’s mouth dropped open.

Braemar took a card from her case, wrote on it with a tiny gold pencil.
New Things, Inc.
He remembered the Planters Bar.

“Come to see me. There are things you need to know.”

He could see theatre nurse uniforms. The celebrity cluster was passing by, moving into livespace for the public part of the evening: the speeches. An alien grinned; not at Johnny, but he saw the baboon mask break out in teeth below its dark center, and remembered “Agnès.” Braemar had slipped away. He saw her graceful figure, veiled in colors of a moonlit garden (lime green and mauve! What a combination! Only Braemar—). She’d joined the celebs, she was coming on to a famous face, Royal Society laureate. He heard her laugh, it sounded totally false, it hurt like a slap in the face. Abruptly he’d had enough.

He sought out a washroom, shut himself in a cubicle. Why the hell couldn’t he read what Braemar had written? It was in Italian, but that was all he could tell: he infuriated himself trying to spell it out and failing to make any sense. He took out the other thing again. It was still a passport, apparently a valid passport belonging to John Francis Guglioli, USSA citizen, media person, self-employed. Nothing about his being subject to quarantine regulations. The concept was downright nonsensical. Chasing UFOs to ease the pain of exile he had traveled like toxic waste, plastered with special clearances. Nowadays he had no use for any kind of travel documents. He turned the rectangle of charged plastic around, and around, a monkey with a strange toy.
What does it mean?

He felt like a counter in a game, a helpless bundle of pixels. Someone had picked him up and stuck him on the board again, he didn’t know who or why.

Was there a covering note that somehow hadn’t been delivered to his mind?

He sat on the toilet lid, face lifted, waiting for visitation. An image flashed up on the internal screen, but it had nothing to do with aliens. It was Carlotta with the crossed flags behind her, the blood-red flag with the silver stars, crossed with Old Glory. Some of that blood was mine. I sliced my wrists; I let my life run out. The inevitable UK camera eye was peering down at him, circled by its coy message FOR YOUR PROTECTION.

He jumped up on the seat with an inarticulate yell, and flailed at it. Viva Maria-Jesus!

Ex-eejay QV victim in Barbican toilet incident.

The thought of burly security persons with nil revolutionary sentiment brought him to his senses. He scuttled from the washroom and fled, hugging his bewilderment, into the cold streets of the warren.

He phoned her. She didn’t run a videophone, which surprised him. He wouldn’t have had her down as an Anti-Tech. Her voice was brutally familiar…. She lived in a whole house, south of the river in opulent New Cross Gate. No infill here. There were trees growing on the sidewalks and private cars along the curbs. A repro Mini Cooper, bright red with willow-green detail, gave off an aura that he could not mistake. Half a block beyond her door, a plain white electric van was pulled up. He could see the profile of the driver; the flicker of a changing page of newsprint in his hand.

Intriguing!

He stood on the pad in front of a battered doorman. The screen remained blank but a distorted human voice emerged. The door was opened by a teenage girl, clinging to the choke collar of an enormous black and tan hound. The girl’s eyes were big as saucers, rich brown: eyelashes like sooty forests. She wore an ICH BIN EIN BANGLADESHI tee-shirt.

Woof! Woof!

“—Shut it, Trix. Come on down. We’re trapped in the kitchen, the housebox is bust.”

The basement kitchen was huge, poorly lit and festeringly untidy. It smelled of sloppy domestic recycling, fighting with something viciously hygienic. On a counter by the door sat the kind of house control box to which Johnny had been accustomed since childhood. Six keys were suckered on its side; the screen showed a holding pattern of floor plan. Whatever was wrong wasn’t obvious. Braemar sat at a long table strewn with the remains of breakfast, in a drab grey woolen khurta and leggings, her face barely made up. The dog went to sit beside her, head higher than the tabletop. Another woman in bunchy striped skirts was scrubbing pans at the kitchen sink. A small boy (by the clothes), around two years old was sitting on the floor. The girl with the unnaturally enormous eyes stepped over him as if he was a puddle: but Johnny was immediately attracted. He and the baby stared at each other, measuring up.

The girl ogled him. “I’m a Decommisioner,” she said.

He’d seen the shrine beside the housebox: a gaudily colored sonar map of the sunken islands, Honshu in fragments along the black pitfall of the trench; the bright lipped lavaflows.

“I just think about the atoms in my reactor, nothing else. I don’t even chant. It’s a quantum effect. The decay of an unstable particle is suppressed by the act of observation. D’you realize, people all over the world have been maintaining the Zeno phase in the nuclear reactors down there, for thirty six years. It’s totally insanely vital. It’s mostly the Japanese, of course. The Japs wrecked themselves trying to make things safe right at the end, you know. Their decommissioning work cost a million extra lives. Ikata, Fukushima 3 and Tokai 3 were so supersafe they were programmed to decom themselves, and they did it. That still leaves—”

She paused to count the terrifying undead on her fingers; ran into difficulties and changed the subject. “Have you got a job?”

“I shoot cows. Um, steers. For a real meat company.”

“Yecch. That’s disgusting.”

“Someone’s got to do it.”

Braemar laughed. “Kamla. Aren’t you supposed to be studying that 1990 Dimblebey-Gorbachev interview?”

Kamla pouted.

“Get upstairs.” Braemar reached over and jabbed keys on the crippled box. “And I want to see the program on your tv. Within three minutes.”

“Ionela—”

The Balkan looking woman crashed another antique cooking utensil onto a toppling pile, leisurely removed her apron and made for a door, which must lead to the yard, or garden; beaming widely at Johnny on the way out. She did have rotten teeth.

Johnny sat down, closer to Braemar than was strictly comfortable. He wished to demonstrate that her body didn’t scare him any more. “You run a tight ship, ma’am. Congratulations. How old’s Kamla?”

“Fifteen. Billy’s two.”

Their manner seemed coolish, for mother and daughter—probably because of the baby. Fifteen seemed young too, though he hadn’t noticed the daughter’s birth date on file. He wasn’t going to probe. Personal interest was nil, this was strictly business. He’d had time to adjust. Maybe, with the slightest encouragement, he’d have fallen sobbing into her arms. He wasn’t going to get it, and he didn’t want it. Only a fool loses more than one safe world in a lifetime.

“So, how’s life treating you, Johnny?”

“Oh, you know,”

“Still having trouble with slow horses and fast women?”

He grinned. He liked her cheek. Pitiless as ever.

“You’ve settled in London. You should have let me know. Is Robert still with you?”

“Living on borrowed time.” He was amused at her attempt to invoke the old intimacy. “My landlady doesn’t allow pets. The day will come when she’ll discover his box and I’ll probably betray the poor little bastard, pretend I found him by the toilet and was just about to turn him in.”

“And let’s see, what are you reading?” She peered at the title of the ancient volume that was weighing down his jacket pocket.
“A Separate Reality.”
She cackled. “Castaneda. Oh,
Johnny!”