Read Online White Queen by Gwyneth Jones - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Gwyneth Jones
Tags: Science-Fiction, reincarnation fiction, Journalists - Fiction, Human-Alien Encounters—Fiction, Feminist Science Fiction, Tiptree Award winner
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from start to finish. There never was a virus. There was only an excuse to close down a space program that had become a meaningless expense and political suicide. An excuse that only cost a few space-jock disappeareds. Was that the truth? Maybe the truth was worse, maybe the whole business was a random error thrown up by Johnny’s precious Big Machinery. Or maybe, why not, the virus was real, the NIH was right, and she and Johnny were both doomed. You can’t know the truth, you can only choose your risk.
Through the glass doors to her balcony the sky was a mass of baroque violet, magenta and heavy orange, folded and crumpled down to the black and unlikely margin of Asaba’s volcanic spine. The chances that the curtains would part and the mountains that were gods appear in person were poor, at this season, but it was still a wonderful show. Around the ’04, you used to get sunrises like this in the tepid post-industrial UK, but that was all over. You had to come far south nowadays to find a good, rich, poisoned sky.
She had lived through fire and flood and earthquake, and seen the world go on just the same. The plate-armor of the soft earth shrugged: seas churned, the twisted islands fell burning into the abyss. The blue sky turned livid, wild lightnings wrecked the man made networks that threaded the atmosphere. Cold and famine took the world, that had been preparing for hot flushes and rising seas…. Everyone got ready to die. But in a few years, it was as if nothing had happened. The human race, somewhat rearranged, carried on getting and spending, making politics, having fun. Starving and suffering if anything a little less, just now, than when Braemar was young.
Though you wouldn’t persuade Johnny to believe that.
She wondered how soon before the drug wore off (not the one she’d taken); and he started to think again. He would remember the rifle. Stupid panic, to have let him see it. She would have to do some nifty handwaving to get around that. But she would have help. Poor child, he’d been so much on his dignity at first—and rightly so—but here he was with his hand in the honey jar all the same. It was so easy, she ought to be ashamed. She was ashamed. She could only tell herself (fearing it was nonsense) that one day it might be possible to explain.
Leaning on the page she turned to look at Johnny, his bare arms startlingly white, vulnerable and pitiful as a child’s despite the deep curves of muscle. Under the influence of Oneiricene, drug that infects the waking world with the loose poetry of dreams, she saw a white hound lying there: clean-limbed, earnest-eyed, eager and absurdly faithful. The muscle-shadows of his power a dapple of urgent words. A lamed hound is a murdered hound. One more betrayal couldn’t hurt him. She had not wronged him. Johnny was beyond harm.
On the bedside cabinet lay a crumpled 3D snapshot of a little girl (better put that away again…) A sprig of creeper in a toothglass of water, the blue flowers already faded. What a dog’s life he’d been living. Johnny Guglioli, friend of roaches, with his leper’s bell and his chastity. The power of American New Age morality astounded her. To think, she murmured, I used to wonder how the devil people could hope to sell Coca-Cola with no sugar in it and no caffeine.
“I believe in pleasure,” said Braemar.
2
THE ALEUTIANS
i
At ten fifty eight a.m. (STZ10) on the fifteenth of July, 2038, Colonel Hebron Everard, commander of USAF base St Francis, Cape Copper Ridge, Alaska was in his public office with his PR. They were about to take Access Hour. The Colonel, an ethnic Slav at the end of a routine career, had regarded this command as a peaceful prelude to retirement. He’d never been very wide awake, politically. The Revolution had plunged him into acute, almost precancerous depression. There had been no enemy across the cold straits for a generation. But barely ten miles away there was a new town of some one and a
Through the glass doors to her balcony the sky was a mass of baroque violet, magenta and heavy orange, folded and crumpled down to the black and unlikely margin of Asaba’s volcanic spine. The chances that the curtains would part and the mountains that were gods appear in person were poor, at this season, but it was still a wonderful show. Around the ’04, you used to get sunrises like this in the tepid post-industrial UK, but that was all over. You had to come far south nowadays to find a good, rich, poisoned sky.
She had lived through fire and flood and earthquake, and seen the world go on just the same. The plate-armor of the soft earth shrugged: seas churned, the twisted islands fell burning into the abyss. The blue sky turned livid, wild lightnings wrecked the man made networks that threaded the atmosphere. Cold and famine took the world, that had been preparing for hot flushes and rising seas…. Everyone got ready to die. But in a few years, it was as if nothing had happened. The human race, somewhat rearranged, carried on getting and spending, making politics, having fun. Starving and suffering if anything a little less, just now, than when Braemar was young.
Though you wouldn’t persuade Johnny to believe that.
She wondered how soon before the drug wore off (not the one she’d taken); and he started to think again. He would remember the rifle. Stupid panic, to have let him see it. She would have to do some nifty handwaving to get around that. But she would have help. Poor child, he’d been so much on his dignity at first—and rightly so—but here he was with his hand in the honey jar all the same. It was so easy, she ought to be ashamed. She was ashamed. She could only tell herself (fearing it was nonsense) that one day it might be possible to explain.
Leaning on the page she turned to look at Johnny, his bare arms startlingly white, vulnerable and pitiful as a child’s despite the deep curves of muscle. Under the influence of Oneiricene, drug that infects the waking world with the loose poetry of dreams, she saw a white hound lying there: clean-limbed, earnest-eyed, eager and absurdly faithful. The muscle-shadows of his power a dapple of urgent words. A lamed hound is a murdered hound. One more betrayal couldn’t hurt him. She had not wronged him. Johnny was beyond harm.
On the bedside cabinet lay a crumpled 3D snapshot of a little girl (better put that away again…) A sprig of creeper in a toothglass of water, the blue flowers already faded. What a dog’s life he’d been living. Johnny Guglioli, friend of roaches, with his leper’s bell and his chastity. The power of American New Age morality astounded her. To think, she murmured, I used to wonder how the devil people could hope to sell Coca-Cola with no sugar in it and no caffeine.
“I believe in pleasure,” said Braemar.
2
THE ALEUTIANS
i
At ten fifty eight a.m. (STZ10) on the fifteenth of July, 2038, Colonel Hebron Everard, commander of USAF base St Francis, Cape Copper Ridge, Alaska was in his public office with his PR. They were about to take Access Hour. The Colonel, an ethnic Slav at the end of a routine career, had regarded this command as a peaceful prelude to retirement. He’d never been very wide awake, politically. The Revolution had plunged him into acute, almost precancerous depression. There had been no enemy across the cold straits for a generation. But barely ten miles away there was a new town of some one and a
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