White Queen by Gwyneth Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

was a rifle. Johnny gaped in disbelief.
    “Get out of the car, Johnny! Dear God, get out! It’s tampered!”
    He couldn’t move. One of the aliens walked down the lights. It was a? a man? The man-form held out its hands, making a soothing, sort of Christlike gesture. Johnny felt the car respond. The machine moaned, chugged. Its wheels retracted, it tried to put down its track. It closed its big white eyes and nestled down to sleep.
    The aliens piled into their own car, and drove away.
    Johnny had begun to feel very sick. Saliva burst into his mouth, bile rose in his throat. He fell out of the convertible, staggered through wet grass that clung to his knees and fell against something, the bole of a tree. He felt unbelievably sick. A warm stream of piss poured down his thigh. Equal and terrible forces tried to drag him from the tree and mash him into its bark. So sick he couldn’t move or breathe, must be dying….
      
    He woke up in somebody’s front parlor. He was lying on a mattress on a concrete floor, under a brown and grey goats hair blanket and wearing some stranger’s pajamas. The concrete was very clean, the mattress thin as cardboard. At the foot of his bed a chunky CRT monoscreen tv stood blankfaced on a plastic crate, on top of it a Christmas centerpiece of holly and christmas roses. There was dawnish light coming through unglazed windows, and the muddy resmelted roofing.
    He closed his eyes, recalling the second unscripted wilderness experience of his life. He and Braemar Wilson must have fallen in about fifteen rivers, climbed in and out of hundreds of thorny ditches, before they found their way to this suburban street. Reports of Mother Nature’s demise have been exaggerated. He didn’t care to think about what had gone before. He felt a complete fool. At least he didn’t seem to have woken up in a spaceship. That would have been unbearably banal.
    When he opened his eyes again Braemar was there, going through his personal effects surrounded by a mess of children. The monoscreen was blaring away, two African grown-ups in country clothes were watching it, sitting on the floor. Braemar had just managed to open Robert’s mobile home. Robert flopped out. She yelled, the children shrieked with laughter.
    “Hey! That roach is under my protection, Ms. Wilson!”
    If she was embarrassed she brazened it out pretty well.
    “Put the box down.”
    Johnny leaned out of bed and rapped on the concrete with his knuckle. “Everything’s okay, Robert. You go home.”
    The big roach tasted the air in Johnny’s direction, then crept obediently back into its den.
    “Smarter than your average orthopteron.” She came over. The way she looked at him was a lot too knowing for comfort. “My friend, the cockroach. Oh, Johnny. Why don’t you let them do their own dirty work?”
    “He’s a souvenir,” explained Johnny. “We were in hospital together once. One day the world will be ready for cute roaches. Then I press the self-replicate button and restore my ruined fortunes. What d’you think?”
    “Too many legs.”
    “What happened to my clothes?”
    “They’re being washed.”
    “I pissed myself, didn’t I. How disgusting. Thank you for looking after me: I was totally helpless.”
    “It’s called culture shock.” Her face was still painted, but barely. Beautiful women have to do it. Surely paint was better than the never-ending surgery, or the newer kind of cosmetic treatment that could go so horribly wrong.” Have you ever had anyone close to you die, Johnny? I have. It’s strange. It’s like, Africa. There are parts of ourselves that we can keep at bay, the way we fend off, where we live, the parasites and bugs that own this continent. If it breaks through, or if we go to find it, Africa is what it always was: inimical paradise, that made us but God knows how…. When you run into a big unevolved emotional nexus, such as death of a spouse, such as meeting an alien, you fall back into Eden. Doesn’t