White Queen by Gwyneth Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

matter how sophisticated your conscious responses: things get strange.”
    “You didn’t collapse.”
    “I wasn’t in the car when it came alive. And I didn’t meet that friend of yours, she didn’t talk to me.”
    Johnny sat bolt upright, appalled.
    “Bella!”
    “Oh shit. Johnny, it’s all right. I called your wife. Your little girl is home and safe.”
    “I told you?”
    “Yes, you told me. You came out of whatever happened in the fort thinking the aliens had kidnapped your daughter. It’s just fugue, Johnny. Come on, you know all about it. Remember the scenarios. You’ve been drip-fed those scenes since you could sit up unaided.” She pulled her phone from her bag. “I’ll try to get through again. You could listen.”
    He could not speak to his daughter. Izzy wouldn’t allow it. She said she had to protect the child. The thought that Braemar Wilson knew this stung him so that it took him a moment to read the full implication of her offer.
    “You have my ex-wife’s phone number.”
    She nodded.
    He gave her a long, thoughtful look. He didn’t keep phone numbers in his pockets. He held the ones that still had meaning in his head. What else did she know? How deep did she get? No point in protesting. A US quarantine subject becomes a ward of the state, as far as data protection is concerned. Johnny had absconded, so he didn’t even have that meager protection. There was nothing he could do, no legal or practical recourse. Anyone who chose could delve into his private places.
    “Nah, don’t bother. It’s the middle of the night. Too late for fairystories.”
    Braemar nodded, and put the phone away. It was a fine, economical communication, that little nod. It accepted his unspoken contempt, almost with humility. She went on looking at him, giving him this humility like a present. Her eyes were brown: the iris not striated with grey or green as in most brown eyes, but opaque, glowing chestnut. In fascination he kept on returning her stare until it was like the preamble to a cat fight. One of them had to back away or else they had to fall on each other, clawing and grappling like maniacs.
    She stood up.
    “I’m old enough to be your mother.”
    Their hostess had gone away and come back. She put a tray of coffee and porridge down beside Johnny and bent over him, looking concerned.
    “On doit fai ’mene le para—”
    “She thinks you ought to see a doctor.” Braemar became professional. “But I don’t think we want that. Too suggestive of the colonic irrigation in the spaceship, you know the one. Not right for us at all. The chopper’ll be here soon. I’ll ask her to fetch your clothes.”
    “Come and have dinner with me,” she said, when they landed at L’Iceberg. “Have dinner with me, and we’ll talk.”
    He returned to The Welcome Sight and spent the hours dozing, trying to work out what he really believed. He and Wilson had scripted the stance he’d take in the intro carefully. It was meant to put him on a level with the audience, no sneering disbelieving voyeur; and yet retain some intellectual credibility. It dealt with the likelihood that Johnny Guglioli would spin any kind of yarn to get attention for his plight, and made that part of the story. But what was the truth? Something had brought him to Africa. Something had held his peripheral attention, for years. He could not be counted among the believers. But a true disbeliever would reckon his files, his open-minded interest, so much crackbrained waste of time and memory. One had to face that.
    Now he was inside one of those hapless real-life true stories. It had happened to him, and it still wasn’t evidence. It seemed to him that his only evidence was that gut-wrenching, bone-deep terror, far more vivid than the inconclusive and easily faked events. But Braemar apparently believed in something; something that made her willing to carry a deadly weapon. However she’d got hold of it, smuggled it, no journalist would take up a