Free White Queen by Gwyneth Jones Page A

camrecord for the last hour, including what I’m saying now. Nothing happened, okay? We don’t want the media all over us. Let’s get through with the revolution shall we, before we move on to alien invasion.”
      
    The alien girl left another note for Johnny at the Planter’s Bar. This time, the meeting went smoothly. Since Johnny wouldn’t touch any of her coralin-based equipment, Braemar bought a “dead” camcorder and stock, locally produced but still ridiculously expensive. The hotel terminal in her room had a port for the adaptor. It processed the images: constructing statistical approximations of the information unavailable to a flat lens. She sat on her bed, remote in one hand, taking Johnny and his alien apart frame by frame: obverse profiles, upward angles, backviews. Braemar had once saved her own life by exploiting a housewife’s tv science of pop-anthropology: explaining to her fellow-housewives the far-reaching implications of a bride’s behavior at an English middle class wedding. She turned that science on the alien. She was trying to find answers—in gesture and glance and dress—for the questions that might be so vitally important.
    What kind of people are these? What do they respect, what do they value? What do they fear?
    She soon gave up looking for the zip-fastener. The alien kept her overalls on, and her brown cloth baseball boots with the ankle ties. She did not, if one could express it so, mug “alien life form” in any way; she didn’t ham it up at all. But she was entirely convincing.
    Johnny took the alien’s hand. The creature allowed him. There were three rather short fingers, a thumb, the stub of a fourth finger. With the “thumb” locked in a fist, pads on the outer surfaces formed a thick horny paw. The nails were trimmed claws. The skin of hands and face looked faintly scaly, with visible pores: goosebumped like chicken skin, but no trace of down. He felt her forearm through the cloth, laid his own beside it.
    “This is the pentadactyl limb!”
    The alien observed his awe with mild amusement. Braemar saw her wondering, Why shouldn’t an arm be like another arm? When Johnny ingenuously offered to trade nakedness, the alien was at first overcome with mirth: then suddenly deeply wary.
    What was that anxiety? Not sexual, not simply sexual anyway.
    They called her “Agnès.” It was the only name she offered aloud, and Johnny reported no other. Confusingly, she sometimes seemed to use it to “name” Johnny as well as herself. It would do for the moment. So would “her” gender. The alien still seemed feminine to Johnny. Braemar accepted his attribution: but it had taken a very few frames to convince her this certainly was no woman. “She” had not been aware that the name “she” borrowed was a girl’s name. The reaction to Johnny’s probing —are you female? was odd. “She” did not appear to misunderstand, or to find the question alien. She was embarrassed for Johnny, no sense of taboo broken, just a minor social gaffe. Johnny was continually embarrassing her. She didn’t want to believe how easily he was impressed.
    Johnny wanted to know: “Why have you come here?”
    
    She saw that Johnny was dissatisfied. She shrugged in disappointment.
    Braemar read body language: emotion and unconscious habit. No voice spoke in her mind. The alien’s facial gesture was swift and delicate: Braemar could not identify any organized system of sign. On the tape, Johnny spoke aloud and the alien rarely spoke at all. When the conversation became intellectual she had to rely on Johnny’s notes. As far as she could judge, the gaps in the dialogue were filled with reasonable likelihood by the