White Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

for the chosen few, her artists, the young “engineer-journalists” trained and licensed to handle the protean goop at the heart of the latest phase of the Information Age. Johnny and Seimwa’s relationship had been personal from the start. He humored the old monster, enjoyed her, loved the life she gave him. One day he discovered that she, or someone, was aware of his Union activities. He braced himself for the earthquake: none came. The next time Johnny went on a trip it was up to the Space Station. In prospect this was an obscure piece of excitement. No one went to Space anymore, not even the Chinese. It was several years since the Station had been abandoned. The crewed trip was a one-off: assess and retrieve. In practice, they discovered that eyeball evidence didn’t differ much from pictures relayed by the station’s compromised communications; they retrieved nothing; and nobody watched them on tv. But at Johnny’s medical debriefing, he was declared infected with a Class Q petrovirus.
    Petroviruses had been developed by the military, designed to dissolve organic polymers. The Class Q type combined this ability with a propensity to attack the protein based “living” material that had replaced conventional silicon-based processors. No one knew much about QV: except that it had appeared from nowhere, ruined the Mars Mission, soured the relationship between the USA and Russia for years, and arguably had been the final death knell of Man’s attempts upon the High Frontier. No one had ever claimed responsibility for the Mars debacle. The theory that QV was an artificial product, designed by terrorists, was perhaps no more than a reassuring myth. Maybe it had just growed.
    Johnny wasn’t just a journalist, he was an engineer. He took things apart, he put things together, he actually handled the marvelous, vulnerable, magical “Blue Clay,” through nothing more than a skin of silky plastic. He would never be able to do that again. He was a risk even in normal life, because the QV killed humans too. Death would come, at the Diagnostics’ best estimate, within two or three years; after a brief plunge into premature dementia.
    The infected space program personnel had vanished into Quarantine, and presumably died there. Johnny would have to live and die there too. Not many federal laws were still respected in the third decade of the twenty-first century: but that was one. Seimwa’s doctor—a human being, ironically for privacy and style—gave Johnny the hint that it would be a few hours before his foreign correspondent’s passport could be cancelled. Johnny just had time to get home and kiss goodbye… He’d taken flight, knowing that he was not infected, and understanding that the mitigation came from Seimwa, as did his punishment. The doctor wouldn’t have dropped that hint on his own initiative.
    He could have disappeared, gone native. But Johnny meant to survive. Therefore he kept himself registered, did the things Notifiable Disease people were supposed to do in countries that did not quarantine: and continued to protest his innocence. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t even clean toilets: but he had a pension from the paper, delivered to him through the Embassy in whatever country he was in. He had contacts in long-haul travel who would still give him rides. These trips were hedged around with gruesome indignities but they provided some distraction. They permitted him to keep up his fantasy game, his imaginary treasure hunt.
    Life was still awful, simply awful.
    Johnny came home from L’Iceberg and lay on his cot staring up at Byron the Bulb, reviewing his horrible plight. And the moral of the story is—he thought—don’t tease the dinosaurs, kids. Doesn’t matter how decrepit those pea-brained bonepiles may seem. Their teeth just go on getting bigger.
    Johnny’s hotel was called The Welcome Sight, a cheap doss, but tolerant and friendly. The room was cleanish (he swept it himself) and furnished with