Phoenix Café
Page 4
He reverted to formal speech, to keep things polite. Lord Maitri, though out of office, was a respected veteran of the Expedition. “How is ‘Catherine,’ anyway? Such a shame about the psychosis. Sad for our friend, and awkward for the Expedition.”
“She is not crazy.”
Catherine’s powers of recovery had reassured her guardian. She was in control again, there was no trace of the state she’d been in this morning. The person who was at present Catherine had always been the same. Always taking life terribly hard, always capable of getting back on his feet, laughing at himself.
“Didn’t someone tell me all human females are insane, to some degree?” continued Sattva imperturbably. “Something to do with hormones or enzymes or neurons or whatever. I suppose our friend didn’t know that when he made his famous will. Or he might have considered the risk to the reputation of the Buonarotti project, if not to his own health. The folks out in orbit don’t know anything about humans, but they don’t like unknown risks! Not that I’m in the least worried. Our friend is unbalanced, owing to the effect of having been translated into human female form. It’s very sad. It has nothing to do with that early trip he took in the Buonarotti prototype. The Departure’s going to be as safe as dying in bed. Everyone who matters is satisfied of that.”
The shipworld had been lost in space, irretrievably lost, when they’d stumbled upon the giant planet’s system. The “Buonarotti Device” was going to take them home. It was the great prize, the incalculable treasure that had transformed the Expedition to Earth from a rather raffish looting raid to the immensely important business it was today. The person then called “Clavel” and now called “Catherine,” one of the Three Captains of the original Expedition, was the one who’d tracked down the Device (which the human engineer who built it had tried to conceal) and proved, by his “test-flight” that they could all return Home. The fact that he’d died as a result of that daredevil trip was not an obstacle. Many years of research and development had ensued: the Aleutian version of the Device was not tainted by a heroic association! Then suddenly, in what was surely the last generation on Earth, with the Departure imminent, Lord Maitri—Clavel’s staunchest follower—had conceived in middle age. The embryo had been immediately identified as Clavel: and in accordance with the Third Captain’s wishes had been re-engineered as a human female, and transferred to a human womb. Sadly, the process of translation had serious psychiatric ill-effects. Which was convenient: for the Third Captain—even in the body of a human female—had of course, immediately, started making a nuisance of himself. Always the same Clavel.
To be perfectly frank, though one would never say so aloud, “Catherine’s” missionary behavior was what the humans call “a Godsend.” Bloody murder, when he openly confesses he doesn’t believe they will live again! Now try telling Aleutia your beloved lord is perfectly sane!
“It just goes to show,” went on Sattva, looking hard at Maitri. “What we can expect, messing about with reproduction in that nasty human way? I don’t want to sound pompous, but some things are best left to the WorldSelf. We can’t have conceptions being triggered at will, people getting born whenever their friends feel like it. It would destroy society as we know it. Don’t you agree?”
Maitri had never admitted the implied charge, in seventeen human years or so. Too wise to be goaded into argument he gave a diplomatic shrug.
“Oh, absolutely. I’m sure you’re right.”
“Well, well. Let’s say no more. I really must circulate.” Sattva looked for a suitable target. , he complained, discreetly Silent so the humans couldn’t understand.
“Agathe? Agathe Uwilingiyimana.”
“She.”
Maitri sighed.
Sattva’s manner changed.
Reformers and Traditionalists were the principal human political parties, former combatants in the Gender Wars. They contended for control in every city, not always under those names. Originally they’d represented the human sexes: the Reformers being the party of the women, Traditionalists mainly led by men. Throughout Earth, and especially in fiercely Traditionalist Youro, the factions were more and more at odds as Aleutian influence withdrew.
Sattva frowned: then deliberately raised his voice in another speech, short and to the point. “The Expedition is doing its best to build bridges. One reason I’m here today, Lord Maitri, is to sound-out Youroan opinion on our negotiations with the Reformer regime in the Americas.”
North America had quarantined itself, early in the Aleutian era. The southern continent had joined them later on. The Americas had shut themselves off, behind physical and data-proof barriers, and refused to recognize the Aleutian presence. Presumably there was some covert human contact, but the aliens had never been able to find a go-between. For a hundred years they’d been pretending they didn’t care, and secretly longing to be invited back.
Maitri grimaced a discreet warning: the word “Reformer” struck a wrong note in this company. Sattva forged on regardless.
“It is our hope that our last acts on Earth will be to heal the breach between the two great Broods, and bring the Americas back into the human fold. We mean to secure peace with honor, for all humankind.”
The Aleutians were the lords of life. In the days of First Contact, and for generations after, human deadworld communications devices had been avoided with horror: void-force technology was an offense against reason and religion. Maitri glanced at Sattva’s virtual ghost with a wry smile.
They had drifted, as they talked, to the buffet table. The food was as usual practically untouched. Maitri sighed. He felt warmly towards Misha Connelly, whatever the young rascal’s motives. He began to rearrange the tidbits in more enticing patterns.
iii
Late in the evening, Misha’s friends arrived at the Connelly town house. The house was large, the lower floors i
n the possession of various Connelly tenants and subtenants. The rooms allotted to Misha, high up, above the apartment that Helen shared with their father when the family was in town, were private territory. He was allowed to let his imagination run free, and was always in the middle of a new creation. Nothing you saw or touched could be trusted.
He had changed his clothes; exchanging the vat-grown overalls he’d worn at the party for a similar outfit, cut and stitched from mechanically woven Old Earth cloth. His friends wore tee-shirts and jeans. Misha couldn’t bring himself to adopt the full, embarrassing native costume: he excused himself by explaining that he, at least, was not afraid of the aliens, and therefore he didn’t have to be slavish about avoiding their fashions. His friends knew he was lying. But they were tolerant of Misha’s vanity, and the slippery nature of his political commitment. He was their leader.
“What was she like?” they demanded.
Mâtho, the shy and solemn one, a Traditionalist but by no means a gilded youth, was the son of a struggling newsagent. Rajath the halfcaste had no affiliation, not even to his own kind, and not the slightest hope of being on an alien lord’s guest list. Joset “the politician” was of Michael’s monied class, but a Reformer, whose formidable female relatives were no longer accepting invitations to Lord Maitri’s “at homes.”
“Why is it called an ‘at home’?” Mâtho wanted to know.
He was a small, round shouldered individual with a large nose and a wide-pored caramel colored skin. His big eyes seemed stretched out of shape by the hours he spent at the screen, splicing and blending by hand footage gleaned from the leavings of more prosperous newshandlers. His question was serious. He spent his hungry leisure studying obscure informational byways, hunting out the tiny details that would be needed to rebuild a world. “L-lord Maitri was a-at home, but no one else was. Except the other aliens in his household, I mean. So why at-at-at home? Shouldn’t ‘at home’ mean a p-party where people stay at home and meet in the datasphere?”
“I have no idea.” Michael poured lime-flavored water for them, and rinsed his own mouth again: the soapy taste of the buffet lingered. Maitri’s cook might be human, but the air in the aliens’ kitchen was irremediably tainted.
He was receiving his friends in his bedroom, which was at present fitted with invisible furniture and apparently walled and floored in clear glass. He threw himself carelessly onto his bed, stretched his arms above his head, rolled onto his belly and lay like a diver suspended, gazing down at a landscape of roofs and towers and chasms that lapped to the rim of a dusky horizon.
“I couldn’t care less what Maitri calls his parties. I met her, oh brothers in the struggle. We talked, intimately. We were alone together for hours.”
“Alone where?” demanded Rajath. “How could you be alone?”
“In the garden.”
The three friends pressed around Misha’s couch, as if they wanted to lick the news out of him, like Aleutian courtiers supping on their prince.
“Did you ask her for sex?” Mâtho groaned aloud and rolled his eyes.
“Did you take her,” demanded Joset with a sarcastic grin. “There, among the strange flowers, in the wild urgency of your mutual passion?”
Misha floated, freefall above the abyss. “She’s one of those women who exudes the scent of come, as the aliens exude their wriggling information cells. The hot, sticky smell of sex fills the air around her. You know as soon as you see her move, as soon as the chemical breath of her mingles with the taste of your skin, that fucking her will be an experience of fabulous, sensual savagery.”
“Does she have a good figure?” lisped Rajath.
The halfcastes had long ago dedicated themselves to physical imitation of the aliens. “He” had been altered before birth in the customary way, and was supposed to have no human sex, male or female. But he was grinning wildly all over his noseless face. “Does she have their place in her belly? Did she let you put your finger inside? Did you get her wet on you, did you feel the claw? How I’d like to have one of their women, if I had a dick you know: and stick it in and feel that claw clutching me. Or is she made like human women down there? Does she m-menstruate?” He shuddered in thrilling disgust.
Mâtho started to get upset. Rajath’s crude language distressed him.
“What does it matter?” he protested. “Whatever traits they have given her, she is not a woman. They don’t have sexes; they are all exactly the same. He is an alien, we must remember that! We must not be fooled by his disguise.”
“She’s not an alien,” corrected Joset, the doubter. “She’s the daughter of one of Maitri’s human servants: conditioned, characterized, stereotyped into believing herself one of them. She’s not an Aleutian, she’s a dangerous lunatic. You’re a brave man, Mish. I wouldn’t have liked to be alone with her. Did you ask her about that latest conversion ceremony? Have you snagged the coverage? Nasty! Very, very nasty…”
“The missionaries don’t kill,” muttered Mâtho, scrupulously fair. “It’s assisted suicide; it’s quite legal if it’s done in private. It’s not legal to watch.”
“Is it my fault if some grasping newshandler has been trawling the emergency services?”
“We talked about God,” Misha whispered drowsily. “And death and immortality. But sex was there. The subtext of our conversation was all sex.”
Rajath and Joset crowed and slapped each other on the back. “Michael Junior is in love with the alien throat-slasher!” howled Rajath, and broke into a fragment of popular song. “Oh, sweet mystery! Across the galaxy! Fated we meet, to be each other’s doom—” Mâtho looked ready to weep, torn between shame and guilty fascination. Misha remembered the inner torture chamber; the haunted darkness of Catherine’s eyes. He was feeding his friends with gobbets of her agonized flesh and blood.
He swung himself to his feet. “Tomorrow I shall make flowers. Blue lilies and orange bellflowers. It’s an allusion to her gown. I’ll send them to her. She finds the sexual organs of our plants irresistibly arousing.”
He swept his duster coat from the foot of the couch and tossed it around his shoulders. It had begun to melt. It would soon be in perfect tattered form for the passeggiata. He resumed his black beret and studied the effect, in his inward eye, with brief but exacting attention.
“Don’t be scared, Joset. She’s given up the missionary work, she told me so herself. Miss Catherine will need a new distraction, and we shall provide it. But we don’t want to seem too keen. Let’s go. Out, anywhere! To the Café!”
He plunged his hands to the wrists into a crystal nautilus vase that stood on the glass floor. “The City Manager was there, talking to lord Maitri. He was watching me very closely.”
“The Manager!” breathed Mâtho, stunned.
“So old Sattva ghosted the party.” Joset grimaced knowledgeably. “He’s a tricky customer. Did you manage to eavesdrop? Hear anything about increased law enforcement?”
“Not a word,” confessed Misha. “I wasn’t interested. But let me tell you about the food. It was bizarre. Roast peacocks with their feathers, whole antelopes with their heads and horns, hedgehogs in fish sauce, small mountains of extinct fruits, and everything tasting horribly of yeast and detergent.”
They stormed through the house and courtyard and out into the streets. It was growing dark at last: a darkness that would be unbroken by street-lamps or commercial displays. The Aleutians did not understand why anyone would need municipal lighting. Each of them bowed for the prince’s aspergation. Misha lifted and shook his glistening hands over their heads. On they swept, into the vast, exhausted human city, each carrying their own share of the pale, clinging fire.
2
Political Meeting
i
Catherine resumed her old place in the household. She joined Maitri’s elderly and diminishing band of retainers at services in the character shrine, in the slow formal dancing that closed every day; and through the sociable Aleutian nights. When the members of the company n
apped and chatted and entertained each other, she reminisced with them about the glory days gone by. She discussed sacred records with the chaplain, played “Go” and “chess” with the Silent, and “Scrabble” with the Signifiers. She sent word to her comrades in the Church that her health had broken down and she would be taking an indefinite break from her missionary work. She made arrangements to dispose of her trou, along with the few possessions she’d left there. Maitri, delighted, secured her an invitation to visit the daughter of an old friend, a young lady like herself.
The Khans sent a closed car, which picked her up at the front door of Maitri’s house and deposited her, some time later, inside a walled garden. There was a sharp twittering of birdsong. Far distant walls (the garden’s dimensions were doubled, at least, by the artful use of virtual display-screens) were bright with vividly colored Aleutian creepers. Fruit trees stood in rows, bearing flowers and fruits together, apples and pears, apricots and peaches: all the foliage, dark or pale, suffused with the tell-tale un-green of hybrid Aleutian genes. Butterfly wings flickered, insects hummed.
Airborne traffic within the Cities was limited by environmental law; and unfashionable. Youroans traveled continental distances, without a thought, in “closed cars,” that gave you no sensation of movement. It worried Catherine, like a vague nausea, that she did not know where the hell she was. She could have crossed Youro, or spent the hours sitting in a traffic jam.
“You must be Catherine.” Mrs. Benazir Khan, Maitri’s old friend, dismissed the car: it vanished, magically, into an antique false vista of box hedges and fountains. She was a tall human, a gauze scarf draped over her sleek dark hair, her figure markedly but sedately female in sober Aleutian overalls. She held Catherine’s hands slightly longer than the customary greeting required, as if judging for herself and finally whether this was a suitable companion for her child. “I’m glad you’ve given up the Mission work,” she said at last. She shook her head. “Maitri has been so worried. The Church of Self is not the answer, Catherine. You must let us find our own solutions to our problems.”