Phoenix Café
Page 6
Always had to pay.
Maitri levered himself away from the wall. It made his nasal ache to think about “reproductive tracts” and “information systems.” In the old days nobody had been interested in science. How it used to make Kumbva mad! Now the air was full of chatter about the Buonarotti Device, the Multi-Realities problem, and other obscure puzzles. Maitri felt like an old dullard. How we’ve changed, he thought. It’s going to take us lives and lives to get back to normal, afterwards.
So many friends were not around, this last generation. Kumbva the engineer. Rajath the trickster, First Captain: the unscrupulous individual who had the idea of making landfall in the first place. Aditya the Beauty. Dear Bella, and funny old Sid. The Landing Parties cluster had dispersed, maybe never to be born together again. Maybe it was just as well. Some of the others might have been tempted to do something outrageous about the way the end of the adventure was being handled: if it was only to chuck a spannet in the works. Luckily for them, the Expedition’s current backers only had to deal with ineffectual Maitri, and a poor mad local girl who held the soul of that stiff-necked person who will never use his own power.
Those delightful phrases, he thought sadly, (retreating from his fencing match with Aleutia-in-the-Mind, before he got himself into trouble). No one uses them anymore. You probably wouldn’t find a human in this city who could remember what a spannet was. They didn’t watch the movies, they didn’t follow the news. There was nothing but interactive sport and those dreadful virtuality games: art without an audience. What’s the use of art without an audience?
Maitri’s eyes brimmed with tears, Aleutian tears that blurred his vision but did not fall. Some of his best friends were Reformers. What would become of them after Aleutia had gone?
“The poor devils,” he muttered aloud. “Oh, the poor devils.”
The Monet robe felt heavy: the corridors in this house got longer every day. He bent forwards, his hands curling into paws. The tired body wanted to trot on all fours. But respect for the stolen beauty of the waterlilies kept him upright.
iii
The meeting hall was in a Reformer neighborhood, which caused Lord Maitri’s party some qualms when they realized where they were heading. Maitri pointed out that the next venue on Lalith’s tour was half way across Youro. They’d had to give up their dear old limousine when the household became too small to count as a “transport community” in city ordinance, and the cost of such a journey in hired cars would be shocking. Everybody was supposed to be economizing, he reminded them virtuously, to cover the expense of the Departure Project.
Their cab dropped them at a deconstruction site where something very large was vanishing at speed into the maws of silent, bovine civil engineering plant. There was no sign of a meeting hall, and everyone began to panic. Most of Maitri’s people had lived in Youro in the Gender War. They were justifiably afraid of finding themselves lost in the human city, where the air was dead as stone, and the only information available came in printed text or confusing street-projections. Catherine looked for a minitel screen, Maitri flicked through a street directory. Atha, one of the Silent members of the household, covered himself in glory by spotting a glowing hand-sized green arrow, which did not seem to belong to the projection that surrounded it. He had noticed similar green arrows on the flyer Maitri had copied from the local listings. Someone spotted another. They followed the trail, painfully, from one eye-hurting virtual commercial to the next, through the unbuilding site and into the alleys beyond.
Maitri complained.
They knew they’d reached their destination when they met a young person in brightly colored overalls, putting up copies of that same flyer at the entrance to an ancient brick-built Christian character shrine. He was using a small machine, which he pointed at another machine that clung to the wall of the church: a data-junction box. As he did so, the Renaissance flyer materialized among the church notices, displacing the text of a restoration appeal fund, a list of Mass-times and the St Vincent de Paul Society’s yearly accounts.
“Isn’t that clever!” exclaimed Vijaya, Maitri’s first secretary.
The human looked round and smiled alertly. He was a halfcaste: his face dinted in the middle, with nostril slits instead of a human nose; his upper lip short and divided. “Free advertising,” he lisped. “It doth no harm. The bit-minder will restore the licensee’s data in an hour or two, and that’s all the time we need. Step right inside, noble aliens. Your reserved seats are waiting for you.”
“But how did you know we were coming?” cried the chaplain, naively astonished. “Have you been ‘bugging’ Lord Maitri’s house?”
“Didn’t have to. You snagged us, we snagged your hit. And then you ordered a cab to the venue. Simple.”
The Silent were hanging back, deeply alarmed by the puzzle-trail and the obviously illicit behavior of this halfcaste. Silent Aleutians—naturally conservative, obstinately conventional—mistrusted any extended articulate speech that did not emanate from “the proper authorities.” Maitri’s domestics had joined the outing under protest. They were well aware that their lord was using them to make a doubtful excursion look respectable.
Maitri managed to reassure them, but Atha had wandered off down the street, because he’d seen a car that reminded him of dear old limo. Catherine had to go and fetch him, to the amusement of several more humans who’d come out to see the fun. At last they were through the double doors (inert slabs, Old Earth style, like the door of Catherine’s prison cell). They found the whole assembly on its feet, jostling eagerly for a glimpse of the aliens. Stewards wearing green armbands greeted them with the large, infantile gestures of Youro humans trying to “speak Aleutian.” They were ushered to a row of hard seats-with-legs. Their chairs were indeed marked, in symbols and in printed English, “Reserved for Our Aleutian Friends.” This time (to Vijaya’s disappointment) the signs were mere rag-card. Maitri rose to the occasion, answering the stewards in the same expansive style.
“So much for discretion!” he muttered, sitting by Catherine and arranging the folds of his sleeveless robe. He did not seem displeased. He was wearing scarlet, a sober industrial color he’d thought suitable for the occasion. “I don’t think I’ve caused such a friendly stir among the humans since First Contact. Aren’t the chairs lovely!”
Venues licensed for in-person speakers were small and few. The status of articulate speech in Aleutian society made the aliens nervous about human demagogues: especially in Youro, always the most recalcitrant region of Old Earth. Catherine noticed that this hall was not only small but unnaturally bare. Generated-image décor was cheap and universal, yet these faded plaster walls were naked. Niches around the nave, which should have held either actual statues or the economical virtual-image version, held only strange, draggled bunches of leaves and flowers. The church seating had been rearranged, in a pattern that had not been current on Earth for three hundred years: rows that faced ahead towards a makeshift dais. A tall public address screen stood at the back of this dais, a row of hard chairs in front of it faced a simple upright lectern; and the audience. The screen was blank, and there was no draggled decoration up there. One of the stewards scurried up to the end of the aliens’ row, bearing an armful of small machines.
“Transcripters.” He spoke in French, then remembered and waved his arms.
Maitri beamed. “You speak very good Aleutian, young man.”
“I’m a woman, actually. But thanks anyway.”
Catherine, having looked in vain for the
arts and crafts (unless those bunches of leaves counted for something), settled to contemplate Buonarotti’s miracle. Buonarotti had bemused the First Contact world by insisting there’s no such thing as alien intelligence. She hadn’t meant the aliens were fakes. Intelligent creatures may take on different bodily forms. (Peenemünde had once confessed that she’d hoped the first extraterrestrials to arrive would resemble octopuses. She liked octopuses). Cultures may vary. But a few simple, logical and mechanical laws will shape life wherever it arises: driving through evolution on every fractal scale, from slime molds to party-politics. Thought and feeling will be formed everywhere by the same pressures that created them on earth. Intelligence cannot be alien…. And here was the proof. Every human in this crowded hall was chattering away in a language the Aleutians understood (and misunderstood) as confidently as they would the Common Tongue of a different Brood at home. Unfortunately, since humans were addicted to the Spoken Word and ignored what they dismissed as an “animal” mode of communication, most of them didn’t care what they said in Silence.
They shouldn’t have been allowed in. What are they doing here? Well, I’ve seen them. That’s something to tell the grandchildren. Wonder if I could touch one? They make me feel sick, they’re dirty, they’re filling the air with their mucky bugs. They make me feel as if things are crawling on me. Are they really going to leave? Just vanish, the way they came? I don’t believe it. I wonder what they look like naked. They wear nappies instead of going to the toilet, they have little creatures bred specially to wipe their bottoms: how revolting.
Maitri’s retainers were veterans. They’d either lived on Earth before, or been schooled by those who had: they were almost as indifferent to the legendary rudeness as if they were human themselves. Beside Catherine, Atha, Maitri’s kind-hearted cook, picked a claw full of squirming red life from the pores in his throat, and offered it to Vijay. This is me my dear, this is how I feel, this is how things are with me just now. Vijaya accepted the gift affectionately. A wave of intensified disgust burst from his human neighbors. Atha looked about him, wondering silently:
Catherine giggled. People in dull green overalls, with the bright green stewards’ armbands, marched onto the packing-case dais. The crowd came to attention. The stewards retired, a single figure approached the lectern.
Lalith the halfcaste presented as feminine, though not female. She had the moderate prenatal transformation: nostril slits and a cleft lip rather than a fully open nasal. She was sturdily built, her skin tone an average rosy-brown. She launched into some general remarks about peace, love and the work ethic.
Catherine prepared to be bored. She wondered if Misha Connelly could possibly be interested in this sort of thing.
“None of us can forget the Gender War. It has shaped our lives. It has shaped the state of our planet, as much if not more than the Aleutians—”
Lord Maitri’s people started, and the Silent touched their lord in furtive chemical reproach. Lalith’s odd noises could not distract them from her perfectly intelligible Silence.
“But how much of the rest of human history do we remember? I am, as you can see, a halfcaste. You may wonder why, if the Renaissance seeks a way forward that’s beyond gender, I remain gendered as a member of the third sex. It’s because I’m proud of the halfcaste tradition. When the Aleutians arrived, some three hundred years ago, they were welcomed, almost worshiped. Some wanted so desperately to be like these angels from outer space that they altered their bodies by crude surgery: became sexless, silent, noseless. It was childish of course. But they also adopted the Aleutian practice of studying the records. Halfcastes study the records for the same reason as the Aleutians do. They believe that they can identify their former incarnations in moving-image records of the past and thereby ‘learn to be themselves.’ Although I respect that belief, I do not share it. I study the records not as an individual but as a citizen of humanity. It is not myself that I find there, it is humanity’s Self. We have forgotten our past. We have forgotten our own resources. We play the games, which have no history. We ought to be making movies, talk-shows, science programs. We ought to be analyzing our archives. The Aleutians are the lords of life. But they build and preserve their cultural identity through the artificial records made by the Priests of Self—a mass of data to which every Aleutian, rich or poor, famous or obscure, makes a contribution. Why have we given up our own history, if the Aleutians value history so much? We’ve become dependent on their biotechnology, their skill at altering our landscapes, at generating tailored hybrids so much superior to our original crops, animals, machines. But we had our own life sciences once. We can recover them. We can build our own customized world.”
Lalith paused, sweeping the crowd with a practiced, in-gathering glance.
“Once, we believed that the Aleutians were divine. Today we know that they don’t live forever, and they cannot read our minds. When they arrived they were shipwrecked adventurers, their asteroid-mothership lost in space. Soon they will return to their home planet, using the invention of a human physicist. They will go in peace. But when the Aleutians hand over their research on the Buonarotti Device to Earth’s scientists—as was agreed at the Neubrandenburg Conference, when two halfcastes, Sidney Carton and Bella, had re-discovered the secret of instantaneous travel (excuse me if I correct the popular record, which credits this discovery to the Three Captains.). When they leave us, I say, equipped to seek our own new territories among the stars: will we be ready?”
Probably Lalith had planned her speech without knowing that actual Aleutians would be in the audience. She certainly wasn’t making the alien visitors feel inconspicuous. Catherine was thankful when she realized the speaker had reached her peroration.
“The Renaissance is not a war against gender. We, in the Movement, are Reformers and Traditionalists, feminine and masculine. We are women, men, halfcastes, and ‘don’t knows’ (this sally raised some human tittering). We have no plans to give up any of these diverse identities! We want to go on, not go backwards. To start history again from now. I call myself a halfcaste, but I’m not a human trying to imitate the aliens. I’m a human who is the product of three hundred years of history that cannot be denied. Who is trying to find a new way forward for humanity as it is. The Renaissance asks you to reject Aleutian goods and revive our native technologies—not because we believe that our culture is superior to theirs. Not because we reject the aliens. But because we need to learn to stand on our own two feet! I am a construction: born not of nature but of human history. Let us agree that this is true of us all. We can’t take up our old ways as if nothing happened—on that strangest of days, in Krung Thep, in Thailand, July 2038, when the Aleutians made themselves known. We must begin again from where we are now. Changed, not by the aliens alone, but by our own dynamic history. Changed and reborn!”
Cheers, applause. An interval was announced. Refreshments, a sale and display of Renaissance products, informal discussion: after which Lalith would take questions. Lalith was being escorted from the dais. This time Catherine noticed how carefully her escort masked the sturdy figure; and the sparkle of a security shield around that humble olde-worlde lectern. Lalith’s profession of non-violence might be sincere. But her material was inflammatory: and the organizers knew it.
Catherine stood, with the others.
They joined the movement to another hall. At last there were things to see and touch. Antique boxed and mounted CRT screens, out of which Renaissance luminaries from round the planet were peering, ready to work the crowd. A long table where food and drink were being dispensed. The humans broke into groups, into animated conversations and nervous silences. No one approached the aliens; even Silent comment on their presence was now extremely subd
ued. But there was no real hostility.
Most of the people were clearly Reformers, Catherine noticed. Most of them were young, and drawn from that shrunken and struggling group Mrs. Khan would call, with pity, “the employed.” There were also a few halfcastes and Traditionalists; even figures shrouded in the full chador who might be genuine high-caste Traditionalist young ladies. Everything was exactly as one would expect. She noted wryly the scattering of old lags: ageing humans with the brave, shabby, world-weary demeanor of lifelong dissidents. She knew that look well! Buonarotti’s miracle strikes again.
Maitri’s party relaxed. The speech had been alarming, but it was over. The old spirit of adventure began to stir. Atha, pleased to recover his proper role for a while, went to forage at the canteen table. Vijaya and the second secretary, Smrti—a pair of amorous predators who had never been lovers themselves, but loved to hunt in couple—attempted to make Silent propositions to some of the young male Traditionalists, whose striking appearance they much admired. They Silently (but discreetly) deplored the Reformer tendency to look and dress and act like so many big-nosed Aleutians.
Maitri and Catherine exchanged rueful glances.
“That wasn’t what I expected,” remarked Catherine, aloud and calmly. “I thought we were going to be taught how to make raffia mats; or try our hands at desk-top publishing.”
“I was a little taken aback myself,” Maitri agreed, in the same public tone. “But it sounds very creditable, and not at all anti-Aleutian, or gender biased.” He beamed at the display beside them. “What a wonderful tv cabinet. Reproduction of course, but lovely. The severe lines, such a lively counterpoint to the—”