Phoenix Café

by Gwyneth Jones

  Their waiter had returned; the Café was emptying; the evening was over. Catherine tried to offer her palm to his debit machine, but was shouted down. “Tonight you’re our guest!” they cried. “Don’t be so keen, rich lady! We’ll surely be sponging off you soon!”

  “Let Mish pay!” roared Joset. “Let’s humiliate the style-victim!”

  ii

  Soon after her introduction to the Phoenix Café, Catherine realized that she had to go back to the poor ward. She was sane again after a spasm of madness, and she wanted to know what had become of the young lady with the bandaged wrist and the toy snake. She took a cab to the police station where she’d been held, but prudently had it drop her a few blocks away and sent it back to the stand. It would be cruel to leave it waiting, where an untended semi-sentient vehicle was likely to be butchered and carried off in pieces before she returned.

  In Maitri’s garden it was autumn now. Here the weather was always the same. The same brazen sky pasted like strips of paper across the cracks between the termite-nest blocks they called the hives; over the parched miserable patches of potager where no crops thrived. The same listless figures peered from doorways; the same dull-eyed children gathered to follow the stranger. She’d dressed like a local in a loose blouse and trousers, with a long sturdy overshirt to conceal her female body; she couldn’t make herself inconspicuous. Hive-dwellers came to the prosperous streets. They were the beggars. They were the weed-cutters who fed your cab when you were stopped by traffic orders or stalled by a crowd, the squatters who prowled in ragged troupes in search of new living space or ground to grow food. But a hive “estate” was as exclusive as a rich suburb. Outsiders did not come here by accident.

  The usual straggling crowd covered the ramps and the steps of the police station. She couldn’t make up her mind how to approach this. Suppose she asked, and the police said: What girl? There was no girl, Miss Catherine. In the end she turned away. The police were like Catherine: they knew they weren’t supposed to get involved in rich people’s troubles. This was the wrong place to start. She decided to visit her own little trou: the building was nearby. Someone might remember something.

  She left the stuffy glare of the street and climbed. The termite nest shape of these tenements was meant for coolness and efficiency. It was a design found everywhere in the quartier; and quite likely over the whole human world. But though the hives were potentially, easily, self-sufficient in power and light and waste disposal, their connection to the bit-grid was not enough to support their routine maintenance. The lifts and lights never functioned for long at a time; sanitation bacteria gave up the unequal struggle. She reached her floor and picked her way through an overflow, where foul liquid oozed over the floor of the indoor street. Children were picking through it too, looking for anything edible, anything remotely of value. She reached her trou, and scratched at the entrance.

  “Justine?”

  A face she didn’t recognize peered through the hybrid curtain.

  “Who are you?” Catherine demanded. “Where’s Justine, and her kids?”

  “Has she sent you for the rent? You can’t have it. We haven’t got it.”

  She glimpsed her small room, full of bodies: adults, children, a baby—all of them hooked up to the tvc. Except for the baby, which was crying, and one figure that lay writhing and shivering on a miserable bed-with-legs.

  “What’s wrong with your friend?”

  “Leave us alone!”

  She could not bully her way in. She had stupidly come here without any cash, without anything to give. She pulled off her overshirt.

  “Here, take this. It’s good material. You can sell it, buy medicine—”

  Furious, she went straight to the Church of Self. The shrine, a dirty partition on the ground floor of a much older building, was as she remembered it. Stacked screens running blurred and indecipherable Aleutian sacred records. A larger screen featuring one of the Church of Self’s meager prize exhibits: an African ordained to the priesthood, recounting a telepresence visit to the shipworld. Everything covered in dead dirt, skin flakes, grease, dust. Her former comrades were dozily chatting and eating sweeties, on the low stage that imitated an Aleutian dais.

  “Where’s Justine? She was to have my trou. Why are those people renting my room? There is no rent. I paid it for the whole lease!”

  They gaped at her.

  “Justine can live with her uncle now,” explained the unctuous deacon, gathering himself in alarm, trying to bow. “So she’s renting out the room you kindly gave her.” he added in Silence, plaintively.

  “What about my things? You were to sell them, buy food for the poor.”

  The deacon was wearing a pair of Catherine’s Parisian shoes. He noticed this fact a moment after Catherine did, and pulled the hems of his trousers over his feet, with a fatuous grin. “Too good to sell, Miss. It would have been a waste.”

  She shook with rage. She could not remember their names, which made argument impossible. “There’s a man very ill in my trou. It looks like antifeedant sickness. Did you know that?”

  “Oh, yes,” agreed one of the lay-persons. “It’s his own fault. They’ve been squatting on preserved land, Miss. They don’t understand that if they don’t leave the park land alone we will all suffer. So they go there and get sick.”

  “He’s near death.”

  They nodded, bewildered. Wasn’t death the Mission’s gift to the poor?

  “You should have told us you were coming, Miss.” The deacon had got over his fright, his tone was dignified reproach. “We would have been prepared.”

  Catherine searched for the tenement block where she’d attended her last conversion. She didn’t know why she was looking for it. She was crying, rubbing her bare arms. She didn’t know why she was crying. What else did she expect? In Misha Connelly’s world trade was a thing of the past. In the hives buying and selling were the desperate facts of life. They could not live except by battening on the rich, and the rich defended themselves savagely, poisoning the land and everything that grew on it with the antifeedant genes, the pesticides that had to be removed laboriously from the produce before it could be eaten. Pests! The humans were turning on each other, as creatures will when they are too many for the space and food and water. She was responsible for this misery. She, Aleutia, what difference? Unlike Bhairava she believed in permanent death. She believed that death was better than life. Blood on her hands, but she didn’t pity the humans. No different flesh. If they were the masters they’d behave just the same: no end, no escape, always the same, always the same—

  “Catherine?”

  She was huddled in a blank doorway, on an indoor street she didn’t know. People were passing, indifferent. Someone bent over her. It was Agathe Uwilingiyimana, in red and green patterned overalls and a bright head tie.

  “You’d better come with me. Come to the Settlement.”

  The Settlement was a dangerous rival institution, set up by the Reformers, that vied with the Church of Self for converts. She let herself be taken there. The termite nest was better maintained than those around it. Solars glittered, the window-pocked tapering walls were festooned with tiny hanging gardens. Above the entrance, in grubby tricolor, arched the Reformer legend: “Liberté, Egalité, Amitié.”

  “Sit down, I’ll get you some tea.” Agathe frowned at Catherine’s strange undress. “What happened to your overshirt?”

  “I gave it away.” Catherine wiped her eyes.

  It was a large room, cool and well lit: cluttered with office machinery, seed boxes, planters of young vegetables; fruits on the vine, craft tools. It reminded her of the Renaissance meeting. Settlements could not compete with the Church in snob value, having no connection with the aliens, so they seduced the people with crude bribes: cheap, well-maintained rooms, improved seeds for their potagers, interesting activities.

  “One of those curse God and die days?” Agathe su
ggested cheerfully, as she struggled with a cranky drinks dispenser. “We all have them. Sometimes you lose it. Ah, qu’il est difficile de faire le bien! That old Pastorale has it right. Doing good is the hardest work in the world. People are nasty, brutal, ungrateful, sly. And being deprived doesn’t make them any nicer.”

  “How do you cope?” Catherine’s teeth were chattering; her defenses were down.

  “Anger,” said the councilor, handing her a quilted-paper wrap and a steaming beaker. “Anger, authority, and kindness. I try to keep hold of those three, not necessarily in that order. I’m glad to see you here.” She sat down, a cluttered table between them. “We don’t run group suicides. I admit I don’t like the Church of Self much. But I admired what you were doing. Our motives aren’t so different. Like you, I’m trying to shift people out of the shit.”

  “Why?” asked Catherine. She could not drink hot liquid.

  Agathe laughed. “God knows!”

  “She’s a priest,” said someone. “More than that: she’s a Perfect.”

  The speaker was Lalith the halfcaste. She came over from a desk where she’d been feeding sheets of print through an ancient scanner. “Do you know what it means? She doesn’t make love. She doesn’t even masturbate, in theory: and somehow the rest of us benefit. Isn’t that a strange idea?”

  Agathe touched a small gold pin fastened to the breast of her overalls. She looked embarrassed. “I suppose it is strange. But it suits me.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Catherine,” said Lalith, smiling at Catherine’s astonishment. “The Settlement’s letting me use this place as my office. It turns out I’ll be based in the quartier for a while. We’ll probably meet at the Phoenix. But I’ve heard about you right here in the hives. People have been missing you. They appreciated your help.”

  “I didn’t join the Mission to help them,” said Catherine, repelled by so much bright, cheerful effort. “I did it to help myself. Why do you try to make them happy? Why should they be rewarded for living the way they do, for enduring the world the way it is? They’d rather have the shit. You know that’s true.”

  “Think of the city’s atmosphere,” suggested Agathe. “We don’t live under a glass dome. Yet the city has its own climate, an envelope of fug that shifts and changes, but stays in place without any intervention. A community of people is like that: a mass of individual particles held together by complex pressures. If the air in our mini-atmosphere becomes poisonous it has to be cleaned. We can’t take it away to clean it. We can’t shut down the plant; we have to adjust it while it keeps on running. I know what you’re saying, Catherine. Some bad things never seem to change, although I believe they may. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make things better. The situation is not hopeless.”

  Catherine shivered and held the beaker awkwardly. She recognized a stubborn dedication she’d met sometimes at home. Maybe the priest was right. Maybe if you kept at it, being good would work. For all her reputation as “the conscience of Aleutia” she’d never practiced Agathe’s kind of virtue; and never would. But she had begun to recover from her fugue. The Settlement was Reformer shareware—free until you’re hooked. She should not be here. This place was Gender Politics.

  “I came to look for someone,” she said, putting down her drink. “A girl, a Traditionalist young lady like Thérèse. I saw her at the police station when they were holding me after the conversion ceremony. She was in a bad state: down and out, maybe sick, totally withdrawn. At the time I thought it wasn’t my business. But she stayed on my mind.”

  Lalith and Agathe looked at each other, exchanging small, grim smiles.

  “You know something?”

  “Not exactly,” said Lalith.

  “It’s not unusual,” explained Agathe. “There’s a kind of young lady who goes that way. Their lives are very hard, hard as anything I’ve seen in the hives. The ones who struggle—like Thérèse, like Misha’s sister, Helen—suffer more. It can end the way you saw. They escape but they can’t survive.”

  “I didn’t know Misha had a sister.”

  “Well, he does. She used to come to the Phoenix. We don’t see her any more.” Agathe leaned forward, earnestly. “Catherine, I know you don’t want to get involved in Gender Politics. The war is over, even Youro is at peace, and your people are proud of that. But you can’t pretend it never happened.”

  “We don’t want to bore you,” said Lalith, “But there was a holocaust. When you aliens first moved into human government in a big way, do you remember what the Aleutians kept asking? Where are all the women?” You’d been told that half the human race was female, and the numbers didn’t add up. They didn’t add up because millions upon millions of innocent women, girl children and girl fetuses had been killed, starved to death, stoned to death, aborted, because they were women. It’s hard to forget something like that.”

  Agathe frowned. “This girl…. Do you know what a ‘Traditionalist young lady’ is, Catherine? If you were really here in the War, maybe you remember a kind of sextoy developed by the Traditionalists? Later on, when they wanted to preserve their sons’ male secondaries, they used drugs. They already knew how to produce ideal little girls. Do you understand?”

  “Females don’t need males,” said Lalith. “Except for intromission, to get pregnant: and we don’t need that any more. Males need females desperately, because otherwise they have no offspring. Men are supposed to have invented all human arts and sciences you know, as toys to attract the females. But women somehow hijacked that exclusively male thing called creativity, when they walked out on patriarchy. Then they didn’t need males for anything, and the men who insisted on being men, not human beings, were in a fix. That’s where Traditionalist young ladies come in. They’re fake trophies, to replace the real trophy-objects that got up and walked away. Male need, female independence: that’s the real cause of the Gender Wars. That’s what the men couldn’t forgive. It’s not rich versus poor, it’s not big and strong versus small and weak, it’s not aggressive versus gentle. All human beings can be any of those things. It’s the reproductive imbalance, that’s the poison. The rest is just politics.”

  Agathe smiled uneasily, clearly aware (Lalith seemed to have forgotten) how Catherine would respond to this kind of talk. “Sometimes these things need to be said. We don’t want to force anything on anyone, but humanity must and will get beyond the problem. We say to Joset at home, be as masculine as you like, be as feminine as you like. Take on any role that suits you. But don’t—”

  “Don’t be male,” put in Lalith. “Be human. Being male sucks.”

  “And does it work?” wondered Catherine.

  Agathe laughed. “Are you kidding? He wants to be Mish Connelly! We get at him because we can’t help it. We call him a throwback. It just makes him worse. But he’s still one of us, because Reform isn’t dogma, it isn’t something we impose on anyone, it’s what’s happening: an evolution.”

  “Aren’t male and female ‘two sides of the same coin,’ as you people say?”

  “Maybe. But ‘being female’ is being human, and able to have children, which goes for anyone, really: it’s not a special state. Being male, mm, well—”

  “Look at Misha Connelly,” broke in Lalith again, “His whole purpose in life is to rebel against his father, to outdo his father, and yet he knows that he is his father. It’s a recipe for psychic disaster. They say they’re living in the ancient traditional way, but have you looked at them? Elite Traditionalists don’t marry. Why have a sexual partner who may undermine you, betray you, try to steal your slice of pie? They don’t have children. They make copies of themselves, or worse. Girls like Thérèse never grow up. They’re living dolls. They’re the embodiment of everything that’s wrong. Meanwhile young men like Misha, stuffed full of testo, go crazy because the sweeties are out of reach.”

  Agathe gave her a warning glance. “We shouldn’t talk about our friends when they’re not here. But it’s ironic that you people regard the Traditionalis
ts as the natural humans. Nothing very dramatic has happened to us, nous autres, who have drifted with the tide. Women are different now. We don’t menstruate; we don’t get pregnant so easily, we don’t have nursing breasts unless we’re pregnant or suckling babies. Men are different too. They have a lower sperm count, don’t get so hairy or so bald, or build such muscles. Girls and boys take longer to become sexually mature. It’s all detail. Everything fun or valuable about sexual difference is still available.” She grinned. “My little brother is too young to be interested in sex, though he’d love you to believe otherwise. But by all the signs he’s going to be a raving hetero.”

  “This is fascinating,” said Catherine. “But what about my young lady?”

  They shook their heads.

  “There’s nothing more we can tell you,” said Agathe. “This is the city where the good guys lost. Bad things, terrible things can happen here. We see them daily. Your young lady was not unique. That’s as much as we can say.”

  Catherine let them put her into a cab and send her home.

  What had she seen that day? It was hard to be sure. The fragile skin of a human forearm, burnt or scorched by little black sores. Maybe the girl had been in a fire.

  She sat on her bed, wondering. Agathe and Lalith had been “messing with her head.” It didn’t take a telepath to know that! But she had no will to investigate further. Did they believe that Catherine had been here in the Gender War? Perhaps not. Or they wouldn’t have imagined they could get her to take sides. It was interesting to have heard Lalith speak so unguardedly, so differently from her public manifesto! Interesting, but not surprising. She studied the flesh of her own naked arms. The inner forearm was very pale and soft.

  What do I look like?

  There were no mirrors in the aliens’ part of the house: Aleutians considered mirrors uncanny. She found a tvc set, took it to her room and made herself a tall virtual screen, silvered like looking-glass. Her nose was too narrow and slender for the rest of her human face. She had not known that before. Her shoulders were too high. She stripped off her clothes: she smoothed her hands over the barely covered bones of the human ribcage, missing the long Aleutian straps of muscle. She cupped her small breasts, held the sides of her indented waist (another strange absence of muscle); groped the fatty mounds of her buttocks. She opened with her fingers the folds of flesh beneath soft hair at the base of her belly. The place human females used for making love, for accepting intromission; for giving birth. She’d tried to masturbate: this body didn’t respond. She had never made love with anyone. She had been perfect, without effort.