Phoenix Café

by Gwyneth Jones

  They waited for Lydie, high as kites and hungry for more adrenalin. It was about two in the morning, north-western Youro time. Misha, who had broken his usual rule and kept a cab waiting, revealed that he’d sent for a case of rifles. He had promised Catherine that he’d take her hunting. This was a good night for it, he said. They would go after a tribe of foxes that had been plaguing a vehicle nursery. He’d had a report from the local keepers, and told the men he’d take care of the cull himself.

  The Connellys had been wildlife wardens since the Gender Wars, when the first Michael Connelly was huntsman to one of the warlord kings of Paris. Nowadays their chief business was the management of virtual wilderness experience, but they retained some antique privileges and pleasures. The friends jumped into cabs at the arena in the jostling midst of a crowd. When they jumped out again they were alone in the dark on a street corner, in a neighborhood nobody knew, and no one except Misha had ever seen before. They sent the cabs away: Misha unveiled the weapons. They were beautiful, classic, sleek, simple works of art and craft.

  “It’s a vixen,” he said, “and her half grown cubs. They don’t kill, they graze. They get in the nursery pens and tear chunks out of the vehicle blanks, which are at this stage much like very thick domestic animals: huge, stupid, moving heaps of meat. You know what foxes are like? They go blood-crazy. They can do a hell of a lot of damage.”

  “Nasty,” agreed Mâtho, solemn and responsible. “Got to be stopped.”

  “We’re going to try for the mother: if she’s gone the cubs will scatter or die. I’ve a plan of her usual movements. Wild animals are creatures of habit.”

  They sat round him, peering at the flat reader he’d laid on the ground. There was no one about, no sound but a stirring and grunting from the open pens. On the screen, menacing tawny shapes slipped in and out of shadow.

  Lydie murmured: “Is that what foxes look like?”

  Misha laughed.

  “I lied. They’re not foxes; they’re lions. A family group has moved here from some preserved woodland nearby. If they were foxes we’d do nothing. We don’t give a damn for the cab breeders, alien-stock profit-grubbers; so what if they lose a little financial fat. But lions that move into the streets sooner or later will prey on humans, and that we can’t allow.”

  “How many do you want us to kill?” demanded Joset grandly.

  “If you kill one, Jo, I’ll be very much surprised. To your positions, ladies and gentlemen.”

  He took Catherine to her place himself. He set her at the mouth of an alley, the pens ahead and the street behind. She was in a state of extreme excitement. The night was full of gleaming teeth, flashing limbs, white-rimmed eyes. It smelled of sweat, body heat and blood. She’d forgotten what was going on; didn’t know what had happened to the others. Through a darkly transparent barrier she could see the big soft bodies of the living machines. They moved like heavy clouds, exhaling faintly luminous green gases that drifted in the air.

  “I’m glad you kept some big wildlife,” she whispered, her blood thrumming. “Once it looked as if they would all vanish. There’d be nothing left but you people, your food and machines like those.”

  “Only the ruthless ones,” said Misha. “Lions, foxes, raptors. Nothing gentle survived.” He put the hunting rifle into her hands, and guided it to her shoulder. “Have you used one of these in the real?”

  “Yes. Have the others?” She was concerned. “The real is still different, no matter how well you can handle yourself in a game envie. They might do something crazy.”

  “You mean Joset?” He laughed softly. “It’s okay. He’s firing blanks. Self, I’m so high I could fuck one of those things. I could roll in that field and eat tiger weed. What about you?”

  He left her. She wondered: have I the right to kill the beast that preys on humans? She wondered if her own weapon was loaded with blanks too. She saw the rust red sand of the arena racing towards her, the wicked curved horns plunging. She jumped over the moon, and leapt, oh, flying, on the edge of death. The alley was cold: she heard movement. She leveled her rifle, searching the uncertain space for a low-moving shadow, filled with fellow feeling for the animal she might kill, waiting intensely for a deadly rush and a spring—

  But the animal was Misha. Without a word he gripped her waist, turned her away from him, pushed her against the wall and impaled her, pulling up her skirts and stabbing in and out: ah, ah. The barrel of the hunting rifle jarred against her breasts.

  When he’d gone she was unsure of what had happened. Was that real or was it part of the high? Fluid dribbled between her thighs. She picked up the weapon, which she’d dropped when he let go, and took it back to the street corner. Lydie and Rajath were sitting in the roadway. Lydie had her rifle in one hand and a bottle of complicated wine in the other. “I’ll tell you something,” she said, when she recognized Catherine. “When we’re in the arena, everyone wants us to be killed. People say they do tvc sports for the endorphins, for the excitement, the skill, the artistry of the performers. What they want is for us to be killed. You only have to look at the stats, the peaks in the ape mapping.”

  “Ape?”

  “Audience participation,” explained Lydie gloomily. “Neuron activity mapping.”

  “I’m not morally challenged,” said Rajath, grinning. “I was just scared.”

  Catherine sat beside them.

  “You know the other corrida? The bull-fighting?” the dancer went on, “I’ve never wanted to be a matador. I don’t care how famous you can be. But what I was going to say was, nobody wants to hook up to the bull. Maybe a few, but it’s a tiny percentage. And it’s the rich. Who wants to be the victim, huh? Trapped, no way to escape. Most of us have that for free, every day of our lives: it isn’t romantic. In my game a steady thirty per cent of the punters want to be the beasts, even though you can’t remember it. You can’t, you know. No one can remember being an animal, it’s like a dream, it vanishes the moment you uncouple. People want it because they know the animals are not the victims, we are. If a cow kills one of us she’s an overnight sensation. Everyone wants to hook up with her. You know what the games are? Drug dependency: brain candy. No different from the injectables and pills they teach us to think were so awful and degenerate. Why bother with the analogues, when you can mainline the original and best…. So.” She handed the bottle earnestly. “That’s why I don’t want to hunt. Fooling around with death isn’t fun; it’s work.”

  “I think they’re loaded with blanks anyway. I don’t think there are any lions around here. Or any foxes either.”

  “Oh?” Lydie scowled. “Typical Mish. The outsider, laughing at us all. I bet you’re right.”

  ii

  One of the great ladies of the quartier held a reception for Lalith the halfcaste. The speaker’s fame had grown, enhanced by the way news coverage of the Renaissance was sparse. The movement was a thing of the streets and the radical young: and therefore piquantly attractive to the very rich, who feel no fear. The lady was called Alicia Khan, she was some connection of Thérèse and Imran’s family. She had never been seen by an Aleutian, on screen or in-person. She had never before allowed an alien into her house.

  The rooms, laden with illusion in the style of a century ago, were thronged with masked or costumed humans, many virtual, a number actually present. Most of Youro’s tiny inner circle seemed to be putting in an appearance. The event was in full flow when Catherine and her friends arrived. They had been at the Phoenix since early afternoon, playing a lovely old-fashioned game (pirates, treasure, monsters of the deep), so engrossing they’d kept repeating the dose when their time ran out, until someone realized it was midnight. There was no sign of the grande dame. Splendidly male footmen, in square shouldered cutaway coats and skin-tight pantaloons, strode about proffering trays of food, drink and party favors. Catherine regarded these familiar items of rich-human décor with new interest, but didn’t recognize any of them. She became separated from the others, accidentally on purpos
e, took an fx generator from a tray and wandered alone, disguised as a large mournful insect.

  In each room the décor was different. In a hall dressed as a grove of flowering trees she noticed a malign small face peeping from the branches, peering down at the revelers. The eyes seemed to follow her around the room. She saw the figure again, looking out of the furniture in the next apartment; and again in the next. She assumed it was one of the tricks of the illusion designers, the kind of memento mori human craftworkers have always loved to leave behind them. Then Imran found her, and told her to take off the mask. He’d been commanded to present her to their hostess.

  Lady Alicia was alone upstairs, in a room that was a closet compared to the splendid halls. She lay in a reproduction four-poster bed (Catherine could see that the canopy was an illusion, and not even a good one), propped on pillows and lapped in red satin coverlets. The room was packed with virtual works of art, interfering with each other in a mélange as wild as in Misha’s favorite eaufort sites. Alicia wore a turban and an elaborate dressing gown, on which moving-image cheetahs stalked forever a herd of graceful antelope. She was smoking a green-skinned cigarillo in the style of the Gender Wars. In her free hand she held a lorgnette, which she lifted to her eyes every few seconds throughout the interview; pausing in the middle of a sentence to examine, it seemed, the ash on the end of her cigarette or a fold of the bedclothes. She was tiny, no bigger than an eight year old child.

  “I am two hundred and fifteen years old,” said Alicia. “And we have met before.”

  It was an Aleutian greeting, a polite way of dealing with the fact that they’d all “met before” time and again, though one didn’t always instantly remember when, or in what context, one had known the other person. Humans had adopted the expression; they thought it made them sound sophisticated. But you rarely heard it from them nowadays.

  Catherine shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s because you’ve forgotten, Miss Alien-in-disguise. I was a young lady once myself. I belonged to the Khans. I met all the great ones. In the end we age, quite suddenly. When it happened to me they let me retire to Paris, the most beautiful city on earth. I never go out now.” She sucked on the cigarillo, and studied her visitor intently. Catherine saw the same bright black eyes that had trailed her through the throng.

  “Why did you choose that body?” Alicia paused to raise the eyeglasses, then spoke in English, with a pretty accent. “I am His Highness dog at Kew. Pray tell me Sir, whose dog are you?”

  Catherine shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  At the end of the bed stood the shattered image of a woman, impaled on a pedestal. Catherine couldn’t make out if it was alive (as Binte was alive); or not. It drew her glance.

  “Yo soy la desintegracion,” said Alicia. “You like that piece?”

  “No, I don’t. It’s American, isn’t it?”

  “Well judged. The original was from the Americas. Helen Connelly, Michael’s sister, made that version for me.” Lady Alicia laughed and waved her hand. “Go. I’m tired of you.”

  Imran had been waiting outside the inert, wood-paneled door. “Is she really two hundred and fifteen years old?” Catherine asked as they walked away.

  “She always says that. She’s about eighty, I suppose. Sextoys aren’t very long lived: too many artificial chromosomes.”

  “How old is Thérèse?”

  Imran glanced at her, annoyed at being caught out in a slip of the tongue. “We’re not monsters,” he said, shortly. And didn’t answer her question. “Alicia’s our great aunt—or something like that—in the old style. She was her father’s, my grandfather’s, principal concubine. If that seems grotesque to you, I’m sorry. It isn’t, not in our reckoning. She retired here when he died. But we prefer not to talk about our family affairs to strangers. You can mask again, if you like.”

  It was nearly dawn. Thérèse had left the reception and gone to lie down on a terrace above the river. She had her period. She was curled up on a heap of shawls and cushions, all in Alicia’s favorite scarlet, nursing her lower belly and moaning piteously from time to time. Misha was in attendance when Imran and Catherine joined them.

  “At least the blood won’t show,” he was pointing out, unkindly.

  “Don’t be horrible. I’m having such awful cramps.”

  “Why don’t you take a painkiller?”

  “I have, to take the edge off. But, mm. You don’t understand. Mmmm.”

  From the plane of smooth pale stone a flight of steps led to the water. Heavily preserved to protect it from the poor, the great stream ran full and smooth and silver in a diffuse sunrise. The golden lion tamarins that haunted this part of the rive droite appeared magically, from nowhere. They had no fear, but a healthy caution. They crept closer to the large human animals and sat watching them with great interest: occasionally darting up to each other to groom or tease. Agathe Uwilingiyimana and Joset came out of the house with Lalith. They joined the others, attended by globes of silver-gilt light; and a tray of canapés that followed obsequiously at shoulder height. Agathe stripped off her formal robe and lay on the balustrade of the steps, the robe bundled under her head. “We shouldn’t have done that last dose. Six subjective voyages across the Spanish Main, and then this: it’s too much.”

  “My brain hurts,” complained Joset, fisting his eyes. “How can people endure all that bourgeois de-grade air-trash!”

  To Catherine’s alien perception there was scarcely any difference between Lady Alicia’s décor and the gaudy confusion of the bit-grid city. She didn’t say so. “Did you do good networking for the Renaissance?” she asked Agathe and Lalith.

  Agathe groaned. “I don’t want to talk about it. Grown-up parties give me a headache.”

  “Maybe,” said Lalith. The Aleutian and the rabble-rouser exchanged a thoughtful glance. Lalith smiled.

  The tamarins, dark eyes outsize in tiny, extravagantly whiskered faces, were disconcerting. No one knew where they’d come from: they were an anonymous biological posting. Joset tried to lure them with scraps of party food. “Mish ought to cull the brutes,” he grumbled, when they wouldn’t come to him. He had not yet forgiven his friend for the fake lion hunt. “People shouldn’t be allowed to grow actual entire animals and let them loose at random.”

  “Thought is free,” remarked Agathe. “If they were virtual, an arbitrary flowering of extinct primates in the data forest, you bit-fiends would defend them with your lives.”

  “There’s no need to cull them,” Misha had appropriated some of Thérèse’s couch and lay comfortably inert, gazing up into the sky. “They may be entire, but fakes almost never breed successfully. They won’t survive.”

  “Yet they might,” said Thérèse. “Fakes might become real. Things do.”

  “Ideas can become material,” agreed Agathe sleepily. “If the human race returned to a ‘state of nature’ now, we wouldn’t lose the Gender War edits. We’d live as social groups of parents and children. Recalcitrant males would prowl outside, fighting each other madly for the prize of an entrée into our society.”

  Joset roared and tried to bash his sister over the head with the canapé tray: it evaded him and scooted away. Imran and Misha refused to rise to her goading.

  “Aleutian Signifiers would starve,” said Thérèse. “In a state of nature.”

  “We wouldn’t.” Catherine lifted a hand, involuntarily, to her throat. “We can all eat the way you do. Meat and veg. If we’re really starving, we can even produce cook’s secretions. It’s well recorded.”

  “Your cooks make food out of any old rubbish. How do they do that?”

  “They spit on it,” supplied Misha. “Or dip it in poo.”

  “Yuk! Disgusting!” Thérèse giggled. “I’m glad I’m not likely to be stuck with you on a desert island, Catherine.”

  Catherine thought: I have been here before. She had been “here” often, in those Aleutian memories, absorbed through the endless hours of her childhoo
d in Maitri’s house. This reckless dawn, this little band, this ramshackle crew…. She stretched herself on the cool stone, bathing in past lives, drunk on nostalgia. She wondered why she was even interested in Lalith’s game. If the Renaissance movement was indeed a front for an international terrorist plot, it was the humans’ business now. The Aleutian Empire was over. Nothing lasts.

  “Tell us something you’ve learned,” ordered Thérèse, “about humans.”

  “Smiles and grins,” Catherine offered. “With us, a smile,” she lifted her shoulders, “is nearly always a good sign. When we grin, it’s a warning. We’ve found that with humans it’s the opposite. A grin is harmless. A smile from a human negotiating partner means: you have stepped over the line. With you people bared teeth, the honest warning, is usually friendly. The repressed warning means danger. That’s interesting, isn’t it?”

  “A man may smile and smile, and be a villain,” murmured Agathe.

  “And a woman. Why did you decide to become a Traditionalist girl?” asked Joset.

  They interrogated her like this, at random intervals. Her answers were payment for the privilege of their friendship.

  “I didn’t. I decided to become a woman.” There is always some truth that can be told. “When we first arrived you people used to call me, used to call Clavel, that is: ‘the poet princess.’” She fell into reminiscence. “You’d made up your minds that some of us were men and some of us women. We didn’t think anything of it because we play that sort of game ourselves. You know. There are two sorts of people, the people who talk about there being two sorts of people, and the ones who don’t. You could call one of our there are two sorts of people games ‘masculine and feminine.’ It fits, roughly. With us it’s like being extrovert or introvert. Like reading your horoscope. When we…when the consensus says you’re masculine, and you admire the traits that are currently labeled masculine you think, how true! When you don’t like the look of your horoscope you think, what rubbish it all is. It was ages” —she recalled, ruefully— “before we realized we were dealing with something more important than idle trivia.”