Phoenix Café

by Gwyneth Jones

  “I used to keep my flier at a disused airstrip on the Youro west coast,” explained Lalith; “it was none too secure, and I couldn’t get there to check on it very often. After I revealed my secret identity to the Phoenix guys, they let me move it here.”

  Menacing little eyes of orange bioluminescence twinkled as they passed, from the tiger weed that veined the cracked concrete. There was a smell of rain, ozone and emptiness: a sense of many ghosts. A section of the arena wall, a blank between blocks of seating, split open. Lalith and Agathe, who’d hurried on ahead, appeared in silhouette, hauling on something invisible: clawing at the air.

  “Come on,” urged Joset. Catherine and Misha followed him. As they reached the open archway, the women’s arms were suddenly full of material. A huge sheet of camouflage tarp rucked and tumbled to the ground, and Lalith’s flier was revealed: a blunt-nosed pilot’s cone locked to a payload frame. The wings were retracted to stubs, the frame held a barrel-shaped pod, belly flat on the ground. It was bigger than Catherine had expected.

  “Didn’t you come over alone?”

  “Yeah, but one scenario was I would get people out. Identify key peacemakers and rescue them, take them to the FD. Didn’t find any candidates.”

  “How long has it been grounded?”

  “I keep everything maintained,” said Lalith. “Can’t do much flying. There’d be reports of a hell of a big bird flapping around the haunted arena.”

  She climbed footholds and disappeared into the cone. The flier rose a little from the ground, and glided out into the arena. It opened its lamps of eyes: and started violently as if woken from sleep.

  “Steady, boy, steady.” Lydie patted the cold machine skin, and giggled at herself. “It’s like a fantasy game. We’re going to ride in a big fat bird!”

  “The funxing thing’s not alive,” snapped Imran. “Stop clowning.”

  The friends bundled the tarp, climbed the cone, and stuffed it somewhere inside the pilot’s cockpit. Faces, dark and pale, turned to Catherine in the chill gloom. The glow of virtue, in Agathe’s strong and compassionate gaze. The messages speeding between Joset and Misha’s socket insets. Imran and Rajath full of bold purpose, carrying some long bulky cases between them. She could read nothing: they were the Aleutians, she was helpless. They loaded their supplies into the payload carrier.

  Thérèse, wearing her chador again but with the hood thrown back, took Catherine’s hands: “We’re staying behind, Imran and me. If you fail, at least somebody will know what those beasts are trying to do.” She put her arms around Catherine and kissed her: soft cheek, golden hair, implacable green eyes. Living doll with a will of iron.

  “Goodbye, Catherine,” said Imran stiffly, stepping back. “Good luck.”

  “Let’s go.” Misha was leaning from the hatch in the pod’s belly. “Inside!”

  Imran and Thérèse moved away.

  Catherine stepped onto the open hatch cover. It lifted, and waited for her to embark. The pod was a bare shell, a glimmer of light piped along the roof. Mâtho and Lydie came after her, Agathe, Rajath, Joset and Misha were already on board. The panel sealed itself. They sat on rudimentary benches braced against the fuselage and strapped themselves into webbing jackets. The long bags of weaponry and armor were webbed down along the center of the floor, in life-raft capsules. Catherine sat between Agathe and Lydie.

  “I wanted the Renaissance to be yours,” she whispered.

  “It is ours!” hissed Lydie. “Lalith’s more than our ally; she’s one of us. We’re one Brood, on Earth. You said so yourself.”

  “Animals have life!” shouted Joset. “Machines have soul! Are you listening in the cockpit? After this hit we resume the quarrel; is that understood?”

  “Can’t wait, dickbrain,” came Lalith’s voice.

  The pod began to shake, rattling their bones (Catherine remembered luxury jet transport, and the splendid “indoor” air cruisers of modern Youro: but no frills for the secret agent of the FDA). Mâtho huddled opposite. His trembling hands fumbled over his webbing, checking the closures.

  “Don’t be frightened,” he whispered. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  They were airborne, rising. Imran and Thérèse must have opened the canopy. “This is going to be a long journey,” announced their captain. “Tough one for you effete Youros. There will be no inflight movies. No protection from the sensation of movement. The head is in that tiny compartment at the back, if you have to use it don’t unfasten your webbing, it’ll stretch into a tether. Sickbags under your seats. If we crash, the jackets will release, eject, and turn into cradle-chutes: very safe. But we won’t crash. Get some rest.”

  Catherine dozed. She saw Maitri’s body wrapped in its embroidered carapace. The person I love most in all the world died this morning. They tell me I am immortal, and maybe so, but I, this Catherine, I will never see him again.

  Lalith’s ingenuous sincerity. The halfcastes in the USSA were purged, pogromed, killed. She must know that; yet she wore her disguise without a shiver: strange people, secret agents. She came from the stronghold of non-biotech culture and preached a life-science Renaissance. Could the Movement in Youro survive, when people found out?

  Fake things can become real…. Who said that? Thérèse, talking about of the nature-identical tamarins on the rive droite. And about herself. Michael’s sister in that room, lit by the fire of roses: a living-doll, a fake human being and a maker of worlds.

  The girl outside the police station: ma semblable, ma soeur. Flight into madness, into a hell where nothing can hurt you. Helen Connelly with her Vlab, making hologram movies of her own destruction, and feeding them to Catherine’s oversuit, to show without showing, tell without telling—

  Was she crazy? If anyone ever had a right to be insane, it was Helen.

  She opened her eyes and saw the others playing some kind of game. They were rolling dice, passing them from hand to hand. Discussing each score in murmurs. Casting lots. Wonder what that’s about.

  Misha watched Catherine until her eyes finally closed. He turned away, looked into the camera eye in his head and made himself a porthole window. He could see stars. How high are we flying? What if the wings ice up and we fall out of the sky? I am going to give it up, he thought. Goodbye, testo, sweet poison. I am going to stop using. He saw himself walking away from Catherine, on that steep, dark underground street beside the Tate. A beggar in a foul doorway: Misha changed places with the beggar. He dwindled, he lost substance. She’ll never know how important she has been to me. And with the thought that Catherine would never know came a sense of repaired defenses, renewed security.

  For some reason the buried alley became a canal towpath. Grey water flat under a darkening sky, the city all around. This terrible beauty must die. He saw himself walking away, walking away. Wearing the beggar’s clothes over a body raw and naked as a peeled twig.

  The pod was poorly heated. Catherine burrowed into chill dreams of shuddering movement, woke and slept, woke and slept. Finally they woke her and bundled her without ceremony into a survival capsule: nobody spoke but she wondered what had happened to the webbing jacket that became a “cradle chute”? Heat flared through the bone-eating cold. Her knees seemed to be pressed into her eyesockets. She was sucking air through a tube, breathing out into a sweaty mask: she was tumbling, rolling; she hoped she wasn’t going to vomit. In becomes down. The heat was intense, why? Surely it wasn’t meant to so hot? Flames thundered. She fell and fell, terrible sense of catastrophe: and worse, responsibility. What’s happened to the others, my crew?

  She managed not to vomit, and not to bite her tongue in half when the pod landed like a dropped brick.

  Actually she was floating. She lay in a mass of something between soft gel and spider web: there was a steady moaning sound that seemed to come from everywhere. She crawled out of her cradle chute: she’d landed on a beach (in becomes down, the flames). The shore was brown, the waves were grey. She sat staring at the ocean, half unable t
o make out why she was not in West Africa.

  It was daylight. The sky was the same color as the sea: low cloud without a break. The beach ran straight on either side. She stood up and looked behind her. There was a cliff, about as tall as a three-story city block: slabs of brown stone at the base. A short distance away she could see a vertical fissure that might have been made by falling water. She felt very cold. She thought she must be suffering from shock, then noticed there was crisp white frost on the shingle patches that interrupted the brown sand. I’m outdoors she thought: and suddenly realized this was the Americas. One of the life pods was lying in the scum of the tide, she ran to drag it clear of the water. Somebody called her name.

  “Catherine?”

  It was Misha, appearing from behind some boulders further along the shore. He ran towards her, cradle-chute flapping and peeling from his clothes.

  “What happened to the others?” she demanded. “Did we crash?”

  “No, we didn’t. Lalith dropped us. Everything’s going according to plan.”

  “I don’t remember the plan.”

  “We didn’t discuss the details with you. Very sorry, corporate apology; but we’d discussed everything so much. We wanted to get on with it.”

  He dragged the pod further up the beach, sprung it open and hauled out one of the long, heavy bags. “Lalith wired ahead, telling Tracy Island she was coming home, with some highly sensitive refugees. She’s reported that there are strange-looking agents in their data-systems: warned them she’s afraid the SEF may be compromised. That’s why she’s coming in from the cold with so little warning. That, and the fact that these valuable refugees had to be lifted out of Youro at very short notice. She’s done everything by the book, exactly the way she ought to do it, if she wasn’t hiding a thing. Her passengers need political asylum in the FDA: Tracy Island is the obvious, secure port of entry.”

  “What asylum seekers?”

  “Lydie, Mâtho, and Agathe, representing the three genders, you see. The rest of us had to jump, because we’re playing different parts. Don’t you remember that part? You seemed to be awake. Now you and I are to carry our share of the gear, and rendezvous with Joset and Rajath. Most of the base is underground. There’s a network of tunnels; we’re going in through them. Lalith will get away from her escort and bring the others to join us.”

  He was looking up and down the shore.

  “There,” said Catherine. He shouldered the long bag. They set off at a run for the second pod, which was bobbing about a short distance away.

  “Where are we?” gasped Catherine, having difficulty keeping up.

  Misha, without breaking stride, tugged out a pocket printer and slapped the pickup across his temples. The slender cylinder whirred and extruded a white tongue of paper. Misha tore it off.

  “Here. Map of Tracy Island.”

  The flimsy sheet showed a roughly four cornered outline, each corner pulled out to a point so that it made a half hearted star. The star was filled with a mass of tiny details, contour lines tracing a truncated cone; a key down the side, symbols for marshy scrub, tunnel entrances; indications of massive concealed engineering.

  “I meant, where in the Americas.”

  “Well,” He pointed out to sea. “Kamchatka’s that way, somewhere.”

  She laughed. “We’re in the Aleutians? Really? How appropriate. But I don’t understand. That’s a hell of a flight. What is Lalith using for fuel?”

  “I’ve no idea.” Misha waded in, dragged the second pod out of the water, sprung it and ripped open another bag. He pulled out two drab oversuits. “Take off your robe and stuff it in here. Put this on…. I’m not well up on Campfire Girl resources, but she had no problem. We took the Arctic route, avoiding land. I believe they’ve moved this thing, a few times in the last centuries. It used to be off Nantucket. It’s not a real island, you know. It can be towed, like a wave-power raft.” He handed her a packet of soup and a sealed chunk of bread.

  “Eat. That was a long flight.”

  They sat on the pod, sucking warm instant soup and gnawing the tough bread. Catherine realized she was ravenously hungry. Misha dragged the other bag to his feet. He ripped it open, and checked over the contents: fat gleaming barrels and rows of separately packed charges. Those were real, deadly firearms: seriously illegal in human possession.

  “How did you get hold of them?”

  He didn’t answer. “Good,” he said. “They traveled well.” He shut the bag.

  There was a strange moment, as they finished eating, when she noticed they were alone together and wondered by reflex, will he rape me? But Misha seemed utterly unconscious of her, staring out to sea, still chewing: and that was never going to happen again. He turned his head, as if she had spoken.

  “What?”

  His golden eyes were affectless, preoccupied, tranquil.

  She shook her head and smiled. “Nothing.”

  “Let’s go. Got to get up that cliff.”

  The rock slabs were more formidable in close up. The first handhold was way off the ground, too far for Catherine’s reach. Misha took a swing at it with the light stuff bag on his back, and scrambled up. He fetched out a rope and let it down. Catherine attached the bag of firearms. When that was raised he let down the rope again. She fastened it round her waist and he pulled her up.

  “Should be easier now,” he said.

  They climbed, Misha leading. The stuff bag was slung over his shoulder; the bag of weapons roped and hauled after them in stages.

  “Tracy Island was financed by a woman called Marjorie O’Reilly Steyning,” he remarked, unhurriedly. “Perhaps better known as Seimwa L’Etat, legendary media proprietor in First Contact times. She became, posthumously, a fanatical anti-Aleutian. She’d hidden most of her assets in the 2038 revolution, so the Revolutionary Government never got hold of her money. Her estate funds this base. She was Johnny Guglioli’s employer, funnily enough, before she framed him as a computer-innards plague carrier, a coralin Typhoid Mary. I’m sure you knew that. Bet you didn’t know she’s still here.”

  “She’s reincarnate? They have reincarnation in the USSA?”

  “You mean the FDA. Nope, still the first incarnation.” He searched for a new hold, “It’s in the terms of the endowment. They have to keep her body in a tank, the tissues pumped full of some patent goop. It’s room-temperature technology; she didn’t trust cryogenics. Lalith says she bubbles like a ginger beer plant. Whatever the funx a ‘ginger beer plant’ may be. She’s alive as a sacred object. I don’t think my Dad would regard her as competition.”

  They were in the fissure she’d seen, alternately bracing and scrabbling in an unstable sandy funnel, and clambering layers of vertical slabs. She climbed automatically, images of her life with the Phoenix Café flowing through her mind. Misha playing “Great Balls of Fire”: hammering wildly at a hallowed twentieth-century keyboard up on the stage, while the Phoenix staff yelled at him in helpless protest. Teasing Mâtho. Does the Koran permit the taking of gaming-drugs during Ramadan? A sumptuous Christmas breakfast in the eternal cartoon-colored spring of Thérèse’s orchard.

  She had seen the friends bound together by Misha, the problem child. But they had been equally bound—she realized now—by Helen Connelly, the auteur, the maker of worlds. Even now, she regretted like a greedy tourist that she would never know Helen. She saw her knowledge of the Phoenix Café, of these young people, like a mariner’s chart. A coastline traced in detail, only a blank beyond, that she would never explore.

  We never got further than that, and now it’s over.

  Maitri whispered to her: but my dear, you weren’t looking for a new familiarity, you came here looking for the strange.

  The climb became daunting, but she didn’t care. Friends who trekked with Catherine were horrified by her appetite for hardship. “It’s not that I feel at home in the wild,” she shouted. “Some people do, not me. I hate it; I’m crushed by the emptiness. Nobody believes that, but it’s true. I c
ome out here because I need edges, starkness, absolutes—”

  “May I give you a piece of advice?” cut in Misha, from above. “Stop talking to yourself for once. Just climb.”

  She hadn’t realized she was speaking aloud.

  Now there was no more sand, only a rocky chimney. The drop between her feet was startling. Where had the little cliff vanished to? She was in the shipworld, climbing in the huge spars between the two shells: a dangerous entertainment for stir-crazy voyagers on the endless dark ocean. She couldn’t tell if she was heading up or down. She slipped, the weight of the firearms dragging her backwards, the thunderous energy of fear in every nerve. She saw Johnny Guglioli’s face contorted in everlasting terror and disgust. She felt herself a small, naked crawling thing, extended beyond her powers—

  They were standing on level ground.

  “Cath. Are you all right?”

  The abyss above and below weighed on her like death. She was coming apart, drifting into fragments on the ether. Gods and demons, impossibly huge faces, looked down on her and roared. She was tumbling into fugue. Arousal, tension, fear. Functioning under the influence. Michael Senior putting Catherine through her paces, a roguish twinkle in his eye: she responded, she performed, because somehow she must. Columns capped in dirty snow surrounded them like sentinels. There was grey ice underfoot. A nameless wind had found them. It drove straight through the insulated suits, searching every sweated crevice of flesh. Misha tugged clumsily on Catherine’s arm.

  “I said, are you all right?”

  He pointed to a cove among the boulders, a wind-riven house. They crouched in shelter, he fed her with pieces of something sticky and sweet. At last she managed to speak.

  “I’m all right. I don’t know what came over me.”

  “You almost passed out. You shouldn’t be wearing that body,” said Misha. “It isn’t practical outdoors.”

  She nodded. Her fragile young-lady limbs were still trembling. A tuft of grey-green barrens grass grew in the entrance of their shelter. She touched the tough blades with her gloved hand, grateful for their reality. “The Aleutian islands, how marvelous. I think it counts, even if this is a movable one. Rajath always said they were horrible. I loved West Africa: Kumbva was very fond of Uji in Thailand, where he landed, we all were. Rajath never came back here, not once. I like the scenery, but I can see his point.” The wonder of being an adventurer again had blotted out her sense of crisis.