Phoenix Café

by Gwyneth Jones

  “I’ve met Agathe here. I heard about Joset.”

  Joset was with the casseurs, the Renaissance gangs who were on the streets, talking to the crime of gender violence in its own language. Misha detested that kind of thing. They passed over the breach swiftly.

  “And Lalith, of course. I know about her.”

  “Of course!” Misha groaned. “She’s all over the place, preaching at the casseurs, interviewing old vampires, explaining our ways to the Feds. It’s a joke, isn’t it? She’s like the messianic leader of a new world order.”

  “Isn’t that what you people wanted to happen?”

  “I try to remember that.”

  Catherine remembered the Nose: the gentle soul who believed that passion was a curable disorder of the brain. Who had dealt with her so bravely over those articles. “Mâtho was my patron,” she murmured. “The only patron for my work I ever found on Earth.”

  The biscuits were energy-pumps, packed with fat and sugar. She’d forgotten how disgusting they tasted.

  “And I’m becoming a famous Renaissance artist,” said Misha, finishing the roll-call. “If you’re tired of that, dump it. Tempe is an acquired taste, especially sweetened. You don’t have to mind your alien manners, Miss Catherine. Nobody’s watching you. Nobody cares anymore.”

  “I went to Tracy Island,” she said. “On the tour. The delegation was down to make a visit. And it is moored in the Aleutias. Everything was weirdly familiar, except there was no trace of the events of my earlier trip. What really happened, Misha? Can you tell me now?”

  “There was a conspiracy,” he said, sipping his tea and gazing at the catering machines. “There were two conspiracies, actually. I told you once, if you remember: your people’s guilty secret wasn’t much of a secret. My Dad and his bunch of psychopaths knew the Aleutians weren’t going to hand over the Buonarotti technology. They didn’t care; they hated the idea of instantaneous transit. They were only interested the superweapon. We knew too, and we cared. Finding some way to get hold of, and to replicate, the Aleutian tech was our secret agenda. Bright and his team were engineering Aleutian anti-self tissue and putting it through the Buonarotti acceleration. We had to get hold of that enriched material, so we could take it apart. But it was the ultra-Traditionalists who succeeded: they had better contacts. It’s true that there was a cabal of willing girly victims for the genocidal cause; it’s true that Helen was recruited. She did not kill herself rather than submit, as you of course would have done. And I don’t see how we could have saved any of the other girls if we’d tried: but think what you like about that. She’d already been working on her own idea for a Buonarotti gate—not a couch, but I think it’s going to be couches, more reassuring—based on what Sidney Carton said. A virtual envie, a game engine, is what the Aleutians said we could never have, a vessel made of minds…. She went along with the old monsters, because she needed to see the anti-self cultured in living tissue. She stole a few scraps when they did their mad-scientist biopsies on her infected brain, and created a model of what Bright had done: the pump, being into nothingness and back again, translated into virtuality, into the non-bio deadworld code of information, where everything is the same…. I’m explaining something I don’t understand, so don’t try to impress your friends with my account of it. But I wouldn’t tell you any more if I could. You’re a competitor.”

  “Too stupid to be a dangerous one. You proved that.”

  He smiled. “Helen designed the engine, other Renaissance people built it. Then we recruited you. Whenever you went into the games-room at the Phoenix Café you passed through a Buonarotti gate that could be linked to our accelerator. And you never knew.”

  “The Blue Forest is a new planet, isn’t it.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know. I’ll tell you this much: the Stardate Diaries are junk. Take a very rich spectral profile of a star’s light; filter it down until you can isolate the chemical components of the planetary atmospheres. If you find something breathable, in an Earth-type orbit, you’re on your way. That’s what Buonarotti did, allegedly, three hundred years ago. But nobody can find her planets again, not so far. We have to look for new ones.”

  “But what about that night?”

  Misha gazed into his inward eye. “What about it?”

  “Was there an Americas side to the plot? Did Lalith have a flier hidden in the games arena at the café? Was the girl with the phoenix-toy, the girl with the empty-centered sores, Helen? Was she one of your people? And the bracelet, the Campfire Girl bracelet. Was Helen’s partner a Campfire Girl infiltrator?”

  “Resign yourself,” said Misha, with the old arrogant smirk. “There is no absolute reality any more; we’re living in Buonarotti time. The world has become a Belushi sphere: if you know what that means. We took you for a ride, Catherine. We took you to the Americas, to the situation of the Aleutian trade delegation’s arrival, and on the way, in the non-existent time of the transit itself, you shared a long vivid dream. It was a “transition event”: everybody knows about them now. Then we willed ourselves home again, and you arrived in LA no more psychotic than usual…, because we have beaten that problem. There was no weapons test. By the time you passed through our gate, that night, the unspeakably awful doomsday conspiracy had already collapsed. That’s the recorded truth, and it’s the only truth you’re going to get.”

  He looked at her curiously. “But I’ll tell you something odd. I know what your transition experience was, when you were the Third Captain, long ago. It was fire. Flames, and a sense of falling.”

  She stared. “It was the landing in West Africa. We crashed. I lived through that crash again, and then I was Home. But I had forgotten. I had forgotten completely, until you took me to Tracy Island—”

  “Movement test pilots have been through your flames. Either flames or some kind of climbing incident, or both: they often feature in the transition. We think the climbing must be from Johnny and Braemar’s adventure. Of course by definition there’s only one ‘state of non-location’: maybe it’s burned forever with the traces of the people who opened the way. Congratulations. You’re the first Aleutian to have a signature among those on the gateway.”

  “How romantic.”

  She took another bite of the biscuit. It wasn’t so bad. A child set up a loud, hopeless keening. Something happened in the surgery area: she saw figures rushing that way. Burns were the worst. They needed endless, impossible supplies of multitype skin. The Church of Self Mission went around preaching their redemption and dispensing for free from their stockpile of strong painkillers and tranquillizers. They’d become very popular with the medical staff, who had nothing else to offer to the dying.

  “Getting hyper-conscious,” Misha said, “as you do when you pass through the gate, means becoming hyper-aroused. It was easy for us to deal with that state. We’re gamers and we’re human, full of hormones and stuff. You had to learn, in your female human body, to cope with hyper-arousal. You needed to experience the kind of thing paper-flowers does.”

  “Sure,” said Catherine cynically.

  Misha glanced uneasily into his camera eye.

  “I’m trying to say I’m sorry. I know there are no excuses. I’m just sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” said Catherine. “Ça ne m’a rien coûté. It’s not as if we could have been real lovers. We’re too much alike.” And she laughed.

  After a moment’s puzzlement, he laughed too.

  “It’s nearly midnight, Miss Alien. Shall we go outside? Excuse me.”

  She saw the self-regarding perfection of his walk again. The ghost of an elegantly tattered duster coat swirled. He spoke to a young woman in a high-necked overtunic and loose trousers, the usual dress of Traditionalist women aid-workers, who stood by processing desk. Her face was undisfigured; her great, dark, shining eyes still lovely. Catherine marveled at this astonishing resistance: then Misha unguardedly put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. His touch passed through the image.

  He returned.
They climbed an outside stairway, picking their way between huddled bodies. At the turn there was an open landing. Misha folded his arms on the wall of ancient poured stone, and gazed out at the city.

  “On a night like this, it seems to go on forever.”

  “Was that Helen?”

  He glanced at her sharply. “Yes. She wants to hold on right to the end, to be with me.” He looked down at the cropland, the scented bean fields of one summer day, in another world and time, and shrugged, admitting the fantasy. “She’s always with me.” He let her see the fx generator on his wrist. “Sometimes she’s just a hologram. Sometimes, I swear, there’s a fragment of my Helen. Sometimes, she looks out of those eyes—”

  “Ah. Like that? Let her go, Misha. It’s over, set her free.”

  “Why should I?” He looked away from her. “What would you know about it?”

  Catherine lifted her shoulders, a sad smile that didn’t reach her eyes. The blank spaces of the heart. “Something and nothing.”

  “By the way, I’m off the testo. And I’m staying off.” He half-turned, following the glittering horizon of spires and towers. There was so much light tonight, in the city that had been in Aleutian darkness for so long. “They say, about people like me: he doesn’t care for anyone but himself. Not true. You can’t love yourself, if you don’t love anyone else. I loathed ‘Misha.’ Now I don’t. And I love Helen. I didn’t, before. I didn’t know she was a person. I thought she was a goddess, and out of arrogance, out of vanity, I thought I owned her and didn’t care about her pain, as long as she was there. Sorry isn’t enough. I want to thank you. I don’t know how, but you helped me.”

  Catherine thought, it was true that they were alike. Far more alike than Clavel and Johnny Guglioli, but nowhere near so close as Misha and Helen. The night he’d shown her his work, his branch of cold flame, how strongly she’d felt his sense that it didn’t belong to him. That nothing in the world belonged to Misha: and therefore he had unlimited license to “get his own back” any way he could.

  She’d blamed herself, blamed Aleutia for ruining this young man. But it was Helen who owned the world, in Misha’s eyes. Parent, lover, mentor, servant—in Old Earth Aleutia’s romantic ideal wasn’t a futile fantasy. It was only too possible: and it appalled her. Which was very funny, after three lifetimes. She thought of Maitri, who fortunately would never be her lover. Though in all the lives, she’d probably never love anyone more.

  “How little divides us!” she exclaimed.

  Misha nodded absently. She decided she would not try to share the joke. Though she seemed to remember he’d once said much the same thing about immortality, always a romantic ideal for humans. In real life, it was appalling.

  “What will you do now?” he asked. “I mean, afterwards.”

  “Live, somewhere or other. Maitri’s cook has offered me a home, if the Giratoire seems too haunted. I have some credit. I think I’ll work, sell my stuff. Why not? Mâtho bought my diaries.”

  “Well, in that case…” He delved into his jeans pocket and produced a small packet. “I’ve been wondering if you’d want these. I would have sent them to the Giratoire house, but I didn’t know you were still in Paris. You know my father committed suicide?”

  “Shame.”

  “Yeah. I was hoping he’d spend his declining years in a proper old fashioned prison, getting child-abuser therapy from his friendly cell mates. He wanted you to have the keys to the house at L’Airial. Everything’s as it was, and of course the staff will be there. He liked you. He said he was very glad to have met you. Take them, anyway. You may want to go back there someday.”

  Suddenly he checked his inner eye again, and started. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “They’ve gone!” Far out in the dark, out of sight behind the moon, which was near the full in their sky, but in reality invisible, above the city’s atmosphere, the shipworld had winked out of existence.

  Gone.

  Uproar broke out. Sirens blared, bells rang. A torchlight parade began, careening wildly onto the cropland. Crowds rushed about below them, trampling the fields, shouting, singing, letting off firearms.

  “My God,” breathed Misha. “Gone!”

  They watched the riot of sound and light and mad rejoicing, in silence.

  “This is the real world,” said Misha. “Here, where people hack each other to pieces and cry in each other’s arms. This will go on. The Buonarotti device will become part of it all. No one will think about what it means. Here, where we live and die, people don’t care how the engine works. Or what happens when the illusion of a single reality is broken. They’ll just get in that car and drive. And that’s the way it will always be.”

  He looked at Catherine with a new and startling expression. It was compassion. “You’re going to be so lonely.”

  She shook her head. “Oh no. For I am surrounded by so great a crowd of witnesses, as the Reverend Paul of Tarsus puts it. I’m never alone, no matter where I am. I’m an Aleutian, an embodied consciousness, embedded in the matrix: a person just like you.”

  Every self in the myriad: every separate flame.

  “I’d better get back to Helen. Goodbye, Catherine. Try to forgive me.”

  She thought how much she detested being pitied, apologized to, and made to feel like a cripple. And she laughed again.

  “Nothing to forgive. As my old friend Karl once said to me, in another lifetime: fair exchange is no robbery. Goodbye, Mish.”

  But he was gone, down the stairs, through the bodies. Catherine stayed. After a while she tired of the spectacle, and went to see if the police had any spare washing-powder.

  Envoi: Un Bel Di Vedremo

  One day. It was mid-July, according to the calendar, and a late, hot, ocean afternoon. Catherine was coming up from the beach with her bodyboard under her arm. She climbed the wooden steps, sun and salt prickling on her bare back. She was alone with the Forest’s cloud of witnesses, the invisible virtual users. She put her hand on the rail at the gate, and saw the Campfire bracelet. It sat easily on her tanned wrist, but snug enough that a band of white developed under it every summer: this impossible messenger, this mocking reminder that she did not know. The tiny brilliants in the incised flames glittered. Her gaze was held; her grip on the bar of soft, salt-powdered wood became so vital and intense that she remembered the paper flowers; she remembered Tracy Island. She was walking out of the police station again: punch-drunk, wavering; and there: something moving on the floor, caught in the corner of her eye…

  The girl with the phoenix in her hands.

  She would never know when it had begun. When time and space have been once annihilated, all the rules are changed. The young people of the Renaissance had set out to catch themselves an alien. Not because they needed Catherine’s help. Not at all! Because they didn’t need her, and they wanted her to know it. She remembered her night in the Blue Forest. Misha had been cruel, and that was a crime, but when she thought of his heartless, triumphant young face as he shafted her, the alien in disguise, who was on another planet and didn’t even know it, she could not help but sympathize. They had taken their revenge: but so joyously, so playfully; and with such little cost to Catherine, in the end.

  She saw Misha and Helen Connelly as she had seen them last, in the field hospital. Helen had died, while Misha lived, and presumably was still alive somewhere; yet she still felt it was Misha who had been destroyed, Helen who had escaped from prison. Who had survived the battle of the sexes. Traditional young ladies must vanish, along with many lovely, tainted things, and she had to hope the war was over for good: she was an Aleutian. (We don’t want to bore you, reminded Lalith’s voice sternly: But there was a holocaust.) Let it go, let it pass. She had been a bit player in a drama that she’d only partly understood. Everything must be forgiven.

  but when?

  Ahead of her, on the landward side of the dunes, the Forest began, the world where she lived at L’Airial in perfect serenity, with the park staff and her work; with the V
irtual Master or some descendant of his (she wasn’t sure: the staff simply always kept a hedgehog mascot; always known by the same name). The winters were still getting longer and colder, over all. The permanent snow did not retreat. But the Atlantic Forest would last out Catherine’s time, not much altered. Sometimes she roamed the house, searching in closets of forgotten junk for relics of the schoolroom that she’d never found again. Looking into the empty rooms and wondering which had been Helen’s boudoir. She used Mr. Connelly’s study often; it was her favorite winter lair. She would sit curled up in his brocaded armchair, listening to his Puccini records by the chrysanthemum fire.

  Occasionally she caught up with the news of the post-Buonarotti world, where the humans were learning to get in that car and drive. She was not tempted to return. She believed that Misha had told her the truth about the Tracy Island event. The young people had played that fine, scary, exciting game with her, in the timeless instant of passing through the Buonarotti gate, and finally delivered her safely to LAX…. But she would never know. The human scientists at the Buonarotti project worried endlessly about the paradoxes of breaking the mind barrier, the awful suspicion that reality was, in some sense, destroyed, shattered into fragments and remade with every Buonarotti voyage. What happens if something gets left out; what if the reconstruction fails?

  The sum of being shifts like a kaleidoscope, always changing. And yet from moment to moment, what happens, happens. What is, is. Somehow it will always seem to fit together: just as the unstable, multifarious cloud of signals that makes a self-aware mind seems a coherent self.