Phoenix Café (10 page)

“How empty the city is tonight. Where are all the people?”

Mâtho shrugged. “It’s a Reformer neighborhood. I don’t know their habits. But the city’s strange. Sometimes there are people everywhere, sometimes they seem to vanish. Don’t you find that?”

She was filled with a mysterious euphoria.

“I’ve been wondering what to do, since I’ve finished with the Mission. I’d like to record for you, Mâtho. Would you be interested in some other topic?”

Mâtho instantly panicked. “Oh, but…. You, I…. A lady doesn’t need an occupation. Not that I don’t but…. And we couldn’t pay you. We can’t afford to pay you.” Overwhelmed, he was rescued by the return of the halfcaste, who had found a cab and was driving it up the middle of the road, whooping in triumph.

“You fool,” roared Joset. “It’s a four-seater, and there are five of us!”

After a long discussion, during which the semi-sentient vehicle kept trying to move off, the young humans decided to take turns in occupying the fourth seat. Finally they set out at walking pace. Rajath got down from the driver’s place as Mâtho climbed in the back; and pranced along backwards in front of the vehicle until Joset yelled that he was frightening the poor brute and endangering the lady. Rajath ran around to climb in at the back, and Misha jumped from the driver’s place. Then Catherine insisted that she didn’t want to ride in state, she wanted to take her turn, so she jumped out and Misha stepped back in…and so they continued, until they reached Joset’s address.

Catherine was sorry the game had to end. An awkwardness seemed to descend when they were four in the cab: as if Misha’s personality, when his Reformer foil wasn’t there, was too much for the other two to handle. They arrived at a street that was completely dark, and the cab stopped again.

“This is where I live,” announced Misha. “I’ll call you another cab, Miss Catherine. This one won’t take you to the Giratoire: it’s too late and too far. We’ll let these wastrels have the brute. It stinks of that execrable dirtjuice concoction, anyway. You’d better come inside.”

She knew he had contrived to be alone with her. She’d chosen to accept the pretext: charmed and flattered; taken out of herself. As soon as they
were
alone she regretted it. Sattva wouldn’t like this; Maitri’s human friends would be scandalized! But Misha behaved with perfect propriety. They stood together in a large paneled lift, light from some hidden source glowing on polished wood; smiling and silent. He showed her into his apartment. The walls, floor and ceiling of the room they entered were one seamless illusion of dusky space, lit by dim stars above and twinkling city lights below. It was disconcerting: and the more so because she knew the real streets were dark.

“I’ll call a cab. Excuse me if I don’t introduce you to the folks: they keep early hours. Do sit down.” A knowing grin. “Or whatever’s comfortable, Miss Alien.”

There was nowhere particular to sit. Catherine went to the only un-camouflaged item in the room: a Vlab, an expensive top-of-the-range professional machine.

“Have you seen one of those before?” asked Misha casually. “It’s a Virtual Laboratory. For industrial research, decorative art, games-building, so on. A machine for three dimensional virtual modeling. If you understand what that means.”

“I’ve seen them,” she told him, smiling slightly at his lordly air. “I don’t suppose you’re doing industrial research. Are you an artist?”

“Of sorts.”

“So am I!”

“Oh yes, I think I knew that. What do you do?”

“Stills. Single frames: the things you call ‘pictures’ and we call ‘poetry’”

“How interesting for you.” Misha’s tone dismissed her ladylike hobby. A vase of flowers had materialized, poised on illusory emptiness beside the lab. The vase was a chipped blue glazed pottery mug that had lost its handle. The style of the flowers was familiar.

“Ah. You built the floral decorations for the meeting.”

“Yeah, they were mine. And I had to change the whole funxing thing at the last minute, because Mâtho said I’d mixed up the seasons, and he insisted—”

“Mâtho
insisted?”

“Believe it. He may be timid with the ladies, but he’s a demon for historical accuracy. But do we have to stand? The cab may not be here for a while.”

Catherine’s eyes, growing accustomed to the illusion as they might to darkness, made out the dimensions of a soft Aleutian-style couch, flanked by pillowy low chairs. She chose one of the chairs, Misha flopped on the couch.

“This will seem an odd question, but have you been drinking today?”

“Drinking what?”

“Alcohol. You see, the testosterone supplement in the air in my rooms—I need it, to maintain my secondaries—might affect you if you were mixing it with alcohol. It can make a woman aroused, er, unexpectedly.”

Catherine choked back laughter. He was gazing at her in apparently genuine concern.

“I don’t think it will be a problem.”

“Good! Did you notice I used native weeds, street flowers? I had rosebay, rayless mayweed, plantains, dandelions, buddleia. The survivors, bombsite colonizers. I thought that was a neat touch. But it was rough work, I wasn’t proud of it. The stuff Mâtho threw out was much better. Now this coral branch—”

The blue mug materialized again on an invisible table at her elbow. This time it held a single slender branch: perfect in every detail, in every whorl and stipple of the coral-red rind; the veins and stomata of each leaf; each flame colored bud and blossom.

“That’s very beautiful.”

“But purely imaginary, so of course Mâtho hates it. Touch it.”

She reached out, puzzled. Vlab models were exactingly accurate, code by code. But they were built of void-force signals, deadworld nothingness: they were images only. She felt the leaf, strangely cold to the touch, waxy against her fingertips, and gasped in shock and delight.

“You’re not an artist, you’re a magician. She passed her hand through the illusion, fascinated. “It isn’t there, but…. I feel it! How do you
do
that?”

He shrugged deprecatingly. “Make things appear and disappear? It’s easy, in here. This is my controlled environment; I have the whole 4-space mapped and clickable. How did I make the vbranch fool your sense of touch? Work. Sheer bit-by-bit grind. Have you ever used a lab?”

“I wouldn’t know how to begin,” said Catherine frankly. “This is so good! Where do you show? Is this your studio? Can people call up and televisit?”

“We don’t do that. We only display in public. The street’s our gallery. That’s a problem some of us have with Lalith. She’s in favor of gun control.”

“Gun control? You mean firearms?”

“No!” He stabbed a finger at her. “Zzzip! zzip! Bit zappers.”

“Oh, I see.” She remembered the green arrows. “You steal—er, borrow, grid space. Well, yes: I can understand that. I can see that would be fun. But—” She touched the chilled unreality of the coral branch, “don’t tell me you can splice
this
into the pixels of one of those crude three-d projections.”

“Four-d.”

“For what?”

“Four dimensions,” explained Misha, sighing. “A three dimensional moving image moves, right? That involves time, right? Four dimensions. A street projection fate map is built of tetrals, not pixels. Points with four dimensional coordinates. Timelines. That’s what we handle.”

“All right, four-d. But ignorant as I am about void force technology, at some level your coral branch has to use a huge number of, er, ‘bits.’ How can you plug it into a street corner junction box? Surely you’d crash the whole department?”

Misha frowned. “I’m a rich boy,” he told her, after a displeased silence. “I have everything. Even a prestigious job for life, should my father ever retire. I do my art for myself and for my friends. I don’t care if no one else knows it exists.”

So he hadn’t tried to display the branch, and didn’t think it could be done.

And where was that cab?

She had tucked up her legs and wrapped herself in the violet robe, so it lapped around her feet. Misha’s smile returned. “You look very comfortable: like a nice little cloud in my night sky. You’re an Aleutian in a human body. What does that mean, exactly?”

“What it sounds like,” she answered, somewhat defensively. “I was engineered, the same as you were, I suppose. The chemical code of an Aleutian embryo was reconfigured into human bases, and implanted into the womb of a human woman. I grew there, I was born.”

“Weird. Did you know, I’m almost unique myself. You’re looking at one of the world’s last authentic white heterosexual males. Our ripped up ozone layer got all the purebred fair-skinned races except for the Irish in Ireland; from whence the Connellys trace their proud descent. Yes, I’m engineered. Everyone’s engineered now, except the poor, and who cares about them. We’ve been conservative about it so far, but I anticipate an explosion of adaptive radiation when you’ve gone. Humans will diversify to fill the niches stripped out by mass extinction.” He propped himself on his elbows and studied her, without offence but with great curiosity. “But you
feel
you are a genuine Aleutian?”

“Or a genuine human, with Aleutian memories. What’s the difference?”

“Can you read my mind?”

She was puzzled. Misha Connelly was supposed to have had an Aleutian education. “If you mean, can I ‘read’ what you express, intentionally or otherwise, in what you call, roughly speaking, body language and we call the Common Tongue, I suppose the answer’s yes. Don’t worry. Those of us who’ve been here before have learned to filter. What you say in Silence has become subliminal to me, the way it is for you among yourselves. Even humans know that spoken words are only part of a conversation.” She grinned. “If you’re planning to insult me, in Silence, in some outrageous way, you still have nothing to worry about. As you know, the Common Tongue isn’t evidence, and I must ignore your offence. Though I might not forget it!”

“They tried to teach me to ‘speak Aleutian’ for years. It didn’t work, I couldn’t hack it. We’ll never be able to converse by twitching nostrils at each other. But what happens when you ‘hear’ what I ‘say’ in Silence? Do you really get the voices in your head?”

Catherine laughed. “Sometimes, yes. I hear voices. Most Signifiers do; and not only when the supposed speakers are present. But so do you: or one voice, at least. Don’t you have that human interior monologue? The voice of consciousness
you
hear in your head, and can scarcely stifle if you try? With us that voice is modulated. All the possible selves of Aleutia may talk to us, and we talk back to them. It’s our way of experiencing social pressure, personal complexity, cultural assumptions and so on.”

“If you were human, people would say you were crazy.”

“In Aleutia, people say you’re crazy if you
don’t
hear the voices.” How intently Misha watched her! She tucked the robe closer, and spoke to disarm a Silence that was growing uncomfortable.

“Things are very different in the Enclaves, where we’ve been accepted: many humans ‘speak Aleutian’ fluently. But the halfcastes used to be the experts. Remember Sidney Carton, Bella’s ‘native guide’ in the hunt for the Buonarotti device? I met Sid a couple of times: I’m sure
he
heard the voices. He didn’t have a lot of time for me, but he could certainly make himself understood! You’ve kept your distance here in Old Earth. You don’t want to be like us. We rather like that. Why should you learn to ‘speak Aleutian’? Enough of us can speak aloud. And you have your own brand of fake telepathy, your implanted gadgets. How did you call my cab?”

“Interesting you should mention Sid and Bella,” remarked Misha. “Bella was the reverse of your engineering, wasn’t she. Human starter, Aleutian body. I think that was the only time it’s been done, apart from your case. Am I right? The only two human-Aleutian hybrids. And her starter came from a sample of Johnny Guglioli’s tissue, didn’t it: or so the story goes. Which takes us right back to First Contact, the Rape, the Sabotage crisis. Isn’t history fascinating?”

Johnny Guglioli was the name of the journalist who had met the Third Captain in West Africa, when the Landing Parties were still trying to pass for human, and had later, with Braemar Wilson, leader of the anti-Aleutian terrorist cell called White Queen, tried to blow up the shipworld. Which he and Braemar had reached using Peenemünde Buonarotti’s prototype instantaneous travel device. The concessions the humans had been forced to make, after that failed attack, had been the foundation of Aleutian rule on Earth.

She made no comment.

“Speaking of Johnny Guglioli,” Misha went on, “didn’t
he
hear the voices? Without anyone teaching him how? He interviewed Clavel, Third Captain, when the aliens had only just arrived. I’ve seen that record. But perhaps it was only possible because of their special relationship?”

Catherine stared at him wonderingly. “You can’t have seen the original record of the Africa interviews. That material was destroyed and never copied. But whatever you’ve seen, I think I can reliably inform you that Johnny and Clavel did not understand one another. If Clavel had understood Johnny’s feelings there would have been no rape, and things would have been very different. Why are you so interested in these old stories? What does it matter? The Aleutians are leaving.”