Phoenix Café (11 page)

Misha smiled again. “Please don’t take this personally: but I don’t think
you
understand. We’ve been ruled by aliens for three hundred years. In all that history there are a bare handful of human names that
feature.
Johnny Guglioli, Braemar Wilson, Sidney Carton. Bella—if she counts as human. Of course the few humans who made a difference are important to the Renaissance, to people who are trying to imagine a human future. You heard Lalith. We study the records. We re-member. We’re trying to reassemble the parts.”

He touched the impossible branch of flame, silently reminding her of the
human
skill that had built it. How painfully he resented his position: a human, deadworld, artist in an Aleutian world. He was good, very good. But when the aliens were gone he would still be left with this legacy of self-distrust. Nothing in the world belongs to me, everything I do someone else can do better, I can never be first. He teased her and goaded her with his sly references to the past, but she heard the voice of his grief:
mon sembable, mon frère.

A flash of eye-contact: Misha’s dark gold and Catherine’s dramatic black on black.

“Johnny was executed out in orbit,” he insisted, “for the crime of attempted genocide. The Buonarotti Device vanished and the Aleutians stayed, because they didn’t know how to get home. Johnny’s tissue was used to make Bella, in some sense Johnny’s daughter—who came back to Earth and rediscovered the treasure. Now the Aleutians can go home, and here are we, at the end of the story. An Aleutian and a human…. Which Aleutian are you supposed to be, by the way? I know there’s no such thing as an anonymous alien. You have to be
somebody.
Who are you? Or is it a secret?”

“You know who I am,” she said, uneasily. “I’m Catherine.”

He frowned—

“I wonder where that cab is!” Catherine stood up.

“Oh, it’s here. I didn’t want to interrupt. We were getting on so well.”

They went down together to the street door, through the dark floors filled by the lives of Connelly tenants. Catherine tucked herself into the pumpkin belly of her hired coach, and it carried her away.

Misha returned to his eyrie and walked about with his hands behind his back, pausing often to turn and stare at the place where she had been sitting. His spine tingled, the hairs on his nape rose. He’d been listening to the huge, awesome voice of an ancient demi-god, speaking from that dainty little body. There she had sat in her aster-colored robe, saying:
yes, I knew Sidney Carton, I knew Bella.
All the stars of the Aleutian-era screen.

“Name of a name of a name! Worth the price of admission alone!”

He executed a neat step dance over the fake abyss, singing.

“Oh, Paddy dear and did you hear, the news that’s going round
The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground
It’s the most distressful country that the world has ever seen
They are hanging men and women for the wearing of the green!”

iv

In the room below, Helen listened.

She stayed very still, relaxed in her long chair, until Catherine’s cab had passed out of the courtyard; until not the faintest whisper of its retreat through the empty streets could be caught by Helen’s emissaries, the discreet and obedient servants she had seeded through the nerves of her father’s house. Then she sat up a little and shook back the loose, lace trimmed sleeve of her nightgown. She was looking at the dressing on the inner skin of her right wrist and forearm when Michael Connelly senior came into the room. He seemed disconcerted to find her in her night clothes.

“Oh, you are ready for bed.” He hesitated. “How is it?”

Helen smiled ruefully. “Not getting any better, papa.”

“Let me have a look.”

He came heavily to her side, like a statue of Misha walking; and dropped on one knee. The medical cabinet was by her chair. He slicked quarantine film over his hands and the cuffs of his overalls, took her wrist, and eased away the dressing. Together they looked at the lesions. “Are there any new marks?”

“I don’t know, papa. This sounds strange, but I find it difficult to count them.”

The camera in her father’s eye took pictures and made measurements. His gaze, which seemed so intent, was purely mechanical. When he looked up the examination he’d made was already far away, under expert attention.

“It’s just a harmless little reaction: it will pass.”

“Yes papa.” At her gentle acquiescence something stirred in the depth of his eyes, Misha’s eyes cast in bronze: but the emotion quickly vanished.

“Well, we’ll see what the doctors have to say.”

“Do you know what a Black Hole is, papa?”

He shook his head, again absorbed in turning the slim wrist from side to side, taking more pictures. “Some nonsense you’ve picked up?”

“A Black Hole is a place where a star has died. It’s what happens when the death of a star turns malignant, so that ceasing to exist becomes an active force. It draws everything around it into itself. All of space, and time, and being is dragged through the same dark gate. Some people think a Black Hole actually destroys the fabric of reality. Isn’t that extraordinary?”

“What nonsense.”

“Stars are made of the same elements as human beings.”

Her father’s tone became less indulgent. “Don’t think about such things: it’s morbid. I shouldn’t let you use the free network, it’s a midden of useless information; it’s not just ridiculous, it’s harmful.”

At that threat she said nothing, but the chill that pervaded her small white face seemed to leach all the color, and warmth, and softness from this large, luxurious room. He replaced the dressing with practiced neatness, and patted her hand. “Oh, don’t look so sad. I won’t take your connection away. But you should vary your amusements. Why don’t you work on your project again? You haven’t touched your lab for days: I notice these things you know. You need something pleasant to occupy your mind. Soon you’ll feel better, and I’ll take you out for a drive: or you may have a friend to visit; one of the inner circle, you know, not a stranger.”

Helen had not left this room, or seen anyone but her father, since she’d returned home exhausted from that visit to Lord Maitri’s “at home.”

“I think I won’t see anyone, or go out again. I get so tired, it frightens me.”

“Nonsense,” said the man of stone and bronze. “You’ll soon be well.”

“I don’t want to let you down,” she whispered.

He selected a powerful pain killer, and applied it to the big vein inside her elbow. “We’ll go home. You’ll be more comfortable away from the city.”

“I’m sleepy now, papa.”

“Yes. Well, I’ll leave you.” He leaned and placed a dry kiss on her cheek.

Helen lay for a while with her eyes closed. She could feed constructed images of this room to his agents. She used to do that routinely when she had her freedom, when she and Misha were allowed to be together. Since she had become almost a prisoner she’d been surprised at how little she felt the need for covert defiance. She could be private enough in the darkness behind her eyelids. Papa monitored everything, or imagined he did: but he didn’t invade her mind. She thought he’d always been afraid of what he might find there.

She stood up slowly—how heavy they were to carry, those small dark marks—and went to her workstation. Her Vlab was older than Misha’s and showed clear signs of its industrial origins, but it suited Helen. She knew its ways. She recalled from secret limbo the project that her father had mentioned. (The secrecy was habit, it had never been necessary. Her father never showed any interest in the virtual art he considered a suitable pastime for his daughter.)

How long?

She touched her unblemished left forearm, and the lace at her throat; where she had begun to feel the spots of tingling numbness that were the precursors of the lesions. The reaction would pass, papa said. It would do her no harm. And if it did pass…what then?

Papa was right; she must get back to work. It’s the experience of each moment that matters. She smiled, involuntarily: the joy of the work flooding through her, filling every reflection of Helen’s self, past present and to come. There were effects that she had struggled for, and now was sure she could achieve. What artist could ask for more? What was it the old man said?
Instantaneity, the same light everywhere
…. But the interview with Catherine was already in her mailbox. She converted it to tincture and waited a few moments. The bubblepack emerged. She leaned back, trickled the drops into her eyes and settled to watch Misha’s rushes.

Her brother’s obstinate refusal to come to grips with the Common Tongue was going to be a complication…. But that was all right. Helen would be directing him, and there was nothing wrong with keeping Miss Alien-in-disguise off balance. She would not let herself feel hurt that Misha had found a replacement for his old companion. It was necessary for the plot. She watched, frame by frame, immersed in the game that she had devised: a sick child, bored and lonely, deploying her toy armies across the counterpane.

3
The Phoenix Café

i

There were four fatal casualties during the police action at the Renaissance meeting: a small figure, but embarrassing. Bhairava killed himself the next day as an apology for his misjudgment. Everyone knew this was a deliberate snub directed at the City Manager, but Bhairava had planned his escape well. Sattva, though he fumed, couldn’t call it suicide. The house at the Giratoire was plunged into mourning. Maitri spent hours in the character shrine communing with his dear friend and sometimes lover; and everyone in the household felt the loss.

Catherine made no attempt to contact Misha. She waited, as a young lady should, passive as Thérèse Khan in the high-walled orchard, to see what would happen next. She spent a lot of time in her room, alone. Since she’d seen Misha Connelly’s flowers, she had felt, or imagined she felt, something stirring in the part of herself that had been empty, dry and broken for so long.

She woke one day, mid-morning, from a drowse of half-formed ideas, and found someone at her door. It was Misha, dressed as before, in a loose light coat over local-grown overalls. The coat was blue and the dun suit under it had a fine blue pattern moving in the fabric. He seemed nonplussed by the membrane, scarcely more than a foggy thickening of the air, that stood in place of an Old Earth style solid barrier. These days humans rarely visited Aleutian private rooms.

“Walk through it,” she told him, “It won’t hurt you.”

“I did call. This morning. Lord Maitri said you’d like to see me. One of the secretaries—Vijaya?—had me brought up here.”

Catherine had been letting Maitri take all her calls since she came back to the Giratoire: she was afraid of the Church of Self. She hated the idea of being ambushed by the virtual ghost of that halfcaste deacon. Misha stepped over his commensal escort, which was weaving around his ankles hoping to be petted. He stared frankly at the cluttered array of devotional pictures and movie-loops.

“I would have called before, but I was uncertain of my welcome after the massacre,” he declared grandly.

Catherine held out her arms. The little servant jumped into her lap, nuzzled her throat, and clambered over her shoulder to get at the wall, where it started to nibble at a crack in the plaster. Its default purpose in life was to keep things looking nice and decayed.

“Why should that have made you unwelcome? It wasn’t your fault.”

“I wonder why the police chief killed himself over something so minor. Four pathetic humans; not much of a body-count.”

“Bhairava doesn’t believe in permanent death,” said Catherine quietly, “It’s beyond his imagination. He wanted an excuse to leave Earth, but he wouldn’t have allowed anyone to be murdered.” She realized she was crouching on her bed, in a pose that was too Aleutian. She rearranged herself. “At least it ended the quarrel between him and Maitri. That’s one good thing.”

Misha glance at his divinity, sidelong. How strange they were about death! He couldn’t believe he’d been lead into her bedroom. He wondered if it was a trap. Lord Maitri was about to leap from a closet, outraged at this invasion of his ward’s modesty, and demand the non-permanent death penalty. Out of bravado he took down a slim volume and began to leaf through it:
The Life of a Soul.

Thérèse of Lisieux, how intriguing—

Her heroic virtue was exercised in such ordinary ways that it was not easily recognizable…. Likening her life to a glass of medicine, beautiful to behold but bitter to taste, she went on to say that this bitterness had not made her life sad because she had learned to find joy and sweetness in bitter things. “It has come to this,” she said, “that I can no longer suffer, because all suffering is sweet.”

He laughed.

“What is it?”

“I was thinking of our own Little Flower. You’ve met her: Thérèse Khan.” He was gratified at her surprise. “We all know each other. It’s almost Aleutian, the way we know each other. Youro is huge, but the inner circle is tiny.”

The litter on the table under her bookshelf included oil pastels, pencils and paper; styli for graphic screens that had been obsolete before the aliens arrived; an Aleutian sketchpad; a quill pen (never cut) a Japanese inkstone in a lacquered case, a glass Virgin full of sand, a bird’s nest (beautifully recreated by some Aleutian artisan) containing three ovoid pebbles of blue, white and marbled grey. A model airplane, hologram holy pictures; a scatter of unset precious stones; a Hand of Fatima cut from ancient printed circuit-wafer, its complexity blended into a pearly moiré; rigid amber silk.

“Is this your souvenir collection? It’s rather disappointing. After three hundred years of looting I’d have expected more of a haul.”

“I wasn’t around for the whole three hundred years. Anyway, I keep the real stuff in my bank vault.” She saw that he believed this, and laughed. “No! I got rid of my hoard. It embarrassed me.”

He had found a Pre-Contact canvas, propped unframed on an easel against the wall. The scene was a Nativity, the symbolic birth set among ruins, a favorite theme of the original Youro Renaissance. Renewal was held in the disintegrating womb of the past; the sacred child surrounded by a chaos of broken columns, refractory camels, investigative journalists, toppling palm trees, mad astrologers.

“I like this. Who’s it by?”

“Someone called Leonardo da Vinci.”

“Is that so? A copy, I suppose.” He touched the picture: it was solid.

“It’s original, so far as I’m aware.” She shrugged and smiled. “It’s loot, you’re quite right. I’m weak and greedy and I couldn’t part with my Leonardo.”

“My, my. Leonardo da Vinci. And you don’t know if it’s real. You should let me find out for you, I can do that.” He whipped a small machine from his pocket. “Nothing invasive, a photochemical scan—” The thing had done whatever it did before she had a chance to protest; or to explain that the picture’s provenance was actually impeccable.

Irony, she decided, had best be avoided.

“I’ll let you know.” He put his gadget away. “But I came to ask you out. I thought I could show you some sites, places you probably haven’t seen. We could eat Old Earth style. We might eventually meet those brutes who were with me at the meeting, but I’ll protect you from their coarse humor. In short, I’m offering to be your native guide. Lord Maitri approves.” He beamed at her: ingenuous, eager. “Do you accept?”

He went to wait in the atrium. Catherine put on a robe, the same smoky violet she’d worn to the Renaissance meeting (it was a sturdy garment, meant to last a season); and boots. He had a demicab waiting at the front of the house, “demi,” meaning there were two separate soft compartments. Catherine rode behind, peering through the flawed gel of the windows, where the effluvium of the city air was constantly gathering, constantly being dismantled and dispersed. It was like looking through moss agate.

“Do you know the
quartier
well?” demanded Misha, from the front seat.

She knew the premises of the Church of Self. Her congregation’s cramped, sweaty rooms; an estate of packed tenements; a police station; Maitri’s house. “I don’t know it at all.”

“I’ll take you to the Car Park.”

He stopped the cab about halfway between the Giratoire and the local commercial center. The pavements were full of people, the roadway full of bicycles, cabs and buses; the occasional private car. In the distance a lumbering aircraft crawled above the rooftops, delivering bulky goods or carrying humble passengers to some other part of Youro. Shop-front plate glass, which had never reappeared after the War, had been replaced by sheets of a hybrid membrane that ate dirt and turned it into color. The shops themselves were living space. Bodies swam and faces looked out through cat’s-eye, garnet, carnelian, ruby: humans living as they imagined Aleutians lived—in public, without walls.

“A lot of people hate the bit-grid city,” declared Misha, “They want to strip it out. That’s the way Lalith feels. So does my father, an embarrassing ally for her I would have thought. Agreed, the grid is appallingly badly managed. There’s untold dross, staggering quantities of obsolete public information; and who buys these products? We live like Aleutians these days. We’re peasants. We feed and clothe and furnish our own households. We only
buy
commissioned works like my Vlab, luxury items. We stick our surplus production in a
vente directe
booth, and gain little more than status when it empties. Most of the products you’ll see advertised in the publicité hoardings don’t exist, did you know that? Try to get hold of those multifarious brands of soap and socks: you’ll soon find out.
Pub
is imaginary, fossilized ephemera. It’s a pathetic survival. But we want it to stay because it’s our raw material, our creative medium.”

He stopped, hands in his overall pockets, the blue coat pushed back from his hips in artful disarray. The hurrying crowds parted round them. “This is one of my favorite sites. We call this
eaufort,
etching. I don’t know who did it; a lot of grid art is anonymous.”

The “site” was an area of smart surface that had been rented out to many different customers, successively and simultaneously. Nothing had ever been completely erased. The moving images standing in the air ran into each other, layered like sheets of living cells, incomprehensible but full of information: a cruel experience for the visual cortex. Random coherence rose up and vanished: a human eye, a moving wheel, a huge shape that looked like a grieving skull.

“In
eaufort
the art is in the data. You don’t put it there: you find it there. Like Michelangelo Buonarotti—you’ve heard of him?—freeing human bodies from marble.”

“Thank the Self they’re not allowed soundtrack,” said Catherine.

Michael stepped into the site’s footprint and tipped his head back, taking the pounding waterfall of the unreal full in his face. “You’ve never been anywhere that’s licensed for sound? It’s
much
worse. An experience you mustn’t miss.”

He led her on. “Why do you walk?” asked Catherine. “I noticed, the other night. It means something to you Renaissance people. You and your friends ordered a cab for my sake. But you made a joke of it; you didn’t want to use it.”

Misha halted, “Are you tired?”

“No!”

“Good,” He strode on. “The cabs are alive.”

“But not Aleutian! Bred and grown entirely by humans—!”

“They have hybrid genes. That’s not the point. We don’t agree with Lalith. We don’t want to develop life sciences. In our view that’s not the Renaissance. I use my Vlab to make illusions, I don’t build synthetic biologies: what’s the point, Aleutians do that stuff better. We believe in void forces and machines. Have you come across the expression:
Animals have life: machines have soul?”

“Er…no.”

“It was the motif of the
eaufort
I just showed you. Never mind.”

“You don’t like living technology, so you walk. On your biological legs.”

He grinned. “So laugh. You are the lords of life, we are the living. Your superiority is inescapable. Anything we do to reclaim our separate identity is absurd. We don’t care.”

He seemed to have forgotten about the Car Park: he had the air of a careless
flâneur,
wandering at whim. But Catherine detected a growing, tense anxiety. It crossed her mind that this might, after all, be an anti-Aleutian terrorist plot: an abduction attempt. They reached a complex junction. The ancient buildings around it were naked of projections. Probably they were famous and under a preservation order, but they looked skinned alive and rejected. Only the cowl of a maglev station in the center of the naked
place
was awash with moving color.

“You don’t know how to use the lev. That’s one of the things I’ll show you. However, you mustn’t use it alone.” People were pouring in and out of the arched entrance; cabs and minibuses nosed each other outside, disgorging travelers. Misha started walking round the cowl. “Young ladies don’t, of course, nor do ordinary females if they can help it. Even dressed as you are you’d have trouble, and the chador only makes it worse.”

He stopped in the viewpoint of a projection, a single-layered cheap image: low rez and detail poor. A gigantic Traditionalist woman with dark hair and unnaturally pale skin stood on a seashore. Her hair fell in chunky masses over white draperies. Waves crashed at her feet as she went through her classic, touching routine:
buy this and be beautiful like me.
She should have been holding some kind of skin-bleach or exfoliate.

“Oh, thank you Lord,” breathed Misha, quietly exultant. “Thank you, Jesus! Whooee!”

The coral branch lay in the woman’s white palm: glowing, extraordinary, an intrusion from a different order of creation. Misha touched Catherine’s arm, shifting her position slightly. A husky, drawling female voice murmured, from nowhere,
“a branch of cold flame.”

She was genuinely thrilled. “You did it! What’s the response?”