Phoenix Café (31 page)

And waited, reflecting on the changes in human society (brought about by the long War, the aliens, the previously existing conditions of late capitalism) that had turned a police station into a shabby, overcrowded locus of care and compassion; whilst the Post Office became a heavily armored luxury bunker.

She was assigned, eventually, to a livespace cubicle. No ghosts. No décor. The sleek small box held a chair, a desk and the obligatory little red lamp in a corner of the ceiling. When she sat down the wall that faced her chair cleared from blank to a chaste cerulean blue. The light in the ceiling winked on. An Aleutian looked at her out of the screen, the face was subliminally familiar. Recognition struggled and failed. She recovered only a sour conviction that any dealings she’d ever had with this person had been futile.

“Can we help you?” The functionary spoke careful English.

“I asked to speak to the Youro City Manager, to Sattva. It is urgent.”

“The European Manager is on Earth.”

“I know. Patch me through. This is the way I want to do it.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Tell him Catherine wants to talk to him. Tell him she says please.”

The face opposite her barely shifted—

“He’s in a meeting,” Catherine read aloud, exasperated.

The Aleutian beamed idiotically.

she agreed, through gritted teeth. She continued, silently. Get Sattva.
I know he’s in Asaba. But Lord Maitri is dead, and this is the best way for me to reach Sattva quickly, without endless obfuscation. Tell him…>

Her teeth were going to be gritted to pulp.

as a very great favor,
to grant her an interview. Tell him,> (even in her alarm, this was agony.)

The person in the screen peered out, inspecting Catherine carefully. A light dawned in the blandly obstructive countenance. Catherine!
Sorry, I didn’t recognize you. You’re the Aleutian in a human body, Lord Maitri’s ward. How sad that he’s died, wasn’t he planning to stay on?>

“No. Peenemünde Buonarotti, who invented the device, was the first. And then the saboteurs, Braemar Wilson and Johnny Guglioli.”

explained the other, sticking to the Silent mode though Catherine had switched to formal English; which was rude. Her point was entirely lost on him. He leaned further forward, as if hoping to make serious inroads on the quarter of a million miles between them, and remarked with genuine and unofficial interest.

He resumed his functionary face, and spoke in English.

“We’re sorry but we can’t arrange an interview with the European Manager at this time. Lord Sattva has departed Asaba to join the Delegation to the USSA. He’s in pre-flight security. He cannot be contacted.”

As a kindly afterthought, he added, returning to the Common Tongue. could
try the Office of Aleutian Affairs desk. They’re the people who accept personal petitions, gifts and the like for us.>

Catherine stood up, breaking the connection; and left the booth.

When she left the building she paced up and down, irresolute. She’d forgotten to bring a phone with her. She bought a cheap one from a vending machine just outside the baffles and warning lights. Leonie answered.

“Maman, would you check my desk for messages?”

“Yes, Miss Catherine. Mr. Misha has been asking for you. He said if you called, we were to tell you to meet him at the Phoenix Café.”

ii

She had to wait for a connection, on the perilous lev. She sat in the ladies’ waiting room, where the wall screens were showing burning cabs and running crowds, looters rampaging. The trouble you saw on the news was always far away. But while she sat there a young Reformer was half carried in, clothes disheveled, bleeding from a head wound. His friends gabbled the story to each other, in words and Silence and frustrated anger. Someone had decided he looked too feminine to be out on the street without a chador. He’d tried to placate his accuser, but a mob had gathered and watched while he was beaten. The injured youth’s friends kept looking at Catherine uneasily: They couldn’t place her, because she had no place in this pattern. They didn’t speak aloud to her; neither did she speak to them.

When she left the lev, all was quiet. The urban atmosphere kept the temperature indoors bland, but it was winter and nightfall came early. The globe lamps on the bridge were coming into bloom. Golden ripples flowed endlessly into the beauty of the city night: most beautiful of cities. Beyond the river, she turned a corner and there was the Café. Antique-effect colored lamps were strung in the branches of the great sycamore, tables set out in the mild evening. They were empty. So were the long chairs on the verandah, where Agathe had been watching for Catherine that first time. But the café was open, defiantly trying to be a refuge from “intercommunal violence.” She had a moment’s fugue as she entered the dining room: seeing faces without any aura of life, without history in the structure of her mind. She was frightened, disoriented. But they were only customers; nobody she recognized. She took a small table in an alcove. A smiling waiter came, and spoke to her by name. She ordered uncomplicated wine.

“How many glasses, Catherine?”

“One. No, two.”

She should have gone through Maitri’s people. She should have cut through their weakness, their mourning, their conviction that Sattva had everything in hand. She had been the Third Captain, surely she had
some
power to reach the Expedition Management. She’d wasted time: living in the past, reduced to futility by the conflict in her mind. She knew she should speak to Sattva; she didn’t want to speak to him. Her story was incredible, and she was tired of being called crazy. So she’d spoken, but made sure he wouldn’t listen. She was disgusted with herself. If there was any chance that what she suspected was true, she ought to be moving heaven and earth (as the locals used to say) to impress the danger on Aleutia.

Instead she’d come here.

She saw, more clearly than ever before, how little genuine recursion there was in the décor of the Phoenix. How little genuine nostalgia for her beloved Old Earth. The culture of the Renaissance was
new,
and spare, and singular and strange. Not a survival but a birth. The scattered diners, few and nervous, conversed in low voices and in the Common Tongue. What were they saying? Talking about the Departure, talking about violence. The air was full of fragments she was too distracted to read. That infuriating functionary face. She had no power, never had any real power in Aleutia. She might as well be here. The phrase that had been newly current, when she met Misha Connelly, still kept running through her head:
the unreality of these last days.

At last he appeared, wearing jeans, and a cotton tee-shirt that read, TAKE ME DRUNK IM HOME. She’d never seen him in Renaissance dress before, it looked odd. He smiled and stood over her, radiating grave sympathy and secret malice.

“I’m very sorry about Maitri.”

“So am I. Sit down, we need to talk.”

He let himself look briefly puzzled. “You want to talk about
us?
Not here, Catherine. It’s too public.”

He picked up the wine bottle and both glasses, lead her to the Ladies’ bathroom, and locked the door.

“Don’t worry, I’m allowed. I told the duty manager you were sure to be upset, and we’d need somewhere private, on my way in…. I’m
so
sorry. You left in such a rush. I felt terrible about letting you go alone, so distressed. I followed you immediately; I’ve been chasing you all the way back here.”

“I’ll bet you have,” said Catherine grimly.

“That’s a
strange
tone to take, when I’m offering sympathy!”

“Misha, stop it. Stop that game and listen. Do you remember the day I met you? I’d spent the night before Maitri’s precious reception in a police cell. As I left the station the police were trying to remove a sick beggar who’d collapsed in the lobby. I went to help: the beggar was a Traditionalist young lady.
Ex
-Traditionalist young lady, maybe. She had all her secondaries, none of the reduced difference you see in ordinary locals, who breathe the city’s standard issue air and don’t boost their sex hormones. She had a bandage on one arm. I unwrapped it and saw the empty-centered chancres on her wrist. I recognized them. The only way you can get sores like that is through unprotected, or poorly protected, handling of the materials used in proliferating weapons production.”

Michael poured himself a glass of wine. He seemed bewildered.

“I’m sorry Catherine; I’m not getting any of this.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know what proliferating weapons are. They’re legendary among your people: the alien Ultimate Deterrent. You know how they’re made, the outline of the process anyway. The information’s been on the grid for three hundred years. You take a sample of your enemy’s inert tissue, dope it in esoteric ways, and use it as a starter to
breed
a kind of anti-self, a specific killer. You must know, though you’ve never mentioned it, that something like weapons processing featured in the development of the Buonarotti engine. The
Buonarotti engine,
Misha? The device that’s being perfected in a high security lab in the Atlantic Forest park, next to your father’s country house—?”

He shook his head sadly, gazing at her in limpid concern, helpless to stop this crazy torrent of speech.

“If you won’t talk, you can listen. Proliferating weapons attack and consume anything that shares biochemical self with the enemy. People, living machines, buildings, food plants, the microscopic traffic in the air. Superheat will stop them in the first generation. Once they’ve started to breed they’re almost impossible to destroy. You can’t poison them; they can eat anything. In response to attack they divide faster and without limit. Blow them up and you fill the air with microbial devouring mouths. They’re in the water, in the food chain; they get inside people’s bodies and eat their way out. They go on until there is no food for them left. No people, no commensals, no plants, no tools, nothing. It’s genocide, there is no other outcome. At home it’s our only form of real murder.”

He frowned in concern. “Catherine, why are you telling me all this? And what have you done to yourself? What’s happened to your hair? I think I’d better call a cab and send you home.”

“I have no home.” She bared her teeth. “You really don’t know what I’m talking about? I’m glad to hear it. Go ahead, call a cab. I can tell you the rest while we’re waiting…. When we met at Maitri’s party there was a moment when I thought you knew about that girl. It passed. I was very confused and unhappy at the time…. I have always blamed myself for the disastrous effects of Aleutian rule on Earth: because of the Rape, because what I did to Johnny Guglioli seemed to have set the whole relationship between your people and mine on the wrong track. In this life, as Catherine, I’ve been more desperate than ever, because we were leaving. I met you; I recognized a kindred spirit, someone as unhappy as myself. That’s what I found so attractive. I forgot about the girl. I thought what I’d seen on her flesh was a hallucination. You adopted me, you brought me here, I made friends with your friends. When I remembered about her I went back to the poor ward. Of course I couldn’t find
her.
I mean it in all pity and sympathy when I say I hope she’s dead by now. But I met Agathe and Lalith. They told me that Traditional young ladies who escape from captivity often end up dying on the streets. Like the fake animals people make and release that can’t survive in the real. My girl was just an everyday sad story of Youro city.”

Faintly, she could hear a murmur of talk from outside: people leaving, polite conversation masking great anxiety. Misha watched her with cool curiosity, his honey-colored eyes clear as gemstone. He seemed to have decided to let her go on babbling until she silenced herself.

“I forgot about her again. I didn’t completely forget, but I was distracted. As you know, I was distracted…. Then you asked me to come to L’Airial. I learned that your sister Helen keeps to her room, and emerges—if that was a living person I saw and not a virtual ghost—wearing long sleeves and high necked gowns. Weapons-processing sores show first on our most active open secretion-sites, the base of the throat, the inner skin of the wrists. I guess there’s a mapping to the same areas when it’s happening to a human body. I was told something I must have known, but I’d never thought about it, because the connection didn’t mean anything to me. The Buonarotti lab is close to your father’s Lodge. And someone arranged that I should find this.”