Phoenix Café (4 page)

Misha, who had eyes in the back of his head when he wanted them, ranked the sleek young fashion-plates around her expertly; and assured himself that they were no competition. But the lady was right: you have to check your ranking. The young men seemed to be snatching each word from the air, open-mouthed. He knew that none of them was paying the slightest attention to what she said. They were gorging, in suppressed sexual excitement, on the phenomenon of her presence. But Lord Maitri’s ward was equally on auto. She looked to Misha as if she was drunk: or else like someone staggering under a burden, defending terrible injuries behind a wall of words.

She wore the Aleutian costume, the same as everyone here—the same as Misha, though he’d pushed the limits as far as he dared with his duster coat. Her hair was loose, tumbling down her back in dark, smoky masses. The orange and blue robe was carelessly open, revealing glimpses of a figure devoid of Helen’s rich and dainty curves. The rise of Miss Catherine’s breast barely lifted the dun stuff of her overalls, but he suddenly felt that he was in the presence of a real woman for the first time in his life. She was woman as nature intended her to be—an alien creature prowling the edge of the firelight, a dangerous trophy to be pursued in fear and trembling. Next to her, his beautiful little sister, with her human soul looking out of those huge voluptuous eyes, was something grublike, preserved in a jar.

He decided that he would make Miss Catherine come over to the buffet table to join him. Misha had an augmented lymph system, designed to protect him from infection; and especially from the infested air, teeming with their life, that surrounded the aliens. With no scientific grounds for the belief, he sometimes thought he could use the defense that his skin exuded to communicate like an alien. He willed the summons outwards, keeping his back to the alcove and systematically devouring a platter of minute cinnamon flavored meat patties. It was amusing, but the trick had better not work! She’d tell Maitri that one of the humans was talking dirty to her with his immune system glands, and he’d get thrown out.

“Yes? What is it?”

He started. Miss Catherine was at his side.

“Damn,” he said. “I missed the show.”

“Why did you call me?”

He leaned across to pick out three golden packages of feta cheese and spinach. “Did I call? You were sitting down and I wanted to see you walk, that’s all. I’m curious, like everybody else, Miss Alien-in-disguise.” He tucked the food into his mouth.

At close quarters her robe seemed to be made of interwoven flower petals. Freckled orange lily throats drew the glance inward. White stamens curled, indecently inviting, in the splayed mouths of the bellflowers. He could tell that it was an instant creation: grown to serve a whim and meant to vanish after an evening’s wear. He was glad she wasn’t a snob about enduring artifacts, like Lord Maitri the culture-vulture (rarely had the ancient phrase been more appropriate!) The coat he was wearing himself would not last through the night.

“And I was curious about you. So we were thinking the same thing.”

She smiled, struggling out from her private torture chamber. Misha had to bite back the retort,
I doubt it!

The Aleutian artisans had not given her a perfect finish. He guessed that maybe they just couldn’t
believe,
when it came to it, in the fine details of human appearance. There was a suggestion of baboon tusks in her lower eye-teeth, which caught her lip when she smiled. Her nose was awkward, and they’d over-corrected the slope of her shoulders. In alien terms they’d given her a permanent wary smile. Presumably that’s the way we look to them, he thought, amused at the insight. The mistakes, paradoxically, made her seem even more a natural animal, a wild creature.

Now that he’d caught her he didn’t know what to say, since anything he really wanted to say was impossible. He’d have to take care to remember that she was a young lady of his own caste, as far as social manners went.

“I was curious,” explained Catherine. “Because you seemed so hungry.”

“Not any more. The food’s excellent, by the way. Won’t you try something?”

“Oh good. I’ll tell my mother…. No, I won’t eat.”

Suddenly, her eyes flashed. Her head turned, with the speed of a hunting animal fixing on prey. An instant later Misha saw a flurry of disturbance over where Lord Maitri was still receiving guests. The air quivered, and an Aleutian figure stood beside their host. Somebody had just arrived by telepresence.

“Excuse me,” muttered Catherine.

Sattva, the Expedition’s Planet Surface Manager for the City of Youro, found it more convenient to manage his turbulent megapolis from the Aleutian second capital in West Africa. His in-person visits to the Youroan continent were rare (Sattva blamed a shrinking budget). Telepresence, though it involved spooky void-forces mechanisms designed by humans, was a useful compromise. As a walk-around ghost he could satisfy the humans’
amour propre
and yet assure them, truthfully, that he was unable to decide anything or grant anything while in this wholly un-Aleutian state. He was not pleased when he saw Catherine coming. She hadn’t expected that he would be.

Sattva flashed a glance of furious reproach at Maitri, who made helpless gestures. he snapped.

she pleaded,

demanded the City Manager acidly.

This question, to
Catherine,
whose views were utterly well known, was so insolent it took her breath away.

repeated Sattva. His ghost moved jerkily over to the examination pit, and hid itself in a group of Maitri’s elderly Aleutian retainers.

“I’m sorry.”

Her enigmatic exchange with the City Manager was over. Amazingly, she had returned to Misha’s side. She set off again, with a glance that invited him to follow. He kept pace with the drifting train of her robe, through green light and into gold, to an embrasure where native glass doors opened on the gardens. He wondered what they’d been saying to each other. To watch a conversation between Earth-accustomed Aleutians was very odd. They stood looking at each other, twitching a little, in a silence occasionally broken by a spoken word or phrase of human language, suddenly barked out aloud….

“What was all that about?”

She glanced back at him. “You don’t speak Aleutian?”

The aliens read human faces and gestures so accurately, using the rules of their infamous “Common Tongue,” it could seem like mind-reading. Few humans were able to return the compliment.

“Not when it’s so fast, and, um, elliptical.”

“Too bad.”

Finality. She would not or could not say any more.

“Maybe you’ll tell me one day. I heard your Diderot lecture. You speak quite good French.”

But she was speaking impeccable English now. There were Silent aliens, who never spoke aloud. They were the ones who did the processing, the technicians, domestics, artisans: hewing wood and drawing water so to speak. Disconcertingly, some of them were in positions of power, extremely rich and influential, though dumb as animals. But the Signifiers, the few who used articulate language and dealt with humans, seemed to be a cultural elite —as far as human terms made sense for alien society. Maitri was a Signifier. His ward, naturally, had the same status. Misha wondered if she could do the famous trick of speaking
any
human language, almost perfectly, after hearing it once.

“You were listening.” Catherine showed her teeth. The little tusks gleamed. “I was thinking of Aleutia: but it’s the same with you. You call our Signifiers a ‘ruling class.’ Isn’t it just as true among humans that most people prefer to be silent? They ‘only want to get on with their lives,’ as people always say: so they pay some human Signifier to have opinions for them. That’s what your cultural hierarchy amounts to, same as ours.
Tout le monde a son maître.
Loyalty is convenient. It answers that nagging question: why? Why am I here? I don’t have to answer that. Go ask the head of my household. The few who will speak are all psychopaths to some degree: people who feel they have a right to use others for their own ends. Maitri’s like that, though nobody thinks of him as ruthless. And then there are the ones like me, with no agenda. I have no desire to rule even the smallest of worlds, yet I do nothing but criticize the obliging folks who do the job. It’s very irritating of me. People run when they see me coming. I don’t blame them.”

Maitri had let his lawns run to seed. They were swishing through a miniature meadow, a horticultural effect Misha found insulting.
If you must imitate us, at least get it right.
Her hands brushed the fluid sheaves of red and gold. She turned and smiled, shoulders lifted and warmth in her eyes.

“Excuse me: I make speeches. It’s a dreadful habit. I love a lawn at this time in its year, don’t you? Grasses are so beautiful in flower.”

They reached an informal arrangement of old-earth stone carvings, buried shoulder deep. Catherine knelt, squatted, and finally sat with her legs curled under her, propped against one of the stones. The aliens were half-hearted bipeds, reverting easily to a four-footed habit: it was odd to see that animal fidgeting in the limbs of a civilized young lady. Misha traced the lettering on a stolen fragment of his ancestral culture.

Not lost to memory, not lost to love.

But gone to her father’s home above.

“You’re a missionary. What’s that like? Do you make many converts?”

Catherine thought of blood and entrails. “I’ve given it up.”

“Very wise. Personally I avoid the poor as much as possible. They tire me.”

“We don’t only preach to the poor—” Shoulders lifted. “Sorry. No more speeches! You’re Michael Connelly, aren’t you. The son of the park-keeper Michael Connelly, who manages everybody’s virtual wilderness experiences. I know about you. But I don’t think I’ve seen you at one of Maitri’s parties—?”

Misha laughed. “So young, and already having memory-problems. No, I’ve never been here before. My father gave me an Aleutian education, but he doesn’t like the kind of young man who hangs around aliens. I would have defied him of course,” he added gallantly, “if I had known what I was missing. And you are Lord Maitri’s ward, the young lady who is really an Aleutian in disguise. Everybody’s heard of you: nobody seems to know exactly what that means.”

Catherine leant her head against the stone. How strange. He had called her, which no human should be able to do, and for a moment she’d felt that Michael Connelly knew everything; he’d seemed to feel the same pain, to bear the same terrible burden of guilt. The hallucination she’d suffered at the police station had flashed into her mind: a human girl whose flesh bore the marks of a deadly industrial disease, unknown on Earth… (she understood that illusion’s message very well:
I am corrupted, they are doomed).
Now he was just another of the rich young men who clustered around, whenever she made an appearance. She wondered if she could recapture that flash, that positively Aleutian meeting of minds, and was afraid to try.

Misha had never been alone with a young woman in the flesh, except for Helen. And Helen, he had to accept, was always chaperoned now. She had closed her eyes. She opened them suddenly. They’d given her level brows, long lashes, and left her the
black on black
Aleutian effect. The alien eyes were very human in structure, but so dark there was no visible distinction between pupil and iris. It was more startling in the frame of white, without their pronounced epicanthic fold. She looked away, frowning.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to pester you about the Departure, which I assure you is the major topic indoors. One day, a few hundred years ago, we woke up and you were here. One day soon we’ll wake up and you’ll be gone. I don’t care. You people can leave whenever and however you like, it’s all the same to me.”

She laughed, human style, with teeth bared and a full-throated sound.

“Do you believe in reincarnation, Michael?”

“Misha, Mish. Or you can call me ‘Junior,’ but I’d prefer you didn’t. No.”

“Nor do I.”

“But you are ‘an Aleutian in a human body,’ however that works. Doesn’t that mean you’re an immortal yourself?”

“You think I’m confused? So would you be. This person beside you will live and die a human. Yet I’m an Aleutian, that’s the truth, I feel it: and the Aleutian I am, who chose to be human, will be born again, not wearing this disguise. But does serial immortality mean that the same person lives on, exactly? Some of us don’t think so.’ She moved restlessly, as if struggling against invisible bonds. “You’re right. The Departure doesn’t matter. What matters is what’s going to happen on Earth, afterwards.”