Phoenix Café (12 page)

He affected unconcern, while continuing to gaze at his work in adoration. “I don’t really know. It’s getting some notice, here and there. I don’t keep track.”

He would clearly have been happy to stand there all day, but managed to remember his responsibility as the young lady’s guide. “Good, we can eat now. You must be starving. The Car Park isn’t far.”

They passed into one of the neighborhood’s small stretches of cropland: bean fields in indigo leaf and flower that gave off fumes of sweet scent. It was cooler at once. The Aleutians were untroubled by the helplessness of their own elite, but they’d been unable to tolerate the idea of commoners who could not feed themselves: hence every inhabitant of an Aleutian city must have a piece of earth, if it was no bigger than a windowbox; besides the major areas of food-plant, threaded through the City’s ecology. This was a big shared patch, a farming co-operative. Tenement towers surrounded it, curled and crooked and indefinitely various. A massive block stood ahead, where their unpaved track re-entered the streets—swathes of naked concrete appearing and disappearing through its flickering layers of colored décor.

“The Car Park,” announced Misha. “I know you’ll love this.”

It was a food market, spread over several floors of huge, dank, low-ceilinged halls; connected by massive poured-stone ramps and stairways. Every floor teemed with booths, counters and lunching citizens, and every stall seemed to offered dishes as ancient as those Leonie recreated: a wonderful, ideal vision of Old Earth.

“What’ll it be?” asked Misha, smug with success.
“Potage bonne femme?
A little lobster bisque? What about a pizza? Let’s cruise. See what’s new.”

So they cruised, collecting snow-pea lasagna with insect protein, (You’re not a vegetarian are you? asked Misha); a rice dish with starfruit; beanbread, a confection called carracara flan, with carrots, caramel and tofu sauce…. Ionized ground water and a flask of rose sherbert. The customers, poor or not so poor, were antique and various as the cuisine. Many wore cut and sewn fabric, not as a revolutionary gesture but because they knew nothing else. Misha chaffed with the stallholders, both in-person and virtual. Balancing cartons, Catherine looked for somewhere to sit down. The tables, packed with enthusiastic lunchers, looked as interesting as the food.

“Sorry, no. We don’t eat in. The food is shareware when it’s new to the menus; that’s a Car Park tradition. It gets a price when you go back for more. But if you sit down, you always have to pay.”

Outdoors, they found a spot among other frugal patrons on the steps of a fine modern pantheist temple, decorated with scenes from the lives of Sts Rama, Guru Nanak, Louis and Genéviève. It was hosting a rousing midday service.

“I’ve never been
convinced
by starfruit,” remarked Misha. “An interesting idea, but too clever. I don’t know who did them, they’ve been around forever.”

“God, I believe.”

“Really? I never knew that.”

There seemed to be a vogue for black-and-white movie clips in savory packaging. Tiny invasive messages crawled through Lauren Bacall’s coiffure. Humphrey Bogart exhaled twenty-fourth century graffiti. Catherine tore up her empty bowls and ate them: chewing fly-posting, high art, and vandalism in digestible cellulose. Few other lunchers, she noticed, observed this virtuous ritual.

“When we arrived, to
drop litter
was a bleak gesture of alienation. At least that’s changed. All trash is compost! Why is it important not to pay? You’re rich.”

“I don’t carry cash. Anyway the nitrogen-fixing grub-mulch we just trialed is an experiment. I like that aspect. I like being ahead of the game.”

“I see. It used to be called ligging.”

“Hmm?”

“Ligging. Freeloading as an artform, a fashion statement. We were terrific liggers. We never paid for a thing, once we understood the rules. Bother, I ate my spoon. One can take instant recycling too far…. Oh, it’s all right, this’ll do.” The pudding came in plain industrial red and brown. She unearthed someone else’s discarded fork from a drift of debris, licked it and dug into her flan. Misha watched, slightly horrified.

“Maybe you really are an Aleutian.”

“What? Why not? I have very tough bugs in my gut: same as you. And I
am
an Aleutian, no matter what you think of my bio-chemical provenance. Remember Sidney Carton?
Race is bullshit, culture is everything?”

“I’m amazed,” said Misha, grimacing at the banal movie clip on his lasagna tray, “by the way we keep everyone fed. We’re not as upholstered as the folk in the old movies, but the common people can still pack out a place like the Car Park, where extra food is sold for fun. Yet they tell us Youro is starving. Have you had enough? Or shall I root you out some moldering bus tickets?”

“Thank you, I’m fine. You believe that Youro is starving?”

“Things are tight, just now. Can you imagine, we once expected to have a population of twenty billions on this planet? It’s lucky the organochlorines got to our fertility, not to mention that inspired invention, the Gender Wars. There simply isn’t room. Did you know, in the last three hundred years, coincidentally happening to be the period of your rule, we’ve lost more than seventy per cent our agricultural land, world wide?”

More like thirty, she thought. The other forty per cent you lost in the hundred years before we arrived, mainly by your own stupidity. Some locals blamed the aliens for the devastating Gender Wars, and that was debatable: but Aleutians were certainly responsible for the climate-improvement projects that had done maybe even worse damage. Catherine looked at her boots, unsullied by the midden at her feet; they were Aleutian make, and she shouldn’t be wearing them outdoors. But nobody cared anymore. She listened to the singing from the temple, and wondered if it was possible for any Aleutian, even an Aleutian in disguise, to make friends with a human.

N’ayons pas peur de vivre au monde
Dieu nous a devancés!
N’ayons pas peur de vivre au monde
où Dieu même s’est risqué…

“I’m sorry,” said Misha, insincerely. “I didn’t mean anything personal.” He stood up. “Now I’m going to take you on the lev.”

“When we arrived—” began Catherine.

“You’re going to have to stop that. The ‘when we arrived’ line. It could get to be a bad habit. Don’t be offended, I’m trying to help.”

N’arrêtons pas la sève ardente
Dieu nous a devancés
N’arrêtons pas la sève ardente
qui tourmente l’univers—

He set off, coat skirts swirling. He didn’t get far. A machine on tracks, a about knee high, came rushing up and began to circle him, yelping.

“Barcode! Barcode!”

“Funx off, you stupid little brute. I’m not stealing anything!”

“Barcode! Barcode! Barcode!”

It was the returnable bottle, a rather pretty pink glass flask, that had held their rose sherbert. Misha had inadvertently tucked it into his pocket. It was too late to hand it over. They were forced to slink back into to the Car Park, yelped there all the way, and Misha had to use his family credit line to pay.

“You wouldn’t believe how many people try to walk off with these,” commented the stallholder happily. “We must be on to a good thing.”

“I wasn’t—” Misha’s delicate skin flushed furious crimson.

The entrepreneur, a Reformer in faded overalls, leered cheerfully. “Naturally! It was an oversight, that’s understood. Thank you, Mr. Connelly Junior. That will do nicely.”

Again they walked, and Misha recovered his temper. They talked a great deal, in the corrupt version of English
(Youro,
never Europe) that was still a global contact language, thanks to the patronage of the aliens, who’d adopted it for their official communications long ago, and who disliked change. Misha was bilingual in French, but knew no other languages. He wanted to know how it felt to be an automatic linguist. She couldn’t tell him: “I’m not a neurologist!” she protested. “I just do it.” They talked of the ancient sects and cults, stronger now than they had been Pre-Contact. Meanwhile the Church of Self, successful in the Enclaves, made few inroads here. Perhaps they don’t kill their converts in the tropical zone? suggested Misha.

And of the entertainment industry: more and yet more gruesome tele-visual-cortical spectacles (gladitorials, bull-dancing, duels between humans and wild beasts, duels between humans and robot killing machines), where the audience hooked up and shared the violent experience of the performers. Gaming hells, tvc’s main competition, still packed the public in. But the games had become “degraded pap,” said Misha.

A telepresence package tour to Mars was cheaper to provide than a decent meal, he explained; and it was junkfood. Did Catherine realize that the whole of Earth’s space program was run on teletourism? That the only actual humans who went to Mars and the Moon were making the virtual masters? Essentially, B movie actors. A splendid joke, if you were a student of history.

“I did know that,” said Catherine. ‘It’s a shame.’ Aleutia had starved the Mars and Moon projects of funding. The shipworld saw no point in epic discomfort.

“I hate the hells, but I love direct cortical telly. Don’t you? Even the everlasting repeats. How many times have you jumped from Angel Falls?”

Catherine admitted to eleven. She’d been an addict of direct cortical tv before she joined the Mission, to the distress of Maitri’s household.

On the lev they traveled first class. Apparently Misha didn’t mind spending credit when he only had to transact with a machine. Don’t do this alone, he repeated. Only with a male escort. Now she was sleepy, and the shareware food sat heavily and queasily on her stomach. When they emerged she had the same uncanny feeling as when she’d stepped from the closed car into Thérèse’s orchard. She didn’t know where she was. Were they still in Paris? Even still in Youro? The sky had turned a darker blue, pricked by false stars. She’d been told that the real stars were invisible even in the parks or in the middle of food plant: the city’s atmosphere hid them.

It was curfew hour, the projections had closed down. They were in an old ward of indeterminate character: neither rich nor poor; not halfcaste, Reformer or Traditionalist. They descended, between tall old buildings, a long serene prospect towards gleaming water; crossed an ancient bridge set with globe lights that were reflected, shimmering, up and down the dark stream. Neither of them had spoken since they left the station. It was the quiet of two comrades coming back to the lights of home after a day’s tramp in the wilderness. She felt again the mysterious euphoria of the evening when she had first met Misha and his friends. The true city: the old city, not the great Youro sprawl, lay beautiful and still. An owl hooted. A delta plane of feathers, gilded in the dusk, dropped silently. The bird rose carrying a young rat in her claws.

“Hunting,” said Misha. “That’s something else. I’ll take you hunting.”

Not far from the river, they turned a corner and there were tables on the pavement under the branches of a sycamore tree. There were colored lamps, people were talking. Three shallow steps led to a terrace where a dark-skinned Reformer, a low-brimmed hat over her eyes, glanced up as they passed. She nodded to Misha and his companion; and looked away with an odd, rueful smile.

Inside the café more tables, most of them occupied, covered a wide floor of bare, softly shining wooden boards. A few middle aged or elderly couples were placidly absorbed in their evening meals; but most of the clientele seemed young as Misha. She had a sense of shared laughter and glances. She noticed obvious halfcastes, always a sign of general tolerance and good will. She heard the whisper of leaves, the sigh of distant traffic, an occasional clear word of conversation: sampled, mixed down, blended and woven into
musique naturelle
—the sound that was born in canvas shacks and dirt-floored shebeens in West Africa, and took the world by storm the year the aliens arrived. She stood transfixed, tears of nostalgia stinging her eyes.

“I knew you’d like it,” said Misha complacently. “Welcome to—”

“Miss Catherine?”

The dark-skinned Reformer woman had come indoors. She held out her hands. “Agathe Uwilingiyimana. We’ve met, but I’m sure you don’t remember. I know you’ve met my brother. I won’t make you say Uwilingiyimana even once. Agathe will do. We’re glad to see you. Misha promised us he would bring you. Welcome to the Phoenix.”

Catherine gripped her hands, and said inadequate things. “Oh yes, Joset. Yes, Agathe, at my guardian’s house, I do remember. Hello.”

Someone shouted: “Mish! Over here!” Rajath had jumped up from a chair, waving. Joset, Rajath, Mâtho and a handful of other young people, filled a long table. She and Misha went to join them, Catherine bewildered and pleased at the warmth of their reception. She could still feel the pressure of the Reformer Councilor’s handclasp. She hoped she hadn’t become a prize of intercommunal warfare, and was glad to see that there were other obvious Reformers, beside Joset, in the group she had joined.