Phoenix Café (13 page)

“Do you take your wine simple or complicated?” asked Joset, proffering bottles.

“Huh?”

“The grape; the pure esoteric grape. Or something chemically improved?”

“I’ll take the plain grape.” She thought of orange peel and dogdirt.

“And what will you eat?”

She was still suffering from the maggot lasagna.

“But you m-must break bread with us,” insisted Mâtho.

“Give her bread; let her break it. You don’t have to eat it, Miss,” (They don’t like our “hard food” someone explained importantly to a neighbor: They live on lukewarm soup.)

“Break it over Mâtho’s head!”

Food was ordered, after an intense discussion in which Catherine was not expected to take part. She was assailed by fearless, excited questions.

“What does it mean to be an alien in a human body?”

“Is Lord Maitri your biological father? Are you cloned or engineered?”

“Are you a single malt like Mish, or are you a blend?”

Misha aimed a thump at the speaker, a bird-boned halfcaste, presenting herself as feminine, with slick, black cropped hair and enormous eyes.

“Excuse them! They’ve never been this close to an alien in the real. This is Lois Lane, she’s a bull dancer and she adores you.”

“It’s COWS, dickface. And I’m NOT called Lois Lane. My name is Lydia!”

To Catherine’s astonishment the halfcaste leapt onto the table and aimed a flying kick that sent Michael’s black beret spinning like a Frisbee across the room. She made a neat dismount, into the empty chair beside Catherine.

“I admire you, that’s true. It’s so
casual
to have yourself translated into another species. Just what I’d do if I was rich. What’s the point in being normal if you’re rich? You don’t know me but I admire you. Maybe we can be friends.”

The two figures opposite Catherine were shrouded in the full chador, but one of them seemed familiar. “Do I know you?” she asked.

The first veiled figure stripped off her hood, revealing the blonde hair and tip-tilted green eyes of Thérèse Khan. She was still wearing butterfly makeup, in a fresh design. “It’s me,” she admitted, grinning. “Yes, I’m here in person. I’m not completely a prisoner—or an idiot. That’s my brother Imran.” She waved a hand towards a smoldering, hawk-faced young male. “This is my maid, Binte, my chaperone.” Thérèse ripped open her servant’s veil, uncovering a round, placid brown face as glossy as polished wood. “I call them all Binte. She’s my bodyguard, my private policeman. Be careful what you say. She’s very aggressive, and awfully strong.” She laughed at Catherine’s expression. “No, I don’t mean that. Say what you like, she’s not
human.
She’s a surveillance camera. She’s only capable of noticing certain things.”

“Like what?”

Binte smiled and nodded.

Thérèse giggled. “Shoplifting!”

The food arrived, along with Misha’s hat. They had settled on garlic soup, a little roast chicken (it was a
very
little roast chicken, it looked more like a roast hamster),
mamaliga
and sour cream.

“We have our own kitchens,” the waiter told her proudly, returning Misha’s beret with a flourish. He was a masculine Reformer, but differently masculine from Joset. “In the pre-Aleutian style. You must see them. We’re a co-operative, everyone does everything. We’re part of a chain; we have branches in every city, two or three in many
quartiers.
Would you like to learn to cook?” He held out his hands. “Welcome to the Renaissance, Miss Catherine.”

“What a splendid logo,” she said. “The Phoenix. The mythical bird that remakes itself, that dies in a nest of flames and is reborn from its own ashes—”

The waiter laughed. “Actually, it’s the name of the person who opened the first café. He’s called River Phoenix, he’s a halfcaste. Reincarnation of a great Pre-Contact recording star. Maybe you met him in a past life?”

“No.” said Catherine. “I never did. But I love
My Own Private Idaho.”

“Never seen it. Nor has River, but it inspired him to be a cook. A whole movie about love and sex and potatoes. We knew about the extinct birds too, of course. Hey, I don’t suppose you remember what they really looked like?”

“Mamaliga
is only cornbread.” Mâtho leaned down the table, mortified by this poor scholarship and trying to distract her attention. “You can m-make it very soft with some more sour cream. D-don’t try the meat, it’s very hard to digest.”

“Could I buy some wine?” Catherine offered. “If I can use Maitri’s credit here.” She raised delighted laughter by adding: “If it’s not too
uncool
to pay for things?”

She ate, to the admiration of all, and found the food excellent. She heard as many definitions of
the Renaissance
as there were eager faces around the table, and joined a discussion about the metaphysical significance of
couture.
They wore “native costume,” they told her, because like the Renaissance itself it could not be grown. It must be woven, cut and sewn, by hand or by machine. It must be separated from the world. That was the essence of human art and craft! It must be defined, delimited, distilled, detached, unreal!

Misha, seeing his protégée safely launched, leaned back in his chair to consult privately with Joset. They’d both been wired for years, and were accustomed to commune with each other like this, whether in the same room or apart: a secret cabal in the midst of any crowd.

He showed Joset, transferring the image from his cortical screen to his friend’s. <
This is a picture by Leonardo da Vinci, a study for a major work that was destroyed in the War. It’s known to have been in alien possession for a long time. The registered owner is an alien we know well. Kevala the Pure, poet and philanthropist, aka “Clavel,” the Third Captain. The one who shafted Johnny Guglioli, thus precipitating the Sabotage Crisis and the Landing Party Treaty. The one who, in her next life, tried to get a new “Johnny” made up for herself, from a Johnny Guglioli tissue sample. You’ll remember it didn’t work, but the resulting fiasco became “Bella the librarian” who found the Buonarotti device. Whereupon Clavel tried it out, proved the feasibility of the Departure project, and convinced the Aleutians to steal the invention and develop it for themselves. Thus, to sum up, we have here the alien of all aliens.>

Joset:

Misha:
< Trust me, Jo. The thing is worth several million lakhs of rupees, if it’s the original, and it is sitting in Miss Catherine’s boudoir. You know the way they work. Serial immortality. A baby gets born; the priests of Self establish a chemical identity. Then and only then, they have assigned to them the possessions and rights, or lack thereof, belonging to their serial self. She says it’s hers. If it’s the real thing, she has to be Kevala the Pure. They took names in Sanskrit when they arrived because they thought it was our worldwide sacred language. They still do it. Originally they chose handles that matched the Aleutian person by some salient quality. Guess what “Catherine” means, in this city’s reckoning, Mister Yaweh-Increases? It means “The Pure.” Are you convinced? Yours ever, Who Is Like Unto God!>

Joset (reads through Misha’s long transfers again):

Misha:

Joset:

Misha:

Joset:

Misha:

Misha closed the screen that had unfolded before his inner eye: no more strange than a train of verbal thought, no more distracting than a daydream. No, it’s not magic, he thought, smug as an Aleutian. Though it’s true I have constant access to the common mind of humanity, in the great library of data storage. I could even, if I were a policeman or a peeping tom, know a lot about what my friend was actually
thinking,
not merely what he wants to tell me. But please, it’s not supernatural. You wouldn’t understand, Miss Alien. It’s to do with entities, not even real things, too small to be alive, called electrons, photons, muons, quarks, that float in the human air and join us all in one commonalty of un-life. He raised his eyes, slowly panning across the tables. Slowly smiled. We’re on our way, he thought. Stage two. Wonder how she’ll like stage three.

Catherine was thinking that she knew why she had been forced to eat shareware. Misha hated to be reminded that he was a copy of his father, and that happened every time he raised a credit line as Michael Connelly Junior. She would get Leonie to give her some cash, and ask someone less prickly to come to the Car Park with her, so she could really eat
potage bonne femme,
or
moules frites,
instead of maggot pasta. She called to Mâtho: “Those news articles you wanted. Could we talk about it?”

Catching Misha’s eye, she sent him a warm and grateful smile.

“How will you settle, ladies and gentlemen?”

Their waiter had returned; the Café was emptying; the evening was over. Catherine tried to offer her palm to his debit machine, but was shouted down. “Tonight you’re our guest!” they cried. “Don’t be so keen, rich lady! We’ll surely be sponging off you soon!”

“Let Mish pay!” roared Joset. “Let’s humiliate the style-victim!”

ii

Soon after her introduction to the Phoenix Café, Catherine realized that she had to go back to the poor ward. She was sane again after a spasm of madness, and she wanted to know what had become of the young lady with the bandaged wrist and the toy snake. She took a cab to the police station where she’d been held, but prudently had it drop her a few blocks away and sent it back to the stand. It would be cruel to leave it waiting, where an untended semi-sentient vehicle was likely to be butchered and carried off in pieces before she returned.

In Maitri’s garden it was autumn now. Here the weather was always the same. The same brazen sky pasted like strips of paper across the cracks between the termite-nest blocks they called the hives; over the parched miserable patches of
potager
where no crops thrived. The same listless figures peered from doorways; the same dull-eyed children gathered to follow the stranger. She’d dressed like a local in a loose blouse and trousers, with a long sturdy overshirt to conceal her female body; she couldn’t make herself inconspicuous. Hive-dwellers came to the prosperous streets. They were the beggars. They were the weed-cutters who fed your cab when you were stopped by traffic orders or stalled by a crowd, the squatters who prowled in ragged troupes in search of new living space or ground to grow food. But a hive “estate” was as exclusive as a rich suburb. Outsiders did not come here by accident.

The usual straggling crowd covered the ramps and the steps of the police station. She couldn’t make up her mind how to approach this. Suppose she asked, and the police said:
What girl? There was no girl, Miss Catherine.
In the end she turned away. The police were like Catherine: they knew they weren’t supposed to get involved in rich people’s troubles. This was the wrong place to start. She decided to visit her own little
trou:
the building was nearby. Someone might remember something.

She left the stuffy glare of the street and climbed. The termite nest shape of these tenements was meant for coolness and efficiency. It was a design found everywhere in the quartier; and quite likely over the whole human world. But though the hives were potentially, easily, self-sufficient in power and light and waste disposal, their connection to the bit-grid was not enough to support their routine maintenance. The lifts and lights never functioned for long at a time; sanitation bacteria gave up the unequal struggle. She reached her floor and picked her way through an overflow, where foul liquid oozed over the floor of the indoor street. Children were picking through it too, looking for anything edible, anything remotely of value. She reached her
trou,
and scratched at the entrance.

“Justine?”

A face she didn’t recognize peered through the hybrid curtain.

“Who are you?” Catherine demanded. “Where’s Justine, and her kids?”

“Has she sent you for the rent? You can’t have it. We haven’t got it.”