Phoenix Café (16 page)

“I remember feeling the same. When I found out how movies were made, and I’d believed humans were individualists. Do they have a print of the Isaacs?”

“I don’t want to see
The World at War.
It’s too emotional.” Misha walked away, to stare at some dazzling images of fire and molten metal, a beautiful woman’s body morphing into a dolphin with a radioactive glow; a Peugeot campaign from around the turn of the twenty-first century. “I’ve grown up a little. I hate art that doesn’t do work. I can’t do what they did, those people in the endless credit lists. That machine’s run down. But I know they were better than me, smug and alone with my Vlab. Better than me. Don’t you love the way the car ones morph into religious images, so sacred, so reverent: while the traffic absolutely
disappears?
Same thing happens to tobacco cigarette ads, in their decadence. There aren’t any of those here; they were banned from tv for the crucial period. Actually I hate this stuff. Let’s find something prehistoric and static. You’ll like that.”

“When we first arrived—” Catherine grinned, “people in England were extremely scathing about this collection. Old tv commercials as high art! The Tate was held to have finally, utterly flipped. But I agree; I don’t want to be a superior outsider, ignoring the masses. I want my art to be simple, banal, ordinary. That’s my hopeless ambition.”

“Is that why you’re working for Mâtho?”

Catherine frowned.

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Mâtho’s a good guy. I’m jealous. Would you work with me?”

She shook her head.

The Expedition had arranged for Catherine’s visit to be private: an unnecessary precaution. It was not the tourist season, and Thames Valley residents never came near this institution, in-person or by tvc. It was supported by a private foundation. Catherine and Misha were alone in the vaults except for the security guards. They parted, by unspoken consent. Catherine wandered through funerary halls of Gender War casualties. The headless Winged Victory that had stood in the Louvre, a great jagged canvas called
Guernica;
the white marble David from the Accademia; Piero della Francesca’s bleak, supernal Resurrection. All gone. But here they were, alive in the data grid. Still passionate, still burning in humanity’s external mind and heart.

She went looking for Misha and found him as he’d promised, with the Tate’s current selection of static canvases. They walked slowly towards each other, along the cool, honey-colored gallery. Diffused daylight spread through air, carried from distant windows, amplified by light-bearing veins that ran through the stone. They met in front of a Renoir and stood at gaze, the folds of her honor-cloak nudging his sleeve.

“This is what you call poetry?”

“It’s your nearest analogue to our poetry. The only use we have for printed words in Aleutia is in instruction manuals. Art made in that medium would be like—um, asking your average human audience to admire a page of mathematical symbols. People do it from time to time, it’s done. Not by me.”

“You do representational pictures. Aleutian Renoirs? Narratives?”

“I don’t look for a subject. I draw what’s in front of me, usually. I try to capture a moment. Is that banal enough? But an Aleutian poem is…it’s alive. How can I explain? When an Aleutian takes a wanderer from his skin, and feeds it to a friend, he’s saying
this is me now, this is my state of being.
When I compose a poem I’m trying to do that to the world, through the microcosm of what I see. This is the world, now. When another Aleutian comes along, maybe generations later, and ‘looks at my picture,’ the meaning of that moment to me is shed from the picture and enters the viewer. The poem is a communication-loop. Captured: and released again, not the same but evolved by everything that’s happened since, brought into being by my poem’s meeting with the new gaze. I’m not explaining this well. If I could say what I mean by making a poem in Spoken Words, it wouldn’t be poetry.”

She stared at
Les Parapluies:
the flower-faces standing out like love stories in the sober, cynical text of Renoir’s narrative. Virtual particles of the dead artist’s intention filled her air, entered her being.

“I’m wrong. It is the same.”

She felt the touch of Misha’s sleeve against her own through her whole body, and did not attempt to filter out her knowledge that he had the same awareness; that for both of them this intellectual conversation was exquisitely, secretly erotic.

Misha applied his utility test. “But do you do it for profit?”

“Absolutely. Personal profit for me. Does that count?”

A security guard had found them. It sneaked up, apparently fascinated by the sight of the young lady and her escort, and hovered. Misha glanced around, with a forbidding glare. It stood its ground.

“It’s no wonder nobody comes here,” said Misha, loudly. “Who wants to see this stuff? Babies and breasts, dead bodies, movie-moments of corporate confirmation. You’ll have noticed there’s death and sex and violence in hideous quantities, but if there’s an image of someone
shitting
anywhere, I missed it. That’s one of the least celebrated pleasures in life if you ask me, the feel of a lovely big fat turd plopping out of you. What’s art if it doesn’t venerate pleasure?”

“I prefer to ooze,” reflected Catherine. “I learned to shit your dreadful bricks in my first life here, same time as I learned to eat your weird food. We don’t do lumps. We
don’t
always use nappies. It was only on the shipworld that we took to toilet pads. But I like them. Oozing into a pad is the best. I like to seep, to feel it going while I’m talking to someone, or walking down the street. I like the way it vanishes into your pad. You produce, but what you produce immediately becomes part of the world again.”

“It must be like the trickle of menstrual blood.
Do
you menstruate?”

The guard had begun to show mechanical signs of embarrassment early in Misha’s speech. It fidgeted on the spot, roused a detector vane or two; retracted an appendage. Finally, torn between prudery and censorious suspicion, it scooted off backwards and careered out of sight, still ogling with every sensor.

Misha and Catherine burst into giggles.

“Ah,
les rosbifs.
Who says there’s no such thing as ethnic identity?”

“No I don’t,” she said. “I know your fancy young ladies still bleed, but ordinary women don’t. I didn’t want to be special.”

He flushed crimson. “Self, I didn’t really mean you to answer that.” He quickly recovered. “For completism, maybe you
should.
It’s classically female. Are you fertile?”

“Subfertile, your quacks say. Same as always. I am myself, translated.”

They came up into the forecourt. A row of cabs stood under leaden clouds, on a field of alien weeds above the culverted river. The brilliant blur of a commercial zone stood beyond: debased remains transmuted by distance into shafts of dancing aurora, phalanxes of multi-colored angels running up and down between earth and sky. It was the last day of their trip. They went to the Expedition car that was waiting for her.

“Come back with me,” she said, not wanting to say goodbye. She scratched the rubbery creases around the vehicle’s sleepy, daylight eyes. “Come back to the Embassy, stay the night. You shouldn’t pass up a chance to spend an Aleutian night. We can travel together in the morning.”

They would travel together, alone in a closed car. It would be scandalous, unforgivable, if Catherine was a real young lady. But she was not. She was wearing these clothes for a whim; she belonged to no one but herself. Of course Misha understood that. She would tell him how peculiar and perilous it felt to have no underwear. They would laugh about it. They would escape from their roles: she from her need for punishment, he from his secret anger. They would be friends, be good to each other, make love, enjoy—

“No thanks,” he said.
“Vive la Renaissance.
No belly of the beast for me. I’ll use the lev.”

Misha left the Tate forecourt by an underpass. The twenty-fourth century vanished into dank archaeological gloom. There were cities under cities in western fringes of Youro, dead things layered in the dark. Strips of bacterial lighting, crawling with minitel information, directed him to his station; the only fragments of the present day. He checked his tally of how many times she had said “always,” and how many times she said “we.” It helped him to keep his distance. As he passed a buried shop front, stepped on and trampled by the clambering generations, a sexless, haggard face looked up from a beggar’s pitch. The troglodyte thrust out a filthy palm.

Misha halted, obeying an impulse of petty malice. “You think you’d like to change places with me, don’t you.”

The beggar grinned and nodded, now sure of a generous handout.

“You’re wrong.”

He strode on.

iii

Misha told Joset something he could have told him a while before. The Leonardo da Vinci in Miss Catherine’s boudoir was the real thing. Although, of course, totally inferior to an analogous Aleutian artwork, as it didn’t give off information-rich whiffs of sixteenth-century pheromones. The others had either long been convinced that Catherine was the one they sought (Mâtho, Rajath, Lydie); or remained skeptical, but wanted to get on with the plot (Agathe, Lalith, Thérèse, Imran). Commence phase three.

Misha came to fetch Catherine as usual, and they took a cab to the Phoenix Café. She knew as soon as she walked in that she was in some kind of trouble. The cadre was unusually united: Rajath, Mâtho and Lydie, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, her brother; Lalith. Shortly after Misha and Catherine came in they were joined by Thérèse and Imran Khan. It was evening twilight, the traditional human gathering time. The café was crowded. The regulars were used to seeing Lord Maitri’s ward by now. Lalith attracted more attention: public interest in the Renaissance was growing. But this evening nobody came over to try and introduce themselves, no would-be acquaintances casually dropped by. The group of friends had an atmosphere. Unusually, there was no food or wine on the table. It was Rosh Hashanah, they explained to Catherine, the Jewish New Year. The citizens of Youro enjoyed the holidays of all the various cults, if they happened to be employed: or observed the rituals (as far as they were remembered), if they happened to be believers.

“What
are
we supposed to eat?” demanded Lydie. “I’m hungry.”

“Black letter print with sanserif sauce?” suggested Agathe. “Newsprint paté? The Jews are the People of the Book, aren’t they?”

“Nah,” grinned Joset. “Turtle soup with pigs’ trotters, followed by dairy ice cream.”

Mâtho, the authority, was ordered to pronounce, but he refused to be drawn. “It isn’t really Rosh Hashanah,” he told Catherine. “It isn’t even Yom Kippur. Youro celebrates everything on the wrong dates, because of the calendar change in—”

She was not allowed to listen. Her second mood-piece had just been released by the agency, and everyone wanted to congratulate her. “There’s one thing about this video diary,” remarked Joset, “that’s puzzling, Miss Catherine. The ‘Aleutian-speaking’ commentary software picked up your name.”

“Let’s get some wine,” said Misha.

“It turns out they call you Pure One, around the house. Is that a common name? Or are you the famous Pure One: Clavel the Third Captain?”

So that was it. She sighed, relieved. “No,” she said. “I mean, no it’s not a common name; and yes, I’m Clavel. It’s not a secret. I’m Clavel.”

Joset opened his eyes wide. “Wow! We are sitting here with one of the three original leaders of the Expedition to Earth?”

She knew (she couldn’t filter out everything!) that they’d always known who she was supposed to be. Most of all Misha, whose goading had always been right on target! She didn’t care whether or not they believed she was Clavel. She’d only prayed they would feel it was “cooler” not to refer openly to her past history. She’d been asking too much. Wine arrived. The young humans, maybe nonplussed by her unhappy silence, were silent in turn, staring at Catherine or the tabletop, in degrees of curiosity and embarrassment

She began, “But you always—” (Misha smiled coldly.)

She tried again. “All right. I am the person the Aleutians call Pure One, translated into a human body. That’s who I learned to be, the way an Aleutian child learns. That’s ‘who I am’ in the physical entity of the Brood, and in the Commonalty of Aleutia. But I’m not in charge now! It’s a
long
time, lives, since I was a leader of the Expedition.”

“You’re still a
really important person,”
insisted Lydie.

On a scale of what? She found it hard to face the dancer’s eyes.

“Even when I was the Third Captain, I wasn’t very important, Lydie. We’d been lost forever, we were bored. The Expedition was a private venture. We were stir-crazy wastrels. I certainly didn’t have an idea that Aleutia would end up ruling this world, and I’ve never been remotely interested in that as a plan.”

The humans looked at each other.