Phoenix Café (17 page)

“Is it t-t-true that you raped him?” blurted Mâtho. “J-Johnny Guglioli the journalist?”

“Yes.”

She lifted her glass and drank, to fill the silence.

“I don’t know why people make such a fuss about that,” exclaimed Lydie, loyally. “What’s so terrible about one little rape?”

“It caused the
Sabotage Crisis,
Lydie,” muttered Imran, scowling.

“I don’t see that! Johnny Guglioli got raped; he didn’t have to join the terrorists. He didn’t have to hijack the Buonarotti device, and try to commit genocide. He could have turned Braemar Wilson over to the authorities.
Self!
What if everybody who had sex forced on them thought they were entitled to kill millions of people in revenge?”

She blushed, her thick, big-pored halfcaste skin flaring suddenly dark.

Agathe touched Catherine’s hand. “I’m named after Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who was assassinated in an early phase of the Gender War; the first female Prime Minister in modern Africa. It’s the custom in my party to take the names of Reformer martyrs, people who have borne witness to our beliefs in their lives or by their deaths. Our saints, if you like. We got the idea from the halfcastes, who took it from the Aleutians. I don’t believe in reincarnation, certainly not for humans. I do believe Agathe Uwilingiyimana lives on in me. I’ve learned from your Aleutian perception of God. We
are
all aspects of the WorldSelf. We are part of each other. If she was guilty, I share her guilt, if she had burdens to bear, I share them too. We are all guilty, all burdened, and all forgiven. It doesn’t mean that I am that dead woman. I am myself.”

“It’s just a name,” said Rajath, puncturing the Reformer’s solemnity. “My parents aren’t believers. They sent me to the Church of Self to learn ‘speaking Aleutian’ and I didn’t. They keep up the halfcastes stuff out of habit. Being called ‘Rajath’ doesn’t mean a thing to me. If the First Captain owes anyone anything, they can forget it, far as I’m concerned!”

Agathe batted him down with a gesture, watching Catherine. “To us you are Catherine, a human being. In our company you can be yourself.”

Misha rapped on a wine glass.

“I declare a press conference,” he announced. “As Miss Catherine’s manager, I’ll keep order. The alien in human disguise, formerly known as Clavel, will take your questions.”

The mood lightened, to Catherine’s relief. Agathe looked annoyed, but she didn’t protest.

“Don’t ask me about the Departure. I won’t answer anything about that. Sattva would have my throat.”

“That’s fine. We’re sublimely uninterested in your leaving plans. Lydie?”

“What’s the real name of your planet?” cried the dancer.

“Home.”

Lydie pulled a face. “That’s what you guys always say. What is it
really?”

“Home!” repeated Catherine, laughing. “Why not? It’s better than ‘dirt.’”

“What’s the identity of your home system’s star?” asked Imran sharply.

“What do we call it at home? The sun, I suppose, more or less.”

Imran frowned, but Lalith broke in before he could pursue the point.

“What’s the
real
name of your people, nation, Brood, whatever?”

“Aleutians.”

“Oh, come on! That’s a chain of islands off the coast of Alaska, where one of your landing parties touched down. I mean your own name for yourselves.”

For a moment nothing happened. Someone giggled.

“She told us in the Common Tongue,” guessed Lydie. “We didn’t get it.”

Imran had been thinking. “I’ve got a good one—”

“You’ve had your turn,” protested Joset.

“But she didn’t answer mine, and this asks why.”

“Let him, let him,” came a chorus of voices.

“Why have you people never used your own formal language on Earth?”

“Our articulate languages are extremely fluid and contextual,” explained Catherine, plausibly. “People change their spoken names, and the names for things, constantly, as seems appropriate. In the context of the Expedition to Earth, English
is
our formal language.” She laughed. “That’s the party line. Be reasonable: I’m a trader, we’re a trading nation. If people learn your spoken language, your formal system of signs, it’s going to give them a bargaining advantage. To retain control in a trading situation, you speak the other people’s language and manage it so they don’t learn yours. I don’t know if it works, but that’s what we believe. I seem to have observed humans operating the same way,” she added. “If they get the chance.”

She felt their recoil: she’d offended them. She should not joke about the how the aliens had manipulated the humans. It wasn’t funny.

“So will you say something for us now, in the Aleutian formal language?”

“No.”

Misha laughed. “Does that mean no?”

She grinned. “Yes.”

“She’s an Aleutian,” muttered Imran. “They don’t break ranks.”

“What do you think of the way humans in the Enclaves all ‘call themselves she’ these days? Is it the Aleutian policy to encourage that?”

This was a difficult issue, and it would get the party line, with no joking. “It’s true that locals in the Enclaves tend to think of themselves as human first and male or female second, these days. But the ‘she’ aspect is physiological fact, or so we have been led to believe. Women, bearing breasts, is the definition of the kind of animal humans are, isn’t it? Hence the expression…mammals?”

She should have known the official line would be a disaster. Now everyone was
deeply
offended. Except, presumably, Agathe and Lalith. But they were keeping their thoughts to themselves.

“Whose side are you on,” asked Thérèse slowly, “Traditionalists or Reformers?”

“Don’t be
stupid,”
shouted Lydie, “you can’t ask her that.”

“She can,” countered Catherine. “But you know the answer. I’m not on either side. That’s not policy, it’s the truth.
I was here in the War.
I don’t care if you believe that or not, to me it’s true. I remember the War. There were no ‘good guys’ once the weapons were out. There never are. And there are no Gender warriors who are good guys now.”

“She’s right,” said Agathe abruptly. “We’ve put gender violence behind us. Isn’t that what we keep saying? Isn’t that what the Renaissance is about?”

“Is it?” wondered Misha. “I thought it was about not giving up our differences.”

“We have to give up
s-sex!”
burst out Mâtho. “Th-the problem is
sex.
It isn’t necessary any more. Women—and, and men too if they feel it’s right—can get pregnant by taking a pill. We can be f-f-feminine and masculine s-spiritually. If people st-still want to do
that,
to do those things, th-they are twisted inside.”

“Are
you
twisted inside, Miss Catherine?” inquired Joset, with awesome insolence.

Misha rapped his glass. “Disallowed! This is not a medical examination. What I want to know is, is
Mâtho
twisted inside?” He leered cruelly at the Nose, who was covered in confusion.

Everyone laughed. “Order, order!” shouted Lalith. “The conversation is getting disgusting. There are ladies present!”

“Rajath hasn’t had a question,” said Lydie, when there was quiet.

“I don’t want one!” Rajath assured them, looking alarmed.

“Nor has Agathe.”

“I waive my right. The press conference is closed.” Agathe considered Catherine, her chin propped on one firm dark hand. “What shall we do with her now?”

The Phoenix Café continued its life around them. Natural music whispered that rain was falling: beating on wet roadway turf, on rooftops; on the river as it flowed; on co-op fields and tiny
potagers
and termite hives.

“Do you remember,” said Agathe, “you once asked why there was no personal entertainment in here. No tvc, no gaming?”

Catherine saw dancing eyes, a little malice; a lot of triumph.

“It was stupid of me, that wouldn’t be in period. You’d have to have virtuality couches, video and voice-phones, rows of personal computers.”

“True, and we do use Pre-Contact systems. But we don’t always stay in period,” said Lalith. “The virtual world is important to us. It has a special place in the Phoenix Café concept: it unites us with our fellow café-goers everywhere.”

“What do you think?” asked Misha. “Is she ready?”

“Feed her to the blue demons!”

Misha shouted across the room, “Leaf! Leaf! Open the hellgates!”

The Renaissance cadre erupted from their seats. People at tables round about started clapping and cheering as Catherine was hauled out of her place. It seemed this ritual was something they recognized. She was picked up bodily and carried, a bundle of skirts and veils, by Lalith and Agathe. The back wall of the Café, beyond the comfortable bar area where people were relaxing around old-world island screens, had suddenly sprouted a pair of blue “Bella” demons, time honored guardians of the entrance to a gaming hell. Thérèse darted up and pulled Catherine’s veil over her face.

“No peeping!”

They set her on her feet, and stripped off the cloak.

“You can open your eyes!”

She stood in a deep blue gloom, in the antechamber to a gaming arena, facing a semicircle of gateways. Each should be the portal to a different world, a different
envie.
It was a long time since Catherine had been inside a hell. She looked for racks of visors: for weapons, fx generators, mask readers. She saw only the shining floor, the dim ceiling: and the glittering photochemical gates, leading into utter darkness. The young humans stood round her. Thérèse had also shed her chador. Binte the maid had been left outside.

Misha was beside Catherine. “You’ve played arena games before?”

“Not in this life.”

“Some things have changed. A lot of things are the same. Once you’re in the game environment, or once it is in you, you’ll run around and jump and play in real space, with your physical body, in the arena beyond those doors. It’ll seem like a whole world. The
sensei
will keep you from colliding with anybody, or doing anything to make you conscious of the real-world scruffy hall. Remember what a sensei is? The Master Control Program. It keeps everyone in the same
envie
in contact, by sensing the electrical activity in your brain and converting it into void-forces signals: light, but not visible light. Your world will be made of the game
libretto,
the storybook that’s been put into your brain. Plus the input from all the players who have entered the same
envie,
wherever they may be. You understand?”

She nodded.

He took her by the shoulders, his touch circumspect and distant; and guided her into position, her back to one of the gates. He showed her a tiny vial, cupped in his palm.

“What’s that?”

“Your visor. How the game gets into your head, in our time. Look up.”

“Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound…”

She heard the murmur of his voice, felt the liquid touch her eyes. “Go!”

She dropped. Into infinite space. She was in the game.

She brought back nothing from that first visit to the Phoenix games, except the confused fragments a dream. A dark wood, a wild animal. A panther or wolf-like thing running through undergrowth, thorns tearing at its furry hide. Had the animal been Catherine? She wasn’t sure. There had been hunters, a tremendous chase; and there’d been more, so much more. It was gone. She would have to learn the skills of virtuality gaming over again. How to remain lucid: how to enjoy the unreal world to the full, without getting sucked in and losing control. She was amazed she hadn’t realized that her young friends
must
be gamers. She’d been fooled by the nostalgic décor of the café, recalling so strongly First Contact Earth: where virtuality had been so crude, unfashionable clunky gauntlets, visors, bodybags.

Catherine sat up.

She was in the Café’s Ladies’ cloakroom, reserved for orthodox Traditionalist women, whose culture forbade them to share the ordinary bathroom. Someone had laid her on a couch and spread the chador over her. She couldn’t remember leaving the game.

“Hello.” Misha opened the door and closed it behind him. “I shouldn’t be in here, but I’ve permission from the management. I’ve come to see if you’re all right.”

“I’m fine.” She felt that the café out there was empty. “Is it late?”

“Quite late. Everyone’s gone home.” He sat beside her. The door he had closed so quietly was made of paneled, painted wood, hung on metal hinges. How Maitri would adore the Phoenix Café. But she would never let him come here. Lord Maitri would destroy the Renaissance; he would love it to death.