Phoenix Café (2 page)

A single-seater cab was ready for her outside on the ramp. As she blundered into it she knew she should turn back. The fugue moment had passed; she felt she’d betrayed the girl with the bandaged arm. But there were so many, so much grief and pain
. Don’t meddle with the rich,
she whispered to herself. She huddled into an animal crouch inside the little vehicle’s fat belly, and let it carry her away.

The cab took her to Maitri’s house at the Giratoire. She roused herself in time to stop it from trundling in at the front gates and got out in a dusty alley, where naked children played in the black and orange tiger weed outside the aliens’ back door. A tinker shook powder onto a broken griddle and rubbed two rims of metal together, releasing the acrid stink of lattice-fusion. The children pulled sprigs of alien weed and let them feed on warm skin, giving themselves tiger weed bracelets, earrings, tattoos. Faces peered from troglodyte windows in stained cliffs of artificial stone. The Giratoire had been one of the vast road junctions that had ringed this
quartier
when it was a conurbation in its own right. Most of them had vanished into later development. This one, in ruins, had miraculously survived. Maitri had settled here long ago for the romance of the location. He refused to move, though the neighborhood had gone downhill and the monument now teemed with squatters. There was a brief stir as Catherine got down; but the streetlivers knew her. They returned to their own concerns, and she passed through Maitri’s gate. A barrier impermeable to any material it did not recognize, living or dead, sucked her in and closed behind. She left the human city and entered a different air.

It was always green in here: the green of true native plant life, rarely seen anywhere outside a sentimental alien’s garden. Maitri had a “burst main” spring, which helped; fed by the lost workings of an ancient pumping system. The human servants said it had been running for more than three hundred years. The tank was in Maitri’s vegetable beds. Catherine went to it, drawn by the grieving sound of the water, and stood watching the silver daemon, that thrust its blunt head, endlessly, through viridian mosses, to fall into a pool of transparent darkness. When she was a child she used to think that the water-daemon was trapped, begging to be let out. She would try to catch it and help it over the side. But the water flowed through her fingers and just went on crying.

The air had a slight haze in it, enough to blur the vista of Maitri’s lawns and flowers. At First Contact, human observers had noticed straight away that the aliens communicated “like animals.” It was true that a chatty gathering of Aleutians could look like a troupe of baboons in clothes, silently embracing, grooming, nuzzling; conversing by gaze and gesture—with the occasional startling outburst of articulate speech. It had taken longer before the humans realized that Aleutians were also in constant, biochemical communication: through tiny particles exchanged in the air they breathed, and absorbed through their pores; through the wriggling scraps of skin fauna that they picked from each other and ate. Like almost every animal on earth—except for humans—they lived in a broth of tastes and smells that kept them always in contact with each other. But in the aliens’ case the traffic was conscious.

It was this living, intelligent flux, thick and complex as commerce on the lifeless human information networks, that had destroyed human supremacy. It was the basis of the aliens’ effortless biotechnology.

The Aleutians
were
like animals: animals who had attained spacefaring civilization while still possessing and developing their most ancient animal traits. Controlled biochemical processing—a technology the humans had just begun to develop when the aliens arrived—was their element. They had conquered, like the tiger weed, not because they were different, but because they were like enough to compete. Meanwhile the extraordinary human technologies, their weird dead machines, their occult control over the forces of the void—
electrons, photons
—had fallen into neglect, reserved for games and toys. Artworks. Such irony! It was as if the people of Earth had taken a convoluted wrong turning, and arrived back on the right track just a little too late. Aleutians and the humans had met as equals. Who would believe that today?

The green of Maitri’s garden seemed to be in mourning. White everted stars looked up at her, each pushing out a furred yellow tongue. Thick, water-hungry leaves brushed her thighs. They were crying: help us, save us! We can’t survive without you now….

She was suddenly aware that her bladder was bursting. She had to drop to her haunches among the vegetables, barely managed to get her underwear out of the way in time. She stayed there, in the rising fumes of warm urine, laughing weakly: she should have used the waste bucket in the cell. But she could not remember these things. The body was human; the spirit knew a different set of rules. Under stress she simply forgot. Her head between her hands, she found herself staring at the hairy base of her belly, where hid the secret human female parts.
Will the flowerbud open when I grow up? Will it be beautiful?
Maitri had told her:
darling, I don’t know. That’s partly what you wanted to find out.
Real young ladies did not wear trousers. They wore long, layered flimsy skirts and tight little bodices, veils and scarves and jackets glittering with gold and silver and gemstones: but
no underwear.
Catherine had been fascinated to discover, where it mattered. She wanted to be authentic, but she had baulked at that. Aleutians are a prudish people. She thought of the girl at the police station, and was again ashamed of her panic. But now she must go into the house. She must face Maitri and the others. They didn’t like the Mission. It was going to be hard to admit her defeat. Her head pounded. Always defeated—always. It was too much to bear.

In the kitchen, in the part of the house that belonged to the human servants, she found her mother. Leonie was cooking something on her open-flame hob, the perilous-looking device on which she produced her miracles of Old Earth cuisine. Peter, her human son, was sharpening knives.

“Maman?”

But her foster mother (breast as flat and hard as if she was an Aleutian now: it was a long time since she’d suckled a child) had refused for years to acknowledge that Catherine had ever been her baby.

“Yes, Miss?”

Catherine could taste the stinging tinker-reek of Peter’s work box. The smell of cooking made her dizzy; Leonie’s rebuff brought her to the verge of tears. But Leonie herself was visibly shaking. Peter kept his eyes on his work in an unnatural pantomime of unconcern. She stood between them, human blood dry-smeared on her clothes and in her hair. She’d forgotten they hated her missionary work worse than Maitri did. She lifted her shoulders in the gesture that meant a smile in Aleutian, an apology in human body-language; spoke earnestly and kindly.

“I know I look terrible. The blood, I know the blood looks bad.” She tried to laugh. “Don’t worry; I’m not going to try to convert you!” She gestured, with the flowers that she’d brought in. “I picked these for Maitri. Could I have a vase?”

Peter kept on madly sharpening. Leonie stared in wondering pity.

“You can’t have those indoors,” she said. “They’re poisonous.” But she brought a vase, and filled it with water from the hydrobiont pump on her kitchen counter. “Lord Maitri’s waiting for you in the atrium.” She swallowed. “Maybe you should get washed first.”

“No, it’ll wait. Maitri won’t mind.”

The atrium was a large and splendid square hall, colonnaded around the sides. A dome of the marvelously transparent local glass, stained in sweeps of green and gold and ruby, rose above the central space. Pieces of ancient machinery, beautifully restored, stood among troughs and tubs of native plants. The centerpiece was an examination pit from a motor garage, which Maitri had had transported here, and let into the floor. It held a small fountain (fed from the “burst main”) with cushioned seats beside the pool; and gave off from its blackened walls a faint romantic whiff of engine oil.

Lord Maitri was alone, resplendent in one of his antique morning robes. “My dear,” He put the potato flowers aside and gripped her hands. “I hope the police have been nice to you. They’ve been being very polite to us. Now tell me
all
about it.”

Maitri spoke “formally,” in English. When he and his ward were alone they always conversed this way. Catherine had learned to manage very well in the Common Tongue, but she was still at a loss sometimes, deprived of the living traffic of the air. He shrugged ruefully, waving a hand to indicate the rest of the Aleutian household. “I thought I wouldn’t subject you to ‘the zoo,’ so early in the morning. But everybody wants you to know that we’re glad you’re safe.”

“There isn’t much to tell,” Catherine said. She recovered her hands, folded her arms under her breasts, delivered her report in a firm, level tone. “I was attending a conversion ceremony. It was in an apartment belonging to one of our proselytes—belonging to his family that is, but the rest of the household were away for the evening. I was alone with the candidates. I tried to keep them indoors but they kept rushing out again. I warned them that we could be in trouble if we invaded a public space, but they wanted to bear witness to the good news. It was chaos, I admit. But no one was getting hurt…that didn’t want to be, I mean. It was almost over when the orthodoxers arrived. They had heat guns, I don’t know where from: totally illegal. They fried everything in sight, the building turned on the powder-sprinklers for the whole landing and then the police turned up. They arrested me. Me, not the orthodoxers, of course. They put me in solitary in an unmonitored cell, and refused to charge me. So I refused to eat, and that was embarrassing I suppose. So this morning they decided to throw me out and here I am.”

She rubbed at her sleeves. “But I’m not hurt. It’s not my blood.”

“I almost wish it was.” Maitri burst out. “Hurt? I don’t care if you’re sliced to bits. I don’t know why I said I hoped the police had been nice. I wish they would
beat
you.”

He drew a breath. “It’s not that I don’t agree, in principle, with what the Mission teaches. Of course permanent death is pure superstition. Their physiology has not been much researched, but they must be born again the same as we are: the same chemical identities, the same set of individuals that goes to make up a society. They only have to learn to remember their past lives, to know themselves as eternal aspects of the Cosmic Self…. I agree with you completely on that! And the conversion ceremonies. It’s something we’ve done ourselves in the past, and no doubt we’ll do it again: licensed group suicide in times of hardship, for the good of others. The humans themselves don’t consider it a crime. It’s all very, spiritual and uplifting, I’m sure…. But darling, I think it has to come from them. From the humans. We can’t impose belief. It won’t
stick.
My dear, I know you want to help. But a
missionary!
So banal! Is it really you?”

He broke off to make a tart little bow to the populated air, which was carrying away the chemical trace of his opinions—to be picked up, maybe, in the wide web of the Commonalty, by a sensitive clergyperson. “No offence meant, none taken I hope. I’ve always made my views on the Mission plain.”

“You think the whole idea is stupid and nasty,” she whimpered accusingly.

Maitri stood in a pool of lucid gold, the dark nasal space in the center of his face contracted in helpless anxiety. He lifted his clawed hands and let them fall. “I respect your belief. But we’re so worried. You don’t seem happy, or well.”

“You should have told me you hated the Mission when I moved out.”

“I was afraid,” explained her guardian simply. “I was afraid of losing you.”

She turned away, wrapping her arms more tightly around her body. “My cell was lovely,” she announced. “You’d never guess. The walls are covered in real ceramic tile, must be over three hundred years old. And roses. You’d love the roses. You should get yourself arrested; then you could see for yourself. He was so nice, the boy whose apartment we used. I wish I could remember his name. I can never remember their names.”

Maitri was watching her with undisguised concern.

“How long since you ate?”

“Am I babbling? Fifth day. I’m not going on with it. There’s no point. I’m beaten.”

“I’m glad of that, at least. There are so many interesting drugs on this wonderful planet, if you
must
ruin your health. Starvation is just silly. Have you begun to hallucinate?”

Catherine frowned sharply. “No! Not at all.”

She began to weep, the human tears spilling from her eyes. “Maitri, I’m so sorry. I know I’ve let you down. You expected more from me. I know the Mission is stupid. But the humans are dying. We’re leaving, their world is trashed and they have nowhere to go. They can’t survive and
I know it’s my fault.
Can you understand how that feels?”

“Go and lie down,” he advised gently. “Have something to eat; sleep. Let us look after you. You don’t mean these wild things, you’ll feel better soon. But I should warn you, I’m having a little reception this afternoon. One of my usual parties for the locals, it won’t disturb you.”