Phoenix Café (22 page)

They were listening attentively, but blank-faced.

“You mean like halfcastes?” hazarded Thérèse.

“Maybe. I’m sure it’s because they knew about our frivolous divide that they still call themselves ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’ Is that true Lalith?”

“It would help if I knew what a horoscope was,” complained Joset.

“Or an extro-whatsit, or the other thing,” agreed Agathe.

“We need Mâtho!”

“We
don’t!
We’d be here forever.”

“I’ve never heard of this personality-trait package duality,” said Misha acutely. “And I’ve had a fine Aleutian education. I wonder why not.”

“Ah.” Catherine saw the pitfall too late. She always saw the pitfalls too late. “It fell out of fashion.”

“Why?” wondered Thérèse. “It might’ve helped alien-human relations.”

“Don’t be stupid,” growled her brother, casting one of his flashing, hawk-eye glances at Catherine. “They’re the superior race. It would make them seem like us. They don’t want that.”

Silence fell. A dawn stillness closed over this little disturbance of the conversation, as if it had never been. Agathe and Joset’s lights became ethereally pale, but lingered on like ghosts defying the morning. Majestic indoor aircraft, in the style of the last century (indoor, meaning they had permission to traverse the city’s mini-atmosphere) drifted across the river, taking party guests home. Catherine thought about the culture into which she’d so blithely plunged herself. Alicia Khan, Thérèse Khan…herself. Toys with minds, built from human flesh. She understood what Agathe had tried to tell her, that day in the hives. The Traditionalists were even less “human” than the Reformers…. She had returned to earth as a woman, to expiate her guilt: she was too late. The men and women she had injured were long gone. The mystery of human sexual gender had collapsed into hyperadaptive disorder, like an Earth-type species at the end of its natural life. She suddenly remembered, with the clarity of fatigue, that the Aleutians were not to blame. Not even Catherine herself.
Yo soy la desintegracion.
The aliens had arrived, by chance, in time to witness the last acts of a long drama: tragic, fascinating, rich and rank and strange.

How long since she had first known that?

How soon would she forget, and crave the pain again?

Thérèse sighed. Why was Imran so irritable? Since she had bested him in the competition for their mother’s favor he had been unbearably snappish. And yet why? It was inevitable. Mama couldn’t use a real, full grown young man as a sextoy. People would not accept that, it would be a scandal. And almost certainly now, he would be the heir: unless Mama played the dirty trick of having another child. Whereas Thérèse, if she lived, would have a beautiful house like this one for her retirement. A pang clutched her belly. Misha couldn’t possibly understand the slothful comfort of it all. He would never know how
nice
it was to lie here aching in her finery. A mere rag of flesh, surrendered to her mother’s will, she gazed at the silver river, undrinkable water. The parkland beyond, cleared to secure Alicia’s perfect vista; that punished trespassers with lingering death. All the great city in its corruption, at one with her own dainty, bleeding body.

“The world is coming to end,” she murmured. “Our civilization is dying, maybe even the Earth itself. It’s our fault, and we know it. But I still don’t want anything to change. I want everything to stay exactly the way it is now.”

iii

The trees were tall and massive. The rind was fissured vertically in long hollows so deep you could slip your whole hand inside. It was blue-black and greasy on the surface, streaked with powdery indigo where layers had been rubbed away. The branches started very high, but some trees had masses of tall whippy suckers growing at the base. The light was submarine. Fallen trunks were monstrous shipwrecks, weed-draped keels glimpsed through the broken cages of their own branches, tumbled out of the buoyant air and become impossible obstacles. In shadow there was no undergrowth, only a thick bed of dead needles; violet fading to charcoal grey. In sunlit spaces a knee-high plant with funneled palmate leaves was the most common. Its flower was a cup of two fused white petals, veined in blue; the fruit a single large black berry with a warning opalescent gleam. Masses of threadlike fungoid creeper crusted the ground with tiny jellied purple nodules. Sometimes there was a flash of yellow, an acid rose that seemed to be a parasite; which rooted itself into the tree bark.

“They’re like conifers,” said Lydie. “But I haven’t seen a cone yet.” She slid her narrow hands into two bark fissures and studied one of the acid-yellow tree limpets closely.

she noted, committing observations to memory, silent and intent.

All science is description. Is gaze.

They were playing at being explorers, in an
envie
Catherine had never visited before. Lydie had persuaded her to come on a naturalizing foray. The dancer was making a catalogue of the unreal wildlife: a charming idea, but Catherine was bemused by her methods.

“Why don’t you make yourself a notebook?”

“Can’t. We don’t do that. Not in this kind of
envie.”

In her last life on Earth Catherine had been one of the elite who could manipulate the game worlds. She’d used loopholes and trapdoors in the virtual architecture: created her own objects, added her own features to plot and landscape at will. In the Phoenix games her friends did the same, with varying degrees of success, but to Catherine their
envies
were immutable as the real. She hadn’t asked anybody how the new virtuality ware could be tricked, she was too proud. Neither had she tried to find out for herself. These playgrounds belonged to the young humans. She nodded: accepting the new whim. Truly, the Blue Forest did not seem made for magic tricks.

“I would never have guessed you were, um, a taxonomist.”

The little halfcaste shrugged. “You can pick up anything on the public grid, if you have the patience. I have masses of time with nothing to do when they lay us off between seasons. And it’s free. I got interested, don’t know why.” Lydie was thinking of climbing another tree. She had climbed several. She’d get a long way off the ground and slither down again, defeated, before she reached the lowest branches. The view didn’t change, she said.

“Gaming seems much more relaxed these days. When I was last alive it was always battles and gambling casinos and torture chambers.”

“We do that stuff too.”

“Yes, but ‘Explorers’ makes a pleasant change.”

Lydie decided against the climb and moved on.

“Who made this?” persisted Catherine. “It’s very unusual. I like it very much. It has, I don’t know: depth. It seems indifferent to us.”

“No one made it,” said Lydie, then looked at Catherine oddly. “No single person builds a game. You know that! It must have been the same when you were last around.” She giggled. “Maybe God made it. Maybe it just growed.”

It was Catherine’s first visit, but the
envie
was popular with café-goers, they were not alone. Brushwood huts stood in the clearing where they were camped, roofed in slabs of the thick black moss that grew on fallen trees. There was a well-used bonfire site, a pit oven; even some odd wooden sculptures, the marks of stone axe and adze gouged into the dark, dense timber. All this, Catherine knew, could have sprung up in an instant; but she thought not. Everything had the mysterious air of solidity that attaches to established virtual artifacts. The evening gathering of young people was quite large. Nobody was masked, as far as Catherine could tell: no demons, monsters, animals, no pirates or princesses; not a whimsical virtual pith helmet in sight. Blue Forest was a place where people dressed as their natural selves.

Another group had collected firewood while Lydie and Catherine were away. A fresh bonfire was built, the red charcoal from last night raked out to fuel the oven. Somebody had made some flutes from hollow sections of the indigo suckers. As the submarine light faded a whispering music filled the clearing and a few people started to dance. Others joined them; the flute music took on a marching beat and the dancers began to sing.

Oh when the saints!
Oh when the saints!
Oh when the saints go marching in,
I want to be in that number,
When the saints go marching in!

Foraging parties brought vegetables and berries. Cooking began. The explorers sat together to talk about the Renaissance and ate: roast roots, vegetable stew, a blackish sludge that tasted of chocolate and was mildly intoxicating. They drank water, found and fetched by another party of foragers. Misha, who’d been in conclave with a group of strangers—gamers from another city—introduced to Catherine a slight, dark-skinned person whose presence was feminine, but with a casually dismissive air:
if it matters.
She was from Asaba, the Aleutian second capital in West Africa.

she said, showing a little throat.

Her manners were so perfect that Catherine found herself replying in the same mode.

said Eva, it dances.
Don’t you agree?>

Eva’s Silence was complex; highly individual, self-consciously intellectual, but a mood of warm elation sparkled through it. She sat as close to Catherine as another Aleutian might: assured, Aleutianized, serenely confident in the non-Aleutian future.

said Catherine. <“Blue Forest” is like a natural feature of the virtual cosmos: something born, not created. Virtuality gaming has grown up in the Phoenix Café. It has reached a state of being, which is so much more than doing.>

Then she was embarrassed by her own enthusiasm. Maybe a lot of modern games were
deep
like this, or partly like this, she wouldn’t know; she’d only played at the Phoenix. But the African seemed pleased.

Misha had left them; he couldn’t understand Aleutian. At the sorting out of the sleeping arrangements, he returned and she knew what would follow. It happened whenever he had the slightest opportunity. The others knew exactly what was going on, though no one mentioned the affair in her presence, even in Silence. She’d seen Agathe saddened, because another Traditionalist young lady had fallen victim to self-destruction. She’d seen Mâtho grieving. She knew she’d lost face badly. They were probably certain now that she was simply crazy, not a highly important alien in disguise at all.

She didn’t expect them to understand. How could they?

They were to sleep out of doors; the mossy huts must be reserved for some other purpose. Guards were set, to watch for “wild beasts or savages.” Everyone else lay down on couches of the indigo needled shoots, around the sinking fire. Misha of course managed to lie beside her. When the camp was quiet he turned on his side. The bonfire made bright red pinpoints in his eyes.

“Please don’t,” she whispered. “Not here.”

He took no notice. She watched the cold, smiling curve of his mouth as he stared into her face, while his fingers probed between her thighs and into that soft, membranous channel.

“Has it ever struck you,” he murmured, “that
envie
means desire?”

He loosened her clothes, bent his head and sucked hard at her nipples, first one and then the other. He pushed her thighs further apart, the same blunt, autistic gesture as that first time in the cloakroom. He held his claw in one hand, for guidance: she felt the pressure of his knuckles, then the blind head and swollen stem driving between the walls of muscle: rhythmically, piston-hard. She stared over his shoulder. Her back was jolted against the bed of branches, a piece of flotsam battered against rocks. He reached his climax, slumped heavily against her for a moment and then rolled away.

Catherine listened to the night sounds of the unreal forest.

She was not innocent, nothing could make Catherine innocent. But tonight she was desolate. She wanted to take command of the
envie,
to make something nasty happen to Misha. Not rape, but something bad. She didn’t know how to start. She didn’t even know how long the session would last: subjective time was one of the many parameters she didn’t control. Finally she got up, carefully unsnagging her skirts from the branches. Head for the exit. She would leave. She took two steps, and felt a tree in front of her. She groped around the massive base, and found another. The fire had disappeared. She could see nothing at all.