Phoenix Café (24 page)

“What we do when we lie down together doesn’t trigger pregnancy. But it means something like the same for us as it does for you: it’s about bio-chemical communication. The little social gestures where we exchange our wandering cells are a repressed, diluted hint of what happens in lying down. Your claw and your lover’s claw grappling, your two cups opened and spread wide, those inner surfaces running, melting, streaming into each other. I thought if I lay down with Johnny it would solve everything. I would flood him with Aleutia and he would pour Earth into me. The information we exchanged would pass from us into both communities, there’d be no more deception. I found my way to his room in London. It was a rainy night in September, the air smelled of drenched dust; air full of water instead of life, it tasted of grief. I’d never seen a human without clothes on. I believed our minds were the same; I didn’t know our bodies were different. I told him that I loved him. He said,
get away from me you monster,
but I took no notice.

“I remember it as if it were yesterday. Sometimes I know everything that followed would have happened anyway. You’d have had your catastrophic Gender Wars, ruined your own weather systems, destroyed your own living space. Sometimes I know it was all our fault: our doing, my doing. Maybe I’m crazy. What do I care whether I’m crazy or not? The rape continues. I can’t stop it so I want to be raped too. To be abused, humiliated, despised by someone who should have been my friend. What was the question? No, I don’t think you’re Johnny. It never crossed my mind. I don’t care who you are. You’ll do.”

She turned to him, eyes narrowed. “Was I
supposed
to think you were Johnny? Is that what all this has been about?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“It doesn’t matter at all.” She had dropped into the Aleutian crouch—a gesture of flight, aborted. She sat up again, intent on her story.

“In my next life, as you know, I had my artisans build a hybrid, something that was supposed to be a Johnny who would love me; using an Aleutian host, and his identity, to disguise what I’d done. That was Bella, and that’s partly why I had
this
done to myself. To make reparation. When I knew I hadn’t created what I wanted, I took to hanging around the gaming hells here in Old Earth. I’d pick up young halfcaste gamers, the younger the better. I’d pretend they were what Bella was supposed to be: my true child, my Johnny born again. I’d take them home and make them act out the rape with me. I was addicted to my guilt; I didn’t care what I was doing to the children. Did you know about that, too?”

“I think you’re being hard on yourself.”

“Think what you like. I was there, you weren’t. I mean it doesn’t matter. Whether I’m brainwashed or I’m the real Third Captain, you can’t treat me worse than I want to be treated. Because of the things I’ve done, and because the rape goes on. But
don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”

“I used to write to you,” said Misha. “Years ago, I used to send messages to you: Kevala the Pure One, the great Aleutian poet. I wanted to know about your art, the images you made, the human artists you’d known. The records and pictures and stuff you’d seen that I could never see in the real, because the War had destroyed them. I wanted you to teach me. I don’t know what I was talking to: a piece of software cobbled up from press releases, some halfcaste who believed he was your incarnation. There are so many kinds of simulacra on the grid. There’s a whole virtual Madame Tussaud’s in there, if you know what that means. Whatever you were, you answered me kindly. From a great height. You were very sweetly condescending.”

Catherine had begun to cry. She wiped the tears with her fingers. “It wasn’t me.”

“It didn’t talk much like you.”

“Is that why you rape me? Because a grid persona was condescending?”

“Does what we do need so much discussion? I do it. You like it.”

She lay down. They lay facing each other, not touching.

“Misha,” she said, “I hate to sound grown-up and responsible, but I have to ask. What you do with me…have you done it to anybody else? Have you done anything worse?”

He flushed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t…. I’d never done it with another person, in the real, before I did it to you.”

“You’re serious?”

“Straight up,” he confessed, sulkily. “I was a virgin. What’s it to you?”

“Well, that could explain a lot!” She sighed in relief. “I think I believe you. That’s good news. That’s a weight off my mind.”

“I know you like it. I may be very young, Miss Alien, but I can tell. If you refuse to move a funxing muscle you still get wet. And you can’t stop the stuff inside from moving when you come. Why don’t we just say we both want this?”

The charcoal masses of her hair fell forward. She pushed them back again. They looked at each other as if each was staring into a mirror: without tenderness, without surrender but with knowledge and complicity. At last Catherine turned from him. She began to dress.

“I’ll be out of town for a while,” he said. “We’re going to spend some time in the Atlantic Forest. I’ve asked my father to invite you to visit us, at the Warden’s Lodge. You ought to come. You might even like my father. He’s interesting. Will you come?”

“Will I meet your sister?”

“She’ll be there. I don’t know if you’ll see her. She’s a bit of a hermit.”

It struck her, alone in her cab on the way home, that he had not answered the other question she’d asked: though in the silent subtext of their relationship he had admitted a thousand times that he was in desperate trouble. Perhaps the invitation was his answer. You want to know what’s up? Come and see.

Maitri was in the atrium, pretending to admire a planter of giant orchids. His embroidered robe of maroon and silver, gorgeous as the flowers, stood around him like a splendid company of courtiers. He smiled as she came in: a smile so warm, so ruefully tender that Catherine had to laugh.

“Why are you looking at me like that? Am I such a pitiful spectacle?”

“Not at all.” He held out his hands. “You look remarkably well.”

She sat at his feet, resting her cheek against the deep red robe. She touched her lip, it was already healing.

“I do
worry,”
confessed Maitri, in his best maiden-aunt style. “The intercommunal violence is not directed against Aleutians, so far. But you don’t
look
like an Aleutian, especially not in those clothes, charming though they are. I wish the Departure was over and done with, so we could calm down. But at least we can feel that you are safe with Michael.”

Catherine chuckled. “Did you know he’s a junkie?”

The ageing adventurer was neither shocked nor surprised.

“He is? I suppose it’s ‘testo,’ the sex drug. One hears about that.”

“The stuff I had tonight was some kind of cocktail, involving void-forces wizardry I don’t begin to understand. But sex hormones were a large part of it.”

“Was it good?”

“Unbelievably good, my dear guardian. Rather horrible, but very good indeed.”

“Can you get me some?”

“Certainly not! It wouldn’t work on your chemistry, anyway.”

The indoor fountain murmured, palms and ferns stirred softly in the cool, hazy air. Maitri inquired delicately, “So, without wishing to be prurient: I
am
wishing to be prurient but one must make concessions to the good taste of sensitive people…. You take your cocktail, and then you lie down together?”

“Sort of,” agreed Catherine. “But not at all. It isn’t like lying down. It’s almost the opposite. There’s no contact, zero communication. You’re completely alone, and possessed by an appetite, a greed of such power and desperation that nothing else exists.”

“There never
is
any contact between humans, lying down or any other way. Not in our sense of the term.” Maitri winced at his own lapse. “I know I’m not supposed to say things like that, but I’m getting old and loose-mouthed.”

Catherine shrugged and smiled, one finger tracing a path of knotted silver in plum-shadowed folds. “You are getting old, and taking refuge in commonplace opinions. I’m sure humans make love, and love each other, all the ways that we do. Even now, even now. But this is
sex,
distilled and purified. It has no affect at all. It’s an engine, an engine and a fire.
It burns.
When you take sex as a drug—as we did, Misha and I—you become a machine. You become one with mindless life, with not-self. It’s extraordinarily violent, and in a way transcendent. Think of their cults. Especially the Christian cult.”

“My least favorite of your enthusiasms. Those
horrible
incunabula!”

“Horrible, yes. The lives of the saints, gruesome ‘miracles’ of disease and suffering and mutilation. It all seems so disgusting and meaningless until you realize how their world is
saturated
by disease and suffering and death. Then you understand that even spiritual joy has to take the same imprint. We’ve always found their obsession with sex grotesque: we felt like that from the start, when we thought sex was the same thing as lying down. But it isn’t, it’s the mindless engine of territorial expansion; which has become their engine of destruction. They know that, they’ve known it for a long time. How can they stop thinking about this destroying angel? How can they ever think about anything else? We stopped the Gender War, but the obsession just went underground. It comes out in everything they do when we aren’t looking—”

“How impressive. Trust you to find the only game in town, my lord. Last time it was the hells, and you appalled everyone by plunging into those weird, occult native rites. This time you’re a…hmm. A fire engine, was it?”

“A sex machine,” supplied Catherine.

“People aren’t going to understand. You know what we are like. People will just think you’re talking dirty.” He lifted his hands in apology to the listening air. “Well, it’s true. We Aleutians are such prudes. Lying down is something everybody does. But it’s never supposed to be mentioned.”

“Maybe the games are the alternative,” said Catherine musingly. “Maybe
they
are more like our lying down. The battle of the sexes denies communication and eats
lebensraum.
The game
envies
are kept in existence by communication between the players, and they create new worlds.”

Maitri had never entered a gaming hell. “Now
that’s
what I don’t like!” he broke in, firmly. “I find it very disturbing to think of those other worlds. Where do they go when the players snap out of it? I imagine them squeezing into the same space as
this
world, like signals in a cable; or the Multi-realities problem in the Buonarotti project, and it upsets my stomach. What if there’s an overload?”

“What if we reach the end of infinity?” murmured Catherine.

“I suppose I shouldn’t talk. I’m so easily disoriented. Remember how I had to send back my lovely exercise bike that we found at Christmas. I kept falling off when the visor showed me going round a corner.”

Catherine laughed. The spectacle of Lord Maitri on board that antique fitness aid had been a glorious addition to the life of the main hall.

Absently, he stroked her hair. His fingers snagged in the tangles and he struggled, careful not to tug, until he was released by the tiny inhabitants of the air. He laughed, rubbing at his wrists, where the wanderer-glands lay in twin soft grooves on either side of bone and tendon. “My skin is getting so hard and dry! Sometimes for hours I have no flux. I’m so old, I might as well be human!”

Maitri was going blind to the Commonalty, deaf and dumb to Aleutia.

She took his hand, and held the calloused grainy palm against her cheek. “I wanted to know what it was like to be helpless. Because of Bella, and because Johnny said I had treated him like a woman. I wanted to know what that meant.”

“Women fight to defend a territory,” said Maitri wisely. “Men fight to establish ranking. That’s why you must always be aggressive with a Man. He’ll be happy because you’re doing something he can understand: and if you win, which you probably will, he’ll happily accept his new ranking, at least for a while. You should never get pugnacious with a Woman, because in any fight she feels she’s defending her life and her children’s food. It’s a simple formula but it really works, except for the difficulty of guessing which kind you’re dealing with. And whatever you say, Catherine, the ‘sexual equipment’ is no guide at all.”

“Dear Maitri, don’t change the subject: I wanted to say that I’ve been very stupid. I meant to dedicate this life to repentance; but every time I try to expiate my sins, I find myself wallowing in an orgy instead. It’s absurd. I’m going to give up looking for punishment. Misha has cured me.”

“I knew I could trust that young man.”

Neither of them spoke then, for a while.

“I was sure you would want to be here,” said Maitri at last, tremulously. “We were going to leave; it was your last chance of a life on Earth. And there was nothing I could do for the humans. So I stretched the terms of your will, a little. To trigger a pregnancy is not a crime, is it? It just isn’t something we do, only because we never knew how, until we met human science. I thought you had got over Johnny. And then you were so unhappy, I was afraid I had done something awful to you. Everyone said you’d been born crazy because I meddled with the mazes of rebirth.”