Phoenix Café (26 page)

“We’re not on the grid,” said Mrs. Hunt sternly. “We have our own network, all the rooms are wired. This room’s password is Wilson. You can use it at any time. If you need our assistance to communicate with the outside world, we can patch you through to the park office. The evening meal is at seven. The Warden will expect you to be prompt; you will be called. Other meals will be served in your room whenever you wish. I hope you enjoy your visit, Miss Catherine.”

The two domestics left. Catherine went to look at her bathroom, and marveled at the glistening white porcelain. Handwritten notices, preserved behind glass, reminded her that she should use hydrobiont powder and chemical waste disposal “whenever possible.” She admired the spirit that had retained the massive sanitary ware, convinced that the lost past of unlimited free-running water would someday, somehow return.

Her bedroom had two, real, mineral-glass windows. The larger looked down the length of the clearing, into the repetitive dark quiet of the trees. The smaller was almost obscured by the red creeper. She sat on her bed, soothed by all these delightful curiosities: feeling like an innocent tourist, carried back into a world where none of the wrong had happened.

Her door opened and Misha quietly entered.

“Welcome to Arden.”

He closed the door and sat beside her. “You’ll have met my father, and the demonic Mrs. Hunt. Don’t mind her; she has a grudge against genuine curves. Did she tell you how to manage the net? It’s a natural system. It speaks, you answer if you feel inclined. Speak and you will be spoken to.” He opened drawers in her bedside cabinet, and took out a flat reader. “We don’t do fancy holograms. Guests mostly stick with voice, but if you want to see who you’re talking to you can use this screen.”

“What’s your password?”

“Guglioli.”

“I see!”

He grinned. “Don’t blame me; it’s a family tradition. The Connellys have been raving anti-Aleutians for a long time. In the nicest possible way.” He tapped the case of the reader. “Watch out for open lines. Click on this and say ‘Wilson,’ and you’ll find yourself peering into our servants’ hall. Or should I say the other ranks’ mess. If you forget to log off after you’ve ordered your breakfast, you’re still in livespace. It goes for voice as well, but surveys have shown it’s the little window that people forget. Wilson.”

With a new, and wicked, smile he held up a single pale papery wafer.

“Shall we split it? It might enliven the hideous dinner ritual.”

“How do you make a paper flower?” asked Catherine, haggling.

“It’s games tech. I use the Vlab to build a neuron-map model of an—an erotic daydream to put it politely. One of my own hand tested favorites. I download the model into a harmless biochemical substrate that contains hypergrabbers, that’s neurotransmitters and things to grab your attention and slam it into high gear. Testo is among them. You eat this; your brain chemistry takes it up. You have the experience I modeled,
but
you have it in your own way.”

He broke the wafer in two.

“People make flowers for sale. You can buy them in the Café. Commercial rubbish; nothing like as pure. I don’t do décor. I do
nothing but the hit.
But this won’t throw you across the room. You’ll be jogging; you’ll be able to converse.”

She swallowed the paper petal. Misha ate his share.

“Were you planning to change for dinner? You should. It’ll be formal. See you later.” He tapped, absentmindedly, at the reader screen. “Wilson.”

“Wilson,” she said, as soon as the door had closed behind him: and smiled. She wondered what kind of private additions Misha had made to the house grid. At least he had warned her: you’re in my game space, watch out!

It was the first time since the rapes began that he’d had a chance to take her and not used it. The relationship had changed, but she didn’t know how.

Perhaps he was simply afraid of someone else lurking in the net, peeping. She went to the wooden, standing clothes chest where her things were neatly arrayed. I will wear flowers, she decided, thinking of the wicked wafer: chose a vial and broke it open. A delicate, insistent scent blossomed. Tissue flowed over her arms, in a fluttering mass of clean scarlet and lilac-tinged blue. She thought of the sheen on the grasses in Maitri’s garden: a meeting, a shared loneliness, an understanding she had never managed to recapture.

Dinner was served in a large room below ground. By the time Catherine had been called, and fetched downstairs by the same maid who had unpacked her clothes, the household army had assembled. Misha, his father and the staff officers stood solemnly waiting for her, around the dais table.

“You see,” Michael Connelly senior told her, “we follow Aleutian custom: the whole company gathers for the evening meal. Though I’m afraid there’ll be no dancing.” Catherine was reminded even more of wartime. The underground hall had the dour atmosphere of an armored bunker. “It’s a gloomy old place,” he agreed, smiling at her. “But we do our best to cheer it up.” He pointed at one of the large fake windows that lined the walls. “Badgers.” She saw some greyish, grub-like things shuffling around a heap of boulders, under a murky sky.

“Charming creatures. They’re extremely popular.”

She was on Misha’s father’s left, Misha on his right. The officers were presented to her, a tally of names she instantly forgot. Her driver wasn’t among them. Mrs. Hunt appeared to be the only female-labeled person at high table. Beside Catherine there was an empty place. It remained empty as the Warden signaled that Catherine should sit down. Everybody below them followed suit, with an intimidating clatter.

“Tell me about Lord Maitri,” said the Warden as the first course was served. “I consider him a serious rival. Not in terms of years, of course: but
mutatis mutandis.
He’s certainly by far the oldest Aleutian left on earth.”

“It’s my father’s hobby,” explained Misha good-humoredly. “Growing old gracefully. Ordinary rich people get their faces replaced and their vital organs regrown. If you’re in the premier league you don’t stoop to anything like that, Dad would rather die than have his hair color restored. They watch each other like bit-minders, spying on medical records for secret forays into bridgework.”

His father frowned. “The goal is to live longer and better, within one’s genetic potential. I have no desire to live forever. I don’t use intervention, and I don’t expect I ever shall. If I should ever succumb to major organic collapse, restored natural quality of life would be my goal, not artificial survival.”

Misha snorted. “As natural as money can buy. Warning! This is not a sport you can take up if you’re forty, living in the hives and feeling young for your age.”

“Does Lord Maitri, ah, employ any intervention, Miss Catherine?”

“I don’t think it would occur to him.”

There was a short silence, and she understood she’d stumbled into one of those invisible pitfalls. She had no idea how she had given offence. Everyone spooned their soup; which was smooth and good but had a strange aftertaste.

“I won’t ask you what it means to be ‘an Aleutian in a human body,’” said Mr. Connelly easily; resuming command. “I’m sure you’ve heard that question far too often. But Misha tells me you’re a disciple of Buonarotti.” He studied her brightly with Misha’s golden eyes. “You don’t believe that the Aleutians are aliens? It’s an interesting philosophical position.”

“She doesn’t believe in serial immortality either, sir.” said Misha.

“Really? You believe
Aleutians
don’t come back? In what sense do they suffer permanent death? And where does that leave you? You are yourself a reincarnate, are you not? Though in human form for this life.”

She thought of an Aleutian child, born some unknown time after the Departure. Who would be told: remember when you were Catherine. He would study Catherine’s recorded confessions, edited and formatted by her character shrine. He would consume messenger cells in which the lesson
you were Catherine: you were like this
was minutely inscribed; reports from the Expedition’s the last days on Earth; other people’s perception of her life. Obediently, the child would remember this strange episode in his long career: he would become the Commonalty’s Catherine.

“Any society is a self-organizing pattern,” she said. “An individual is a nexus in that pattern: a knot in the web that returns, like a ripple in the stream, though the water is not the same water. We are very much aware of this phenomenon, more so than you. The construct, that motif in the text of our community, will recur. And will be trained to remember my memories, because that’s the way our society works. And will truly be me, because
me,
this personality, is really nothing but a specifically coded bundle of chemicals with its own particular history; a specifically connected social nexus. But the ‘I’ speaking to you now, the sense of self that ‘I’ have in this moment, only exists here and now. I am certain of that. So am I more immortal than you are? Maybe you may say ‘the recurring place X is temporarily occupied by Catherine,’ whereas we say ‘the recurring place X
is
a person called Catherine.’ Maybe that’s the only difference. But there were human societies where reincarnation was the accepted gestalt, before we came. Except that people were not expected to remember their past lives, to feel themselves continuous, if I have that right?”

“So reincarnation is simply a convention, and we are all Aleutians? That’s an interesting point of view for a super-being.”

Catherine shrugged. “Humans have told me that permanent death is a more useful concept. People work harder; they have more energy if they believe they have only one chance. To me that sounds like an admission that either explanation will do. Aleutian physiology is different from human physiology, Aleutian reproduction different from human reproduction. But our subjectivity is the same: it’s the same sense of self. I think that’s what Buonarotti meant.”

“All seeing is perception,” murmured the Warden.

Someone came into the room. The company, lower and upper tables together, stopped whatever it was doing. The newcomer glided to the dais and took her place: a slim young woman, wearing close-fitting black under a gauzy robe and a silver veil. Catherine could not see her face. Nobody breathed a word.

Catherine found herself staring at Mr. Connelly.

“You are honored,” he said sourly. “Misha’s sister doesn’t usually deign to join us at table.”

Helen—because it had to be Helen—said nothing.

“She doesn’t believe in telepathy either,” said Misha, gallantly deflecting their father’s displeasure, ruthlessly using Catherine as a human shield. “Ask her what she thinks about the Common Tongue.”

Catherine didn’t mind. She felt like making speeches.

She was acutely conscious of the lathyrus robe. The exquisite scent and color of those frankly sexual flowers seemed to impart a sensual glow to this conversation. It was as if she’d fallen in love with Misha’s father. She was bathed in a rush of attraction, the more exciting because he
was
dangerous, he
was
an adversary, she was sure of that. She had completely forgotten the drug. She moved back in the hard, Old Earth style dining chair, to accommodate a domestic who was presenting the next course (a salver of roundish golden brown vegetables and a jug of thick pale sauce). She felt two hands gripping the inner surfaces of her thighs.

She managed not to look at Misha.

Mr. Connelly smiled encouragingly.

“I admit it’s a misconception to dismiss our Silent communication as a mere feat of memory and expertise in body language. There’s more to it than that. Each of us has a model of the whole Commonalty as part of our awareness. We negotiate with ghost-others, Aleutia in the mind, when we’re apart—with reasonable success. There is a physical structure in the Aleutian brain, so I’m told, I’m not a neurologist, that models this model, more or less developed from one individual to another, just as human brain structures vary. It’s part of the information system; it’s kept up to date by our exchange of wandering cells. So you can say that Aleutian telepathy is scientific fact and a power humans don’t possess. We truly do ‘keep each other in mind.’ But you have your own huge neuronal-map archives, stretching back through evolutionary eons, maps of all human experience. You can use that archive to help you guess what another person might say or do in any given situation: and you do use it, all the time. We do the same. We just don’t call it guessing.”

She drew a breath, a pause to fall into the intense reality of the drug. Aware of Misha in that room in the city: lying on the foam, agonizingly aroused, the glans bursting from its sheath, glossy and desperate. He wasn’t going to touch her. He was going to watch, no contact, while Catherine was invaded by the ferocious imperative, that paid for its possession of her soul in pleasure strong as poison—

“If this was two hundred years ago and I was an Aleutian in your house I would have to be physically isolated, coated from head to foot in quarantine film. You don’t worry about quarantine anymore. You can…better…defend yourselves, now, you feel, from our invasion. But also I think you no longer quite see yourselves, the way you did when we arrived, as separate objects in empty space. You feel yourselves to be, like us, swimming in a continuum. In the heterarchy of life, where it’s natural for all boundaries to be in continuous negotiation. Our so-called telepathy is an intuitive grasp of the changing state of the diversity of the continuum. Incomplete, because there is so much: yet effective, adequate. And that’s not alien to you.”