Phoenix Café (28 page)

She woke up with a start, sweating: certain that there was somebody in the room with her. Wilson? She said. Nobody answered. Piped starlight showed only the beautiful old-fashioned bedchamber, empty and still.

Was that a nightmare, or a message? What did it mean? She touched her face. Eyedrops? A visor, stealthily slipped over her skull stealthily removed? She remembered Misha Connelly’s lair in Paris: “4-spaced,” so he could make things appear and disappear at will. The slithering, rustling animals were still behind her walls, but silent now. She went back to sleep.

8
Paper Flowers

i

Catherine was not required to repeat the performance of her first night. The evening ritual was unvarying, but Misha didn’t spike it with paper flowers and Mr. Connelly did not interrogate her again. He was gracious but reserved, a little on his dignity after their midnight encounter. She rarely saw the Warden at any other time of day, and Helen never reappeared. She would breakfast in her room. Later Misha would take her, chaperoned by a driver and a senior female servant, on one of the park’s excursions. They visited the great road, a picturesque ghost village, bird-haunted marshes; those highly popular badgers. The lynxes; ancient craft workshops. It was very curious and otherworldly, she found, to visit virtual-tourism sites in the real.

Once they drove to the mountains on the south-eastern margin of the reserve, and took one of the great fragile Wings, that were used for making masters, up to visit the nearest of the glaciers. They rode the air alone: Catherine pinned face down, helmeted and gauntleted, in the web behind the pilot’s sling. Misha was steering, their chaperones were left behind at the trailhead. It was freezing cold. The Wing was capable of vast journeys, but not equipped for the comfort of physical passengers. The mountain slopes lay under her like scarred and fissured skin, the darkness of bare beeches and chestnuts giving way to grey turf and shale. They hovered over pallid amoebae of permanent snow.

“It’s spreading,” His voice spoke in her ear, as she lay shivering in her borrowed oversuit. “Every year we’re supposed to report that the retreat’s begun. It hasn’t. There.” The glacier hung like a grey snake, its back pocked with boulders, the eyeless head stooping to drink at the margin of a long black lake. “Shall we go down?” Her view changed, swooped and banked. She was as if standing under the snake’s mouth, under the mass of its blue-shadowed flesh. “Do you want to see the ice caves?”

“No, thank you.”

The trailhead was an ecological hotspot (or cold spot. All the hotspots in this park were cold spots). They checked the ground station before they returned to the jeep. The instrumentation was inadequate, Misha grumbled. Scientific monitoring had to take second place to the needs of virtual users.

“The users, and that includes the government, don’t want to think about what’s creeping up on us. They’re safe indoors, and this is the pure wilderness. Scientific measurement is an intrusion, practically a crime. Damned fools. The whole park is unnatural. The air is unnatural. The food chain is stuffed with human effluvia, the wild life littered with weird genes. The forest is a man-made artifact. There is no
pristine wilderness
on the planet.”

The cold wind blew from the north, biting into their faces. “And the weather’s
certainly
unnatural,” grinned Misha. “Ironically it’s the Aleutians, who hate measurement, who defend these ground stations. They want to see how their climate improvement plan is progressing.”

The measuring post was by the shore of a frozen pool, a grey bruise of ice that reflected nothing but the cold. Misha looked up into the cloud cover. “It’ll snow soon…. Maybe your people are right. Chewing the top off the Himalaya range was a major intervention: bound to be some side effects. This cold spell is a temporary hitch, it’ll be worth it in the end when the whole earth’s a semi-tropical paradise. Or else our bad weather was coming to us anyway, all our own fault; the chop did nothing.”

“Which do you believe?” asked Catherine.

“Don’t think it matters.”

She wondered at this other Misha, competent and absorbed in his work, talking like any beleaguered professional she’d ever met: so different.

When the weather was poor they spent their time in the underground room that was called “the main hall” by the officers and Misha’s father, “the Mess” by everyone else. They gossiped with the staff, and watched trees growing in the fake windows. She was introduced to the Virtual Master, L’Airial’s mascot: a hedgehog the size of a plump cat, who was not supposed to be indoors, ate gifts of live slugs with noisy enthusiasm and liked to climb onto people’s laps and chew their clothes. They wired-up and played Pre-Contact indoor games for the virtual-modeling: darts, boules, babyfoot. Sometimes they crouched in peculiar positions, wired to the staked-out domains of badgers, martens, flamingos, marsh-harriers, wild boar, and watched what went on; for the benefit of users who liked to spend their virtual visits in comfortless observation hides, so they knew they were really communing with nature.

Mrs. Hunt—on the Warden’s instructions, as she made plain—introduced Catherine to the domestic and farmyard offices. She met the gabbling hunting-dogs in their kennel—a bleak windowless barn where the big hounds romped and raced about, “wired” and goggled, contentedly certain that they were living a very different existence. Catherine and the housekeeper admired them from a control booth in what had been the hayloft. Watching the dogs gave Catherine a queasy feeling, they were too like human gamers. “Don’t they come into the house?” she asked, remembering Thérèse’s report.

“They are not pets,” said Mrs. Hunt repressively.

“Will they be taken out hunting during my stay? I’d like to go with them.”

“That depends on the Warden. We also have a stable and riding school, but they are physically located elsewhere. Actual animals are not necessary for our work. We have an enormous archive of mastered material; I don’t know why the Visitors can’t be satisfied with that. But they like to know the pack exists and that the horses they ride in virtuality are real animals somewhere. And their word is law. Next, we shall visit the
potager.
Our extensive year-round gardening program includes among other pursuits fungi and wild fruit gathering, peasant cultivation, resin extraction, apiary, and prize vegetable rearing. We grow over a hundred different species of edible plants. However at this season many are dormant in the real.”

The Visitors were given a capital letter, Catherine felt sure that she was not. She followed the housekeeper obediently, up and down the dormant but efficient-looking rows of food plant, stopped to admire whatever she was required to admire, and wondered how to penetrate the wall of suspicion. She wanted to talk about Helen. She didn’t believe Mrs. Hunt’s hostility was due to her resentment of “real curves.” The housekeeper was Helen’s ally, and for some reason Catherine was a threat. A large and very natural-looking compost heap seethed in a barrel of rustic-effect plastic, traces of Atha’s specialty foods enlivening the top layer; being turned into something useful. Catherine averted her eyes politely from this sight. The
potager
was surrounded by a tall hedge, thickly covered with winter roses.

“Does Miss Helen help with the gardening?”

A flush arose in the housekeeper’s round cheeks. She almost smiled, and reached out to touch a flower. The petals were white, stained in a random pattern with crisp black.

“This winter rose, with the black and white petals, is called ‘Lord Maitri’s Librarian.’ It won prizes. Miss Helen made it: Miss Helen planted this hedge herself, the year Mr. Misha was born, for the
English Garden
program. We still have it on file.”

“I didn’t know she was older than Misha.”

“It would be strange if she wasn’t, Miss Catherine. Next, the sawmill, the tannery, and the slaughterhouse. Our slaughterhouse provides a complete practical and sensually vivid introduction to the end phase of organic animal husbandry, from a humane but highly immediate experience of administering death to every aspect of expert butchery.”

Further along her own passageway on the upper floor Catherine found a schoolroom. It held globes of the earth and the stars; a child’s model of a strange device she thought was an orrery. Big, jolly informative touch-screens covered the walls, still layered with graded information: “Our Planet”; “How Water Is Made”; “The Aleutians.” In a drawer she found a battered notebook full of diagrams and symbols, pages and pages of them, frozen in time and beginning to decay: equations, symbols, algorithms. The most complete of the images (as far as Catherine could tell) seemed to demonstrate how to turn a sphere into an indefinite number of other spheres of the same dimensions.

Catherine’s helpless ignorance before the world of number was partly a pretense, necessary in Aleutian society. But she couldn’t understand these exercises at all. The many-worlds diagram was signed, like a poem, with a tiny cartouche, which on magnification showed a young woman, painted in the style of the first “Renaissance.” Standing, she bowed over something unseen, her hands clasped in awed, joyful discovery. It was clearly a detail borrowed from a larger picture. She recognized the artist, but couldn’t place the work.

The rest of the drawers were empty. There were no books in the wall cases, no terminals fitted to the old-fashioned sockets. It was a sad place.

She spent surprisingly little time with Misha.

In the mornings and at night, alone in her room, she watched the records she found in the multi-media rack, and had long conversations with Maitri; with that Maitri, the true image, who lived in her mind. Her sense that she couldn’t talk to her old friend anymore had vanished with distance. She shared her doubts and fears without reserve, very relieved that their companionship was restored. It was Maitri who persuaded her she really must ask for a room heater. The flame-effect fire in her fireplace (which did not burn flowers) was the particularly safe kind that gave off practically no heat.

Mrs. Hunt produced, with great reluctance, an aged, undernourished hybrid foot-warmer. Every day it grew colder. Catherine sat on the floor in front of years-old Youro news reports, eating her meager breakfast: Maitri beside her, the woolen rug around her shoulders and the heater in her arms. An Aleutian at prayer, reverently studying the myriad aspects of the WorldSelf in process. It was a long time since she’d practiced her religion so faithfully.

She felt like a hermit: like Helen.

One morning she woke in the heart of a white rose. “Oh Maitri,” she whispered, the snowlight on her closed eyes like a true lover’s kiss. “You’d love this.” The maid who always brought her breakfast had a sweet face, but was firmly in Mrs. Hunt’s camp. Catherine could never remember her name, and had given up trying to talk to her. She recited, distantly, the household’s schedule for the day—which Catherine had as usual forgotten to request.

Mr. Misha’s and the Warden’s apologies. Both of them would be unavailable until evening, busy on urgent wilderness-management business.

“I’ll go for a walk,” said Catherine. “Francoise,” (This was a wild guess.) “Is that all right?”

“I am Virginie, Mademoiselle. I will arrange an outdoor suit for you.”

There was no snow in the shipworld. At home snowfall was a city phenomenon, rare accident that held little romance. It was just too obvious that the pretty crystals were nothing but the damp exhaust gases of people and commensals, briefly glorified by a temperature swing. She’d always loved the wild snowfall of earth, and hardly ever had a chance to experience it in the real. She sipped nature-identical coffee at her big window, gazing out at the white day and feeding scraps of sopped croissant to the room heater. She was building up its strength. It seemed as grateful as such a dumb creature could be.

How long had she been staying at the Connelly house? She wasn’t sure. She hoped her driver was pleased to know that she was finally taking his advice.

The outdoor suit was dark green, supple, and a reasonable fit. It was slaved to the house network, which annoyed her: but she accepted that the humans couldn’t let a valuable Aleutian visitor wander about, in extreme conditions, without some surveillance. Nothing stirred in the clearing. The chickens had not ventured out; the dogs’ hangar was silent. The Lord Maitri’s Librarian roses were smothered in white on white.

Catherine knew why she hadn’t been tempted to explore on her own, though she’d had plenty of opportunity. For her taste a wilderness should be
wild,
it should be lifeless, there should be no compromise. There should be desert emptiness, cold rock and thin air. This vast factory of pumping, churning, xylem production plant, though attractive enough as a tame city park, did not have the allure of the true outdoors. But the snow had changed everything.

As soon as she stepped under the trees the temperature dropped dramatically. Cold parted like a curtain, and folded her into itself; the snow came halfway to her knees. Back in the city, news of an early and deep snowfall in the Atlantic Forest would have attracted hordes of visitors: the virtual experience of wintery weather was a ritual in the modern Youro calendar. People for whom indoor life was a relative novelty wanted to mark the change in their changeless seasons. People who believed that the ice age was closing in wanted to gloat and shudder over the approach of doom. She was surrounded by ghosts, an invisible crowd of virtual companions; but they were quiet company.

The forest trails, from jeep tracks to footpaths, were not marked. There was no need for physical signposts, information boards,
balisage:
all that could be added at the point of entry, tailored to the individual visitor’s needs. She didn’t think she’d get lost. She could follow her own footprints back to L’Airial. She chose a path at random and followed it until it reached a broad jeep track: crossed the track and took an even smaller path that offered more mystery. She wondered how far it was to the Buonarotti research station, and whether she could get close to it, since she had clearance—