Phoenix Café (3 page)

She smiled feebly at his use of the dissidents’ term:
the locals,
meaning our neighbors, people like us. Not
the humans,
meaning the alien species for whom we can’t be held responsible. By such signs a world of difference is made known.

“Do you want me on show?” The humans were very curious about Catherine. She was quite “a draw,” as Maitri vulgarly put it.

“Not unless you’re feeling
much
better.” He handed her the vase, with a puzzled glance at the contents: touched her cheek with one clawed finger. “Now go and rest!”

Her room was as she had left it, when she moved to her little rented
trou
in the hives. She put the vegetable bouquet on her desk, under a twentieth-century icon of the Sacred Bleeding Heart of Jesus, and a very lovely moving image, in a silver frame, of blue Krisna dancing and playing the flute. “If you were Aleutian flowers,” she said to them, “hearing you talk would almost make sense. So you see, I am not crazy.” She lay on her bed, which was a soft Aleutian pallet spread on the floor, and found the same cracks in the plaster ceiling that she had named, to console herself, when she came to live in the aliens’ part of the house. The seagull. The happy face—which had been human when she was very young, but became Aleutian after a patch of plaster fell, leaving a gap instead of a nose. The friendly spaceplane with a crooked wing. In Aleutia buildings did not fall into decay. Everything the aliens used, built, touched, was alive and part of life’s constant change and reparation. On Earth, fascinated by dead objects that stayed the same as they slowly crumbled, Aleutians let splendid mansions tumble around them, dressed themselves in old curtains, collected scraps of litter, to the disgusted astonishment of their human acquaintances.

She closed her eyes.

She was Lord Maitri’s human ward: but she was an Aleutian, inside. There had been no solemn moment when they told her,
You are an immortal. You look like a human being, you grew in a human womb; but you are not what you seem.
They’d simply taken her from her mother and treated her like an Aleutian child: giving her the possessions this person had owned in previous incarnations. Speaking to her as to the friend they’d known so intimately through so many lifetimes. They’d set her in front of moving-image records of her Aleutian past, hour by hour. The records had a biochemical content her human body could not process, a haze of living inscription that left the screen but could not penetrate her human skin. Yet one day it had come to her, exactly as if she was the immortal in the records, without a shadow of doubt, that this was herself.

I am me.
This is my history.

She thought of the conversion. After prayer and meditation the candidates, exalted, leapt on each other. In future lives they’d be able to die like Aleutians, in a normal way, in the certain hope of return. This first time they needed the rapture. They had staggered out into the little concourse in the depths of that genteel, respectable, foul-smelling tenement offering handfuls of their blood and flesh to horrified passers-by.
For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.
The Self is God! they cried. Die to mortality, and live forever!

Maitri was right. The Mission was stupid, distasteful. Those idiotic faked records in which humans pretended to recall other lives! The bogus arguments, shifty false ideas. She did not
like
her comrades in the Church. The aloof Aleutian missionary priest who visited so seldom. The self-satisfied lay readers: long-time proselytes who were never quite ready for conversion themselves. The halfcaste deacon, so eager to condescend and patronize “Miss Catherine.” She’d told herself liking didn’t come into it. There were nowhere near as many humans as had once been predicted: there were still too many. So much living space had been lost during the Aleutian era: devastated by war, poisoned by overuse, ruined by bad, alien solutions to Earth’s problems. The numbers had to be cut back. The Church of Self Mission had seemed to offer a way.
No, it is not spiritual or uplifting
(she told Maitri, in her mind).
We missionaries reduce the surplus population a little: nothing more. It is foul work. That’s why I wanted it.

She was stifling. She got up and stumbled to her window, clawed at the living membrane that had taken the place of the vanished glass. The rents sealed as fast as she could make them. The air was full of tiny living things: messages her human body couldn’t read, tools she couldn’t use, servants who would not obey. She crumpled to the floor, trembling, seeing all that blood.

Dying, falling in flames….

She was dead and lying in a funerary room. Her body’s substance was seeping away, carried off by the tiny creatures in the air, delivered back into the common store of life. She became a desiccated skeleton, slowly crumbling. Maitri was dead, the Aleutians long gone. Catherine’s self inhabited the air of a ruin. The city buzzed over her and consumed her. She was divided into a million, million dust motes, swallowed and breathed and excreted over and over again: but still Catherine

When she woke she was lying on the floor under the window, and the tiny servants had been busy. The room had become cool, her body was clean. The rusty rims had gone from under her nails, every tangle and burr and louse had been nursed out of her hair. As she sat up, fragments of her shoddy poor-ward clothes fell from her; immaculate dust. Someone had left a bowl of savory gruel by her bed, and laid out clean clothes: fresh underwear and a spruce suit of overalls, the dun uniform of the Aleutian Expedition on Earth.

She dressed and drank the gruel by stages, very slowly. When she replaced the bowl, the tray stood up on little caterpillar legs, nudged her knee in farewell and trotted to the door. Catherine smiled. Since she’d moved out to the hives, she had missed Maitri’s whimsical commensals. She had missed a whole world that was alive with tenderness: full of gentle eyes, nestling touches, snuggling caresses. And yet she could feel suffocated.

She returned to her window: she was a tiny speck in the center of Youro, one of the huge cities that spanned the surface of the giant planet. Cities in the Aleutian sense of an enclosed region of life; not an urban concentration. How closely Earth had come to resemble the homeworld! Where the cities were ecologies and outside there was only desert wilderness. “Like dogs and their owners,” she murmured.

Within his domain Maitri preserved the old seasons, so it was midsummer noon in the flower garden under her bedroom. Red roses bowed their heavy heads; papery blue bell flowers nodded on long thin stems; speckled lilies gaped. The flowers on her desk were just as beautiful, but considered non-flowers. Leonie had said they were poisonous. Poisonous vegetables? She must have misheard. She was sure she had often eaten potatoes.

The vague murmur of human traffic, the whole world outside and all her life in this body, seemed more transparent than the film that closed her window. A phrase came to her, one of those expressions that appears from nowhere and is suddenly repeated everywhere:
the unreality of these last days.
Somewhere, not all that far from here, humans and Aleutians were working to perfect a device that would annihilate space and time, the “engine” that would power the Aleutians’ return to their home planet. Her Aleutian self had played a crucial part in the adventure of discovering that longed-for means of getting home. But why should Catherine take the praise, or the blame, for that person’s actions? It’s all lies, Maitri, she thought. They don’t return. Humans are not immortal, actually, none of us are. Already I am not the person I was last night, and this is not the same world that was then. I do not live forever; I die forever and keep on dying. She lay down on her bed, drugged by an immense lassitude. With eyes half closed she dreamed of Maitri’s garden, of the huge ruins of the Giratoire, the sigh and chatter of the human poor in their baked clay alleys and their high-piled tenement hives. She would not go back to the Mission. She would live and die in this quiet house. She would be Catherine, human ward of the alien Lord Maitri: tranquil, unimportant, unregarded. The peace of exhaustion overwhelmed her.

When she next woke, she heard the sound of human voices. She jumped up quickly, full of good resolutions, and prepared to face the world.

ii

Misha Connelly turned aside before he entered the atrium, where the aliens were gathered to greet their guests, and followed a short passageway that led to the character shrine. He’d never been inside this house before in the real, but he knew the layout. If you wanted to do anything or be anyone in this city, you had to be familiar with
their
affairs. The shrine was large and softly murmurous. There were ritual screens, one for each member of Lord Maitri’s household (whether presently living or dead). Some of the stands were plain, some grown in ornately peculiar forms: a squatting homunculus, a mound of fungoid foliage. The predominant color in the decor was deep copper, with highlights of translucent purple. It blended well with the cobwebs in the corners and the cracks in the walls. Most of the screens were blank. A few were playing scenes from Aleutian lives, two-dimensional animations in the archaic style they reserved for their confessional histories. Bronze and silver candelabra stood about, laden with genuine wax tapers. The main presentation, our sermon for today, was shown on a virtual screen much bigger than the antique boxes on the stands. It was a passage from the life of Peenemünde Buonarotti—no doubt in compliment to the afternoon’s human guests. A forest of blue-hearted flames burned around it. Perfumed smoke rose in coils from an incense burner. Misha sat cross-legged, chin propped on one hand, head a little thrown back, golden-topaz eyes a little somber. Russet-tinged dark curls escaped from his black beret and clustered on his brow. A practiced, dandy’s gesture spread the skirts of his light overcoat to advantage. He covered his face, briefly:
The Self Is God.

The great physicist of the First Contact era, later to become the inventor of the Buonarotti device, the instantaneous travel machine, looked like a fat young man in a strange, greasy suit. She hunched on the edge of her seat, her hands knotted in front of her belly. It was early in the twenty-first century, maybe a decade or so before the arrival of the aliens. She was young; she had won a prize; she was suddenly famous. She faced the tv public with a piteous, trapped stare. She was being asked about her philosophical beliefs, in the context of self-conscious artificial intelligence.

“I don’t know,”
she said.
“I’m not sure. But as far as I look into what it means to be conscious, I find an act of separation. An act which is intuitively impossible because the elements involved in the action cannot exist until after it has been completed: the self and the world.”

“Consciousness is displacement?” suggested the unseen interviewer. “To be conscious is to be unreal?”

“Real?”
repeated Buonarotti helplessly.
“That’s not my business.”

Misha took a few amber grains from a bowl of cloisonné enamel, and dropped them into the antique, Old Earth censer. The scent of frankincense was quickly devoured by the living air.

In the atrium hall aliens and humans mingled, both groups wearing the same formal attire: wide-sleeved Aleutian-style robes over dun-brown or grey coveralls with many loops and pockets. Inevitably, humans outnumbered the aliens by a considerable margin. Many aliens had returned to their shipworld out in orbit in preparation for the coming Departure. Of those who remained in this city few shared Maitri’s dogged intersocial illusions. Few of the humans shared those illusions either, in fact probably none. But it was still important to be invited here.

Misha saw his father, engaged in formal conversation with one of Maitri’s secretaries. His sister Helen, heavily veiled, was clinging close to the old man’s side, her little hand tucked into the crook of his berobed, brocaded elbow. She looked across the room: a glance that had something in it of the alliance they’d lost. He passed safely by, threading his way between the blunt-muzzled lumpy-pelvis hairless bipedal baboonoids; and the others, the jut-nosed native simians—uniformly wider in the shoulder and narrower at the hip. In his present mood he found the two species equally repulsive. He reached the buffet and studied a fantastic array of delectable-looking archaic foodstuffs: miniature chicken satay with peanut sauce, tiny pleated dim sum dumplings, luscious pink-tailed prawns in garlic mayonnaise. No one else was eating. He decided to set an example. He picked and chose with studied, affected greed, until his progress placed him in front of the alcove where the most interesting element in this bizarre social construct was holding court.

He heard the voice. It was nothing like Helen’s voice, yet unmistakably feminine: husky, slightly raucous; fragile as a child’s.

“Diderot says:
tout le monde a son chien.
It’s true. But it’s also true that
tout le monde a son maître.
Everybody must serve someone. It’s a physical necessity: we are hierarchical animals, Aleutians and humans both. But I am one who has searched and never found any master except that Person we call ‘the WorldSelf,’ and you call God. Therefore to me God is a necessity. You ask if I believe in God, I can only say it isn’t a belief. This is something I need.”