Phoenix Café (30 page)

Something winked at her from the shadows under the trees. She went to see what it was and found an object half buried, where the snow was loose. She picked it up: a bracelet of polished metal, incised with a pattern of crossed branches and tiny flames. She hefted its weight, turned it from angle to angle, remembering the
branch of coral flame.
She knew what it was,
if it was real.
This was the badge of rank of an officer of the Special Exterior Force, overseas army of the USSA, known as the Campfire Girls. What was it doing here? There should have been an ID inscription; there was none. The bracelet was small for the wrist of a normally muscled adult woman. It looked as if it would fit comfortably over the dainty hand of a Traditionalist young lady, but she decided not to try the experiment. She stowed it in a pocket of her suit.

The shadows had turned a deeper blue. It would not be dark for a while, but the sky threatened and the cold was growing fierce. She closed the suit’s visor and set off, not looking for a path but heading straight for L’Airial, far as she could judge. She struck the jeep trail before long, and found her own footprints, where she’d crossed it earlier. As she reached the clearing, more snow was beginning to fall.

ii

After the ritual of the evening meal Misha tried to slip her a dose of paper flowers. She managed not to allow this, without seeming to refuse the offer. Mrs. Hunt was too close, Misha’s father too attentive; Catherine’s hands were never conveniently placed for the stealthy transfer. When the house was quiet she put a plain robe over the overalls she’d worn at dinner, and darted along to their meeting place. Misha was there, sitting on the rim of the tub. He held out a wafer between finger and thumb, but his eyes were wary.

“Do you want this? I wasn’t sure.”

She looked at that glistening bathtub. So Old Earth, so incredibly arousing; she remembered it cold and hard and dead against her soft flesh.

“Not yet. I want to talk, Misha.”

How bluntly she’d asked him, in that other room: “What is your problem?” She wished she was like Maitri, who knew how to be kind, who could control his demeanor in the Common Tongue with such skill. Catherine was not tactful. Her sympathy, humiliating sympathy, flooded the air.

She’d left the bracelet hidden in her clothes chest. She hadn’t liked to leave it there, she was afraid it would have disappeared when she went back. But she hadn’t wanted to bring it with her either. She wasn’t going to show it to him. Not yet, not here. The old bathroom was not wired, it was their secret: or so Catherine had understood. But she couldn’t be sure.

Misha was looking at her quizzically. “What about?”

“How far is the sea from here?”

“Not far. Why?”

“Could we go there? I’d like to see the Atlantic.”

“It’s not the right season.”

She chewed her lip. He repelled her attempts at contact; smiling the suppressed warning.

“In this life,” she said, “I’ve had no other lying-down partner but you. I never have many partners. I’m too intense. I scare people. I scare myself. We say—they say—I’ll never lie down unless there’s some reason for it, either something bad and twisted or some exalted passion. We say I never do it for fun, for pleasure with a friend. The Aleutians think I’m…undersexed, as you people would put it.”

Misha snorted. “That’s a joke!”

“Yes.” She glanced at him wryly. “I’ll have some useful tips for my future partners.” Her hair fell into her eyes, she pushed it back. “I want to talk about Helen.”

Misha appeared to admire himself: the effect of a bee-stung, arrogant smirk in his inset lens. “What about her?”

She sighed. “I can’t filter out everything. I hear voices; I hear your voice, Misha. When you invited me here you told me—I mean, I do believe I gathered from your manner, to put it local style, that you were very worried about your sister. Agathe has said it too: Helen’s in trouble. She used to be one of the gang, now no one sees her. Will she see me? I had the idea…. I thought that was why you invited me, because you wanted me to help.”

He took a breath and let it go, a heavy resentful sigh.

“I’ve been worried about Helen. I thought you might be able to help, and I got you out here because she won’t leave L’Airial now. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t know. I’ll think about it.” He took her by the waist and arranged her (that autistic gesture) so she was straddling his thighs. He worked his fingers through the closure of her overalls. “Why don’t you wear girl clothes any more?” he wondered sulkily, looking into her face with eyes as hard as metal. “Someday soon, Miss Alien-in-disguise, I’m not going to want to fuck your brains out. You are finally going to have to learn to eat your shit and shut up about it, like the rest of us. No more Mr. Whiplash from me. Meanwhile—” With his free hand, he held up the wafer, “Do you want to do this?”

“Yes.”

Misha went to Helen, after he left Catherine. She was sitting by her fireside. Her dress was dull, fluid silver, cut high at the throat and covering all her arms but clinging softly to her figure. Flame light, from the heap of red roses in her grate, played on her shining hair and roused pewter gleams in the folds of her gown. There was no other light: her face was in shadow.

She was singing, very softly, about the life of her art: a girl’s art, hidden from view, unworldly; secret and lonely.

Mi piaccion quelle cose

che han si dolce malia,

che parlano d’amor, di primavere,

che parlano, di sogni e di chimere

quelle cose che han nome poesia…

And the words sang of lilies and roses, love and springtime, but the music betrayed heart-catching tones of sorrow, imprisonment, pain and poverty

di sogni e di chimere, dreams and visions—

Misha crept right up to the chair, like a little mouse, until he was touching the brocaded arm. The scent of the thick heavy fabric and the feel of it against his cheek were exactly as they had been long ago. Everything was perfect. The singing stopped.

“You can come out, little mouse.”

He stayed where he was. He didn’t want to break the mood.

“Daddy won’t come,” she reassured him. “He may come to my room and find me alone in the firelight. But there are rooms within rooms in my network. It won’t be
your
me he finds. It will be one of my copies.”

So he came out and snuggled against her knee, the way he liked best.

“What have you been saying to Catherine?”

The old bathroom wasn’t wired, but Misha didn’t believe she didn’t know what happened in there. She knew everything that went on in this house.

“I told her I was a virgin before we started our mad, passionate affair.”

He didn’t look up. He felt her smile.

“It’s true. It’s
true.
I had never touched another person, never.”

“Has she asked about me?”

“Not yet.”

“She will. As soon as she asks you about me, you must bring her here. Then we begin phase four. Not until she asks. It has to come from her.”

She didn’t say anything more. She didn’t talk much these days; it tired her. Misha watched the roses, and rubbed his cheek against the arm of Mummy’s chair. Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow. He had not lied. He could never really lie to her, because she knew everything. Lying to her was asking permission. If she accepted the lie, permission was granted…. It was a reprieve beyond his hopes to be in this room again. To have returned to their sweet first world, where she was author of everything. To when he hadn’t yet learned how to say
I love you, you are so beautiful.
All he wanted was to stay forever by her side, snuggled in her arms, her mish-mouse. For just a little longer.

iii

Catherine didn’t get another chance to talk to Misha. Next morning she woke in snowlight again and immediately put her hand on the silver bracelet under her pillow. It was still there, still appearing solid and real. But she’d been woken, she realized, by a knocking on her door. Mrs. Hunt was there in person, looking solemn. Catherine was summoned to Mr. Connelly’s study.

She was to return to the city at once. Lord Maitri was dying.

She went to her room to fetch her personal belongings, and stared at her local phone, which she’d never taken out of its case. Mr. Connelly had been shocked to learn that she knew nothing about Lord Maitri’s sudden decline. In the Aleutia of the mind, Maitri hadn’t said a word about being ill. If only she’d called the Giratoire, surely she would have found him out. It hadn’t occurred to her. They were Aleutians, they didn’t need to contact each other through the deadworld. They were together always.

She had forgotten that she was human.

She stuffed the bracelet, and Leonie’s hairbrush, in the pockets of her robe: left everything else to be sent on and ran back down to the hall, where her driver was waiting.

9
The Secret Author

i

She would not wait even an hour for them to arrange a private flight. In “the unreality of these last days,” she didn’t trust the locals. They were bound to snarl-up the official rushing of Lord Maitri’s ward (an Aleutian young lady), to his bedside. She could not bear to subject herself to their pompous delays.

Her driver took her to the railhead. She traveled alone, in the park staff’s carriage, to the junction with the public system, and waited on the platform, conspicuous but unmolested in her plain dark-figured robe and Expedition overalls. She remembered many things. The bone-squeezing psychic chill of so many platforms, runways, quaysides of her escapades: the same cold and the same black dawn all over Earth. How the scale of the giant planet reasserted itself when you left the limousines, the air-cruisers and the motorcycle escorts behind. The colors of the sky, the smell of paraffin lamps; a sickle moon glimpsed through clouds; the empty air. Nights when the white and gold and scarlet lamps of the great teeming highways, long gone now, would spin away in the dark like an endless skein of stars. Days wandering in strange crowds, eating the street-food, making experiments in contact. Passing for normal. The frustration, the loneliness, the fascination of the new.

She did not attempt to call the Giratoire house from the train.

Nobody would answer and she didn’t need to call. She knew.

Atha and Vijaya met her cab at the garden gates. Lord Maitri had died in his sleep, about daybreak. Here was the graveled drive down which she had walked with Misha, on the day she was introduced to the bit-grid city and the Phoenix Café. The air was warm, powdery, thickened. It felt like clay in her mouth. Here was the atrium. Maitri’s plants, his orchids, the stained glass dome. She saw, glancing through the garden doors, that somebody had cut the grass. His carved stone collection stood bare. The Aleutians were gathered around his bed, in the main hall. They let her pass. She knelt by his shrunken body, lost in the robe they’d dressed him in.

explained the chaplain sadly.

sighed Atha.

said Hiryana the chaplain, sentimentally.

The household, the depleted little group, clustered around Catherine. whispered Atha, eyes shining.

“No,” she said aloud, in English. “You never do.”

She lay down by his side, involuntarily, not knowing quite what she was doing: her arm around him, her cheek against his still breast. A quiet interval passed. It could have been minutes or hours. At last she sighed, sat up and settled back on her heels.

They hesitated. murmured Smrti.

declared Atha loyally.

Shamefaced assent and stout denial. Of course they wanted to go. Staying on had been Maitri’s whim, not theirs. They wanted to die among friends, in homely surroundings.

they chorused.

A discomfited stirring. Hiryana explained,

Catherine’s eyes widened. Maitri’s dogged presence in the Old Earth city, his eccentric determination to stay on after the Departure, had been a petty annoyance to the Youro City Manager. But such haste seemed indecent.

said Vijaya.

trade delegation?>

said Vijaya, the strange English term falling blankly into the Aleutians’ puzzled, compound gaze. he added, with fatuous conviction. They all stared at her in amazement.

Catherine’s hand closed on the silver bracelet in her overall pocket.

She stood up, slowly. “I’m going to my room for a while. You must fall in with whatever arrangements Sattva wants. That’s for the best.” She left the hall, without another glance at the body.

Bon voyage,
traveler. I hope you meet Clavel again soon.

Her room. The face on the ceiling, the friendly spaceplane. Her bed. Her souvenirs. The Leonardo sketch of the
Adoration of the Magi.
The sounds of the city. She crouched on the pallet bed, it felt that she was distressed and tried to engulf her. She pushed its attempts aside, took out the silver bracelet, which she’d been clutching in the pocket of her robe all the way from Arden, and put it in front of her.

What do I do now?

Someone coughed: a stagey, throat-clearing look-at-me noise. She recognized both voice and gesture. The Magi had climbed out of their canvas. Rajath the trickster was lounging relaxedly on the end of her bed, looking much as she’d last seen him, on that windswept university campus where they’d found the Buonarotti device. Young, bold, dangerous, and shifty. Kumbva sat massively at Catherine’s desk, bathed in a strange amber light; as if at Buonarotti’s desk in the secret chamber on the roof, inside the sarcophagus. She welcomed them without a word. They were the Three Captains: they had always taken decisions together, though their equality was notional. Kumbva, immoveable and careless, Rajath in love with the endless play of power: and the Third Captain, the one they called the Pure, seemingly always in pain over something or other.

What do I do, she repeated, exasperated. What
can
I do?

Pray that you’re wrong! suggested Rajath, brightly and grimly.

said Catherine, looking sadly at her menagerie of icons.

God doesn’t like you because you are a bad guy, Rajath corrected her, grinning. Be
reasonable,
Catherine. You’ve got to be reasonable in trade, even when you’re dealing with a cussed old sod like the WorldSelf. We’re pirates, we came here to rob these people and rob them we did! We’re criminals. God is not on our side! What did you expect? A happy ending?

Kumbva said: if you don’t ask: what
do
you do when you pray?

She felt the void, the emptiness that welcomed and embraced all her reverence, all her contemplation.

But what is real? wondered Kumbva. I think you’ve learned a new prayer here on Earth. The one that goes:
Lord be merciful to me, a sinner.
Interesting. Aleutia has taken it up from you, breathed it from your breath. We’re still trying to work out what “sin” means, when there is no death. Give us time, we’ll have an answer. He took off the elephant head, and tucked it under his arm.

We have to go now, said Rajath, who had started to look rather like a camel. Good luck,
compagnero.
See you around.

Catherine went on kneeling, thinking and staring at the bracelet. At last she stood up, pushed it back into her pocket, and hurried to the humans’ kitchen.

“Maman,
where are those fastened-together blades, what’s the word:
ciseaux.
I need them.”

Leonie and Peter were packing. Faces peeped at the door that led to their living quarters: not even Maitri knew exactly who lived in there, how many or how they were all related. “Miss Catherine,” said Leonie, neither acknowledging nor refusing the term Catherine had used, “You’ll have to come with us.
They
say you’re planning to stay on here, on your own. You can’t do that. It wouldn’t be safe, not without Lord Maitri. We’re moving to the Mediterranean district. We can find a smaller place, with an apartment for you. We’ll keep you safe somewhere quiet. What do you want the scissors for?”

“I don’t want you to keep house for me.”

She took the scissors, twisted her black tangled curls over her shoulder in one thick rope, and hacked the rope through. She shook her head. The loss of weight was delightful. She left the humans staring after her, and returned to the aliens’ part of the house. She took some money, cash and credit-line ID, from Maitri’s desk. As she passed the main hall she saw the Aleutians dancing. They moved in sad and gentle measure, beside the funerary couch of their dead lord, wide sleeves swaying, hands meeting and parting. The Silent were singing in their quavery old voices, one of those plaintive Youro songs the Silent—to whom the words were pure musical sound—had always loved.

Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish Ladies
Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain
For we’re under orders to set sail for old England
And we may never see you fair Spanish Ladies again.

Already the house felt dismantled. She wondered, briefly, as she passed through the still rooms:
How will I live, afterwards?
Hurt to know that Leonie’s offer had been a guilty afterthought…. No, she didn’t want that; but she didn’t want to stay here either. When something’s over, it’s over. So often she had woken from dreams into this house; lives from now she would drift up from sleep, thinking she was still here. Rise into the mild warmth of the mote-filled air; into the barely heard murmur of the human crowd, outside the garden walls. Dying, falling in flames, rising from nightmare. I am Catherine. I am Clavel. I am Kevala, the Pure. I am, I am…. The tumult inside had stilled. She was herself, a tiny persistent pattern within the vast pattern of being: at this moment, now and here.

One morning, in the lobby of a police station. There had been a destitute girl, a young lady fallen out of her gilded cage. Her wrist seemed to be injured. Catherine had unfastened the bandage, revealing the scattered pits of dissolution in the pale skin and—

Had refused to believe what she saw.

It’s your own damned fault, Aleutia. You shouldn’t have told me I was crazy. Don’t you know how difficult it is for one of us to deny something when nearly all of us say it’s true? You told me and I believed you, and I was crazy. Crazy people have hallucinations. They can’t believe in the monstrous things they see. They think it’s personal, and means
despair,
or something, when they should be hammering on the fire alarm. They don’t tell anyone—

She’d thought of a way to get hold of Sattva without fuss and have a private conversation with the fool. She’d cut her hair because it would be difficult and dangerous for a young lady to move about the streets alone, and she didn’t want to wear the chador (which was poor protection, anyway). Never again. In Aleutian dress, with her hair short, she felt confident: wrapped in those forgotten skills of the days in West Africa, shipwrecked mariners passing for normal.

Don’t stare, don’t mess with me. I have every right to be here, and I am well able to look after myself.

She took a cab to the cablenet dome. It was a typical Government of the World building, cool and elegant: not a trace of Old Earth grubbiness, no craven surrender to Aleutia either. Everything was yellow or cream. There were no vulgar displays on the marbled walls of the foyer. Huge virtual screens of muted, abstract color dropped occasionally from space, down to the floor, stayed for a few moments and then vanished. The cablenet—so called for historical reasons, though not restricted to cable—was managed separately from the datagrid. It was the communication system of the powerful, expensive, well protected and difficult of access to the masses; technically open anyone who had the credit. It was administered by the Youro branch of the Office of Aleutian Affairs, an ancient institution. Using Maitri’s credit line, those First Contact skills of silent intimidation and a great deal of patience, she secured access to one of the servers. She asked to place a person-to-person call to the shipworld.