Phoenix Café (33 page)

She could feel every detail of the setting with a surreal immediacy: she could taste the separate fibers and the bloody color in the turf of dark red wool under her feet. Framed, mass-produced verses, made touching by their age, hung on the walls:
L’Angelus.
Copies of sepia-tinged photographs, old when the Aleutians came to earth:
La Pyramide de Cheops, Piazza San Marco.
She felt herself leap into the pictured landscapes, she was assailed by the invoked emotions. She could not decide if this passionately naïve overkill, intense to the point of synesthesia, where all senses bleed into one, was the autistic work of an complete amateur; or an effect of deliberate, original skill. How beautiful this is, she thought, her pulses thrilling, her responses racing. How intense. But no professional would have made
everything
so consummate. Reality is not like that. Reality barely exists outside the beam of the focusing gaze; between the stinging goads of the attention response. She was in Arden, in a simulacrum of the Connelly manor house: but what had happened to the others? The passage with the red wool carpet met the gallery she remembered, above the entrance hall. She glanced down and had a shock. There was no entrance hall, no detail at all, nothing but shadow.

She looked for her guide.

The cloaked figure had vanished. Suddenly Catherine was walking in another carpeted passage and it was dark, a dreamlike switch: again, the kind of thing that didn’t happen in a conventional well-coded game. A door stood ajar showing a line of light, like the door to Mr. Connelly’s study the night Catherine went looking for Helen. But it wasn’t the study behind there. This was the door she hadn’t found. She was going to be shown what she didn’t want to see, told something she didn’t want to know.

No, stop it. Not like this! Please, I don’t like this.

She went in.

Catherine had hated to think of someone living in a cage, even a gilded one. The word implied bad air, stale bedding, the always imperfect human hygiene. Isolation, disinfectant smells. Her remand cell under the poor ward had been all of these things; and a blessed hermitage. But if you weren’t choosing to suffer of your orgiastic own free will, any prison was a hideous place. This room was as pretty and fresh as Thérèse Khan’s orchard, and far more elegant. A fire of red roses burned in the grate, flanked by nice little antique armchairs. The bed was a four-poster, with curtains and canopy of green and gold brocade. The framed poetry on the walls was original, lovely and unexpected: some of the artists were familiar, some new to her. There were flat moving picture screens in the Aleutian style; a Vlab and library console in muted dark casing. A small upright piano stood against one wall; beside it a music stand and a table on which lay a silver glove. There were no natural windows, but one didn’t miss them. Catherine went to the fireplace. She held out her hands to bathe them in the perfumed glow…. Slowly, reluctantly, she looked towards the bed.

A woman lay there, propped on white pillows, a baby at her breast. Her head was turned on one side, cheek pressed against the shadowed linen, she was looking down at the newborn child that sucked. Her body was as if crushed into the pillows by a weight of immense physical exhaustion. Her eyes, when she looked at Catherine, were the somber eyes of the Christ in Piero della Francesca’s
Resurrection: Yes, behold I have conquered death. Conquering death is not so difficult. Now the work begins.

The baby changed in his mother’s arms, until it was Misha as Catherine had known him, lying cuddled there.

He vanished. He was replaced by Mr. Connelly, the father with an air of dignified, fastidious removal from the crude exercise he came here to perform. She saw the Warden speak, but heard nothing. He adjusted his clothing, took a step into the room and disappeared. She thought he’d have looked the same, behaved the same if she had accepted his offer of trade that night in his study. The rational patriarch does not take pleasure in sex. He performs ownership.

There was an editing shift: another of those deliberate caesura. Misha had returned. She hadn’t been certain in the first passage which incarnation of “Michael Connelly” she’d seen grow from baby to man, but this was definitely Misha. He was in his night clothes, old fashioned pajamas; younger than the person Catherine knew. He was crying. Helen, in a long wispy pastel gown, a nightdress, was comforting him. She couldn’t hear the words but she gathered the Warden had told Misha he was not allowed to be alone with his sister, his mother, in the real, ever again. They had to part. Helen said something. Misha sobbed and turned. He pushed her down onto the bed…
that autistic gesture.
He pushed up the gown, clumsily and unconsciously as a baby groping for the nipple: covered her without subtlety. Catherine knew exactly how.

Misha left. The young woman sat up. Her skin turned black as old wine, as black as fragile human skin can be. Her breasts, that seemed too heavy for her slight ribcage, glowed through the lace of her gown like the night of some alien planet: ripe and suffused with blood. Her eyes shone like diamonds, she looked like the mother of the world. She lifted the heels of her hands to cup her chin, covered her face and smoothed her palms upwards. The face became biscuit-brown, heavy, with a thick bar of eyebrow and a mouth like bitter fruit. It changed again, flickering through variations at a speed that seemed almost perfunctory.
I can be any woman, I can be any one, what does it matter?
It settled: pale-skinned, dark-haired, delicate. Catherine understood, as if looking into a mirror, that she and Helen Connelly must look rather alike. Except that Catherine was not so female-shaped. And Helen was human.

Helen said: “In Johnny Guglioli’s day, humans had invented a data-processing medium called coralin. It was a substrate as complex as a human brain, in which mind could be immanent. But the coralin creatures live in another state of being from ours. They are not human, nor self-conscious as we know it. After the Aleutians came, human scientists abandoned research into artificial intelligence, along with so much else. They said ‘We will never construct a self-aware machine, it isn’t possible.’ But here I am. Intelligent by accident, as an unforeseen byproduct of my primary function. Made, not born. Created, not begotten. I am a sextoy, I am a machine.

“I was made for Michael Connelly, whom you know as the Warden. I am his sister, since I was derived from his father’s tissue, as he was himself. But I was not made human. I was able to bear my own child, which is unusual. Misha was a parthenogenetic conception and needed work, but he is all mine. But I am still property; I am still the Warden’s spare piece of flesh. He didn’t hesitate long before offering me as an experimental subject, when he was invited to join in the plot that you have discovered. Maybe jealousy hardened his heart.

“The Warden and his friends wanted to get hold of the Aleutian superweapon before the aliens departed. They persuaded some of the scientists on the Buonarotti team to co-operate. Maybe only one, I’m not sure. There are other human scientists working for the plot now. With the small knowledge they had of weapons manufacture, they began by crudely injecting the stolen culture into the bodies of the young ladies who’d been offered for sacrifice. When several of these experiments had been uselessly fatal, they started using lower grade ‘young ladies,’ without higher brain functions, as a cheaper alternative. Though they believed, going by Aleutian science, that the weapon itself could not be grown from anything but fully sentient bodies.”

“I saw them!” breathed Catherine.

Mr. Connelly, shepherding his flock in the room in her nightmare.

“You saw them,” agreed the young woman, with a serene smile. She was now wearing a deep green gown, her hair drawn back sleekly from a passionate bare brow. “You have seen what I chose to show you, time and again. This is
my
network…. The experiments had been running for some time, in the greatest secrecy, before I was infected. They reserved me for the last stages because I am fertile, which is rare in a sextoy—and perhaps because the Warden didn’t want me to die; and they needed to keep him sweet. They’d improved their technique. When I swallowed the
Vinum Sabbati
it was an innocent white powder, and I lived. I live still, but I have become the breeding ground. Do you remember the marriage that you saw in the glade? I made you see that. You were wearing a suit that was slaved to the house’s system: I controlled what you saw. What happened in that congress was not a human conception, but it was like enough. I did not become pregnant, but my partner did, and she will give birth.”

“Why
did you let them do it?”

She couldn’t believe that this woman had been powerless.

Helen ignored the question. “That chemical marriage happened a while ago. My partner has already been delivered to the FDA to a secret site where the weapons will be tested, finally, in anger as we say. Maybe you wonder why we, my sisters in torment and I, allowed ourselves to be used so wickedly. Well, we are small and physically weak; and we are property. We have no rights in law. But my bride, I can tell you, was a willing victim. She gave her life (in so far as she had a life of her own) for the cause. Don’t judge her too harshly. Have you never, in your long career, asked your retainers to die for Aleutia? Has Aleutia never asked for volunteers for just this terrible purpose? As for me, when papa told me I would serve our party’s cause, that I would suffer
pour la patrie,
and he would be proud, I laughed to myself. I wasn’t fooled. But in some shamed dungeon deep inside, there was a little girl who was proud and glad—”

She drew up her knees to her chest. She looked like an abandoned child.

Catherine imagined the nights, years-long. The days, years-long, spent in this room by the little girl who never grew up. Who was always and everywhere, whatever her talent and her skills as an auteur of worlds, still this desolate child.

Helen opened one hand and pointed at the Vlab. A demonstration was running. Catherine saw 3D diagrams like the ones on the old notebook in the schoolroom. Worlds giving birth to worlds, impossible divisions. Lastly, the image from the signature cartouche took shape, the woman bowed with clasped hands over the glory that she had discovered. “It’s a detail from the Legend of St Helen,” said Helen. “That’s why I use it. Helen was the mother of Constantine, who, following her teaching, imposed Christian redemption on the Roman Empire. She’s a figure of the dawn of a new world. She went to the Holy Land to search for the True Cross on which Christ had died for our sins. Constantine imposed the Church; Helen discovered the scientific proof of salvation. She is pictured in the act of finding the Cross. Do you see?”

Catherine shook her head. She stared at the archaic figure, unable to decipher its meaning.

“It’s like a museum, isn’t it.”

She spun around. The guide she’d followed was sitting in one of the armchairs by the rose fire. It wasn’t Joset or Misha. Knees tucked up, the hood of her domino pushed back; folds of darkest green silk tumbled in shimmering virtual detail around her voluptuous little body, Helen smiled at Catherine. She was holding a brightly colored toy. Catherine had seen the same kind of thing once before: that scaled head, the beak with its scarlet gape. It wasn’t a snake, after all. The Phoenix clung to Helen’s wrist with miniature talons. Its undiscarded ancestry, its history of transformation—reptilian into bird—was proudly evident.

“It’s like a museum isn’t it,” repeated Helen, gesturing with the hand the Phoenix clung to. “My mind is like a museum, and I’m the prize exhibit. I’ve wanted to talk to you for so long, Catherine.”

The phoenix gaped, and uttered a harsh, short cry.

“I make myself look like this,” said Helen. “In virtuality. I make myself speak and move, like this. It’s no longer true in the real. But you know that. I’m at Arden now. I won’t leave this room again, in the real. Sometimes I wish everything would move more quickly. Sometimes I beg for every second to last a thousand years. I’m older than I used to look you know, Dad had me made when he was still quite young. But what I remember from before Mish was born hardly counts as living: I blank it out. No one can be human all on their own.” She began to fade, losing definition by trembling degrees. “I am the secret author of everything you have seen or will see in my game. Don’t question me. I can’t tell you anything more. Ask Lalith. She knows.”

“But you’re not a dumb patriot,” cried Catherine, feeling that her last chance of learning the truth was slipping away. “The others girls maybe, not you. You could have killed yourself, when you found out that you were being used for something so monstrous—” She had forgotten that Helen was only human; that even life in this cage, life as the servant of a savage revenge, might be better than no more life at all. “You must have had some reason!
Tell
me?”

The girl in the armchair raised her free hand and touched two spots at her temples, where Catherine saw small dark wounds, as if Helen had been prepared for a crude early form of virtuality immersion. “Nothing more proves me human,” she said, “than the price I was willing to pay for knowledge.” She turned blind eyes to Catherine. “I am sorry,” she said. “I am a ghost. I’m not real. I cannot answer your questions.”

Catherine was alone. The roses burned, undying: she saw a heap of raw, agonized flesh. Wisely, she did not look again at the canopied bed.