Phoenix Café (34 page)

What had happened to the rest of them? Maybe they were talking to other versions of Helen elsewhere in the construct, being given other clues that could be put together. Head for the exit. She looked for a doorway that wasn’t part of the décor. Instead there was another cloaked figure, standing by Helen’s chair. It beckoned and she followed. They left Helen’s room and sped through the house, brushing through vital, casually realized images of National Park staff at work. In the clearing she saw her driver, polishing one of the jeeps with tender care. The chickens pecked and strutted and bullied each other. Mrs. Hunt was in the
potager,
speaking severely to a young male servant; who squirmed and looked at the ground and hated the old bat—

Abruptly she was hanging in a sensory blank, blacker than the darkest night. Then she was out of the game, in the blue sweat-smelling gloom of the antechamber. “What am I supposed to do now?” she asked aloud. No one answered. She walked, empty and bewildered, through the demon-gates: that read her identity and would shift the price of the game she’d just played into the coffers of the co-operative. Into the real-world, late and empty Phoenix Café.

III
Yo Soy la Desintegración

10
Intermundia

i

The Café was still lit;
musique naturelle
still playing softly. The dining room was empty, except for one table. Agathe and Lalith were sitting together, obviously waiting for Catherine. The
musique
was made of rainfall. It must be raining outside, but the windows—small, postwar windows—that looked onto the dark street were sheltered by the verandah. She couldn’t see the rain; she could only hear the muted, ominous whispering. She crossed the room in a world thin and devoid of conviction, her senses reeling from that extraordinary
envie.

“Was that an hour? Where is everyone? It felt like a few minutes!”

“Sit down,” suggested Lalith. “You’re looking burned. It’s the intensity she uses. Intensified experience just
eats
objective time. But it isn’t as late as it feels. We were the only customers left, so Anatole decided to shut up shop.”

Catherine sat down. “Drink,” said Agathe, pushing forward a glass of red wine. “It’s good for what ails you. I don’t use the stuff, but I had that from someone I trust. Let’s drink together.” She had a tumbler of the café’s best ground-water in front of her.

Catherine drank. The wine was soft and warming in her mouth.

“How do you like Helen’s style?” asked Lalith, oddly prim and stiff. Lalith, like Catherine, wasn’t good at small talk. “It’s different, isn’t it.”

“I call it Modern Art,” said Agathe, mock philistine. “I don’t understand it.”

“You should try her paper flowers,” advised Lalith, suddenly grinning. “They are
excessive.”

Catherine blinked. “Erotic paper flowers? Better than Misha’s?”

“Better. Rougher, weirder.” Lalith glanced slyly at her friend the priest. “But I’m embarrassing Agi.” Catherine glimpsed the strain that the Perfect’s vows imposed on these two, the unknown hinterland of their relationship.

“Was it Helen who built the Blue Forest game?”

They glanced at each other. “No,” said Agathe.

Catherine set the silver bracelet on the table, as she had done when she confronted Misha. She looked Lalith dead in the eye. The halfcaste answered with the same Silent defense she’d given at every previous encounter:

“Is this yours?”

Lalith’s awkwardness had taken on a mask of brittle clowning. She made to slip the bracelet over her solid brown hand and failed, with a chuckle. She didn’t have the classic halfcaste bird-bones. It was far too small.

“Apparently not!”

“But I think you have one of these somewhere. You’re an agent of the USSA: I think you’re an officer of the Special Exterior Force: a Campfire Girl.”

“It isn’t the USSA anymore,” said Lalith, without troubling to protest, or to deny what she’d known Catherine was thinking, all this time. “Hasn’t been for a
long
time. The United Socialist States of America ceased to exist, even in name, over a hundred years ago. I’m a native of the republic of Colombia, and a citizen of the FDA, the
Federación de Democracias Americanas,
North and South. I don’t know why the funx you aliens, and all you Old Earth running dog alien lackeys, can’t call us by our given name.”

“Why should we call you by name,” wondered Agathe, “when you won’t even talk to us?”

“Speaking for Aleutia, it’s not deliberate rudeness,” said Catherine. “We apologize. We’re lazy and we don’t like changes: people can’t help their obligation. Shall we return to the point?”

Lalith set the bracelet down.

“Okay, I’m a secret agent. I’ve been over here for a long time. I have a recorded history, as good as any you’ll find for someone in halfcaste community in Aleutian Earth. Right back to birth: rock solid. I joined the Renaissance movement, I rose through the ranks, I’ve traveled all over the Aleutian ruled cities; eventually I met Misha and his friends. But it’s not what you think.”

Catherine grinned. “So, what is it?”

“I can speak Aleutian. I know how you’ve read the situation, and you’re wrong about me; you’re wrong about the FDA. My mission was to prevent gender violence, not incite it. You think we want to encourage a blood-bath, so we can sweep in and take over? We don’t. We want stability here: we want to help. I was sent over here to infiltrate and encourage any trend, initiative, vision that offered a peaceful alternative. I found the Renaissance movement: I joined it because that was my mission. But you know what? I’m a convert. I’m not working for the FDA, or not just for the FDA. I’m working for the rebirth of humanity. Everything you’ve heard me say applies to the Americas as well. We’ve all been trapped, paralyzed, for as long as the Aleutians have been on Earth…. Agathe knows who I really am, so do all my close contacts: which is in direct contravention of my orders, but I was planning to get the authority to tell the Old Earth public the real story, before the Departure—.”

“I see.” Catherine ducked her chin, withholding judgment. “How d’you expect your superiors to respond to your extended allegiance?”

“My brief was to try to stop Old Earth from blowing up after the Departure. By whatever means came to hand. That’s what I’ve been doing, and it’s been working, that’s good enough. I’m Campfire Girl, we’re trained to act alone, take decisions alone. There are other agents in Europe, working alone too: they’re not implicated. They don’t know who ‘Lalith’ of the Renaissance really is.”

“Are you really a halfcaste? I thought none of them survived in the US.”

“I am now.” She touched the neat rims of her nasal slits. “I don’t mind the morphing; I’ve grown to like it. I had to be a halfcaste; I couldn’t be on either side of the gender divide. Not only because of the politics: semantically. We’ve changed, the Europeans have changed. I couldn’t have passed as a woman or a man over here, not of either persuasion. But who says how a halfcaste is supposed to act? We’re cultural throwbacks. We could be acting like a character in a three hundred year old Pre-Contact movie. That’s my cover, and it wasn’t much of a stretch. Come to the Americas, you’ll understand what I mean.”

Catherine gave the same cautious Aleutian nod as before. “What does the bracelet I found, that was planted on me, mean? It has no inscription, no rank, no name, no number. Is it genuine?”

“I believe so. In manner of speaking, yes. I think it’s genuine.”

“This little toy, made to fit the wrist of a Traditional young lady, belonged to an SEF officer?”

“In a manner of speaking,” repeated Lalith.

In the Common Tongue, they were being as guarded as Catherine herself. Guarded like Aleutian Signifiers on the witness stand: who know their Spoken Word evidence will be thrown out, if it contradicts the language of the body, the flux flowing from them into the air. Agathe laid her hands on the tabletop, like someone anxious to prove herself innocent of trickery. “We don’t know what Helen has told you.”

“Or Mish—”

Catherine frowned. “Were you in the
envie?
I lost sight of the others.”

“We got here too late.” The priest hesitated. “How much do you know?”

“Misha told me that Helen had hidden the answers in her game. I met Helen in there, a version of Helen. She told me some things, but gave me no answers.” Catherine was suddenly chilled, though the room was warm. She’d picked up her robe in the games-room antechamber. She thrust her hands deep in the sleeve-pockets, found Leonie’s hairbrush and was obscurely comforted. “Not about the conspiracy. She said I should ask Lalith, so now I’m asking you, both of you it seems, about the proliferating weapons plot. What’s your version?”

The women glanced at each other. Lalith nodded, handing the baton to her friend: Agathe began. “It started before we met you, when we lost Helen. We all knew that Helen and Mish were lovers—”

“Imran hated it,” broke in Lalith. “Said Mish was going to wreck everything. Of course he was jealous; Mish had grabbed the forbidden sweeties that Imran didn’t dare to touch. Of course, he never considered Helen might have a point of view. But he was right, it was dangerous. The Renaissance needed to be under the radar; know what I mean? We needed time to grow, and a monster like Misha’s Dad could have destroyed us with one swipe of his paw—”

“Let me tell her,” said Agathe, and Lalith subsided. “Helen stopped coming to the café. We were afraid the Warden had caught her and Mish together, but Mish just said she was grounded: not to leave the house except with Michael Senior. Then Thérèse heard, on the young lady circuit, that Helen Connelly had joined the secret society. Not a secret society exactly. It didn’t have a name; it was just a covetable inner circle in a tiny cramped world full of ‘inner circles.’ Special parties, special treats, special presents: for a special group of girls whose mothers and fathers
really loved them.
They had a secret life and whispered about it, then one by one they disappeared: vanished into total purdah. Thérèse assumed it was about sex of course, toy-swapping orgies. But the girls who vanished were literally never seen or heard from again.”

“Classic,” said Lalith. “They’re treated like shit, so all they want is
more
shit. They police each other, trying to outdo each other: thicker veils, more restrictions, more normal activities they decide are forbidden…. That didn’t sound like Helen, but we were worried. Mish says you saw her once, at a reception at Lord Maitri’s. It was probably her last appearance.”

“There was a story going round,” said Agathe. “In the hives: an ugly rumor, not the sort of thing that enters the public grid. We got to hear about it at the Settlement. No names, but it was about a young lady, mysteriously unwell, strictly confined to her room, tended only by her father. A domestic went into the bedroom by accident, and found a body on the bed: half dissolved into a weird black puddle on the sheets, but with living eyes,
still alive….
Does it happen in Aleutia, in the Commonalty of Mind? An urban myth gets about, and you ignore it, but it nags at you that there’s a connection with reality….? We hated the idea that Helen would join an ultra-Traditionalist secret society, but all young ladies are unstable. If her father had forced her to give up seeing Mish, what did she have left?”

“She wouldn’t be the first victim of oppression to escape from torture by deciding she loves Big Brother. If you know what that means.”

Catherine shrugged. “Thanks, Lalith. I do.”

“So that’s what we thought, except, the bogey-story had crawled into our minds and we couldn’t shake it. It was Helen who broke the silence. She finally told Misha what was going on, and Misha told us.”

“And you believed this?
And you did nothing?”

“What
could
we do?” demanded Lalith, just as Mish had done. “You think we should have called the police? The army, the City Council? The Expedition Management? A sextoy can’t be a witness, they have no rights. If a victim had escaped, like the girl you saw… If we’d found her. If Helen had wanted us to turn her Dad in, we still wouldn’t have known what to do. We were so vulnerable, and the Renaissance means everything to us. I’m secretly the agent of a foreign power, and my friends knew that by the time we knew about Helen. And yet I’m a figurehead of the Movement. If that came out in the wrong way it could ruin us.”

“There’s going to be hell to pay in Youro,” said Agathe, “when your people are gone, taking the Buonarotti Device with them, leaving us with nothing but a useless alien particle accelerator in space. We told you, long ago, that day you came to the Settlement. There’s a hard core of reactionaries for whom the Gender War never ended, and they’re running this city. They’re just waiting for their chance. The Renaissance could make a difference,
could
have made a difference—”

“I didn’t intend to become a leader of the Movement,” added Lalith, unhappily. “My plan was to make the initiative work; I didn’t know I’d be so successful.”

“When Helen told Mish and he told the rest of us, we felt paralyzed.”

Catherine sought through the chattering crowd in the atrium, on that day at Maitri’s reception. She was looking for Traditional young lady: small, slender, curvaceous, veiled. She could not find Helen in her memory. Had Misha known what was happening to his sister-mother, when he began to rape Catherine?

“I can’t believe this. I’ve met Helen now.
She
should have been your leader. She has such a shining intelligence. She has such
power
—”

“We couldn’t believe it ourselves,” said Agathe. “But maybe choosing to be destroyed comes with the territory, to a certain kind of powerful person. What do you think? You’re the Third Captain, and you chose to become a Traditional young lady. That was hard for me to accept, too.”

“Anyway,” Lalith continued the tale. “Helen didn’t want us to do call the cops. She convinced us there was nothing we could do for her, or the others. She wanted to string the conspirators along until she knew exactly what they were planning. So we waited. Remember the time we took you to the Blue Forest? It was about then that she managed to send us a record of the final phase: I think you’ve seen part of it. What they forced her and her partner to do.”