Phoenix Café (35 page)

Catherine thought of Misha giving her paper flowers in the rented room. His eyes like cold metal.

“It had to be young ladies? That seems strange, when they’re so highly valued. Even loved, if you can call it loving—”

“Not all of them are loved,” explained Agathe grimly. “Not all Traditional young ladies turn out as they should. The failures aren’t killed; they are kept, or sold off to a certain kind of brothel. But whether or not the girls have higher brain functions, Traditionalists are
in law,
entitled to do anything they like to their artificial daughters. Citizens have some protection, even beggars. Sextoys don’t. And they were following the formula. Aleutians make proliferating weapons by doping inert enemy tissue, and growing the culture in the bodies of living volunteers. Am I right?”

“It would be complex commensals,” said Catherine, slowly, thinking of the creatures she had seen penned under L’Airial. “Usually, if that’s the right word.”

Except (she kept this to herself), that in reality, if things are as bad as that, controlled conditions are out of reach, and one asks for volunteers—

“That’s what they knew. Complex commensals. That’s what they used. Sentient property. I think the users—I hate calling them parents—must always have a suppressed need to destroy young ladies. There’s so much physical disgust, revulsion, in abusing a child, or something identical to a child. It doesn’t go away because the abuser refuses to admit those feelings. Human minds don’t work like that. The horror fights to be expressed, it escapes in twisted ways.”

Catherine felt herself begin to shudder hard, belly-deep, as if she was coming out of a paper-flower high. Agathe laid a hand over hers.

“You’re still looking burned. Hang on. Were all fighting demons over this, believe me. You saw the reconstruction Helen made of the ‘marriage’?”

“At Arden. In the forest; a kind of vision. I saw two women. In the game, Helen said her partner has been sent to the USSA, but that’s impossible—”

“Not impossible,” said Lalith. “The Shield is invincible; it’ll destroy anything alien that tries to cross our coastal approaches, down to micron level: and block anything suspicious. But a gate’s no better than the gatekeeper. There are ultra-Traditionalists in the FDA, what did you think? I don’t know who, I’ve been gone so long: but the SEF are in this; there’s evidence I can’t deny.”

“We think it was the Americas factor that earned Mr. Connelly his key role,” said Agathe. “He has no privileged access to the Buonarotti lab; he’s only the park keeper. But he has those solar Wings and the Atlantic coast.”

“Remember Tracy Island?” asked Lalith. “The Campfire Girls’ Home Base? We’re still the Old Earth dedicated marines, the alien-watchers, but we don’t sign up for perpetual quarantine anymore, we can go home. I trained in the North, in a regular Armed-Forces college. The Island is a museum piece, a national monument, and a cenotaph: a revered location. But it still has the hardest quarantine: I guess our anti-Aleutian fanatics have always been convinced a bunker like that would be needed again. What they call a self-fulfilling prophesy?” She grinned nervously. “That’s where Helen says her partner was delivered, with a supply of semi-sentient blanks—that’s what they’re called, the young ladies who don’t make it. Blanks— to be consumed in the trial. We know when. It’s scheduled for the state visit. The Aleutian delegation is down to visit Tracy Island, to pay their respects to their old adversaries: I guess that makes sense to an Aleutian. If there’s a premature escape, these are alien weapons. The aliens can take the blame. If the trial goes off okay, then later when the mysterious global plague breaks out the trail will lead to Tracy Island and the Aleutians. You see how it works? The bad guys think they’ll be able to wipe out their enemies without admitting responsibility.”

“The Aleutians can take the blame?” repeated Catherine. “But the Aleutians are the target, surely?”

The two women stared at her.

“Is that what you thought!” exclaimed Lalith. “My God, and you didn’t turn us in! You have a hell of an alienation problem, Catherine who is Clavel!”

“Why would it be the Aleutians?” demanded Agathe. “How could you think that, after all we’ve told you? The
plan
is to use proliferating weapons against Reformers, as soon as you people are gone.”

“They’ll explode a small bomb, at high altitude,” said Lalith. “Packed with weapon larvae. The explosion will be tiny, the fall-out will be unstoppable. Now you want to know how my people, the great moral force, the Reformer superpower, could be involved. It’s incredible, yeah. But we have our monsters, like I said. Even within the SEF.” Now she seemed angry with both of them. “You think the USSA (which doesn’t exist) is like, some kind of giant single matriarchal ants’ nest. The Americas is a whole world. There are people crazy enough to want to get hold of the Aleutian superweapon and try to use it. And the SEF, the alien-watchers, they’d
have to
be involved.”

She stared at the little bracelet: Lalith unmasked, someone truly ingenuous, someone who reminded Catherine of Bhairava. A good cop.

“I didn’t believe what Helen told us. It was just impossible. But I had to check. I have my codes; I have access to our systems. I went into the SEF bit-grid. I found out enough to be sure she’s right. That bracelet…. Helen wasn’t the only infiltrator, do you understand? She was not alone in that marriage. Some of the connections I found are so scary, and in so deep, there’s no one I can trust.”

“There’s nobody we can call,” said Agathe. “We know that now. We’re going to have to stop this ourselves, if it can be stopped at all.”

Catherine felt that Helen’s game had finally left her mind. She was stone cold sober now. The whisper of the rain seemed louder. It threatened a flood, reddened and turbulent, filling the streets.

“Oh no,” she said. “No…. Listen, Agathe, Lalith. I believe you. I believe everything you’ve told me, the conspiracy, the theft from the Buonarotti lab, the use of Traditional young ladies as breeding ground. I just wish you’d told me sooner, been more direct—”

“We couldn’t!” cried Lalith. “We had to wait, until the time was right, until all the pieces were in place!”

“All right, listen. What Misha’s father and his confederates have been doing is horrible, dangerous nonsense: but mainly dangerous to themselves and to the poor devils ‘sacrificed’ in their experiments. They might succeed in growing some short-lived monsters; nothing worse. They deserve to be punished, and I…. I can promise you they will be punished, but they haven’t built proliferating weapons. You see,
conception,
that word you’ve been using, in weapons-making it means what it sounds like. A real conception has to be involved. The partners I saw in the ‘chemical marriage’ were both female, and that’s not the way humans reproduce.”

“Yes it is,” said Agathe. “Didn’t you know? Exchanging body fluids: it’s the normal way to get pregnant these days, woman-woman. One partner takes a pill, both if they both want to try. They make love, and the doped ejaculate they swallow and absorb triggers a parthenogenetic conception. It’s called semi-parthenogenetic, because it will include elements of the partner’s DNA. With the right course of prenatals, the pregnancy should be perfectly normal. I don’t know how it happens with weapons, but obviously there are supposed to be offspring.”

Something wrong with this picture, something that didn’t to add up about this conspiracy; about the reasons her friends gave for the bewildering way they’d courted Catherine, drawn her in and yet failed to connect…. Aleutia was not in danger. If she’d ever, seriously, believed that the locals were on the point of launching proliferating weapons against her people, she wouldn’t have been so cavalier. She had not believed, because she’d known it couldn’t be true. But this was the truth. Finally this was the truth, this was the horror she’d known was coming, through three lifetimes. Falling in flames. She had known what Aleutia would do to Earth.

“Agathe, Lalith…. Weapons attack
biochemical identity.
They can’t distinguish between political parties! Bright thinks everything that lives on this planet belongs to what we’d call the same Brood. Sharing life, sharing self.”

She remembered, horrified, a casual aside in Lalith’s description of the “trial.” “You said, ‘a supply of blanks’? You mean, they’re going to let the second generation
eat,
in this so-called dry run?”

“Just because you’re a bunch of psychopaths,” said Lalith. “And leaders of the twenty-fourth century Ku Klux Klan, and in positions of power, it doesn’t mean you have to be smart. That’s a myth.”

“Is there no one you can trust?”

Lalith set her mouth, her artificial nasal pinched and bleak. “You heard me. The test is being hosted by Tracy Island Base.”

“Now you know how we felt,” said Agathe. “When you find out something like this, you feel like laughing hysterically; you feel like kicking your heels and screaming. You want to hide your head and ignore the whole thing. We’ve been through all the stages, and did I mention the cold sweats, the sleepless nights, the days you don’t know how you manage to walk and talk? But we
did
tell somebody. We told you. You’re the great Clavel. We were sure you’d be able to do something. We just didn’t know, until now, how to, to explain without—”

Agathe’s hands gripped each other. Her knuckles, peach-pale seemed about to burst through the dark skin.

Catherine laughed. “You thought I could use my superbeing powers? I tried to talk to the City Manager this morning. He’s with the delegation, out of my reach. I got the
didn’t you used to be famous?
and the bum’s rush. Oh, wait, I could speak to him in the Aleutia of the mind. Where’d ignore me, the way he usually does. Telepathy is not what it’s cracked up to be and I’m not the Third Captain. That was long ago. There’s nothing I can do.”

Lalith and Agathe looked at each other.

“We were fools,” said Agathe. “You haven’t said it aloud, but you’re right, we were fools. One doesn’t know how deeply ingrained the idea of Aleutian superiority is, until one tries. We
did
believe you’d make some kind of miraculous intervention. But it cuts both ways, Catherine. We aren’t immortals, but we’re not children. We’re not helpless. We’ve been getting organized, since the last pieces fell into place. We have weapons, we have a flier that can pass through the Shield. I wasn’t joking; we’re going to stop this ourselves. We’re going to Tracy Island.”

“Then I’m coming with you,” said Catherine.

They looked at her the way Misha had looked at her, when she confessed the truth about the Device. Vindicated. These two had trusted her, and they were vindicated.

Some signal passed from Lalith or the priest. The others came out from wherever they’d been hiding, and gathered around the table.

“It’s my flier,” said Lalith. “I can take us through.”

“But don’t the security codes change all the time?”

“I
am
my code. The system recognizes SEF biometrically. I wouldn’t be able to land on the Mainland, but I can get us to Tracy Island.”

“We’re ready,” said Imran. “Lalith’s been drilling us, while you were at L’Airial. Are you really coming along?”

She wanted them to put her in a cab and send her home. Away from their troubles. Back to the Giratoire house: friendly spaceplane in the ceiling cracks, the Aleutians “having a little music” in the main hall. Maitri died this morning. She suddenly remembered this, with a sense of falling.

“We need firearms. Real ones.” Aleutians regarded the projectile weapons humans knew as “firearms” as useless for anything but sport.

“Taken care of,” said Misha. “We have superheat, and we have Lalith, who is a Campfire officer, and has a map of the base in her head.”

“You don’t have to be part of this, Catherine.” cried Lydie, her narrow face white as paper. “It’s true we hoped…but it’s your choice.”

“My choice is I’m coming. When do we set out?”

“Now,” said Misha, inexorably. “Right now. We go through the games-room arena; Lalith’s flier is hidden out the back.”

ii

Aware she was not being told the whole story, aware of false notes, anomalies, omissions that hid she couldn’t tell what secrets, Catherine followed the friends: between the blue demons, and baulked before the sparkling gates.

“The ID readers! Can’t we switch them off or something? If we pass through, there’ll be a transaction on record, we don’t want that—”

She had plunged into the past, when the Expedition had been deeply wary of any interaction with the void-forces machinery.

“Ssh!” hissed Lydie. “How can you worry about money at a time like this?”

Through a sparkling gateway, but not into fantasy. Footsteps rattling strangely in a drab open space. They were crossing a wide, empty pan of paved ground: circled by ranks of terraced seats, faintly visible in the night. Catherine looked up and saw indigo sky through the spars of a domed canopy.

“What is this place?”

It was the arena of course, the physical stage of their nanotech make-believe. She could see no hint of its secret life. When she looked behind her the
envie
gates were no more than indents in shadow. So this was the physical space where she’d spent hours, weeks, years of subjective time. Been a pirate on the Spanish Main. Touched the great trees of the Blue Forest.