Phoenix Café (37 page)

“What?”

His golden eyes were affectless, preoccupied, tranquil.

She shook her head and smiled. “Nothing.”

“Let’s go. Got to get up that cliff.”

The rock slabs were more formidable in close up. The first handhold was way off the ground, too far for Catherine’s reach. Misha took a swing at it with the light stuff bag on his back, and scrambled up. He fetched out a rope and let it down. Catherine attached the bag of firearms. When that was raised he let down the rope again. She fastened it round her waist and he pulled her up.

“Should be easier now,” he said.

They climbed, Misha leading. The stuff bag was slung over his shoulder; the bag of weapons roped and hauled after them in stages.

“Tracy Island was financed by a woman called Marjorie O’Reilly Steyning,” he remarked, unhurriedly. “Perhaps better known as Seimwa L’Etat, legendary media proprietor in First Contact times. She became, posthumously, a fanatical anti-Aleutian. She’d hidden most of her assets in the 2038 revolution, so the Revolutionary Government never got hold of her money. Her estate funds this base. She was Johnny Guglioli’s employer, funnily enough, before she framed him as a computer-innards plague carrier, a coralin Typhoid Mary. I’m sure you knew that. Bet you didn’t know she’s still here.”

“She’s reincarnate? They have reincarnation in the USSA?”

“You mean the FDA. Nope, still the first incarnation.” He searched for a new hold, “It’s in the terms of the endowment. They have to keep her body in a tank, the tissues pumped full of some patent goop. It’s room-temperature technology; she didn’t trust cryogenics. Lalith says she bubbles like a ginger beer plant. Whatever the funx a ‘ginger beer plant’ may be. She’s alive as a sacred object. I don’t think my Dad would regard her as competition.”

They were in the fissure she’d seen, alternately bracing and scrabbling in an unstable sandy funnel, and clambering layers of vertical slabs. She climbed automatically, images of her life with the Phoenix Café flowing through her mind. Misha playing “Great Balls of Fire”: hammering wildly at a hallowed twentieth-century keyboard up on the stage, while the Phoenix staff yelled at him in helpless protest. Teasing Mâtho. Does the Koran permit the taking of gaming-drugs during Ramadan? A sumptuous Christmas breakfast in the eternal cartoon-colored spring of Thérèse’s orchard.

She had seen the friends bound together by Misha, the problem child. But they had been equally bound—she realized now—by Helen Connelly, the auteur, the maker of worlds. Even now, she regretted like a greedy tourist that she would never know Helen. She saw her knowledge of the Phoenix Café, of these young people, like a mariner’s chart. A coastline traced in detail, only a blank beyond, that she would never explore.

We never got further than that, and now it’s over.

Maitri whispered to her:
but my dear, you weren’t looking for a new familiarity, you came here looking for the strange.

The climb became daunting, but she didn’t care. Friends who trekked with Catherine were horrified by her appetite for hardship. “It’s not that I feel at home in the wild,” she shouted. “Some people do, not me. I hate it; I’m crushed by the emptiness. Nobody believes that, but it’s true. I come out here because I need edges, starkness, absolutes—”

“May I give you a piece of advice?” cut in Misha, from above. “Stop talking to yourself for once. Just climb.”

She hadn’t realized she was speaking aloud.

Now there was no more sand, only a rocky chimney. The drop between her feet was startling. Where had the little cliff vanished to? She was in the shipworld, climbing in the huge spars between the two shells: a dangerous entertainment for stir-crazy voyagers on the endless dark ocean. She couldn’t tell if she was heading up or down. She slipped, the weight of the firearms dragging her backwards, the thunderous energy of fear in every nerve. She saw Johnny Guglioli’s face contorted in everlasting terror and disgust. She felt herself a small, naked crawling thing, extended beyond her powers—

They were standing on level ground.

“Cath.
Are you all right?”

The abyss above and below weighed on her like death. She was coming apart, drifting into fragments on the ether. Gods and demons, impossibly huge faces, looked down on her and roared. She was tumbling into fugue. Arousal, tension, fear. Functioning under the influence. Michael Senior putting Catherine through her paces, a roguish twinkle in his eye: she responded, she performed, because somehow she must. Columns capped in dirty snow surrounded them like sentinels. There was grey ice underfoot. A nameless wind had found them. It drove straight through the insulated suits, searching every sweated crevice of flesh. Misha tugged clumsily on Catherine’s arm.

“I
said,
are you all right?”

He pointed to a cove among the boulders, a wind-riven house. They crouched in shelter, he fed her with pieces of something sticky and sweet. At last she managed to speak.

“I’m all right. I don’t know what came over me.”

“You almost passed out. You shouldn’t be wearing that body,” said Misha. “It isn’t practical outdoors.”

She nodded. Her fragile young-lady limbs were still trembling. A tuft of grey-green barrens grass grew in the entrance of their shelter. She touched the tough blades with her gloved hand, grateful for their reality. “The Aleutian islands, how marvelous. I think it counts, even if this is a movable one. Rajath always said they were horrible. I loved West Africa: Kumbva was very fond of Uji in Thailand, where he landed, we all were. Rajath never came back here, not once. I like the scenery, but I can see his point.” The wonder of being an adventurer again had blotted out her sense of crisis.

“Where are we meeting the others? Where’s the tunnel entrance?”

“We have to go further. Drink. Eat some more. You’ll be fine.”

The cone was ahead of them, a mass of rugged glittering granite: a solid though unlikely landscape feature. To reach its skirts they had to descend into a shallow valley. There were no trees. Between strands of windswept snow the turf was crisp with the brown ghosts of summer flowers.

Misha gazed into his inner eye. “Lalith’s inside. She’s landed the flier, and left it in quarantine. She and her passengers have deplaned safely, they’ve been dipped in quarantine; they’re being escorted to a reception suite now. All the precautions are normal, no problems. They’ll want to separate her from the others soon, and take her off for her own debriefing, that’s also normal but she’ll resist. So far she’s managing to convince them she has to stick with her asylum-seekers. They only trust Lalith, the halfcaste doesn’t speak; they won’t impart their vital information unless Lalith’s in the room, that sort of thing.”

“You’re talking to her aren’t you? I didn’t know Lalith had an inset.”

“Of course she’s wired. She’s a secret agent. You don’t know all our secrets, Miss Alien-in-Disguise. Just listen, don’t interrupt. She’s sending up to some FDA satellite or other, and down again, as if she was calling me on a global-mobile. Leaving no trace of where I am, if they should catch her out. We’ll lose contact for a while, now she’s with the staff. Once we’re in, we’ll be able to talk again, she’s bit-stitched me and Joset into the system. Nothing that’ll stand human scrutiny, but we should be okay for as long as it takes. The Aleutians aren’t here yet, and there aren’t many humans around. This is actually the most dangerous part. Where’s the map I gave you? Take a look at it.”

Head up, staring inward, he traced the contour lines on the flimsy she spread between them on the ground. “See here. A dip, under the slope of the cone, opposite the fissure we climbed. We have to get there without alerting the exterior surveillance. We have the advantage that the surveillance ‘knows’ nothing has crossed the shorelines: Lalith has fixed that. So it won’t be actively searching. The suits have good camouflage. They’ll make us look like whatever is next to us, long as we don’t move. When we move, they’ll give us the signal profile of large animals behaving naturally. Only trouble is.” Abruptly his eyes changed their focus. “There aren’t any large animals around. When I say run, run like fun. When I yell stop, stop
at once
and pretend to be a boulder. When I say run again, run. Got it?”

She nodded.

“Run!”

Run: stop. Run: stop. Run: stop. Catherine stumbled and fell into the final cover, an iced-over marshy dell, frosted tussocks and moss. A tussock flew into the air. Rajath’s impish noseless face burst from hiding. He scrambled up, leapt at Catherine and embraced her. Joset rolled dripping from a marshy lair.

“You made it! You made it!” Rajath was dancing with excitement.

Misha slung his bag of firearms down beside the bags Joset and Rajath had carried. He and Joset bent over them. Catherine heard fragments of their spoken interchange: “a sticky moment on the beach, when she…”

“Did you get the flames, or did you climb?”

What did I do wrong on the beach? she wondered: and closed her eyes.

Misha was right; she really shouldn’t be wearing this body. She had lived in Catherine’s limbs all these years: suddenly she felt trapped in a scanty ill-fitting suit. She’d chosen to wear a human body so the earthlings wouldn’t be able to call her a superbeing; so they wouldn’t feel she was unfairly advantaged.
That part of the plan seems to have worked,
she thought, ruefully.

She lay waiting for the telepaths to report.

“Wake up, Catherine. We must get underground.”

They moved swiftly and with confident precision. Near to the rendezvous dell Misha dropped to his knees and tugged at a granite slab. It opened like a hatchway, revealing a dark pit, roughly square. “Got it. There are exits and entrances everywhere, escape routes for the worst case scenario where the aliens get inside the ultimate bunker. Campfire Girls don’t like to be trapped.”

He reached inside and brushed away fibrous earth, uncovering the first rung of a metal ladder. They clambered, one after another, into darkness. Joset, bringing up the rear, hauled the slab until it dropped back into place. At the bottom of the shaft a section of the wall rose silently, and they stepped into a sleek horizontal tunnel. It was dimly lit, tall but not wide. Misha handed out charged superheat: they set off in single file. Misha, then Catherine, then Rajath; and Joset last. Misha and Joset were carrying the bags. The tunnel took them to a junction, where there was better light and an air of occasional use. Joset and Misha found a panel of controls, and used them to open a supply closet. Shining limbs swayed, disembodied heads peered from a shelf.

“Suit up. We’re in Campfire Girls uniforms from here on. One at a time. Rest of us on guard.”

One by one they shed their outdoor clothing and climbed into the body armor. Catherine was surprised at how light and flexible her suit seemed, how speedily it adjusted to her physical dimensions. She pulled the helmet into place and felt the seals connect. She breathed stale packaged air; then the sweet cold returned, as her suit decided the air in the tunnels was viable. Text and graphic display burst across her field of vision.
Testing.
She entered a shared world.

“Now Lalith can send to me, and I can send to you,” came Misha’s voice inside her head. “But don’t say a word unless you must, we don’t want to be spotted as strangers and have to kill innocent people. Some of the staff at this mothballed base are compromised, we have to treat them all as hostiles, but we don’t want to kill, is that understood? Lalith’s arrival should cover us for a while. Let’s see what’s going on.”

In Catherine’s field of view a transparent image blossomed. She saw Lalith, Agathe, Mâtho, and Lydie. Mâtho, and Lydie were finishing off that dice game. The reception suite, what she could see of it, looked like a corporate hotel in another age. Fitted carpets and wall-lamps. Mâtho seemed to have lost the play-off. He pocketed the dice with a dignified little smile.

“Now study this infra—” ordered Misha.

Another layer sprang into being over the reception suite picture; unpeeling the intricacies of Seimwa L’Etat’s anti-Aleutian bunker. In section the base was strangely beautiful: level on level of curved paths and chambers configured like a nautilus shell around a ribbed central spine. The spine itself was hollow: a well that seemed to drop in a single fall from the floor inside the “volcano” cone, to the platform level undersea.

In the old days, anyone recruited to this service could never return to the Mainland. That way the Americans could be sure that none of those sneaky alien-microbes would ever contaminate their country. For generations the Special Exterior Force—all of them women, forbidden to marry, discouraged from “lasting attachments”; all but a few either infertile or sterilized—had lived and died here, between tours of duty; on their artificial island. Those days were long gone. The infrastructure revealed emptiness: very few people moving about, few streams of power or data.

“This is realtime,” said Misha’s voice. “There has been an invasion, that’s Lalith. A friendly invasion, or so it seems, but totally unexpected. We’ve introduced a foreign population. We’re watching for an immune reaction.”

Catherine’s display focused-in on raised levels of activity, and counted off the systems and locations involved. The stir that clearly sprang from Lalith’s arrival: information and other vital fluids hurrying around the locus of the flier in its quarantined bay; another locus around the reception suite, and related offices. There were routine activities: a kitchen, power generation, a heated swimming pool. And there it was, the tell-tale hotspot. The palimpsest fell away, leaving one group of rooms highlighted: enhanced security converging on the third level above the deepest, midway between the buried shell of the nautilus and the central spine.