Phoenix Café (38 page)

“There!” hissed Rajath. “That’s it!”

“A sick-bay,” reported Joset. “Non-acute hospitalization, says here.”

“That makes sense,” whispered Misha. “I suppose. So we head for the maternity ward. Lalith will follow when she can. She has things under control.”

“Wait!” cried Catherine. “Something’s happening—”

A group of suits, shining fungoid beings, had entered the suite. Their helmets were intimidating, the visors silvered blank. Their voices emerged flattened and stripped of expression, announcing they’d come to take Agathe, Lydie and Mâtho away. The Youroans got to their feet, each clutching a piteous bag or bundle of personal effects. Lalith asked the SEF to take off their helmets. She must have noticed that none of the suits displayed badges of rank or identity. She didn’t comment on this.

“They don’t know what’s happening, they don’t understand—”

A suit challenged Lalith in turn. “Are you Astrid Liliana Villegas Como?”

“Yes, I am. You checked my ID. What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is that we’ve double-checked, and you’re not her. We don’t have any record of an SEF agent with your physical ID.”

“I’ve been morphed. I’m a halfcaste now. My new biometrics should be in the file.” Lalith stayed calm: Lydie grabbed her arm and cried in French: “Astrid, don’t let them separate us! What’s going on? I’m frightened!”

“Don’t worry,” said the first suit: flattened, cold. “‘Astrid’ is coming along.”

Suddenly one of the suits had hold of Lalith’s arms. Another was pointing a light-pen into her eye. Agathe, Mâtho, and Lydie were shouting, protesting, the other suits closed around them—

“They’ve been rumbled!” howled Rajath. “The suits’ve found Lalith’s inset! They’ll know she’s talking to someone! What are we going to do?”

“Thanks for the information, Raj,” snapped Misha. “We might never have guessed.” He hesitated, he shook his head. “Too bad. We have a mission. We’re going to check that sick-bay. Is that agreed?”

They walked quickly. Catherine felt the muscles of her weary calves trying to resist the suit’s intervention and made herself relax. She thought of Mâtho’s brave timidity, Agathe’s glow of virtue. Lydie’s athleticism, the spin and leap and spring of the dancer’s body. Up a ladder (the suit assisting her arms and shoulders) into an enclosed space. A locked door that slid aside when Misha tapped the keypad. A garden. Flowering plants, trees, wisps of water vapor; a moist and scented air. Loungers, chairs, cushions; a vast false window showing ocean and the sky. There were sculptures, mobiles, decorative screens, every sign of wealthy comfort but slightly
wrong.
Different, old-fashioned: and all the leaves were pure green. There was nobody around. Rajath skidded and fell against a cane lounger. Catherine hauled him to his feet and Joset restored his weapon, but Rajath refused to take it.

“It’s weird,” he wailed, waving his arms. “Why’s it like a fancy hotel? I thought this was an army camp. I don’t think we’re seeing it right, it’s masked, we could be walking into anything—”

“Why are you
always
like this, Rajath?” yelled Catherine. “You’re the one who has the terrific ideas for getting into trouble. And then you panic. Always!”

She clutched her helmet with gauntleted hands, shocked at herself. That’s not Rajath; it’s a halfcaste local…. She felt as if she’d been shouting loud enough for the whole base to hear. Misha had rushed back. He ignored Catherine, silently bundled the weapon into Rajath’s arms. They hurried on.

Lalith was still transmitting: her view laid over Catherine’s field of vision. Mâtho, Lydie, and Agathe being marched along a wide passage. Lalith must be in the rear. Why the hell was Lalith still sending? Surely the suits could use the signal to trace the other intruders. It was bad, bad luck that their diversion had been discovered so soon. Maybe the bad guys don’t yet know yet why we’re here, she thought. We need to distract them again, convince them that Lalith and her party are nothing to do with the weapons trial—

The Phoenix Café gang had already thought of that. The prisoners reached a gallery around the central well. Elegant liftshafts played like fountains, empty but decorative, between the spurs of a huge spiral stairway. Lydie suddenly ran for it, and the distraction began.

“I am a terrorist act,” she screamed, in English. “I am an explosive device, I am a camera. Attack me and I detonate! I’m here to tell the American peoples, North and South, about their federal government’s complicity in alien oppression. Don’t touch your weapons! Injure me and I appear instantly on every news-site on earth, telling my story!”

“My God!” wailed Lalith, grabbing her escort frantically. “I didn’t know! I knew nothing about this! You’ve got to believe me! My God!”

“Get her!”

Catherine saw Mâtho and Agathe running after Lydie, who gave a wordless howl and went pelting off around the gallery. The suits rushing after in disarray, Lalith yelling. “Don’t fire! I don’t think she’s bluffing!”

Transmission abruptly ceased.

They hurried on. Catherine’s visor flashed scraps of the continuing pursuit: she didn’t know if they still came from Lalith or if she was catching Campfire Girl communication. The others didn’t speak; neither did she. She had her wish, she was stripped of privilege. It was Catherine, the Aleutian, who followed the humans: stumbling and blind, unable to share their plans. She couldn’t catch her breath. She was functioning on a knife edge, in the stink of lattice fusion; continuous bleeding of one surface into another.

The scenario Agathe and Lalith had outlined was appalling:
a bomb packed with weapon larvae, anonymous microbial plague.
She heard Misha’s father speaking, in noble bitterness, of “the pure human tradition.” He did not regard Reformers as human. The conspirators believed they had found some marker of
difference
that would spare the elect. It was not a new idea; it had been tried before: but never with proliferating weapons to back the madness. On such a big planet, such a volume of atmosphere, the kill would take time. The weapons would mutate, eventually become harmless. But life on Earth was already brutally weakened: by the Gender Wars, and three hundred years of alien rule. They really could die, all of them. True genocide.

Surely it can’t happen, surely it can’t happen. Episodes from the past of her own home and from Earth’s history told her: It can.

She saw a sign on a corridor wall. Level Three.

They reached a locked double door. Medical Rooms. The keypad didn’t respond to Misha’s codes, Joset tried too, failed too. There was a fetid sickroom smell: one of those nasty human smells. It couldn’t be real, couldn’t be getting through the door. It must be an artifact of her fear.

“Luck’s run out,” muttered Joset. “It couldn’t last.”

They moved away from the doors. Misha, the firearms expert, was going to slice the barrier with a fine blade of superheat. Rajath, Joset and Catherine watched his back. Rajath gave a soft moan, in Catherine’s head. She aimed and fired: wheeled, aimed and fired. Joset stood looking at his own unused weapon, and at two fallen suits: one who’d been coming up behind them, the other who’d appeared from around a corner.

“You’ve played before,” he remarked, in admiration.

“Played?”
she repeated, shocked at his choice of expression.

“Inside,” yelled Misha, as the door seals gave way.

Stale air rushed out. They had entered the citadel through a garden: the sick-bay smelt like a farmyard. There were no beds, they’d been removed and replaced by strong slatted stalls. There was a thunder of panicked movement. Animal eyes peered, glistening. The stalls were shoulder high to Catherine. She had to look over the top to see inside. Pallid faces looked up: food for the monsters. She had dreamed of these creatures. Rajath yelled something incoherent. Superheat flared, churning incandescence through the bars and the live squealing meat. Misha shouted, “Leave them! Get to the bride!”

Running feet. Mâtho, Agathe, and Lalith burst together through the doors Misha had burned open. “Sorry!” gasped Mâtho. “They’re coming! Lydie’s still keeping half the army occupied. But there are so many! Far more SEF than there should be—” Joset unslung the second case of weapons and thrust a firearm at each of the three, as a crowd of suits came rushing after their friends. They didn’t have a chance to follow Misha’s advice. Catherine flung herself headlong, tonguing her armor rigid and switching to packaged air. There was wild firing. The hiss of gas cartridges exploding—

“I am a terrorist act!”

The central well was higher than a cathedral nave of the Church of Self, deeper than dreams. The stairway rose in nacreous curves, throwing off ribs and whimsical spurs into vertiginous space. Far below, Seimwa L’Etat lay in state: an image delivered in realtime from the clinical suite where she slept away her immortality. Her tank, from which gross signs of medical intervention had been erased, was a gold and crystal casket. Lydie raced round and round, into the empyrean. She reached the apex and turned to look down on the armored women.
So many, how did there come to be so many? Thought this place was supposed to be shut down.
They looked up, some helmeted, some bareheaded.

This is what it means to be a halfcaste: it means being something other than a single self. To be gestures, to be fragments, thefts and dreams. To be a creature of your own imagination. Lydie jumped onto the balustrade. The doors of the fountain lifts opened. Woman warriors all in identical armor came pouring out.
Soldiers, soldiers.
You’ve sold yourselves. I’m not for sale. Balanced herself, arms stretched wide as wings.
Either/Or.
Stupid coin, same on both sides. I am not a woman, I am not a man. Who knows? Maybe they lied to you all these years,
those others,
the sensible ones. So leap, then—

Maybe you can fly.

—from Lydie’s death dive Catherine fell into her own reality, perception struggling to right itself. Her heart pounding from that plunge. She must be in the house at the Giratoire, wired up to a tvc show. No: she was in the sick bay in Tracy Island base, and it was full of smoke. The enemy had vanished.

Had she been watching Lydie on her visor display? Or imagining that scene? The pens that held the blanks were still. There were bodies on the floor, one of them was Mâtho. Agathe crouched beside him; she’d strapped a breathing mask onto his face and was holding a wad of dressing against his stomach, applying pressure to a wound. She was wearing a mask herself, so was Lalith. Agathe’s “personal effects” were scattered around her; Lalith was scrabbling in them for more First Aid. Catherine pulled off her helmet, and at once began to cough hard.

“Catherine?”

Mâtho turned his head. The eyes above the mask appealed to her.

“They ran away. They’ve gone to seal the level, so they can kill us—” whimpered Rajath.

“I think he’s going be all right,” said Agathe, but she was crying.

Catherine dropped to her knees. “Cold,” sighed Mâtho. “I’m so cold.”

“Oh God,” Agathe felt his hands and breast. “He’s losing heat fast! He’s ice! Must be massive internal bleeding! There’s nothing I can do!”

“Catherine.”

Mâtho tugged her gauntleted hand to his lips, and his eyes grew fixed—

Joset and Misha were hammering on the inner doors, shouting through the lock to the bride’s minders on the other side. They couldn’t use superheat, it would destroy the containment. They had to get in there, and seal themselves in with whatever they found: until they’d destroyed the bride and her children. They were shouting to the midwives of this terrible birth, “You’re surrounded, you’re going to die, we’re about to suck your air out, we have poison gas—”

Failed, thought Catherine, amazed at her own calm. Of course we’ve failed; this was a lost hope; we didn’t have a chance. She replaced her helmet. Might as well die fighting. Suddenly the doors to the containment hissed and were flung open. Bodies rushed out. They were dressed and masked in heavy quarantine suits: but they weren’t armored. Nurses or guards, they raced through the scene of carnage and disappeared into the smoke.

“Something’s gone wrong in there,” cried Rajath.

In a flash of stillness Catherine saw how Helen’s partner had been cherished. Her flowers, her jewels, pretty furniture, and pictures on the walls: her bridal dress and wreath and veil in a display case. She had seen that white lace and satin gown before—or its twin—on the virtual screen in Mr. Connelly’s study. Now, on a narrow bed, a young woman, restrained by straps and clamps, lay in premature labor. Something, maybe the panic caused by their arrival, had precipitated the birth. Monitoring machinery lay scattered, a trolley of instruments sprawled on its side. The children were being born from every pore; the mother’s skin was tearing open. She lifted her close-shorn head and looked at Catherine. Her eyes were pinpoints, drugged deep. She opened her mouth—to speak? A weapon-creature burst out: and broke their paralysis.

They burned bed and everything on it. Superheat flare engulfed them, scalding them through their armor. Catherine walked into the furnace; it leapt around her. Every flame a life; every flame a self. All of them Catherine, and she was all of them: no excuses, no denials. She was the guilty, the collaborator, denying, colluding, greedy for catastrophe, hungry for destruction. She plied her weapon savagely, plunging into the rapacity of being, and the flames were dancing
Everything Says I.