Phoenix Café (39 page)

I am with you,
they sang.
Always with you,
blood and fire in the void.

And still herself.

The ruined hospital room returned. She stood, her weapon dropping to her side, feeling sated and happy. The riot control gas must have dispersed: she was breathing outside air again. It smelled of seared suit and roast meat. The young woman’s bed was a black, glossy mass of fused carbon. She counted the figures around her, the suits without insignia that were still standing. Her head display was blank. She pulled off her helmet.
“Misha? Joset?”

One of the dead Campfire Girls in the room with the pens stirred. She sat up, poked at the charcoal cleft that divided her belly, and began to laugh. She pulled off her head. She was not a woman. She was a young man. She was the waiter who had served wine to Catherine, hours or days and half a world away, in the dining room at the Phoenix Café.

Other corpses stood. The standing suits took off their heads. The company gathered: Misha, Joset, Lalith, and Agathe. Mâtho and Rajath; other faces she didn’t know or didn’t know well. A heap of shattered limbs materialized in a corner, picked itself up and became Lydie, grinning.

Everyone took a bow.

“You have been taking part,” announced Lydie, “in an act of ceremonial magic, meant to keep bad at bay and mark the commencement of a new era. This is the birth of the Phoenix, which we have celebrated in the leitmotif of our culture: that means play-fighting, and as much cost-free arousal as we can get. Well, nearly free. And we hope you’ll be a good sport and forgive us, as we’ve forgiven you.”

They took another bow.

“You mean this was nothing but
a game?”
She ran to the pens. They were plastic packing cases. She was speechless.

“If this is a game,” said Lalith. “Then all the games have new rules.”

“What—?
I don’t understand!”

“You will,” assured Lydie. “You’ll find out why we did this soon. You won’t
understand
until long afterwards. It takes time for it to sink in.”

The company saluted her once more. They filed out, still partly cloaked in virtual costumes, through a gap that had appeared in the sick-bay wall.

Then.

She was alone. She remembered:
dying, falling in flames.
She realized, with astonishment, that at last she knew what the nightmare meant. She had been here, in this strange antechamber, once before. She had passed once before, in another lifetime, through an intensely detailed, absorbing dream: and come out on the other side. She had seen a remembered sky; she had tasted the fount of memory on her lips.

She didn’t know how it had been done, but she must be Home.

But something troubled her. The light was wrong, the air was wrong.

Movement behind her made her spin around. She looked into a long band of mirror, above a spotlessly clean counter that framed odd-looking wash basins. The face she saw was her human face, the body was clothed in Aleutian overalls and a dark brown, figured robe. Nearby there was a confused noise, as of many people and voices milling in a large echoing space. She opened the door that seemed to lead into this noise, and stepped out.

11
The Earlier Crossing

She was not on Home again. She was not in the Phoenix Café. She was in a huge bustling concourse, the distant walls cheerfully,
statically
decorated with blue sky and clouds, between big, peculiar minitel screens. Candelabra of electric light globes hung overhead. There was an expanse of mineral-glass window through which she saw a disc shaped, domed aircraft sailing up above the horizon. Others like it were ranked on the ground.

A group of people was heading her way, clearly an important party: surrounded by officials in uniform, and guards in plainclothes, whose manner was awed, obsequious and wary. Catherine watched their approach and set out to intersect their path. She was soon walking beside one of them.

Yudisthara, an honest, rather timid merchant whom Catherine had known well in her previous life on earth, started: and then beamed in welcome.

Yudisthara accepted this without difficulty. The Pure One had always been able do things on the giant planet that nobody else dreamed of trying.

Catherine’s heart stopped.

Yudi glowed.

Yudisthara was not a Landing Parties veteran, but his sympathies (he felt) had been clear. The glory of being the one to impart the news to Catherine brought tears to his eyes. He caught the Pure One’s hand, and pressed it.

remarked Catherine faintly.

may
be possible to make short hops. But that’s a long way down the line, and why bother?, is what most of us say. What’s the hurry? Time’s cheap. People talk about it making our fortunes, but I doubt if we’ll find many takers for that engine-thing once we get Home. Let the locals have it, and sell them our knowhow. That’s what I always said. And I didn’t care who knew it.>

murmured Catherine (tactfully embracing Yudi’s proud record of public dissidence). She scanned the Aleutian party, hampered by her dumb human chemistry.

Very
unfortunate. Bright had an anonymous tip-off, and discovered some proliferating weapons material went missing from the Buonarotti station awhile ago. Some high-ranking Youro Traditionalists are implicated; it’s believed they’ve been making shocking, nasty experiments on their complex commensals. They were turned in by one of their own, the minister from that big flat suburb with all the trees. I forget the name.>

supplied Catherine.

scandal.
And we’re leaving so soon, he hasn’t a chance of recovering face. He’ll be known for lives as the person responsible! Well, anything to do with
weapons,
getting out of the lab, brrr. It isn’t a pleasant idea.>

murmured Catherine.

Yudisthara glanced at the USSA functionaries. (He had been told the new name of their country several times, but he couldn’t keep it in his head.) They rather frightened him. he asked. He felt warmly towards Catherine, who was not usually so confidential with a dull business-person like himself. He was hoping their companionship might last for the whole trip.

said Catherine.

The delegation absorbed her: faces she knew, others that rose from the sea of inclusive memory; full of congratulations and rueful amusement over the triumph of her local protégées. No one was surprised that the Pure One had turned up. Trust Clavel…and after all, didn’t the Third Captain have a right to be here, on the very last venture of the Expedition?

Catherine began already to grasp that she would
never
know the true status of the raid on Tracy Island Base. Was that a game, a kind of psychic travel-sickness; or a new kind of reality? Let it be. For now, she just knew she had been
taken to the cleaners,
as the locals used to say. Taken to the cleaners, wrung out, and hung up to dry by the young people at the Phoenix Café. She laughed, a bubble of pure, irrational elation rising in her until she thought her feet would leave the ground.

And prepared, as Yudi hugged her arm and the solemn guides stopped to consult, talking not to each other but to little rectangular medallions they wore on chains around their necks, to be very bored.

12
In the Field Hospital

Catherine saw Misha once more. It was the night of the Departure.

The Aleutians had chosen the moment of midnight, north-west Youro time zone (because of the location of the Buonarotti laboratories); and a date in early spring by the old seasonal calendar. It was a year and four months, by that reckoning, since Catherine’s visit to L’Airial. The leave-taking celebrations were long over, lingering Aleutians had packed the last spaceplanes. “Aleutian Rule” in Youro would end, nominally, on the stroke of midnight: there was already no alien presence to support it. Intercommunal violence was no longer something that happened on the news. It was everywhere.

Catherine was still living in the house at the Giratoire. Leonie hadn’t managed to get her family away before the unrest became general; she’d wisely decided to stay put for the time being. The Car Park food market had become a field hospital and displaced persons center. Catherine was working there, alongside the staff of the former Aleutian Mission, the police and other charitable organizations. She’d just been relieved after a shift at a dressing station. She was wandering in a daze, looking for water powder so she could wash her hands, when she saw Misha, by the desk where new arrivals were processed: wearing jeans and a grubby tee-shirt.

He looked up and saw Catherine.

So this was how they met, under the low concrete sky of the Car Park, among the dispossessed, the wounded, the confused old people; the lost children. He came towards her, she went to meet him.

“I might have known you’d be doing something like this,” he said, with a reflexive glance into his internal mirror. “Have you rejoined the Mission?”

“No, I’m just helping out the medics. I’m unskilled labor.”

“Unskilled labor?
Trust you, Cath. An archaism for every occasion.” She saw the old acquisitive gleam.

“Feel free to be unskilled labor too, if you like the
mot.”

They couldn’t stand still. They walked between two rows of cots, where the first in line for emergency treatment were waiting, mostly in silence. Misha seemed smaller. People do that, she thought. They change size: receding into the distance or looming in close-up. She rubbed the drying blood on her hands, and saw the rusty crescents under her nails. She remembered their first meeting.

“Did you enjoy your trip to meet the Feds?”

“Thank you, yes I did. It’s a strange place. A time capsule. You’d like it.”

But he must be saturated with images from the Americas, unless he’d turned hermit. They’d abandoned their Great Quarantine, if only for data. News, images, records, every kind of contact was flooding to and fro.

She had spent the tour with Yudisthara, and felt truly fond of him by the end. They’d parted kindly. She’d returned to a city still overwhelmed by the thrilling news that the Renaissance Movement had built a Buonarotti device. Yudi, bless him, had not quite got it right with his report of beacons and souvenirs: that was science fiction. But the Movement had approached Dr. Bright, who had found their evidence (impossibly abstruse as it might be to the average Aleutian) convincing. It was all based on games technology, Catherine gathered, and something the legendary Sidney Carton had once said. Anyway, everything had changed. The Buonarotti technology was a shared venture again, and the humans were “locals”—not inferior beings, but neighbors and valued customers, who would undoubtedly turn up in future lives, and had better be treated with respect.

And then there was the doomsday plot to “eradicate” Reform. Never a serious danger: a handful of insane extremists had been nowhere near actually replicating the Aleutian weapons of mass destruction. But the fate of the horribly misused young ladies was a shocking revelation. There had been resignations; there had been abrupt disappearances from public life. Mr. Connelly the wilderness keeper was not likely to be seen in society again. There were calls for drastic reform, and an agreement in principle that Youro would abolish the practice of creating what were vulgarly known as “sextoys.” In the future, all engineered embryos would be equal in law…. It was one of those scandals that could have been enormous, if it had come to light at a neutral time. As it was, the horrors sank into urban myth and the terrifying theft of proliferating weapon material was swiftly shuffled out of the news. Nobody wanted to know anything nasty about the wonderful Device.

Catherine had stayed away from the Phoenix Café, she felt she’d be out of place. It was the Movement’s hour; let them enjoy it without an Aleutian elbowing into the line-up. Let them come to me, she’d thought; later, if we’re really friends. But nobody had come, and soon she’d had her own distractions. All the Departure leave-takings, and then the crisis in the streets. Now here was Misha. They threaded their way between bodies and bundles and bloodstained litter to a refreshments counter where volunteered catering machines were dispensing tea and biscuits.

“Did you know Mâtho died?” he asked.

“Yes, I did know that.”

Mâtho and his father had been killed defending their premises. It wasn’t clear how the attack had begun, whether they’d been targeted or simply caught in crossfire. Catherine hoped, but she would never know, that Mâtho’s publication of her video diaries hadn’t had anything to do with it.

“Have you seen Lydie?”

“Not recently.” He knew she was thinking of Lydie’s fake death on Tracy Island. “Nor Rajath. I haven’t been keeping up with the Café circle much. But I’m sure they’re fine. Imran’s going to have a post be in the new administration, did you know? Joset says that’s definite, he got it from Agathe. Maybe there’ll be a post for Thérèse, who knows, these days. Those two always knew how to look out for themselves, didn’t they.”

“I’ve met Agathe here. I heard about Joset.”

Joset was with the
casseurs,
the Renaissance gangs who were on the streets, talking to the crime of gender violence in its own language. Misha detested that kind of thing. They passed over the breach swiftly.

“And Lalith, of course. I know about her.”

“Of course!” Misha groaned. “She’s all over the place, preaching at the
casseurs,
interviewing old vampires, explaining our ways to the Feds. It’s a joke, isn’t it? She’s like the messianic leader of a new world order.”

“Isn’t that what you people wanted to happen?”

“I try to remember that.”

Catherine remembered the Nose: the gentle soul who believed that passion was a curable disorder of the brain. Who had dealt with her so bravely over those articles. “Mâtho was my patron,” she murmured. “The only patron for my work I ever found on Earth.”

The biscuits were energy-pumps, packed with fat and sugar. She’d forgotten how disgusting they tasted.

“And I’m becoming a famous Renaissance artist,” said Misha, finishing the roll-call. “If you’re tired of that, dump it. Tempe is an acquired taste, especially sweetened. You don’t have to mind your alien manners, Miss Catherine. Nobody’s watching you. Nobody cares anymore.”

“I went to Tracy Island,” she said. “On the tour. The delegation
was
down to make a visit. And it
is
moored in the Aleutias. Everything was weirdly familiar, except there was no trace of the events of my earlier trip. What really happened, Misha? Can you tell me now?”

“There was a conspiracy,” he said, sipping his tea and gazing at the catering machines. “There were two conspiracies, actually. I told you once, if you remember: your people’s guilty secret wasn’t much of a secret. My Dad and his bunch of psychopaths knew the Aleutians weren’t going to hand over the Buonarotti technology. They didn’t care; they hated the idea of instantaneous transit. They were only interested the superweapon. We knew too, and we cared. Finding some way to get hold of, and to replicate, the Aleutian tech was our secret agenda. Bright and his team were engineering Aleutian anti-self tissue and putting it through the Buonarotti acceleration. We had to get hold of that enriched material, so we could take it apart. But it was the ultra-Traditionalists who succeeded: they had better contacts. It’s true that there was a cabal of willing girly victims for the genocidal cause; it’s true that Helen was recruited. She did not kill herself rather than submit, as you of course would have done. And I don’t see how we could have saved any of the other girls if we’d tried: but think what you like about that. She’d already been working on her own idea for a Buonarotti gate—not a couch, but I think it’s going to be couches, more reassuring—based on what Sidney Carton said. A virtual
envie,
a game engine,
is
what the Aleutians said we could never have, a vessel made of minds…. She went along with the old monsters, because she needed to see the anti-self cultured in living tissue. She stole a few scraps when they did their mad-scientist biopsies on her infected brain, and created a model of what Bright had done: the pump, being into nothingness and back again, translated into virtuality, into the non-bio deadworld code of information, where everything is the same…. I’m explaining something I don’t understand, so don’t try to impress your friends with my account of it. But I wouldn’t tell you any more if I could. You’re a competitor.”

“Too stupid to be a dangerous one. You proved that.”

He smiled. “Helen designed the engine, other Renaissance people built it. Then we recruited you. Whenever you went into the games-room at the Phoenix Café you passed through a Buonarotti gate that could be linked to
our
accelerator. And you never knew.”

“The Blue Forest is a new planet, isn’t it.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know. I’ll tell you this much: the Stardate Diaries are junk. Take a very rich spectral profile of a star’s light; filter it down until you can isolate the chemical components of the planetary atmospheres. If you find something breathable, in an Earth-type orbit, you’re on your way. That’s what Buonarotti did, allegedly, three hundred years ago. But nobody can find her planets again, not so far. We have to look for new ones.”

“But what about that night?”

Misha gazed into his inward eye. “What about it?”

“Was
there an Americas side to the plot?
Did
Lalith have a flier hidden in the games arena at the café? Was the girl with the phoenix-toy, the girl with the empty-centered sores, Helen? Was she one of your people? And the bracelet, the Campfire Girl bracelet.
Was
Helen’s partner a Campfire Girl infiltrator?”

“Resign yourself,” said Misha, with the old arrogant smirk. “There is no absolute reality any more; we’re living in Buonarotti time. The world has become a Belushi sphere: if you know what that means. We took you for a ride, Catherine. We took you to the Americas, to the
situation
of the Aleutian trade delegation’s arrival, and on the way, in the non-existent time of the transit itself, you shared a long vivid dream. It was a “transition event”: everybody knows about them now. Then we willed ourselves home again, and you arrived in LA no more psychotic than usual…, because we have beaten that problem. There was no weapons test. By the time you passed through our gate, that night, the unspeakably awful doomsday conspiracy had already collapsed. That’s the recorded truth, and it’s the only truth you’re going to get.”

He looked at her curiously. “But I’ll tell you something odd. I know what
your
transition experience was, when you were the Third Captain, long ago. It was fire. Flames, and a sense of falling.”

She stared. “It was the landing in West Africa. We crashed. I lived through that crash again, and then I was Home. But I had forgotten. I had forgotten completely, until you took me to Tracy Island—”

“Movement test pilots have been through your flames. Either flames or some kind of climbing incident, or both: they often feature in the transition. We think the climbing must be from Johnny and Braemar’s adventure. Of course by definition there’s only one ‘state of non-location’: maybe it’s burned forever with the traces of the people who opened the way. Congratulations. You’re the first Aleutian to have a signature among those on the gateway.”

“How romantic.”

She took another bite of the biscuit. It wasn’t so bad. A child set up a loud, hopeless keening. Something happened in the surgery area: she saw figures rushing that way. Burns were the worst. They needed endless, impossible supplies of multitype skin. The Church of Self Mission went around preaching their redemption and dispensing for free from their stockpile of strong painkillers and tranquillizers. They’d become very popular with the medical staff, who had nothing else to offer to the dying.

“Getting hyper-conscious,” Misha said, “as you do when you pass through the gate, means becoming hyper-aroused. It was easy for us to deal with that state. We’re gamers and we’re human, full of hormones and stuff. You had to learn, in your female human body, to cope with hyper-arousal. You needed to experience the kind of thing paper-flowers does.”

“Sure,” said Catherine cynically.