Phoenix Café (7 page)

“Be fair,” murmured Catherine, “Only if we disagree with present policy.”

“It makes my blood boil. Especially the way we treat
you.
You proved the device worked! If it wasn’t for your incredible courage, committing yourself to that monstrous void-forces thingy, we wouldn’t be planning the Departure now.”

“I don’t remember.” She had been curled on her side, smiling at his tirade. She turned on her back, staring at the ceiling. “Everything else, but not that.”

“It’s quite normal that you don’t remember. You were very, very stressed at the time.” He frowned at the row of Youro devotional incunabula above her desk: early printed texts, from before the development of moving-image records.
The Way of Perfection. Life of St Catherine of Siena. Round The Bend. Siddartha. The Letters of St Paul.
He picked up a glass madonna filled with layers of colored sand from the Isle of Wight, and set it down with a sigh. “What dreadful taste you have in this life: you used to collect such lovely things. This robe of mine is copied from one of your Monets. Every stitch hand embroidered too, by a wonderful woman in Accra…”

“It isn’t taste. I’m trying to understand them. I want to feel their pain, commune with their culture of grief and fear. That’s why I joined the Mission.”

“But you could become a patron of the arts, all the same. There’s so much going on, even here in Youro. You could take an interest, in—um—new poetry.”

“Too late. I like human things from the way they were before we got at them. So do you. Look at that robe.”

He went to her window and glowered at the garden, the burning colors of deep summer: asters, fuchsias, gladioli. “The saddest thing is to know that deep down one is as weak and selfish and cowardly as anybody else. No wonder you keep dreaming of our landing. I wish we
could
go back and start again. But we can’t. And
really, deep down,
we consent, you and I: Aleutia consents to the way the Departure is to be handled. We can’t stay. We must leave, and they must work things out entirely for themselves. There’s no sane alternative.”

“Perhaps people like you and I should be nicer to Sattva and his backers,” suggested Catherine, not too seriously. “Remember what you always used to say? Praise is the first rule of good management.”

“I’ve changed my mind about that. Communication is the first rule. When you can’t communicate, nothing else follows. No, there’s nothing to be done. But I wish I could stop you from blaming yourself. You aren’t responsible for the whole Expedition’s misdeeds.”

“I can’t help my obligation,” she murmured, invoking a favorite Aleutian platitude. “It’s the way I’m made, the way the chemicals are put together.”

Maitri turned from the flowers to smile at her sadly. “And so we call you ‘the conscience of Aleutia.’ Poor Catherine; what a thankless talent. But I do wonder what it means,” he added bitterly, “when people insist that their voice of conscience is crazy…. I’m so sorry my dear. I rushed to rescue you from a nightmare and I seem to be trying to give you another one. I had a better reason for interrupting your siesta. I’ve thought of an outing you might enjoy.”

“Another sweet young lady?” Catherine felt that her introduction to Thérèse Khan had not been a success.

“No, no! Something
very
different. A political meeting.”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to get involved in their politics.”

Catherine’s tone was dry. Maitri answered it with equal irony.

“I should have said, a
non
political meeting.” He adopted a tone of artless enthusiasm. “If you hadn’t been burying yourself in the Church of Self, you couldn’t help but know about the ‘Renaissance.’ It’s an aesthetic regeneration, a renewal of the old human arts and crafts, music and cuisine and such like, from Pre-Contact times. It’s been around for years, in the avant-garde. Now it’s been discovered, and it’s everywhere. One of the leaders, Lalith the halfcaste, is in Youro making an in-person tour. It sounds very exciting and attractive, and since it’s strictly non-gender biased, there’s no harm in our going along.”

Maitri shrugged innocently. “Well, what about it? I believe Michael Connelly—the younger, that is—is sure to be there.”

On his way back through the house, Maitri stopped for a rest: pretending to the household that he had halted to admire the decayed paintwork. He meant to compose himself, putting on a cheerful, confident face for the others. Instead he started
worrying,
not about “Catherine” (a name meaning The Pure, in Youro local language) but about the person Catherine was.

The Aleutians were truly “serial immortals,” not just physically reborn. The scraps of life in the air, the “wandering cells” exuded and consumed, were part of a system that kept the embryonic model of the entire Brood (held in each individual’s reproductive tract) constantly updated. Everything that happened to you in any life: your happiness, your sufferings, the development of your obligatory skills; anything that had a bio-chemical signature, was recorded in your proto-embryo, and became part of your self. Kumbva the engineer, the Second Captain of the original expedition, said the live-tissue system (as opposed to “dead” or “inert” tissue of blood, bones, entrails), stood in place of human sexual fusion, as the Aleutian mechanism of evolution. Apparently this “disseminated consciousness” was crucial to the success of Buonarotti project: which a human had invented, but which humans could not use.

Rationalists (Kumbva among them) dismissed the idea that self-conscious memories could be inherited. You truly were, in mind and body, what you had become, through the accumulation of lives: but it was character study alone that gave you that sense of
knowing
you were the person who had lived before. Many people, including Maitri, romantic and old-fashioned, did not share this view. He could not shake off the feeling that “Catherine” really ought to remember going home: such an extraordinarily significant act. The fact that she did not made him afraid the conversion into human form had done his lord some awful harm.

Everybody forgets shocking things, from time to time; everybody has to rely on other people’s records—

But if only she would consent to pretend a little. The Third Captain certainly
had
made the incredible journey: there had been eye-witnesses, there was “information system” evidence derived from his body; when he’d returned, on the point of death, from his trip through the void. Why couldn’t Maitri’s ward make the record people wanted,
how lovely it was to see Home again, how welcoming the air?
If she would do that, Aleutia would have to listen. Instead, her honesty allowed Sattva to dismiss her, without openly doubting her identity.
We hope the Third Captain will suffer no lasting ill effects.

Maitri ought not to be so helpless. He ought to know how to manage her; it wasn’t the first time he’d been in this position! But every child is different: and always the same Clavel! Trying so earnestly to do right, helplessly doing wrong instead. Like everyone else (except those lucky rascals whose obligation was not to care!); but unlike everyone else he refused to be forgiven; or to forget. He always had to pay, he insisted on setting the accounts straight.

Always had to pay.

Maitri levered himself away from the wall. It made his nasal ache to think about “reproductive tracts” and “information systems.” In the old days nobody had been interested in science. How it used to make Kumbva mad! Now the air was full of chatter about the Buonarotti Device, the Multi-Realities problem, and other obscure puzzles. Maitri felt like an old dullard.
How we’ve changed,
he thought.
It’s going to take us lives and lives to get back to normal, afterwards.

So many friends were not around, this last generation. Kumbva the engineer. Rajath the trickster, First Captain: the unscrupulous individual who had the idea of making landfall in the first place. Aditya the Beauty. Dear Bella, and funny old Sid. The Landing Parties cluster had dispersed, maybe never to be born together again. Maybe it was just as well. Some of the others might have been tempted to do something outrageous about the way the end of the adventure was being handled: if it was only to chuck a spannet in the works. Luckily for them, the Expedition’s current backers only had to deal with ineffectual Maitri, and a poor mad local girl who held the soul of that stiff-necked person who will
never
use his own power.

Those delightful phrases, he thought sadly, (retreating from his fencing match with Aleutia-in-the-Mind, before he got himself into trouble). No one uses them anymore. You probably wouldn’t find a human in this city who could remember what a spannet was. They didn’t watch the movies, they didn’t follow the news. There was nothing but interactive sport and those dreadful virtuality games: art without an audience. What’s the use of art without an audience?

Maitri’s eyes brimmed with tears, Aleutian tears that blurred his vision but did not fall. Some of his best friends were Reformers. What would become of them after Aleutia had gone?

“The poor devils,” he muttered aloud. “Oh, the poor devils.”

The Monet robe felt heavy: the corridors in this house got longer every day. He bent forwards, his hands curling into paws. The tired body wanted to trot on all fours. But respect for the stolen beauty of the waterlilies kept him upright.

iii

The meeting hall was in a Reformer neighborhood, which caused Lord Maitri’s party some qualms when they realized where they were heading. Maitri pointed out that the next venue on Lalith’s tour was half way across Youro. They’d had to give up their dear old limousine when the household became too small to count as a “transport community” in city ordinance, and the cost of such a journey in hired cars would be shocking. Everybody was supposed to be economizing, he reminded them virtuously, to cover the expense of the Departure Project.

Their cab dropped them at a deconstruction site where something very large was vanishing at speed into the maws of silent, bovine civil engineering plant. There was no sign of a meeting hall, and everyone began to panic. Most of Maitri’s people had lived in Youro in the Gender War. They were justifiably afraid of finding themselves lost in the human city, where the air was dead as stone, and the only information available came in printed text or confusing street-projections. Catherine looked for a minitel screen, Maitri flicked through a street directory. Atha, one of the Silent members of the household, covered himself in glory by spotting a glowing hand-sized green arrow, which did not seem to belong to the projection that surrounded it. He had noticed similar green arrows on the flyer Maitri had copied from the local listings. Someone spotted another. They followed the trail, painfully, from one eye-hurting virtual commercial to the next, through the unbuilding site and into the alleys beyond.

Maitri complained.

They knew they’d reached their destination when they met a young person in brightly colored overalls, putting up copies of that same flyer at the entrance to an ancient brick-built Christian character shrine. He was using a small machine, which he pointed at another machine that clung to the wall of the church: a data-junction box. As he did so, the Renaissance flyer materialized among the church notices, displacing the text of a restoration appeal fund, a list of Mass-times and the St Vincent de Paul Society’s yearly accounts.

“Isn’t that
clever!”
exclaimed Vijaya, Maitri’s first secretary.

The human looked round and smiled alertly. He was a halfcaste: his face dinted in the middle, with nostril slits instead of a human nose; his upper lip short and divided. “Free advertising,” he lisped. “It doth no harm. The bit-minder will restore the licensee’s data in an hour or two, and that’s all the time we need. Step right inside, noble aliens. Your reserved seats are waiting for you.”

“But how did you know we were coming?” cried the chaplain, naively astonished. “Have you been ‘bugging’ Lord Maitri’s house?”

“Didn’t have to. You snagged us, we snagged your hit. And then you ordered a cab to the venue. Simple.”

The Silent were hanging back, deeply alarmed by the puzzle-trail and the obviously illicit behavior of this halfcaste. Silent Aleutians—naturally conservative, obstinately conventional—mistrusted any extended articulate speech that did not emanate from “the proper authorities.” Maitri’s domestics had joined the outing under protest. They were well aware that their lord was using them to make a doubtful excursion look respectable. secret
meeting,> they protested.

Maitri managed to reassure them, but Atha had wandered off down the street, because he’d seen a car that reminded him of dear old limo. Catherine had to go and fetch him, to the amusement of several more humans who’d come out to see the fun. At last they were through the double doors (inert slabs, Old Earth style, like the door of Catherine’s prison cell). They found the whole assembly on its feet, jostling eagerly for a glimpse of the aliens. Stewards wearing green armbands greeted them with the large, infantile gestures of Youro humans trying to “speak Aleutian.” They were ushered to a row of hard seats-with-legs. Their chairs were indeed marked, in symbols and in printed English, “Reserved for Our Aleutian Friends.” This time (to Vijaya’s disappointment) the signs were mere rag-card. Maitri rose to the occasion, answering the stewards in the same expansive style.