Phoenix Café (8 page)

“So much for discretion!” he muttered, sitting by Catherine and arranging the folds of his sleeveless robe. He did not seem displeased. He was wearing scarlet, a sober industrial color he’d thought suitable for the occasion. “I don’t think I’ve caused such a friendly stir among the humans since First Contact. Aren’t the chairs lovely!”

Venues licensed for in-person speakers were small and few. The status of articulate speech in Aleutian society made the aliens nervous about human demagogues: especially in Youro, always the most recalcitrant region of Old Earth. Catherine noticed that this hall was not only small but unnaturally bare. Generated-image décor was cheap and universal, yet these faded plaster walls were naked. Niches around the nave, which should have held either actual statues or the economical virtual-image version, held only strange, draggled bunches of leaves and flowers. The church seating had been rearranged, in a pattern that had not been current on Earth for three hundred years: rows that faced ahead towards a makeshift dais. A tall public address screen stood at the back of this dais, a row of hard chairs in front of it faced a simple upright lectern; and the audience. The screen was blank, and there was no draggled decoration up there. One of the stewards scurried up to the end of the aliens’ row, bearing an armful of small machines.

“Transcripters.” He spoke in French, then remembered and waved his arms. He scooted off, and returned a moment later.

Maitri beamed. “You speak very good Aleutian, young man.”

“I’m a woman, actually. But thanks anyway.”

Catherine, having looked in vain for the arts and crafts (unless those bunches of leaves counted for something), settled to contemplate Buonarotti’s miracle. Buonarotti had bemused the First Contact world by insisting
there’s no such thing as alien intelligence.
She hadn’t meant the aliens were fakes. Intelligent creatures may take on different bodily forms. (Peenemünde had once confessed that she’d hoped the first extraterrestrials to arrive would resemble octopuses. She liked octopuses). Cultures may vary. But a few simple, logical and mechanical laws will shape life wherever it arises: driving through evolution on every fractal scale, from slime molds to party-politics. Thought and feeling will be formed everywhere by the same pressures that created them on earth. Intelligence cannot be alien…. And here was the proof. Every human in this crowded hall was chattering away in a language the Aleutians understood (and misunderstood) as confidently as they would the Common Tongue of a different Brood at home. Unfortunately, since humans were addicted to the Spoken Word and ignored what they dismissed as an “animal” mode of communication, most of them didn’t care
what
they said in Silence.

They shouldn’t have been allowed in. What are they doing here? Well, I’ve seen them. That’s something to tell the grandchildren. Wonder if I could touch one? They make me feel sick, they’re dirty, they’re filling the air with their mucky bugs. They make me feel as if things are crawling on me. Are they really going to leave? Just vanish, the way they came? I don’t believe it. I wonder what they look like naked. They wear nappies instead of going to the toilet, they have little creatures bred specially to wipe their bottoms: how revolting.

Maitri’s retainers were veterans. They’d either lived on Earth before, or been schooled by those who had: they were almost as indifferent to the legendary rudeness as if they were human themselves. Beside Catherine, Atha, Maitri’s kind-hearted cook, picked a claw full of squirming red life from the pores in his throat, and offered it to Vijay.
This is me my dear, this is how I feel, this is how things are with me just now.
Vijaya accepted the gift affectionately. A wave of intensified disgust burst from his human neighbors. Atha looked about him, wondering silently:

Catherine giggled. People in dull green overalls, with the bright green stewards’ armbands, marched onto the packing-case dais. The crowd came to attention. The stewards retired, a single figure approached the lectern.

Lalith the halfcaste presented as feminine, though not female. She had the moderate prenatal transformation: nostril slits and a cleft lip rather than a fully open nasal. She was sturdily built, her skin tone an average rosy-brown. She launched into some general remarks about peace, love and the work ethic.

Catherine prepared to be bored. She wondered if Misha Connelly could possibly be interested in this sort of thing.

“None of us can forget the Gender War. It has shaped our lives. It has shaped the state of our planet, as much if not more than the Aleutians—”

Lord Maitri’s people started, and the Silent touched their lord in furtive chemical reproach. Lalith’s odd noises could not distract them from her perfectly intelligible Silence.

they insisted, outraged.

“But how much of the rest of human history do we remember? I am, as you can see, a halfcaste. You may wonder why, if the Renaissance seeks a way forward that’s beyond gender, I remain gendered as a member of the third sex. It’s because I’m proud of the halfcaste tradition. When the Aleutians arrived, some three hundred years ago, they were welcomed, almost worshiped. Some wanted so desperately to be like these angels from outer space that they altered their bodies by crude surgery: became sexless, silent, noseless. It was childish of course. But they also adopted the Aleutian practice of
studying the records.
Halfcastes study the records for the same reason as the Aleutians do. They believe that they can identify their former incarnations in moving-image records of the past and thereby ‘learn to be themselves.’ Although I respect that belief, I do not share it.
I
study the records not as an individual but as a citizen of humanity. It is not myself that I find there, it is humanity’s Self. We have forgotten our past. We have forgotten our own resources. We play the games, which have no history. We ought to be making movies, talk-shows, science programs. We ought to be analyzing our archives. The Aleutians are the lords of life. But they build and preserve their cultural identity through the
artificial
records made by the Priests of Self—a mass of data to which every Aleutian, rich or poor, famous or obscure, makes a contribution. Why have we given up our own history, if the Aleutians value history so much? We’ve become dependent on their biotechnology, their skill at altering our landscapes, at generating tailored hybrids so much superior to our original crops, animals, machines. But we had our own life sciences once. We can recover them. We can build
our own
customized world.”

Lalith paused, sweeping the crowd with a practiced, in-gathering glance.

“Once, we believed that the Aleutians were divine. Today we know that they don’t live forever, and they cannot read our minds. When they arrived they were shipwrecked adventurers, their asteroid-mothership lost in space. Soon they will return to their home planet, using the invention of a human physicist. They will go in peace. But when the Aleutians hand over their research on the Buonarotti Device to Earth’s scientists—as was agreed at the Neubrandenburg Conference, when two halfcastes, Sidney Carton and Bella, had re-discovered the secret of instantaneous travel (excuse me if I correct the popular record, which credits this discovery to the Three Captains.). When they leave us, I say, equipped to seek our own new territories among the stars: will we be ready?”

Probably Lalith had planned her speech without knowing that actual Aleutians would be in the audience. She certainly wasn’t making the alien visitors feel inconspicuous. Catherine was thankful when she realized the speaker had reached her peroration.

“The Renaissance is not a war against gender. We, in the Movement, are Reformers and Traditionalists, feminine and masculine. We are women, men, halfcastes, and ‘don’t knows’ (this sally raised some human tittering). We have no plans to give up any of these diverse identities! We want to go
on,
not go backwards. To start history again from
now.
I call myself a halfcaste, but I’m not a human trying to imitate the aliens. I’m a human who is the product of three hundred years of history that cannot be denied. Who is trying to find a new way forward for humanity as it is. The Renaissance asks you to reject Aleutian goods and revive our native technologies—not because we believe that our culture is superior to theirs. Not because we reject the aliens. But because we need to learn to stand on our own two feet! I am a construction: born not of nature but of human history. Let us agree that this is true of us all. We can’t take up our old ways as if nothing happened—on that strangest of days, in Krung Thep, in Thailand, July 2038, when the Aleutians made themselves known. We must begin again from where we are now. Changed, not by the aliens alone, but by our own dynamic history. Changed and reborn!”

Cheers, applause. An interval was announced. Refreshments, a sale and display of Renaissance products, informal discussion: after which Lalith would take questions. Lalith was being escorted from the dais. This time Catherine noticed how carefully her escort masked the sturdy figure; and the sparkle of a security shield around that humble olde-worlde lectern. Lalith’s profession of non-violence might be sincere. But her material was inflammatory: and the organizers knew it.

Catherine stood, with the others. Maitri, warned them all, quietly. is
wrong. I thought it was a fine speech.>

They joined the movement to another hall. At last there were things to see and touch. Antique boxed and mounted CRT screens, out of which Renaissance luminaries from round the planet were peering, ready to work the crowd. A long table where food and drink were being dispensed. The humans broke into groups, into animated conversations and nervous silences. No one approached the aliens; even Silent comment on their presence was now extremely subdued. But there was no real hostility.

Most of the people were clearly Reformers, Catherine noticed. Most of them were young, and drawn from that shrunken and struggling group Mrs. Khan would call, with pity, “the employed.” There were also a few halfcastes and Traditionalists; even figures shrouded in the full chador who might be genuine high-caste Traditionalist young ladies. Everything was exactly as one would expect. She noted wryly the scattering of old lags: ageing humans with the brave, shabby, world-weary demeanor of lifelong dissidents. She knew that look well! Buonarotti’s miracle strikes again.

Maitri’s party relaxed. The speech had been alarming, but it was over. The old spirit of adventure began to stir. Atha, pleased to recover his proper role for a while, went to forage at the canteen table. Vijaya and the second secretary, Smrti—a pair of amorous predators who had never been lovers themselves, but loved to hunt in couple—attempted to make Silent propositions to some of the young male Traditionalists, whose striking appearance they much admired. They Silently (but discreetly) deplored the Reformer tendency to look and dress and act like so many big-nosed Aleutians.

Maitri and Catherine exchanged rueful glances.

Maitri observed,

“That wasn’t what I expected,” remarked Catherine, aloud and calmly. “I thought we were going to be taught how to make raffia mats; or try our hands at desk-top publishing.”

“I was a little taken aback myself,” Maitri agreed, in the same public tone. “But it sounds very creditable, and not at all anti-Aleutian, or gender biased.” He beamed at the display beside them. “What a wonderful tv cabinet. Reproduction of course, but lovely. The severe lines, such a lively counterpoint to the—”

He looked up. He had felt, before Catherine, a change in the air.

“Ah,” he breathed. “Ah, well.” And no more, not even in Silence. Lord Maitri could be the most continent of communicators, when he chose.

The police moved soberly through the assembly, behind their Aleutian officer. Some very unhappy stewards were with them. Catherine saw with dismay that the security officer was Bhairava, the Aleutian chief of police, a veteran of her own Landing Party crew. He’d been Maitri’s contracted love partner, in those days. He’d taken the police post to be near his friends: since the current Management had decreed Aleutian households must not have their own security forces. But Maitri felt, unjustly, that his former lover had sold out to the regime.

Bhairava came immediately to join them, his chin lifted and head turned: showing throat, the Aleutian gesture of respect.

“This is an unexpected pleasure,” said Maitri frostily. “I don’t remember asking for an armed escort.”