Phoenix Café (15 page)

“This is fascinating,” said Catherine. “But what about my young lady?”

They shook their heads.

“There’s nothing more we can tell you,” said Agathe. “This is the city where the good guys lost. Bad things, terrible things can happen here. We see them daily. Your young lady was not unique. That’s as much as we can say.”

Catherine let them put her into a cab and send her home.

What had she seen that day? It was hard to be sure. The fragile skin of a human forearm, burnt or scorched by little black sores. Maybe the girl had been in a fire.

She sat on her bed, wondering. Agathe and Lalith had been “messing with her head.” It didn’t take a telepath to know that! But she had no will to investigate further. Did they believe that Catherine had been here in the Gender War? Perhaps not. Or they wouldn’t have imagined they could get her to take sides. It was interesting to have heard Lalith speak so unguardedly, so differently from her public manifesto! Interesting, but not surprising. She studied the flesh of her own naked arms. The inner forearm was very pale and soft.

What do I look like?

There were no mirrors in the aliens’ part of the house: Aleutians considered mirrors uncanny. She found a tvc set, took it to her room and made herself a tall virtual screen, silvered like looking-glass. Her nose was too narrow and slender for the rest of her human face. She had not known that before. Her shoulders were too high. She stripped off her clothes: she smoothed her hands over the barely covered bones of the human ribcage, missing the long Aleutian straps of muscle. She cupped her small breasts, held the sides of her indented waist (another strange absence of muscle); groped the fatty mounds of her buttocks. She opened with her fingers the folds of flesh beneath soft hair at the base of her belly. The place human females used for making love, for accepting intromission; for giving birth. She’d tried to masturbate: this body didn’t respond. She had never made love with anyone. She had been perfect, without effort.

The reflection was a strange thing. It looked alive, but it had no life. But was this human body alive, in the Aleutian sense? It shed no living presence into the air. It was nothing but an appearance.

The aliens knew as much as they needed to know about the baroque arrangements of the post-war Youro aristocracy. It wasn’t too strange, in Aleutian reckoning, They tried to make themselves into serial immortals, they took partners much younger than themselves. They were more halfcaste than the halfcastes, without knowing it. But it was extraordinary, suddenly, that Catherine had never realized exactly what she had done to herself. She had wanted to be a woman, not a man, for many reasons: some personal, some historical. She had been aware that, as Maitri’s ward, she had the social status of a “Traditionalist young lady.” She had not grasped what it meant.

She went to her closets and took out clothes she had never worn. Skirts and bodices, glistening stockings, subtly engineered basques. She dressed. She was trembling; the sobs that had racked her as she wandered that tenement block were close; and an excitement that nobody could understand, unless they too had some reason to hunger for pain. Why had it never occurred to her to dress this way before? Agathe would be sorry when Catherine appeared like this at the Phoenix. Horrified if she knew that she herself was responsible. She stood in front of the mirror again.
I am the embodiment of everything that’s wrong.

Her mouth dried. Blood coursed into the delicate skin of her cheeks. She touched her breasts, and felt the nipples rising and hardening. The naked, folded rose between her thighs was trying to open, the petals moist and full. She stood, until the arousal faded.

She thought of Misha Connelly.

4
Les Parapluies

i

“Does your building never scrub this, Mâtho?” Thérèse poked at the grainy gel of the newsagency’s windowpane. “It’s like old cheese. Did it ever open? Do you have a nice view?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never looked.”

The journalist hunched over his workstation, picking out the best from a batch of raw offcut. His friends, who had arrived uninvited “to see what he did with himself,” prowled. They were half way up the cone of a termite-nest, the same design as in Catherine’s poor-ward estate but in better repair. The thick walls were gouged out into shelves and alcoves. The floor space was a clutter of mass-market future-proof media ware, so successful that some of it was over two hundred years old. In a touching show of Renaissance feeling, the soft-bodied hybrid tech had been packed into rigid cases.

Mâtho, once he’d overcome his alarm, had eagerly accepted Catherine’s offer. He knew exactly what he wanted: mood pieces, free from politics, on the last days of Aleutian rule, from inside an Aleutian household. Catherine, accustomed to making her own “tape” for the confessional records of Aleutia, had no difficulty. Maitri and his retainers co-operated cheerfully: playing games, making music and reminiscing to camera. Maitri’s only condition was that nobody was to speak aloud. He didn’t want anything undiplomatic formally on record. But he was happy for the newsagency software to add its own commentary.

Mâtho had no diffidence in his work. He’d spent merciless hours grilling Catherine on her editing. But he would only appear at the Giratoire house on a screen, in the form of text. He absolutely refused to invite her to the agency, except in the same manner. The others had found out that she longed to see Mâtho’s workplace, and organized a raid. Catherine stood beside Imran Khan, watching the discard from a major agency being dumped, silently, onto a stack of screens.

“When we first arrived—” She stopped herself. “How does one pick out a news supplier these days? There are so many!”

Imran glanced at Mâtho, and shrugged. “They’re all the same. News is a commodity. News is what people like my mother buy and sell.”

“Then how do you find out what’s happening in the world?”

“We don’t,” declared Misha. “We
are
what’s happening.” He spread his hands, framing a chunk of the screen-stack. “News is an exploded concept. It’s a section cut through living tissue, full of process: live art. You can’t sample it without destroying it.”

“You’re insufferable, Mish,” said Imran.

Joset, unfortunately, was not with them. Imran made a poor Misha Connelly damper. He could neither enjoy Misha nor ignore him. Catherine removed herself from what Lydie the dancer called the “bare knuckled needlery.”

“Could we talk blocks and docks?” Rajath was asking Thérèse, in an undertone, as they bent together over one of the packing cases. Thérèse was sketching briskly on a page of her pocketbook.

“You should try this,” she murmured. “Really good penetration.”

“I don’t want to do anything that will hurt my back.”

“You’re such a sissy—”

Binte sat on the floor in a corner, head unveiled, smiling her bland smile. Thérèse suddenly looked up, caught Catherine’s eye: the notebook vanished into her skirts. A moment later she was leaning over Mâtho’s shoulder, saying, “How
interesting
text looks. I wish you would teach me to read.”

“It’s too late,” growled the modest Nose, contorting himself to avoid the impropriety of brushing against a young lady’s clothes. “You have to learn before your brain hardens.”

“Cheek! I’m sure my brain’s as squishy as yours.”

Mâtho was unhappy at being tracked to his lair, and ashamed of his cheap machines. He thought of the brilliant value of his Aleutian scoop: half in a glow of professional pride, half in despair. The agency would scarcely benefit. If the footage of Lord Maitri and his friends was taken up by software agents of the real operators, they’d run it without acknowledgement. Mâtho and his father couldn’t afford to try and stop them.

Art for art’s sake…. Poor Nose. Catherine peered through the old cheese, having difficulty with everything that she must ignore, all that was spoken in Silence. Someone came to stand behind her.

“Misha,” she said. “I want to go to the Tate. Will you take me?”

“To the
Tate?
That’s obscure. How did you know it was me?”

“I can’t filter out everything.”

The folds of her chador touched his sleeve: her head was only lightly veiled. No one had commented aloud on Catherine’s change of dress, but she felt the immense change in their response; especially in Misha. He was more relaxed. He watched her frankly, as the young males always watched cloaked females, even in the Phoenix Café, for a hint of peeping finery.

“There’s a picture I saw, in my last life. I want to see it again. With you.”

ii

Catherine’s hired limousine crossed the Channel by the Amiens Bridge. She glimpsed the sea passage that had been open water
when we first arrived,
buried under maglev and roadbridges, land clamation, and mats of industrial algae. The western fringes of Youro had suffered heavily in the last phase of the War; all the new development was charmless. She began to see why the humans used closed cars so much.

The remaining Aleutian staff in the Expedition’s London Embassy were delighted to receive her. Misha arrived the next day, and dined with them in more than orbital splendor. The day after that he took them to visit an ancient site in the West Country, a neighborhood that made the hives estate look like a miracle of urban design. The Embassy staff were highly satisfied. They trotted from one street corner to another, admiring the sarsen stones that stood in tiny patches of turf, or bulged from housing block walls. They made records of the children who followed them around, and of the local maglev station—decorated with tasteful projections of the site in former times, when the whole circle had been discernable between the houses. “Imagine!” they exclaimed. “So ancient! And they were Islamic warriors, changed into stone by chemical warfare. How strange and splendid!” They thanked Misha profusely, assuring him that he and his Saracens would feature in their next confessions; and retired to the cars to snack and tvc in comfort.

Catherine and Misha adventured further in this sad marginal land: not yet part of the city, no longer the true outdoors. Misha went into one of the ugly blocks and fetched out a smooth faced elderly individual, sexless in body but presenting as a Traditionalist male. He wore strange stiff overalls that looked as if they were made of pressed shit, like the walls of the buildings. He led them to an alley shut off by a photochemical gate: opened the gate with his palmprint and retired. They climbed a narrow weed-grown path to an open ridge that finished in a grassy knoll. There were no more gates, no explanations. Great slabs of stone guarded the entrance to a stone chamber; a place of stillness that spoke age and mystery beyond measure.

“What a privilege it is,” gasped Catherine, somewhat out of breath, “to know the park keeper’s son. What is this place? Is it very old? Can we go in?”

“It’s called a Chamber Tomb. It’s a funerary room. The people who used it lived before the circle back in Avebury was made; maybe five thousand years ago. But I don’t know why I bother; you people can’t keep numbers in your heads. Yes, we can go in.”wealth of time. Catherine explored it in a few minutes and went to join Misha, who sat with his back against the cold, smoothed and raddled slabs at the inner end. Blocks of greenish translucence had been let into the roof. She looked up into deep water.

“How old is the glass?”

“Quite modern. About a hundred years Pre-Contact, I suppose.”

She laughed. “As modern as that! You know, you shouldn’t have told them that stuff about the Saracens! That was
wicked.”

“I thought it livened up the picnic nicely.”

And the cool, damp silence wrapped them round.

“We’re in livespace,” he said. He jerked his head at a tiny red pinpoint that Catherine had not noticed. “I can get you a copy. You can splice it into your next confession. The Priests of Self will turn it into state fiction, in that funny low-rez video animation. Your Aleutian self will study it one day, and think
there’s me.
On my holidays.”

“I’m always in livespace,” she pointed out, “when I’m with you. You have a 360 camcorder implant.”

Misha traced a pattern of interlinked circles on the damp earth with his fingertip. “I don’t save my rushes. I discard everything. Or nearly everything.
Will
this day go into your record? Or do the priests of the Cosmic WorldSelf decide?”

“The priests decide. I’m the kind of person who makes my own tape, and only turns it over to my character shrine for formatting. A Protestant, I think that makes me, in your native culture. Or something like that. The priests will process my records of being Catherine, and yes, they’ll convert it into ideological-state fiction. It’s not as dire as it sounds. Physical things happen at confession. It’s more like doing deals with your unconscious than submitting your futurity to state oppression. ‘Catherine’ won’t be able to haggle in the biochemical flux, so I won’t have much editorial control this time: but that’s my own fault.”

“Have you ever had a child?”

“No.” She didn’t see the connection. “Why do you ask?”

“If I have a child,” he said, concentrating on his pattern, “Traditionalist tradition dictates that the child has to be me, over again. I have to give birth, though of course I wouldn’t physically give birth, to my father, to my sister to myself. There’s no other choice. That’s my futurity.”

She didn’t think clonal meiosis was anything like the same as Aleutian reincarnation, anything like another self. She didn’t know if telling him that would be a consolation, or an insult. She felt close to the source of that pain in him, the capacity for suffering which had first attracted her: but his presence refused her attempts at intimacy, and she accepted the refusal. She had her own reserves.

Misha, in Silence, did not even say He looked through her, safe on the other side of an invisible wall. He observed without contact.

“Have I met your sister?”

“You’ve probably seen her. She makes appearances, with Dad. Or she did. You won’t have been introduced.”

They sat without speaking. Catherine shivered, and pulled the chador cloak closer.

“You’re cold. We’d better go.”

He stood on the windy summit of the knoll, the skirts of his coat flapping. The grass was as green as the plants in Maitri’s garden, but it had a doomed look. The city was about to swallow it. There would be tiger weed, housing blocks and vegetable beds here before long.

“It gets bloody chilly out here on the fringes where the mini-atmosphere thins out. As you know, we’ve lost the Gulf Stream that used to keep us warm. And the Mediterranean’s drying fast, so there’s no hot water bottle in the bed. It’s going to be a cold, cold winter outdoors, Miss Catherine, after you folks have left. And a long one.”

They were unable to find the Sargent portrait that Catherine had wanted to see. It was in storage, a fact that Catherine had not been able to discover by tvc. The Gallery was reticent about answering questions of that kind from prospective visitors, and had blocked her agent. They went to the Pre-Saatchi rooms instead, moving slowly from one soundproofed cubicle to another, contemplating the glorious colors and pure, naive sentiments of the great age of consumerism. The early Heinekens, several series of British Airways, Virgin, The Halifax; an inevitable bias towards the Gallery’s host nation. The Tate displayed only original prints, and couldn’t afford many interurban acquisitions.

They talked about the way these works were not single entities but palimpsests, bricolage. The music might be two hundred years older than the visuals. The scripts were laden with quotations from ancient sources, now punishingly obscure; which the original mass audience would have recognized easily. They reminded each other that these works shouldn’t be called “Pre-Saatchi.” The period had been named by mistake, due to a confusion between the Saatchi
collection
(which had disappeared in the War), and the era when the Saatchi studio was known to have been active. They smiled at ancient products, foregrounded in vain, and admired the display comparing a wasp-waisted cola bottle—so modestly pleased with itself—to a Flemish burgher kneeling before the Madonna, some centuries before Coca-Cola was invented. “The burgher is convinced that the picture is
his
business. But his name is an irrelevance, his story has vanished. The light that falls through the window of his chapel endures. His figure’s importance is its place in a balance of color and shadow…”

“I’m talking too much,” said Misha. “I’m being insufferable, probably.”

Catherine shrugged and smiled. “For a change, no.”

“It’s all wrong, anyway. The Coca-Cola bottle matters. These pieces were commissioned to make wealth. Or they wouldn’t exist. That tells you something about funxing dilettantes like me. I remember the first time I realized Jeremy Isaacs didn’t create
The World at War
all by himself, for his own glory. Or David Attenborough
The Trials of Life.
I was disgusted, I felt cheated.”