Phoenix Café (29 page)

The exact location of the labs was highly classified. It appeared on no maps; it would be invisible to the chance comer, or to any prying eyes in the sky. The human scientists who worked there never saw the place from the outside; neither did local official visitors. The secret was known only to the Expedition Management, and every anti-Aleutian fanatic on Earth. Apparently, and perhaps inevitably, one could include the wilderness Warden and his domestic staff in the privileged company. What about Misha?—

He must know about it. Of course the lab had to be
somewhere
in his father’s fief, since it was in Youro, and in a protected wilderness. Maybe, like Catherine herself, he hadn’t been interested in the details? Had he ever hinted that the lab was near his country home? She thought not. But there are things people say in Silence, even if you know them well, and you don’t hear them, because you don’t have some vital clue. And Misha, despite their strange antics together, was barely an acquaintance in Aleutian terms. Perhaps it was something she had blanked out, because she was so unwilling to think about the Departure. So hatefully obliged to keep the Commonalty’s secrets.

She remembered how Misha had made a point of telling her, the first time they met, that he didn’t care about the Departure plans, that he had no interest in the topic that fascinated all the other humans. Had she raised the subject, or did he volunteer that information? Probably the explanation was simple. The Connellys bitterly resented having the research station for a neighbor and refused to think about it.

She saw no wildlife, heard no birdsong. She sat under a tree, and stared up into the laden branches. It was a pine, with a slender trunk and a red cobbled hide. The bundled needles bowed their backs under their white freight: the air was so still that not a crystal had slipped or been brushed away. At every surface the elaborate little pinwheels were intact. She remembered the huge dark conifers (or coniferoids) in the Blue Forest game. What made
this
reality and
that
illusion? She’d have liked to take off the suit, or at least the helmet and gauntlets, and feel the snowy forest directly. The thought of nanny-routines back at the Lodge inhibited her; she didn’t want to be embarrassed

She walked on.

Misha’s father had called the house in the clearing “Arden.” If she remembered her Shakespeare, the name claimed that he was a virtuous prince in exile, wronged and waiting for times to change. The Connellys were stinking rich by any reasonable standards (though not as rich as the Khans): but Mr. Connelly senior felt passed-over and shabby. Barred from executive office by his hereditary privilege, he was known to the Aleutians as a power (Traditionalist, rigid; reliably aligned with Aleutia, dangerous in his attitude to Reform) behind Youro’s human government. It wasn’t enough. He wanted to turn his fortified farmhouse into a palace. He was a pragmatic ally who didn’t hide his dislike, the kind of human people like Sattva approved of, and trusted: because he had the sense to insult them openly, because he didn’t try to be “an imitation Aleutian.” An anti-Aleutian who had nursed his grievances too long, lived for too long with the rankling conviction that he
had to
pay court to the dirty aliens; or else have no power at all. He claimed he didn’t want to live forever, but exaggerated his age and secretly believed he was immortal. Alone in that study with his souvenirs of Pre-Contact, he could pretend he was as old and perfect as his ancient music machines. He had lived through the alien invasion; it would be his triumph to live on, to be still standing, after the aliens were gone.

He must be desperate for the Departure.

Or maybe not. If he (ever!) suffered organic collapse, maybe he planned to have his mind transferred into Misha’s nature-identical body, and then into another package, and on and on forever. He would beat the aliens at their own game, he would never die.

Some Aleutians were convinced that local aristocrats routinely had themselves copied, from one of the dumb-chemistry bodies to another—using occult void-forces wizardry of some kind. They treated any humans they had to deal with as if they were the same people who’d been around at First Contact, never tried to distinguish between generations, and felt justified because “it seemed to work.” Catherine knew the humans had no such technique. But even if there were a way, she couldn’t see it working in the Connelly case. They looked alike, but the dumb chemistry of personality was not the same, not at all. There was a barbed intimacy between father and son; no intuition. They knew each other well, as master and servant: they didn’t like each other much. If human cloning worked the way Aleutians thought it did, Michael and Misha ought to be lovers—

There wasn’t any sign of that!

Mr. Connelly’s hunger for mere survival seemed grotesque. But Catherine could be as skeptical as she liked about immortality, it was still her birthright. Lord Maitri could grow old for a whim, he would never face the raw terror of extinction. She could not judge the Warden, she could not blame him. Never, no matter what evil he did. In Misha’s father she was up against the frustration that had galled her for three lifetimes: the resentment that was the other face of her guilt and shame. She could not find a place to stand. She
could not
reach a position where she could judge the humans, and be judged by them, as an equal. Where she could accuse and be accused, speak and be answered.

She had not been raped since she came to L’Airial.

They had abandoned that simple scenario; it was played out. Now it was paper-flowers, and the consensual sex—furtive, frantic coupling in that disused bathroom—that they both needed afterwards to finish off the rush. Nothing else had changed. She was still helpless; he was still in control, still as harsh. He’d slip a wafer into her palm without a word, or the faintest hint of a caress. She never knew when he was going to do it. Sometimes it was in the day, on those excursions. They walked sedately around a tourist site with their chaperones: practicing bilocation, minds in riot. They would part in the entrance hall to go to their separate rooms, and hurry to the rendezvous as soon as they dared.

As she walked now, stomping pleasurably in knee-deep snow, the flashes came. Her invisible partner was Misha himself, naked (as she had never seen him in life). She felt the clutch of anatomically impossible illusion, she was human male as well as female; she was driving into Misha as he ploughed into her: thrusting deep into his gut.
Harder,
he ordered.
Harder! Harder!
Misha was sucking and chewing, face between her thighs, and she was Aleutian again. The lips of her place gaped, her claw reached into his throat until he gagged; his claw was punching brutally into her anus.

The stuff was certainly potent. It was the most pleasure she could ever remember getting from lying down with someone (though it was so little like lying down). By far the most. Yet something had been lost, when they had stopped being rapist and victim and started sharing needles. Some immediacy; some chance of truth.

Sometimes the original material, Misha’s own erotic daydreams, seemed to slip intact through the reformatting.

(Misha hanging naked by his manacled wrists in a corner of the room where his father, obviously his father, even bigger and broader than in life, pounded his male bulk into a slight girl body, broke her open (was that Catherine?). Misha cried stop it, stop it!, struggling and jerking in his bonds, in ecstasy, his erection stabbing the air—)

Images of that kind flashed on her perception and were gone, and she thought she was glimpsing the defenses he’d built, witnessed the cunning of a child’s mind. A child turning the abuse and abandonment of being Michael Connelly’s clone-heir into the trigger for a hormone cascade, shame into pleasure. Thérèse would understand. She wanted to ask Misha if he knew he was showing her these things; was he doing it deliberately? She couldn’t. He would not talk to her, would not communicate except through the drug.

Catherine stood still, wrenched out of her calm appraisal.

He hates me.

In the white world, blue-shadowed; in the piercing stillness, she was free of the drug and horrified by what went on between her and Misha Connelly. He had asked her
do you think I’m Johnny?
She would always dream of meeting Johnny again, always dream of that sweet, go-nowhere green-sickness: still sweet, despite of everything that had followed. But Johnny had been confused and scared by Catherine’s unwanted attentions. It had been nothing personal.

Misha hated her.

She began to walk again, rapidly. The snow clogged her boots, she blundered into low branches. Snow fell over her, blinding her as it spilled onto her face. She dropped to her knees, she wanted to go on four feet and run but her joints wouldn’t reverse, her body wouldn’t obey her. Enacting rape? That was nothing. The paper flowers were far worse, horrible, horrible: spiritual death. To be a pleasure that was feared and hated. To be handled in that monstrous way. To be a baited trap, from which Misha grabbed the goodies and escaped in triumph. To have the act of lying down, the act of communion, heart of everything, negated and despoiled.

She had ordered her people to make her into a woman. She had asked to be treated like one: asked for this. Insane arrogance! She began to shake and sob. She’d never been more miserable. Never, in all her restless and unhappy lives, so desolately lost.

Her sobs broke into human weeping, tears that overflowed her eyes and tumbled, and that calmed her. She had been pounding and grinding at the snow with her fists. She lay quiet with her cheek against bared earth, the black friable earth built by forest fires out of the native sand. Melting crystals stared back at her from stems of heather and dead bracken. I have found my punishment; I got there in the end. But I don’t want it. I didn’t know what I was asking for. I didn’t know it would feel like this. WorldSelf, I’ve learned my lesson, may I go now?

The tears stopped. She rolled over on her back, wiping her face with snowy gloved fingers, and relaxed: stretched out in the cold, springy embrace of the giant planet. Long ago, at home, poems…. She shrugged and smiled in rueful acknowledgement. Yes, you’re right, all of you, I admit everything. I’m a fool. I think too much, I talk too much I feel too much. This world with its histrionic sorrows is a drug a person like me should avoid like poison and yet I can’t get enough!

She had left her path, some time during the rampage. She was simply lying among the trees, which looked down on her from every side: hypnotic, unvarying, uncannily still. The silence, unbroken except for the crunch of her boots until her outburst, brought the quiet sound of voices. Catherine stood up carefully, the suit shaking off shards of caked snow. The voices had stopped. But she was curious. Virtual visitors did not make the forest’s air vibrate. Had she been gone so long the L’Airial staff had sent out search parties? Surely not. They knew exactly where she was, this annoying suit was bound to be telling them…. Who else would be on foot out here? She hadn’t heard a vehicle. The jeeps, whether on wheels or track, were far from silent unless you were shut up in the back.

She went, stepping quietly, to look for the source of that murmuring.

She found an open glade, among the trees. Perhaps it was the scar of a fire; or a once-inhabited clearing; though much smaller than L’Airial. Trees grew close and evenly as a planted hedge around an oval of extreme, glittering blue-whiteness. In the center of the oval Catherine saw two human figures. One was pale-skinned, a rosy flush of blood showing through the pallor. The other was a light-brown, biscuit color. They both had the indented waists, round buttocks, jutting breasts of idealized human females, and they were naked. She could see no sign of their discarded clothing. They were lying down together, coupling, clasped in each other’s arms in the snow. They were not speaking now. She heard only the sounds, the gasping breath, urgent movement she’d heard in the
sous-prolé
brothel when she was waiting for Thérèse. She knew she was not spying on a hardy pair of lovers, really out there, but still she backed away and hid behind a tree. She covered her face and uncovered it: she swallowed bile. She thought of the things she’d glimpsed in that deeply ominous dream; and on the virtual screen in Mr. Connelly’s study. She watched her gloved hands try to fist themselves into running pads.

What is it? What’s wrong with me?

When she looked again the figures had vanished.

She touched her temples and rubbed her eyes. She didn’t want to step onto the unmarked snow, but in the end she did. There was no sunlight in the glade now, no glitter. No sign of disturbance where the two bodies had been. Unbroken cold had hardened the snow crust, but Catherine had left a trail of footprints, and when she pressed her glove down lightly it made a dent in the surface. She felt ridiculous as she made these investigations: but they seemed necessary. What had she seen? A love tryst in the snow, a winter wilderness fantasy for virtual visitors? Had someone (Misha) played another sex-machine joke on her, was that all? Her body had recoiled from something her consciousness had failed to assimilate; a mystery that had fallen through the meshes of memory, a dream vanished on waking.

The air of the glade was tainted by deadworld entities; she was being watched, the way Aleutians always believed they were watched—