Phoenix Café
Page 5
Catherine felt humbled.
“Let me introduce you to my daughter.”
Thérèse Khan was a tiny creature, dressed like a proper young lady in a cinched bodice and full skirt under a robe of layered gossamer. She curled in the middle of a pink flowerbed under an apple tree, teasing a small white puppy.
“Play nicely now,” smiled Mrs. Khan, and left them.
Thérèse’s hands and face were decorated in living color. Her eyes looked out as if from a mask made of butterfly’s wings. Catherine thought of tiger weed tattoos. She didn’t know what to say. The puppy yapped.
“Would you like to hold him? Put out your hands.”
The puppy squirmed in Catherine’s cupped palms and licked her fingers.
“Isn’t he sweet? He’s called Pipi because he does it all the time. He’s supposed to be house-trained but he isn’t.”
“How old is he? Maybe he’s too young to learn.”
Thérèse laughed, not unkindly, at Catherine’s ignorance. “He’s as ‘old’ as he’s going to get. He’s a neotoneyatey…. I can’t remember the word: he’ll be a puppy forever.” She put her hands playfully over the dog’s minute pricked ears. “I’ll tell you a secret. I’ll always love Pipi, but I wish I could have a proper dog. A wolfhound or something.” She kissed the animal’s nose. “I hope he didn’t hear that. Misha—Michael Connelly—has wolfhounds at their place in the country. I’ve seen them often. They’re so fierce and marvelous, so sexy!”
“Perhaps they wouldn’t be happy living indoors.”
“That’s what mama says, and Imran. He’s my brother. But if people can make puppies and kittens that will live for a hundred years without ever growing up, why can’t I have a hunting dog who’d be happy in here?”
“That might be a logical problem, not a technical one.”
Thérèse wrinkled her nose. “If you say so. Shall I show you my birds?”
She jumped to her feet. The dented flowers sprang up, recovering shape like soft furniture. She took Catherine to a rocky grotto that stood incongruously among the tailored trees, hung inside and out with tiny wooden cages. “All native Youroan species.” Thérèse coaxed a finch with a blue and pink head onto her finger. “It’s bad taste to keep exotics. Is it true there are no birds in Aleutia?”
“It’s true. In the shipworld people have made winged things for fun, in imitation of yours. At home we don’t have anything that flies. Where there are living things, there’s no empty space for flying. But as you know, we don’t have either animals or birds, strictly speaking. Our cities are colonies of life, where every variant is related to us, the people: there’s really only one ‘species’—”
“Shall I show you my fish pool? You’ll love my koi. They practically talk.”
Catherine was prepared for anything. “You mean they’re self-conscious? Like, fish-shaped people?”
Thérèse looked over her shoulder, shocked. “Oh no! That would be cruel!”
While they were admiring the fish, Thérèse had a telecall. She politely insisted that she could put her friend off, but the interruption was a relief to both of them. Catherine left her chatting with her virtual companion, and went for a walk. She found Mrs. Khan sitting at a white wrought iron table in front of the fountains vista, reading a news site.
She shut the page, frowning a little. “Are you two getting on?”
“Yes, fine. Thérèse had to talk to someone for a moment.”
“Sit down then. Let me order you some coffee. Or would you prefer a soft drink?” She tapped her reader. “Your Youro Manager doesn’t understand his city. This negotiation with the Americas (which seems pointless, anyway) will cause trouble. Nothing that looks like the aliens favoring Reform will be tolerated in my city. There’ll be riots in the poor wards.”
A servant arrived with a tray of coffee and fruit juice.
“But the poor aren’t Traditionalists,” said Catherine. “How can they be?”
“Naturally you’re right, in a sense. To be human male and female, in the true meaning of the terms, has become the privilege of a wealthy minority: I’m afraid that’s true. But you have worked among the sous-prolé, our leisured classes. You know how they cling to their sexual identities, though it would be hard to tell their naked bodies apart, if you will excuse my vulgarity.”
“I know that. Nearly all our converts were Traditionalist in sympathy, though of course they weren’t voters. I meant, I find it puzzling.”
“Ah, the Aleutian liberalism!” Mrs. Khan smiled wisely. “You people don’t understand the concept of Reform versus Tradition. I am a Muslim. My colleagues in government are Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, Pagans, Marxists, even halfcastes. It’s the same in the other party. I am a Traditionalist, a woman and a member of the Cabinet. Some prominent Reformers are ‘biologically male.’ My goodness, who cares? Biological sex is not the issue. But the issue is real, and the only thing that matters in Youro politics. Traditionalism is a question of values, a choice to remain human. None of us will give that up.”
“But if it’s a choice you can’t have unless you’re rich,” Catherine persisted. “Why don’t the people, the masses, simply become Reformers. Since they can’t help their physiological changes, since Reformers is what they are, practically speaking? And riot until they turn you out of government?”
Mrs. Khan was not offended. She laughed and shook her head.
“My dear, the Reformers themselves cling to the human socio-sexual divide, in their own way. They don’t want to be neuters! That’s what makes Reform so absurd. Did you see the cages in Thérèse’s grotto? They have no doors, and this orchard is open overhead. My daughter’s birds have the freedom of Youro: they prefer to stay here. Our people are like those birds. They prefer the security of the familiar. It’s a law of nature.”
“You’re so right,” sighed Catherine. “It’s the same at home.”
She sipped her drink. The luxury of this setting was insidious. Chatting at ease with this sensible, pleasantly wicked human politician, an Aleutian need feel no guilt: no discomfort. “Is Misha Connelly a ‘biological male’?”
Mrs. Khan looked astonished. Then she laughed—a prim, smothered sound completely at odds with her previous manner.
“I couldn’t possibly tell you.”
ii
Catherine was in her room and sleeping, dreaming of the first landfall. They were about to cross the giant planet’s atmosphere. If we meet hostile natives we’re on our own, if we find treasure we’ll be expected to share it. Heigh-ho, that’s the way of the world. In becomes down, we’ve been lost for so long, at last a new world! Then everything goes wrong. Dying, falling in flames. The screaming, the crying, the sobbing voices—
Maitri was by her bed, kneeling upright, human style.
“You were having a nightmare, darling.”
His robe was a poem of mingled green and blue with touches of palest rose, the soul of a lake of waterlilies: but he looked desperately tired and ill. She started up, shocked. No one had told her that Maitri was sick! She lay back. Of course he was not sick. He was old.
He stroked her hair. “Was it the same one?”
She nodded. “When we crashed in Africa.” This aged Maitri seemed a blurred intrusion; in the world of her nightmare he was so different. “Sometimes even when I’m awake,” she said softly, “I think everything that’s happened since those flames is an illusion.”
She’d made up her mind to devote herself to making him happy. She would be one of Maitri’s souvenirs, a nature-identical Traditionalist young lady he could show off at his parties. She would make afternoon visits to bizarre children, and be pleasant company in the main hall. She’d begun to suspect there might be enough daily laceration in this quiet existence to keep her need for pain in check. But because the dream still possessed her, she suddenly knew the charade must end.
Before Catherine was conceived, Lord Maitri had announced that he
meant to stay behind. In future lives trips to Earth might be commonplace, but he loved the place too much to rely on that. He wanted to enjoy his last certain lease on the beloved giant planet to the very end, and die here of old age. But the Departure had been delayed and delayed. Aleutians don’t cling to life, and don’t collect statistics: suddenly she saw that he would be really old: helpless and confused, alone here with the hungry, angry humans, the billions so exploited and abandoned—
“Maitri, you have to give this up. I know what you promised yourself. But you didn’t know how long it would all take, or what the political situation would be like. Suppose Gender War breaks out again? I want you, and the whole household, to get back to the shipworld. I want you to start arranging that now.”
He looked down at her tenderly. A million tiny chemical touches spilled into the air: his ward felt nothing. “And leave you alone? I don’t think so, my dear. I still plan to have the proud distinction of being the last Aleutian on earth. Not counting yourself, of course.” He chuckled. “What you really mean is that you want me dead, so you don’t have to worry about me. I could say the same of you! There’ve been times, recently, when I’ve truly wished you’d decide to set your proselytes an example. It’s not pleasant to know that someone I love is so continuously unhappy. Shall we make a pact? Kiss goodbye, and pray that WorldSelf brings us together again soon, in some better life? I don’t think we’d be charged with criminal suicide. I am practically senile, as you so kindly remind me. And you have been declared insane.”
She stared up at him. Escape was not remotely a temptation.
“I can’t.”
“I know. I was joking. But don’t ask me to leave you, not before I must.”
He stood up, grumbling unconsciously in the Common Tongue.
“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.
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.