“Of sorts.”
“So am I!”
“Oh yes, I think I knew that. What do you do?”
“Stills. Single frames: the things you call ‘pictures’ and we call ‘poetry’”
“How interesting for you.” Misha’s tone dismissed her ladylike hobby. A vase of flowers had materialized, poised on illusory emptiness beside the lab. The vase was a chipped blue glazed pottery mug that had lost its handle. The style of the flowers was familiar.
“Ah. You built the floral decorations for the meeting.”
“Yeah, they were mine. And I had to change the whole funxing thing at the last minute, because Mâtho said I’d mixed up the seasons, and he insisted—”
“Mâtho insisted?”
“Believe it. He may be timid with the ladies, but he’s a demon for historical accuracy. But do we have to stand? The cab may not be here for a while.”
Catherine’s eyes, growing accustomed to the illusion as they might to darkness, made out the dimensions of a soft Aleutian-style couch, flanked by pillowy low chairs. She chose one of the chairs, Misha flopped on the couch.
“This will seem an odd question, but have you been drinking today?”
“Drinking what?”
“Alcohol. You see, the testosterone supplement in the air in my rooms—I need it, to maintain my secondaries—might affect you if you were mixing it with alcohol. It can make a woman aroused, er, unexpectedly.”
Catherine choked back laughter. He was gazing at her in apparently genuine concern.
“I don’t think it will be a problem.”
“Good! Did you notice I used native weeds, street flowers? I had rosebay, rayless mayweed, plantains, dandelions, buddleia. The survivors, bombsite colonizers. I thought that was a neat touch. But it was rough work, I wasn’t proud of it. The stuff Mâtho threw out was much better. Now this coral branch—”
The blue mug materialized again on an invisible table at her elbow. This time it held a single slender branch: perfect in every detail, in every whorl and stipple of the coral-red rind; the veins and stomata of each leaf; each flame colored bud and blossom.
“That’s very beautiful.”
“But purely imaginary, so of course Mâtho hates it. Touch it.”
She reached out, puzzled. Vlab models were exactingly accurate, code by code. But they were built of void-force signals, deadworld nothingness: they were images only. She felt the leaf, strangely cold to the touch, waxy against her fingertips, and gasped in shock and delight.
“You’re not an artist, you’re a magician. She passed her hand through the illusion, fascinated. “It isn’t there, but…. I feel it! How do you do that?”
He shrugged deprecatingly. “Make things appear and disappear? It’s easy, in here. This is my controlled environment; I have the whole 4-space mapped and clickable. How did I make the vbranch fool your sense of touch? Work. Sheer bit-by-bit grind. Have you ever used a lab?”
“I wouldn’t know how to begin,” said Catherine frankly. “This is so good! Where do you show? Is this your studio? Can people call up and televisit?”
“We don’t do that. We only display in public. The street’s our gallery. That’s a problem some of us have with Lalith. She’s in favor of gun control.”
“Gun control? You mean firearms?”
“No!” He stabbed a finger at her. “Zzzip! zzip! Bit zappers.”
“Oh, I see.” She remembered the green arrows. “You steal—er, borrow, grid space. Well, yes: I can understand that. I can see that would be fun. But—” She touched the chilled unreality of the coral branch, “don’t tell me you can splice this into the pixels of one of those crude three-d projections.”
“Four-d.”
“For what?”
“Four dimensions,” explained Misha, sighing. “A three dimensional moving image moves, right? That involves time, right? Four dimensions. A street projection fate map is built of tetrals, not pixels. Points with four dimensional coordinates. Timelines. That’s what we handle.”
“All right, four-d. But ignorant as I am about void force technology, at some level your coral branch has to use a huge number of, er, ‘bits.’ How can you plug it into a street corner junction box? Surely you’d crash the whole department?”
Misha frowned. “I’m a rich boy,” he told her, after a displeased silence. “I have everything. Even a prestigious job for life, should my father ever retire. I do my art for myself and for my friends. I don’t care if no one else knows it exists.”
So he hadn’t tried to display the branch, and didn’t think it could be done.
And where was that cab?
She had tucked up her legs and wrapped herself in the violet robe, so it lapped around her feet. Misha’s smile returned. “You look very comfortable: like a nice little cloud in my night sky. You’re an Aleutian in a human body. What does that mean, exactly?”
“What it sounds like,” she answered, somewhat defensively. “I was engineered, the same as you were, I suppose. The chemical code of an Aleutian embryo was reconfigured into human bases, and implanted into the womb of a human woman. I grew there, I was born.”
“Weird. Did you know, I’m almost unique myself. You’re looking at one of the world’s last authentic white heterosexual males. Our ripped up ozone layer got all the purebred fair-skinned races except for the Irish in Ireland; from whence the Connellys trace their proud descent. Yes, I’m engineered. Everyone’s engineered now, except the poor, and who cares about them. We’ve been conservative about it so far, but I anticipate an explosion of adaptive radiation when you’ve gone. Humans will diversify to fill the niches stripped out by mass extinction.” He propped himself on his elbows and studied her, without offence but with great curiosity. “But you feel you are a genuine Aleutian?”
“Or a genuine human, with Aleutian memories. What’s the difference?”
“Can you read my mind?”
She was puzzled. Misha Connelly was supposed to have had an Aleutian education. “If you mean, can I ‘read’ what you express, intentionally or otherwise, in what you call, roughly speaking, body language and we call the Common Tongue, I suppose the answer’s yes. Don’t worry. Those of us who’ve been here before have learned to filter. What you say in Silence has become subliminal to me, the way it is for you among yourselves. Even humans know that spoken words are only part of a conversation.” She grinned. “If you’re planning to insult me, in Silence, in some outrageous way, you still have nothing to worry about. As you know, the Common Tongue isn’t evidence, and I must ignore your offence. Though I might not forget it!”
“They tried to teach me to ‘speak Aleutian’ for years. It didn’t work, I couldn’t hack it. We’ll never be able to converse by twitching nostrils at each other. But what happens when you ‘hear’ what I ‘say’ in Silence? Do you really get the voices in your head?”
Catherine laughed. “Sometimes, yes. I hear voices. Most Signifiers do; and not only when the supposed speakers are present. But so do you: or one voice, at least. Don’t you have that human interior monologue? The voice of consciousness you hear in your head, and can scarcely stifle if you try? With us that voice is modulated. All the possible selves of Aleutia may talk to us, and we talk back to them. It’s our way of experiencing social pressure, personal complexity, cultural assumptions and so on.”
“If you were human, people would say you were crazy.”
“In Aleutia, people say you’re crazy if you don’t hear the voices.” How intently Misha watched her! She tucked the robe closer, and spoke to disarm a Silence that was growing uncomfortable.
“Things are very different in the Enclaves, where we’ve been accepted: many humans ‘speak Aleutian’ fluently. But the halfcastes used to be the experts. Remember Sidney Carton, Bella’s ‘native guide’ in the hunt for the Buonarotti device? I met Sid a couple of times: I’m sure he heard the voices. He didn’t have a lot of time for me, but he could certainly make himself understood! You’ve kept your
distance here in Old Earth. You don’t want to be like us. We rather like that. Why should you learn to ‘speak Aleutian’? Enough of us can speak aloud. And you have your own brand of fake telepathy, your implanted gadgets. How did you call my cab?”
“Interesting you should mention Sid and Bella,” remarked Misha. “Bella was the reverse of your engineering, wasn’t she. Human starter, Aleutian body. I think that was the only time it’s been done, apart from your case. Am I right? The only two human-Aleutian hybrids. And her starter came from a sample of Johnny Guglioli’s tissue, didn’t it: or so the story goes. Which takes us right back to First Contact, the Rape, the Sabotage crisis. Isn’t history fascinating?”
Johnny Guglioli was the name of the journalist who had met the Third Captain in West Africa, when the Landing Parties were still trying to pass for human, and had later, with Braemar Wilson, leader of the anti-Aleutian terrorist cell called White Queen, tried to blow up the shipworld. Which he and Braemar had reached using Peenemünde Buonarotti’s prototype instantaneous travel device. The concessions the humans had been forced to make, after that failed attack, had been the foundation of Aleutian rule on Earth.
She made no comment.
“Speaking of Johnny Guglioli,” Misha went on, “didn’t he hear the voices? Without anyone teaching him how? He interviewed Clavel, Third Captain, when the aliens had only just arrived. I’ve seen that record. But perhaps it was only possible because of their special relationship?”
Catherine stared at him wonderingly. “You can’t have seen the original record of the Africa interviews. That material was destroyed and never copied. But whatever you’ve seen, I think I can reliably inform you that Johnny and Clavel did not understand one another. If Clavel had understood Johnny’s feelings there would have been no rape, and things would have been very different. Why are you so interested in these old stories? What does it matter? The Aleutians are leaving.”
Misha smiled again. “Please don’t take this personally: but I don’t think you understand. We’ve been ruled by aliens for three hundred years. In all that history there are a bare handful of human names that feature. Johnny Guglioli, Braemar Wilson, Sidney Carton. Bella—if she counts as human. Of course the few humans who made a difference are important to the Renaissance, to people who are trying to imagine a human future. You heard Lalith. We study the records. We re-member. We’re trying to reassemble the parts.”
He touched the impossible branch of flame, silently reminding her of the human skill that had built it. How painfully he resented his position: a human, deadworld, artist in an Aleutian world. He was good, very good. But when the aliens were gone he would still be left with this legacy of self-distrust. Nothing in the world belongs to me, everything I do someone else can do better, I can never be first. He teased her and goaded her with his sly references to the past, but she heard the voice of his grief: mon sembable, mon frère.
A flash of eye-contact: Misha’s dark gold and Catherine’s dramatic black on black.
“Johnny was executed out in orbit,” he insisted, “for the crime of attempted genocide. The Buonarotti Device vanished and the Aleutians stayed, because they didn’t know how to get home. Johnny’s tissue was used to make Bella, in some sense Johnny’s daughter—who came back to Earth and rediscovered the treasure. Now the Aleutians can go home, and here are we, at the end of the story. An Aleutian and a human…. Which Aleutian are you supposed to be, by the way? I know there’s no such thing as an anonymous alien. You have to be somebody. Who are you? Or is it a secret?”
“You know who I am,” she said, uneasily. “I’m Catherine.”
He frowned—
“I wonder where that cab is!” Catherine stood up.
“Oh, it’s here. I didn’t want to interrupt. We were getting on so well.”
They went down together to the street door, through the dark floors filled by the lives of Connelly tenants. Catherine tucked herself into the pumpkin belly of her hired coach, and it carried her away.
Misha returned to his eyrie and walked about with his hands behind his back, pausing often to turn and stare at the place where she had been sitting. His spine tingled, the hairs on his nape rose. He’d been listening to the huge, awesome voice of an ancient demi-god, speaking from that dainty little body. There she had sat in her aster-colored robe, saying: yes, I knew Sidney Carton, I knew Bella. All the stars of the Aleutian-era screen.
“Name of a name of a name! Worth the price of admission alone!”
He executed a neat step dance over the fake abyss, singing.
“Oh, Paddy dear and did you hear, the news that’s going round
The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground
It’s the most distressful country that the world has ever seen
They are hanging men and women for the wearing of the green!”
iv
In the room below, Helen listened.
She stayed very still, relaxed in her long chair, until Catherine’s cab had passed out of the courtyard; until not the faintest whisper of its retreat through the empty streets could be caught by Helen’s emissaries, the discreet and obedient servants she had seeded through the nerves of her father’s house. Then she sat up a little and shook back the loose, lace trimmed sleeve of her nightgown. She was looking at the dressing on the inner skin of her right wrist and forearm when Michael Connelly senior came into the room. He seemed disconcerted to find her in her night clothes.
“Oh, you are ready for bed.” He hesitated. “How is it?”
Helen smiled ruefully. “Not getting any better, papa.”
“Let me have a look.”
He came heavily to her side, like a statue of Misha walking; and dropped on one knee. The medical cabinet was by her chair. He slicked quarantine film over his hands and the cuffs of his overalls, took her wrist, and eased away the dressing. Together they looked at the lesions. “Are there any new marks?”
“I don’t know, papa. This sounds strange, but I find it difficult to count them.”
The camera in her father’s eye took pictures and made measurements. His gaze, which seemed so intent, was purely mechanical. When he looked up the examination he’d made was already far away, under expert attention.
“It’s just a harmless little reaction: it will pass.”
“Yes papa.” At her gentle acquiescence something stirred in the depth of his eyes, Misha’s eyes cast in bronze: but the emotion quickly vanished.
“Well, we’ll see what the doctors have to say.”
“Do you know what a Black Hole is, papa?”
He shook his head, again absorbed in turning the slim wrist from side to side, taking more pictures. “Some nonsense you’ve picked up?”
“A Black Hole is a place where a star has died. It’s what happens when the death of a star turns malignant, so that ceasing to exist becomes an active force. It draws everything around it into itself. All of space, and time, and being is dragged through the same dark gate. Some people think a Black Hole actually destroys the fabric of reality. Isn’t that extraordinary?”
“What nonsense.”
“Stars are made of the same elements as human beings.”
Her father’s tone became less indulgent. “Don’t think about such things: it’s morbid. I shouldn’t let you use the free network, it’s a midden of useless information; it’s not just ridiculous, it’s harmful.”
At that threat she said nothing, but the chill that pervaded her small white face seemed to leach all the color, and warmth, and softness from this large, luxurious room. He replaced the dressing with practiced neatness, and patted her hand. “Oh, don’t look so sad. I won’t take your connection away. But you should vary your amusements. Why don’t you work on your project again? You haven’t touched your lab for days: I notice these things you know. You need something pleasant to occupy your mind. Soon you’ll feel better, and I’ll take you out for a drive: or you may have a friend to visit; one of the inner circle, you know, not a st
ranger.”
Helen had not left this room, or seen anyone but her father, since she’d returned home exhausted from that visit to Lord Maitri’s “at home.”
“I think I won’t see anyone, or go out again. I get so tired, it frightens me.”
“Nonsense,” said the man of stone and bronze. “You’ll soon be well.”
“I don’t want to let you down,” she whispered.
He selected a powerful pain killer, and applied it to the big vein inside her elbow. “We’ll go home. You’ll be more comfortable away from the city.”
“I’m sleepy now, papa.”
“Yes. Well, I’ll leave you.” He leaned and placed a dry kiss on her cheek.
Helen lay for a while with her eyes closed. She could feed constructed images of this room to his agents. She used to do that routinely when she had her freedom, when she and Misha were allowed to be together. Since she had become almost a prisoner she’d been surprised at how little she felt the need for covert defiance. She could be private enough in the darkness behind her eyelids. Papa monitored everything, or imagined he did: but he didn’t invade her mind. She thought he’d always been afraid of what he might find there.
She stood up slowly—how heavy they were to carry, those small dark marks—and went to her workstation. Her Vlab was older than Misha’s and showed clear signs of its industrial origins, but it suited Helen. She knew its ways. She recalled from secret limbo the project that her father had mentioned. (The secrecy was habit, it had never been necessary. Her father never showed any interest in the virtual art he considered a suitable pastime for his daughter.)
How long?
She touched her unblemished left forearm, and the lace at her throat; where she had begun to feel the spots of tingling numbness that were the precursors of the lesions. The reaction would pass, papa said. It would do her no harm. And if it did pass…what then?
Papa was right; she must get back to work. It’s the experience of each moment that matters. She smiled, involuntarily: the joy of the work flooding through her, filling every reflection of Helen’s self, past present and to come. There were effects that she had struggled for, and now was sure she could achieve. What artist could ask for more? What was it the old man said? Instantaneity, the same light everywhere…. But the interview with Catherine was already in her mailbox. She converted it to tincture and waited a few moments. The bubblepack emerged. She leaned back, trickled the drops into her eyes and settled to watch Misha’s rushes.
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